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Π = 3,14159
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| Author(s) | conversation Anemone Vostell – MK Kaehne, text Brigitte Werneburg |
| Design | müller&friends grafikdesign. |
| Size | 24 x 21 cm |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Pages | 176 |
| Illustrations | 140 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-204-4 |
The biography of conceptual artist MK Kaehne (b. Vilnius, 1963; lives and works in Berlin) oscillates between Vilnius, Moscow and Berlin. Influenced by Russian Constructivism, he draws and builds suitcase sculptures with a department store aesthetic, a reversal of the readymade principle. His focus gradually shifted from the formal to the psychological, towards life-size figures such as It’s me (2023): a hyper-realistic replica of himself, lying upside down in the mud, with a garden gnome next to him. Kaehne’s work is strictly analytical, but the results are full of tragedy and irony. Unintentional drawings, in which biographical, Dadaist and political elements merge, accompany his oeuvre. A total work of art that traces personal and social development.
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Martin Noël
The Retrospective38€ Add to cartThe Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut
The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.
Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
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Was ist Wiener Aktionismus?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
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Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt – Wie eine Spinne im Netz
38€ Add to cartRuth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. Wurzen, Germany, 1932; lives in Berlin) is one the few East German female artists who devoted themselves to graphic art produced on the typewriter. Working on her trusty “Erika,” she arranged letters, digits, commas, and plus signs to compose imaginative visual creations. Under her hands, the black and red characters were transformed into poetic verbal images, gently undulating waves, serial patterns, and architectonic or figurative formations. Sometimes verging on concrete poetry, these typewritings also evince unmistakable affinities with conceptual and minimalist art. In the 1980s, the artist expanded on them in collages that recall Hannah Höch’s Dadaist visual montages. With her graphic work, Wolf-Rehfeldt was also an active participant in the GDR’s mail-art program: she sent the typewritings to artists beyond the impassable borders of her country, building an extensive network of correspondences that spanned the globe.
The richly illustrated monograph underscores the diversity and contemporary relevance of Wolf-Rehfeldt’s works, which were created in the shadow of the Cold War and address the fragility of peace as well as early manifestations of the environmental devastation wrought by the industrial age.
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Flatland
35€ Read moreBetween the Dimensions
The title of this book quotes a literary work by Edwin A. Abbott that was first published in 1884 and gradually gained considerable fame: an allegorical satire whose protagonists are geometric figures, narrated by a square that relates its discovery of a three-dimensional world. Flatland examines the ways in which artists have found inspiration in the formal vocabularies of abstraction since the 1960s. The lavishly designed book gathers works from the past six decades that challenge orthodox interpretations of abstraction.
Contributing artists: Laëtitia Badaut Haussmann, Francis Baudevin, Philippe Decrauzat, Marie-Michelle Deschamps, Angela Detanico / Rafael Lain, Hoël Duret, Sylvie Fanchon, Liam Gillick, Mark Hagen, Christian Hidaka, Sonia Kacem, Tarik Kiswanson, Vera Kox, Sarah Morris, Reinhard Mucha, Damián Navarro, Camila Oliveira Fairclough, Bruno Peinado, Julien Prévieux, Eva Taulois, John Tremblay, Pierre Vadi, Elsa Werth, Raphaël Zarka
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Fabian Treiber
For a While Longer34€ Add to cartUnstable Prototypes of a Reality We Know
Fabian Treiber’s (b. Ludwigsburg, 1986; lives and works in Stuttgart) paintings show what appear to be interiors while interrogating subjective projections and our perceptions of reality. The artificial spaces bear witness to human existence even though there are no people to be seen. In his still lifes, Treiber negotiates classical questions of painting: form and structure, color and composition, representation of space and organization of the surface. His paintings primarily implement formal rather than narrative decisions. This lets the artist provoke a deliberate breach in which the ostensibly fallacious emerges as the essential quality of painting—the effect is that of works that seem somehow off but are actually just right.
Fabian Treiber studied painting and intermedia design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (ABK Stuttgart). His works have won him a Karl Schmidt Rottluff Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the 2021 Hans Purrmann Grand Prize. He has had numerous solo shows, including at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; and Galerie Ruttkowski;68, Cologne; and contributed to group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Villa Merkel—Galerien der Stadt Esslingen a.N.; and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. For a while longer is published on occasion of his first solo exhibition at Haverkampf Galerie.
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Penny Hes Yassour
Temp-Est24€ Add to cartA Monograph about the Award-Winning Israeli Artist
Penny Hes Yassour (b. 1950, lives and works at kibbutz En-Harod Ihud) tells stories and keeps history alive, explores the boundary between remembering and forgetting. In her installations she combines sound, image, and a multi-part world of objects into narrative mise-en-scènes of great poetic power. Hes Yassour leads the viewer through the Jordan Valley with its many watchtowers, accompanies the transformation of the landscape in a gigantic, stagelike water basin, and documents the flight of bats in a narrow, labyrinthine spatial installation. The book published on the occasion of the artist’s first exhibition in Germany provides comprehensive insights into her subtle artistic work.
