Museum Brot und Kunst
Forum Welternährung
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| Editor(s) | Isabel Greschat, Vater und Sohn Eiselen-Stiftung |
| Author(s) | Isabel Greschat, Markus Grob, Marianne Honold, Thomas Miedaner, Jan Rüttinger |
| Design | omnigroup, Lausanne |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Size | 16,5 x 22 cm |
| Pages | 200 |
| Illustrations | 144 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-003-3 |
Food, Art, and Consumption
The craving for food and the desire to avoid being hungry have been among humanity’s central concerns for millennia. Economic activity, science, politics, culture—our basic need for sustenance informs and influences every domain of our lives. The catalogue accompanying the permanent exhibition at the Museum Brot und Kunst—Forum Welternährung sheds light on nineteen thematic foci around the significance of bread as the quintessential food. Founded in 1955, the Museum of Bread and Art was the first institution of its kind in the world dedicated to this subject; its collection comprises a large number of artifacts from across several centuries that speak to the histories of culture, society, and technology. The generously illustrated publication presents a panorama of the wide field of human nourishment in dialogue with art, helping the reader grasp the complexities of the world in which we live.
With works by Ernst Barlach, Bernhard Johannes Blume, Pieter Brueghel, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Simone Demandt, Agnes Denes, Frans Francken, Georg Flegel, Erich Heckel, Christian Jankowski, Markus Lüpertz, Gerhard Marcks, Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso, Claire Pentecost, Thomas Rentmeister, Daniel Spoerri, Andy Warhol and others.
The book was included in the shortlist of the competition “Schönste Deutsche Bücher 2021”.
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Sam Falls
After LifeRead moreSam Falls (b. San Diego, 1984; lives and works in New York) delegates the authorship of his works to the phenomena of nature. Applying water-reactive dry pigments or plant parts to support media like canvas, aluminum, or tiles and then exposing them to the effects of sun, rain, and wind at selected sites for extended periods, he deliberately integrates the agency of chance into his art. The playful yet conceptually rigorous process is a metaphor for the impermanence of all bodily existence. Falls’s symbiotic work with nature and its elements evinces references to the technique of the photogram as well as land art. Melding diverse media—photography, sculpture, and painting—he bridges the gulf between artist, object, and beholder.
Sam Falls studied at Reed College in Portland, Maine, and at the International Center of Photography Bard in New York. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Mori Museum, Tokyo, and Frankfurter Kunstverein.
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Ann Wolff
Observations and Reflections44€ Add to cart“Art is coming from my inside. I am working as its servant.—I let it out not thinking too much—using my hands and gesture—choosing a material to put it on place. I do not use the art. It is using me.“
Ann Wolff (b. Lübeck, 1937; lives and works in Visby and Kyllaj, Sweden) has ranked among the most significant and most influential glass artists on the international scene for over five decades. Yet she has also worked in bronze, aluminum, nickel silver, and concrete, creating abstract as well as figurative sculptures, and produced a sizable oeuvre on paper: pastels, drawings, and fine art prints. Ann Wolff enrolled at the legendary Ulm School of Design in the 1950s to study visual communication with Otl Aicher. From 1993 until 1998, she was professor of “materials-related design” at the University of Fine Arts (HFBK) in Hamburg. Her works, which have garnered an array of prizes, have been shown in numerous solo exhibitions and are held by renowned public and private collections all over the world.
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Stephan Kaluza
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The mythical character of the Rhine as a ‘German symbol’ has long been of profound interest to poets and visual artists. Today, however, the Rhine has lost the aura of a great romantic river along much of its course: from Basel to Rotterdam, it serves as a high-volume shipping lane, and sprawling industrial installations line its banks.
At the dawn of the new millennium, Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) went on an almost eight-months-long walking tour, following the Rhine from its source at the foot of Piz Badus in Switzerland to its debouchment into the North Sea near Rotterdam. During this thousand-mile trek along the river’s right bank, he stopped every minute—after between two and three hundred feet—to take a photograph of the opposite shore. In this way, his camera compiled a painstaking record of the Rhine in 21,449 individual shots. Digitally assembled in a single six-inch-tall composite image, the pictures form a two-and-a-half-mile stream.
What Kaluza created in this project would have been inconceivable before the development of digital photography, which made the seamless presentation of the pictures in a single panoramic band possible. What is more, the computers capable of processing the enormous quantities of data did not arrive until a few years ago. It took the artist’s assistants a full two years just to edit the images. Harnessing digital technology, Kaluza creates for photography what had been the exclusive precinct of painting: a sweeping holistic perspective. A large number of the fascinating panorama photographs were published in the imposing tome Der Rhein in 2007. Das Rheinprojekt now presents a freshly composed selection from this treasure trove.