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Me, Family
Portrait of a Young Planet40€ Add to cartA Journey Through Many Worlds
In these times of great uncertainty, the themes that surface in the works of the thirty-six international artists gathered in Me, Family are more relevant than ever. Compiled by Francesco Bonami with a nod to Edward Steichen’s historic exhibition The Family of Man, the volume paints a multifaceted portrait of humanity in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The original installation of photographs and excerpts from writers opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955 and then went on a seven-year tour of one hundred and fifty museums all over the world. Matching the radicalism of Steichen’s conception, Me, Family presents works by contemporary artists who harness a wide range of media and genres to explore the ways in which humans today engage with their manifold coexistent histories and the diverse challenges they confront. Including reproductions of contemporary art as well as representations of social networks, fashions, information technologies, advertising, sound, music, and performances, the book captures a reality that is beautiful, dramatic, and intoxicating by turns. With writings by Roland Barthes, Francesco Bonami, Edward Steichen, and others.
With works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Doug Aitken, Sophia Al Maria, Yuri Ancarani, Darren Bader, Lara Baladi, Cao Fei, Cheng Ran, Clément Cogitore, István Csákány, Christian Falsnaes, Harun Farocki, Simon Fujiwara, Rainer Ganahl, Theaster Gates, Jack Goldstein, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hassan Khan, Ga Ram Kim, Olia Lialina, Li Ming, Cristina Lucas, Karolina Markiewicz & Pascal Piron, Eva & Franco Mattes, Shirin Neshat, Philippe Parreno, Mario Pfeifer, Jon Rafman, Cindy Sherman, Marianna Simnett, Rudolf Stingel, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jordan Wolfson, Wong Ping, and Akram Zaatari.
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Agostino Iacurci
10€ Add to cartAgostino Iacurci’s (b. Foggia, Italy, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings, sculptures, installations, and murals are based on vegetal forms and botanical subjects. Lucid compositions in radiant colors unfurl fantastical ornaments that transcend the division between figuration and abstraction and the hierarchical distinctions of applied art, design, fine art, and folk art. His central theme is the painted garden, in which he stages plants, humans, architecture, geometry, and decoration in a fashionably theatrical landscape. In Iacurci, the interpenetration of nature and civilization is real, integrating mythological motifs from across the history of art and culture, from antiquity to futurism and postmodernism, into his singular style.
Agostino Iacurci studied fine arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Since 2009, he has realized numerous large-format murals and installations for public and private institutions. He has also worked with international brands including Apple, Adidas, Hermès, and Starbucks.
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Maxim Gunga
10€ Add to cartThe painter Maxim Gunga is utterly unafraid of physicality. His canvas is a riot of oil paints huddling up against one another, fusing like the beasts, the humans, and the urban landscape of Berlin that serve him as motifs. Body and soul, animal nature and architecture, the profane and the sacred, subculture and mass culture—everything interpenetrates in Gunga’s paintings in large formats, melded into hybrid bodies. The result is an ecstatic intimacy, a flowing of colors and more or less abstracted dynamic forms toward their primal state, toward the matrix, toward pure energy: eternal transformation. It makes sense, then, that his pictures also amalgamate diverse styles and periods in the history of painting. He borrows from (Neo-)Expressionism, from Art Brut, from Baselitz, Lüpertz, the Neue Wilde, from modernism and Fauvism, from van Gogh and Matisse. His pinpoint brushwork, which reveals his extensive training, interweaves art history with our contemporary lifeworld and our affects. All the specters of the past and the present come to meet us in the pictures gathered in this catalogue, in a frenzy of the senses, in the primordial soup of Berlin, into which we dive with joyful abandon.
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Jan Zöller
10€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) art has the aura of a jerry-rigged, cosmic, comedic theater. Flames gutter, pant legs and elbows dance, run, and go up in fire. Wells, basins, and tubs are central motifs, symbolizing communal settings, but also the circulation of vital energies, of human and economic interconnections. Zöller’s paintings take fractured or antiquated systems, today’s art world among them, and reforge them into something new. In painting, he reflects on what being an artist means to him, driven by an interest less in a dialogue with art history or other contemporary painters than in the psychosocial relationships and conditions that inform his work. His paintings, sculptures, and installations probe the discrepancy between economic production and the spiritual and magical dimension of art.