Stephan Kaluza received a comprehensive education in Düsseldorf in the 1990s, studying photography at the city’s University of Applied Sciences, art history at the Academy of Fine Arts, and history and philosophy at Düsseldorf University. Since 1995, his work has been shown at numerous galleries in Seoul, Shanghai, Jerusalem, Los Angeles, Berlin and elsewhere. Kaluza’s plays have been performed in Düsseldorf, Berlin, and Stuttgart.
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Christian Boltanski
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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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Shara Hughes
58€ Add to cartBoisterous Compositions
At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.
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Otto Dix in Baden-Württemberg
Museumsführer9,80€ Read moreSeven Museums Jointly Present the World’s Largest Collection of Works by the Famous German Painter.
In 1933, after the loss of his professorship in Dresden and mounting defamation by the National Socialists, Otto Dix (b. 1891, Untermhaus; d. 1969, Singen) retired to Lake Constance, where he lived for more than thirty years. Together, seven museums in the state of Baden-Württemberg — including the museum in his former home in Hemmenhofen — have the world’s most comprehensive collection of his works at their disposal, providing insight into all facets of his creative work: from the social criticism of the major works, at times depicted with brutal verism, to the old masterly glaze painting of his inner emigration and the expressive alla prima paintings of the late years. For the first time ever, this treasure trove is presented in one volume.
The participating museums: Kunstmuseum Albstadt, Zeppelin Museum Friedrichshafen, Museum Haus Dix, Gaienhofen-Hemmenhofen, Kunsthalle Mannheim, Kunstmuseum Singen, Kunstmuseum Stuttgart, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart.
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Valentina Jaffé
Dripping Folds and Melting States24€ Add to cartDripping Folds and Melting States is published in conjunction with the young artist Valentina Jaffé’s most extensive institutional solo exhibition to date. Blending artist’s book and catalogue, the volume gathers works from the past five years by Jaffé, who lives and works in the Rhine–Neckar metropolitan region. Taking an interdisciplinary and inter-media approach, she continually refines the conception of collage that is central to her art. Her creative universe is informed by intersections, imbrications, and the exploration of in-between states—by the concurrence of mutability and constancy.
Created out of long-fibered paper and awash in color, the artist’s visual spaces are transformed with each new environment and have an air of breathing membranes. Her ceramics, meanwhile, play with contrasts of hardness and softness, fragility and stability, coldness and warmth. The book reflects Jaffé’s multifaceted experimentation and is enhanced by scholarly contributions by Carolin Heel and Fedra Benoli, who add depth to her engagement with space, body, and material.
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Ed Sommer
Planetare Allianz22€ Add to cartA Monograph on the Pioneer of Op Art
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Ed Sommer, together with his artist friend Marc Adrian, was one of the most important representatives of op and kinetic art and received considerable attention in the 1970s with his films and photographs.
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Barbara Armbruster
Meins Mine24€ Add to cartAn Intercultural Artistic Narrative between Germany and Egypt
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Barbara Armbruster studied Graphic Art at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, where she later held a teaching position. Her works have been widely exhibited at, among others, the Goethe-Institut in Cairo, the Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart, and the Kunstverein Freiburg.
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Olaf Breuning
Paintings37€ Add to cartThe multimedia artist Olaf Breuning (b. Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1970; lives and works in Upstate New York) has built a multifaceted oeuvre in installation art, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and performance that questions contemporary reality. In a recent series of paintings, he playfully grapples with pressing concerns such as global warming. Like his earlier work, the new ensemble manifests his unorthodox approach. Breuning devised a unique painterly technique involving large-format wooden stamps with which he presses paint onto the canvas. The result is unconventional and fresh.
The publication—the first book dedicated exclusively to Breuning’s paintings—presents two dozen pictures as well documentation of the production process in the form of wooden stamps and sculptures. A dialogue between Katharina Beisiegel, director of the Kirchner Museum, Davos, and Gianni Jetzer, designated director of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, delves into parallels and differences between the oeuvres of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Olaf Breuning.
Breuning trained as a photographer in Winterthur from 1988 until 1993 and completed a master class in photography from 1992 until 1995. In 1995–1996, he was enrolled in a postgraduate program at today’s Zurich University of the Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Chisenhale Gallery, London; and the Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne. He participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has had work in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthalle Zürich; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
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Ugo Rondinone
nuns + monks20€ Add to cartContemplation and Communion with the World
Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is a conceptual and installation artist whose oeuvre spans abstract painting, photography, and sculpture. Nature is where he has long found inspiration, regeneration, and comfort: “In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the secular vibrate against one another.” Rondinone’s works oscillate between the extremes of interiority and engagement with the wider world; stone is often present in his art as a recurrent material and symbol. The sculptures in the series nuns + monks originated as limestone models; the artist made three-dimensional scans and then cast the works in bronze. As a reflection of the inner self in the outside world, the friable mineral contrasts with the solidity of the bronze; the natural genesis of the millennia-old stones with the presence of the polychrome casts in the here and now. nuns + monks attest to a visibility while also giving the impression of flinching from the gazes to which they expose themselves.
Ugo Rondinone studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His work has been presented at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, the Swiss National Museum, Zurich, MoMA/PS1, New York, and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, among others.
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Alexandra Tretter
24€ Add to cartThe art of Alexandra Tretter (*1988) is as deep as it is playful. Owing just as much to the gentle spirituality of Hilma af Klint’s late geometries as it does to Sonia Delaunay’s exuberant disc paintings, almost bursting with sheer chromatic pleasure. Her compassionately designed artist’s book combines monumental paintings with intimate works on paper, all of which are imbued with the contexts of Tretter’s own life as an artist, as a woman, as a mother.
Her kaleidoscopic figurations unfold from a center at rest in itself and multiply in symmetry and asymmetry towards all sides. She contrasts the circular form, the unchanging basic element of her compositions, with the oval, which constantly strives beyond itself, transforming itself in ever-new permutations from one figure into the next, into eyes, mouths, breasts, petals or vulvas.
Her images strive for composure, unfold and blossom, only to let go of all gestalt-like form. Once gained stability is instantly pushed into turmoil. Colors flare up violently or flow delicately about, lighten or shade each other, carry or throw each other off course. Tretter equally realizes materialization and dissolution as basic principles of her painting.
Whereby all, what her images absorb, preserve and release, is experience, growth and slow maturing. Her paintings are “figurations of affection”, in which each individual turns towards something else, doubts or grows, at times turns away or surrenders all the more consciously. They question everything, start anew and yet find their way back to themselves, into their very own.
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Etsu Egami
Rainbow18€ Add to cartWhat is worth talking about in art eludes language. Aesthetic experience is without words, like a human encounter that touches upon our innermost being. Etsu Egami is interested in the margins of understanding, where the communication of ideas and feelings threatens to fail, where forms become illegible. That is the point on which she homes in with her brush, which she wields in a rough calligraphic style, putting almost translucent oil paints on the canvas. Spectral faces emerge that dissolve into abstraction; abstract forms, beheld from the corner of one’s eye, momentarily coalesce into a likeness. Painting, to Egami, is a physical and performative act, the brush an extension of her arm, bringing a picture into being in sweeping rhythmical motions. As we contemplate her work, that momentum imparts itself to us: first our eyes begin to wander, then we feel our bodies stir, and finally the spirit, too, pulsates in the rhythm of the brush. Gathering Egami’s most outstanding works, this catalogue is a universal invitation to join a peculiar dance, an arc of light the artist traces across all barriers to understanding and that speaks to our senses.
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Bettina Buck
Finding Form45€ Add to cartThe German sculptor Bettina Buck (1974-2018) called attention to herself with her “performative sculptures,” which she often presented vis-à-vis museal objects. Buck’s preferred materials came from the hardware store: corrugated cardboard, ceramic tiles, pressed foam, or plastic foil, which are all not meant to last. Out of these materials she created a kind of changeable and transient “protagonists,” who didn’t have a final form but rather emphasized the actual process of finding form (as well as losing form). In a provocative action in 2014, Buck dragged an oversized foam bloc through a museum collection and let it rest next to famous artworks, which gained a new dynamic in this interplay. Buck herself said once that her works were meant to “simultaneously attract and alienate the viewer.” In the exhibition space the objects should “create a tremor, a vibration and a conversation with its surroundings.”
Finding Form, a posthumous monograph, presents Bucks complete sculptural works on over 300 pages and contains texts by Phyllida Barlow, Paolo Icaro, Cecilia Canziani, and Andrea Maria Popelka. The book was conceived and published by the artist’s estate, Bureau Bettina Buck.