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Sibylle Springer
Ferne Spiegel / Distant Mirrors35€ Add to cartThe paintings of Sibylle Springer (born 1975, lives in Bremen) focus on the role of women in the art world of the digital age. For her portrait series Feed, she has painted 40 female artists to date, based on staged photographs from their Instagram feeds. “Is social media an instrument of emancipation, or does it even lead to new forms of objectification?” (Kohout) In Wait for It, Springer copied pop stars from the internet, but used a silver paint that oxidizes the canvases, thus aging the eternally youthful icons before our eyes—precisely what digital image control seeks to prevent. In her more recent textile objects, Springer interweaves female artists of the past and present. This informative book accompanies her exhibition at the Kunstverein Bremen.
Die Malerei von Sibylle Springer (geb. 1975, lebt in Bremen) widmet sich der Rolle von Frauen in der Kunstwelt des digitalen Zeitalters. Für ihre Portraitserie Feed malte sie bisher 40 Künstlerinnen, basierend auf fotografischen Selbstinszenierungen aus deren Instagram-Feeds. “Sind Soziale Medien Instrumente der Emanzipation oder führen sie gar zu neuen Formen der Objektifizierung?” (Kohout) Für Wait for It kopierte Springer Popstars aus dem Netz, aber benutzte ein die Leinwände oxidierendes Silber, das die ewig-jungen Ikonen vor unseren Augen altern lässt, gerade das, was digitale Imagekontrolle zu verhindern sucht. In neueren, textilen Objekten verknüpft Springer Künstlerinnen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Dieses informative Buch begleitet ihre Ausstellung im Kunstverein Bremen.
FERNE SPIEGEL / DISTANT MIRRORS
KUNSTHALLE BREMEN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -

Pieter Slagboom
Scent of Hypnosis42€ Add to cartPieter Slagboom’s drawings are about life and death. About how these ostensible antagonists are inseparable; how, in his imagination, they are even fused. In his enormous canvases, we are held by the essence of our existence as though by a steel vise: we come from the void and in the end shall return to it. Thousands upon thousands of sweeping lines, twisting like Moebius strips, make for an almost physical experience of this truth. The dead and the newborn emerge from the primeval soup of Slagboom’s lines, as do genitals; we spot larger-than-life fantasies of disturbing sexual acts. The circle of life as a short circuit. The energy of some of the pictures in Slagboom’s oeuvre is almost too much to bear—we shudder before the pigments materializing our latent knowledge: that death is suspended in life.
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Jürgen Claus
To the Oceans with Imagination18€ Add to cartThe Sea as a Space of Artistic Experience
Jürgen Claus’s (b. 1935, Berlin; lives and works in Aachen and Baelen, Belgium) oeuvre encompasses paintings, films, light and solar installations, and underwater art. He is also a prolific writer on art, with theoretical works that have sold over 100,000 copies. “Jürgen Claus is the first one to see the ocean through an artist’s rather than a scientist’s lens,” Michel Ragon writes. In this book, Claus intertwines his experiences working on the fascinating underwater installations with a pressing contemporary concern: the global efforts to restore the seas to health. The publication combines visual art, architecture, poetry, and music for a multifaceted engagement with the world’s oceans.
Jürgen Claus majored in theater studies at the Universität München and was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and professor of media art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne.
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Franz Erhard Walther
Manifestations. Catalogue Raisonné of the Posters, Books and Drafts 1958–202068€ Add to cart”I don’t make any artistic difference between a poster design and my Work Drawings.“—Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda; lives and works in Fulda) is a German sculptor and creator of conceptual, installation, and process-based art whose work often stands in relation to his, or the beholder’s, body. For four decades, Walther designed artist’s posters, a genre that has become an anachronism in our contemporary digital world. This book is the first to gather his extensive output in the format in a single volume, rounded out by a wide-ranging survey of his designs and artist’s books.
”Artists give so much time, passion, and energy to their books that they are as important as very big installations. ‚Manifestations‘ is a very important artist book.“
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London”The new catalogue raisonné by Franz Erhard Walther is a masterpiece of parergon aesthetics. With his ‚Manifestations‘, the blurring of the boundaries between work and design, Franz Erhard Walther, after his performative sculptures, has achieved another great success for the emancipatory differentiation of the concept of the work of art.“
Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe”Franz Erhard Walther is nothing less than an exceptional 20th-century artist who has consistently questioned and fundamentally changed what a work of art can be. The innovative power of his comprehensive oeuvre is, of course, primarily evident in his art, but this publication of his manifold designs also provides an overview that is as wonderful as it is extraordinary.“
Andreas Beitin, Director, Kunstmuseum WolfsburgFranz Erhard Walther studied at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach am Main and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his education with a stint at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among his fellow students. His works were on display at documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8, and in 2017, Walther received the Golden Lion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia.