Bettina Buck will be featured in 2026 with a work in Chiara Camoni’s presentation at the Italian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale:
The 61st International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia
Con te con tutto (With You With Everything)
Italian Pavilion, curated by Cecilia CanzianiMay 9 to November 22, 2026
Tese delle Vergini, Arsenale, Venezia
more Information here -
Fiona Rae
Row Paintings24€ Add to cartElements of Energy and Complexity
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
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Gregor Hildebrandt
A Blink of an Eye and the Years are Behind us48€ Add to cartFor the past two decades, Gregor Hildebrandt (b. Bad Homburg, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) has transformed analog audiotapes, cassettes, and records into collages, sculptures, panel paintings, and installations. Melding visual art with music, he has charted a complex creative vision crossing boundaries of medium and genre that he continually refines. Before using a tape, he records selected music—typically a single song—on it, whose lyrics he quotes in the work’s title. The artist’s output draws on his personal repertoire of bands that share a romantic narrative of loneliness and a melancholy keynote. The same attitude toward life is reflected in Hildebrandt’s work. The book offers insight into all periods of the artist’s oeuvre and is rounded out by archival materials from Hildebrandt’s studio, his project space Grzegorzki Shows, and the music label Grzegorzki Records that illustrate his creative process.
Gregor Hildebrandt studied at Kunsthochschule Mainz from 1995 until 1999 and at the Berlin University of the Arts from 1999 until 2002. He was a fellow of the Deutsches Studienzentrum in Venice in 2003 and worked in Vienna on a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service in 2005–06. He has been professor of painting and graphic art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 2015.
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Brandon Lipchik
10€ Add to cartIn recent years, a Wagnerian night has settled over Brandon Lipchik’s (b. Erie, PA, 1993; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin) pictures. Moons rise; beasts and titans populate a homogeneous world of swimming pools, white picket fences, and neatly mowed lawns. Synthesized on a computer screen and then transferred to canvas by hand, the artist’s paintings revolve around the backyard as a mythically fraught scene of popular culture. The garishly lit multiperspectival pictures replicate characteristic shots from 1980s gay porn films and quote a clean American Apparel look. Lipchik subjects men’s bodies, spaces, plants, objects, and animals to digital deconstruction, obtaining rudimentary and abstract shapes. Staring at smartphones or gazing on water surfaces, his characters recall early digital animations and seem oddly hollow, like empty avatars waiting to be filled with new speculative content.
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CLARA MOSCH
and early art events in the GDRRead moreThe legendary producer-run gallery Clara Mosch and the artists’ group of the same title that gathered around it were founded in Karl-Marx-Stadt (today’s Chemnitz) in 1977 and existed until 1982. The catchy name was an acronym of the contributors’ last names: CLA = Carlfriedrich Claus, RA = Thomas Ranft and Dagmar Ranft-Schinke, MO = Michael Morgner, SCH = Gregor-Torsten Schade. As the founders of the first producers’ gallery in the GDR and creators of diverse oeuvres, the group’s artists rank among the foremost exponents of avant-garde art in East Germany. The book presents works of art, limited editions, and posters as well as photographs from the Ralf-Rainer Wasse archive in the collections of the Lindenau-Museum in Altenburg. One thematic focus is on Clara Mosch’s land-art happenings and plein-air pieces. The unconventional actions attest to the group’s stated objective of building greater awareness of the ongoing devastation of the local environment. Forty years after the fact, Clara Mosch’s work has lost none of its relevance and urgency.
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Pokorny
25€ Add to cart“Abstraction means the omission of the irrelevant and the unnecessary in order to find more substantial content and form.”—Werner Pokorny
His often monumental sculptures can be found in many places in Germany and abroad, including Aachen, Berlin, Busan (South Korea), Frankfurt am Main, Freiburg, Karlsruhe, Riehen, Saarbrücken, and Stuttgart. Werner Pokorny works (b. 1949, Mosbach; lives and works in Ettlingen) exclusively with Corten steel for his outdoor sculptures and with wood, steel, and bronze for his indoor works. Well-known basic forms such as bowls, spheres, cuboids, and houses serve as points of departure and reference, which are abstracted by reduction, rotation, tilting, or combination with other elements. The artistic field of tension characteristic of Pokorny’s impressive sculptural oeuvre is due to the oscillation between form and abstraction, figure and reduction, hard edges and soft curves.
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Louise Hindsgavl
Conversation Pieces68€ Add to cartThe Danish sculptor Louise Hindsgavl (born 1973, lives in Copenhagen) is known for hybrid figurines made of porcelain and glazed stoneware: half animal, half human. Only their material evokes the idealized and kitschy scenes traditionally rendered in porcelain; however, Hindsgavl’s “sculptural collisions” tell of disturbing encounters between tormented beast-like people. For that she draws from brutal folktales of the past as much as from the ubiquitous “fairytales” of today’s social media that normalize violence, sexual abuse, and self-harm. Using one of the most fragile materials, she brings these trends into focus for discussion, calling her sculptures Conversation Pieces—which is also the title of this interesting and provocative book.