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Cornelia Baltes
Dingbats44€ Add to cartCornelia Baltes’s (b. Mönchengladbach, 1978; lives and works in Berlin) paintings and installation straddle the divide between abstraction and figuration. Her pictures are inspired by observations of mundane details—apparel, body parts, or facial expressions—that she pares down to simple lines and shapes. Rendered in vibrant colors and gestural fields, they hint at a narrative in the pictorial space. Baltes works with steadily modulated color gradients, on which she places thick and assertive marks. She often interrogates the painted picture’s function, by painting on the wall beyond the rectangle of the canvas, by hanging a picture in the middle of the room as an object in its own right or laying it out on the floor. Her works blend Pop Art and minimalism with an intensity and dynamic energy—and, sometimes, unmistakable flashes of humor—that cannot fail to captivate the beholder.
This book is the first comprehensive monograph on the artist’s oeuvre.
Cornelia Baltes studied at Bergische Universität Wuppertal in 2000–2003 and at Folkwang Universität der Künste, Essen, in 2003–2006, before rounding out her education at the Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2009–2011.
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Roland Schappert & Wolfgang Ullrich
Aktualitätsjetzt16€ Add to cartPhilistinism, climate change, legitimation discourses—in a tour de force sustained by profound knowledge of the phenomena in question, AKTUALITÄTSJETZT blazes trails through the jungle of contemporary art and its current debates. Over the course of two years, the art scholar and author Wolfgang Ullrich initiated 14 dialogues on Schappert’s word paintings, murals, and interventions. Their distinctive formal features and conceptual and substantial dimensions inspired illuminating conversations that range far beyond the specific works to explore today’s art world and questions of the philosophy of art and the sociology of culture. The best volume of dialogues on art since David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon.
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The Art of Society
1900–194529€ Add to cartThe Collection of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin
The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, the last building designed by Mies van der Rohe, has been closed a full six years for refurbishment. To mark its reopening the museum is presenting the highlights of its classical modernist collection under the title The Art of Society, 1900–1945. Visionary, critical, resigned or utopian, the paintings and sculptures bear witness to art’s dialogue with prevailing social conditions – from the German Empire to the First World War, the Weimar Republic and ultimately National Socialism. The catalogue documenting all works in the exhibition traces the major artistic tendencies during the first half of the 20th century in thirteen chapters. The Art of Society, 1900–1945 offers a renewed encounter with works by Edvard Munch, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Tamara de Lempicka, Lotte Laserstein, Otto Dix, George Grosz, Max Beckmann, and many others that is as captivating as it is illuminating.
Click here for the German edition.
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Anders Goldfarb
Passed Remains35€ Add to cartAbandoned Gas Stations and Burned-Out Buildings
In 1986 when Anders Goldfarb (b. 1954 in Brooklyn, lived and worked in Brooklyn, NY) moved to Greenpoint, he was a young photographer with a master of fine arts degree from State University of New York at New Paltz. In moving to Williamsburg, he joined a growing number of young artists seeking the low rents of what was then a declining neighborhood of light industrial buildings and working-class residences. Working with black and white film, and a medium format Rolleiflex camera, Goldfarb began photographing in 1987 in Williamsburg and Greenpoint, riding his bike around the area and looking for the peculiar beauty of sidings, peeling paint and razor wire. Goldfarb’s photographs provide a valuable historical record of these neighborhoods prior to their demolition and gentrification. His subjects are metaphors for loss and vulnerability and distill moments in time that are destined for demise.
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Christian Boltanski
Die Zwangsarbeiter – Erinnerung in der Völklinger Hütte27,50€ Add to cartErinnerungen | Souvenirs | Memoirs
Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris; lives and works in Paris) combines industrial architecture with relics of the working culture in his impressive installation for the Völklingen ironworks – a highly emotional approach to the subject of forced labor.
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Isabelle Graw
In einer anderen Welt. Notizen 2014–201726€ Add to cartPersonal Observation as an Analytical Lens on Society
Isabelle Graw (b. 1962, Hamburg; lives in Berlin) is publisher of the magazine Texte zur Kunst and has been professor of art theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2002. In this book, she branches out from her work as an art historian and critic to offer reflections on a wide range of observations from her own life. Never before has Graw addressed her readers more frankly than in these 160 notes.
“She is blindingly frank, addressing the questions that envelop her days: waxing salons, the arrival of Syrian refugees in Germany, exhibitions and grief, electoral and family politics. Subtly, Graw reveals how impressions and beliefs arise out of circumstance.”
Chris Kraus, American filmmaker and author of I Love Dick“In crisp and striking vignettes, this book shows how self-scrutiny and minute observation of the world intermesh and form the dense web of her analysis. This is a unique and original book, literary, psychological and sociological, all at once.”
Eva Illouz, French-Israeli sociologist






















