


nolde/kritik/documenta (German)
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Birgitta Coers / documenta archiv, Martin Brenninkmeijer, Corinna Otto / Draiflessen Collection |
Author(s) | Astrid Becker, Birgitta Coers, Sabine Fastert, Jens Kastner, Nicole Roth, Barbara Segelken, Bill Sherman, Wolfgang Ullrich |
Design | Studio Carmen Strzelecki |
Cover | Softcover |
Size | 18 x 21,5 cm |
Pages | 220 |
Illustrations | 30 color and 70 b/w |
Language(s) | German |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-076-7 |
Emil Nolde (1867–1956) ranks among the best-known classic modernists. Contemporary perceptions of the artist and his oeuvre are informed by mythmaking as well as its deconstruction. After the Second World War, Nolde himself and art historians of the time portrayed him as a victim of Nazi persecution. More recent critics have drawn attention to his anti-Semitic views and his opportunism in his dealings with the Nazi authorities.
With support from the Nolde Foundation, Seebüll, the Düsseldorf-based conceptual artist Mischa Kuball (b. 1959) delved into the documentary record to shed light on this profoundly ambivalent figure and frame a critical perspective on Emil Nolde’s output and actions. The first fruits of his endeavors were shown at the Draiflessen Collection, Mettingen, in the winter of 2020–2021.
Kuball continued his research at the invitation of the documenta archive, Kassel. Based on his findings, the exhibition project “nolde / kritik / documenta” illuminates the ways in which life and oeuvre are interwoven and inquires into the contradictions of modernism, which Emil Nolde as a man and artist may be said to have embodied. The focus of the new project is on the staging of Nolde’s works at the first three editions of the documenta exhibition series (1955, 1959, 1964), which were instrumental to establishing the “Nolde myth.”
An enlarged and revised edition of the catalogue “nolde / kritik / documenta” is released in conjunction with the exhibition at the Fridericianum, Kassel (December 9, 2022–February 19, 2023).
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Academy of Media Arts Cologne and associate professor of media art at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design/ZKM since 2007.
More books
-
Rainer Jacob
justICE30€ Add to cartRainer Jacob (b. Jena, 1970; lives and works in Leipzig) has anonymously installed objects made of ice in public settings in cities including Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Oslo, Prague, and Budapest since 2013. He then allows them to dematerialize and records the process in photographs. Radiators, wall outlets, QR codes, and the Duchampian pissoir are among his recurrent motifs. The impermanence of the ice objects builds bridges to street art, Fluxus, and action art. Critical observations on the unequal distribution of resources and political power in contemporary society, his works reflect on our perceptions and question the idea of originality in art while also probing the outer limits of sculpture.
The publication showcases the ice objects of the past ten years, embedding them in a decade that has marked a sea change in the life of humankind: JustICE captures an artist’s distinctive perspective on societal processes.
-
Can Yasar Köklü
CYK55€ Add to cartThe young photographer, graphic designer, and filmmaker Can Yasar Köklü (b. Schwelm, 2003; lives and works in Brooklyn) grew up between Cologne and Istanbul and currently studies at New York’s renowned Pratt Institute. In his first publication CYK—an artist’s book featuring breathtakingly beautiful photographs and personal writings—he explores his experiences growing up, the traditions that inform his art, and his feelings in three different cultures: “Heimat” charts his native Germany, where he spent most of his life; “Memleket” is dedicated to Turkey, where his roots are; and “Home” presents the impressions Köklü gathered during a year in high school in Los Angeles and now in New York, where he continues his education. Driven by a passion for storytelling, he captures singular—fascinating and deeply moving—moments in time.
-
Dietmar Lutz
Ein Jahr40€ Add to cartDay by Day
For a full year, from August 2020 until August 2021, Dietmar Lutz (b. Ellwangen, 1968; lives and works in Düsseldorf) painted or drew a picture every day in which he rendered a scene or detail from his day-to-day life. All 365 works appear here in chronological sequence, either in reproductions or in photographs showing them in the setting in which they were created. Taken together, the series constitutes a radically subjective review of one year. The paintings capture memories, but although they invariably owe their existence to a particular situation, they do not necessarily frame it as a memorable event. The artist observes himself in his world and defines his role in it. Painting as a daily task seems to structure time rather than the other way around. Each picture opens up a new space in which the different facets of time manifest themselves to the senses.
Dietmar Lutz studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and rose to renown with large-format paintings in which he portrays situations from ordinary life and weaves references to the histories of film and literature. Lutz is a cofounder of the German-British artists’ collective hobbypopMuseum, with which he has exhibited at the 1st Athens Biennale; Deitch Projects, New York; Tate Britain, London; and elsewhere.
-
Ivonne Thein
TECHNO BODIES28€ Add to cartIn her multidisciplinary work, Ivonne Thein (born 1979 in Meiningen, lives and works in Berlin) addresses the current body images of a digital culture that is undergoing fundamental change due to extensive technologization. Today, new technologies are profoundly shaping both the physical body and its virtual representations in the visual culture of our time. Thein works with AI systems for her installations and places the question of the problem of imitating nature, and thus the relationship between art, technology and body, at the center of her artistic work. To do this, she combines digital techniques with sculptures that she creates by hand from silicone. Thein thereby evokes an intrusive closeness in the exhibition space, as the images generated with the AI no longer remain just a pure data set on the screen. The book presents works from 2020–2023.
-
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.
- Out of stock
Supernatural
Sculptural Visions of the BodyRead moreThe future of human corporeality in the Anthropocene era
Given the technological development in biogenetics, humans will be able to make existential modifications to all living things, Nature, the animal world and human likenesses in future. What will bodies of the future look like? Who or what will we be? Supernatural offers us some answers in its hyperrealistic and realistic sculptures. These visionary works not only exemplify the impact of the digital revolution and genetic engineering on “posthumans” and the environment, but also illustrate, including in their own hybrid creations, how increasingly blurred the line between nature and culture is now becoming. Technological innovations are also having more and more effects on trends in the latest hyperrealistic sculptures. In using 3D printing to perfect their creation processes and pushing sculptural boundaries to encompass robotics and synthetic biology, artists are opening the door to new design possibilities in artefact, biology and technology for themselves as well.
The book presents works by Anne Carnein, Isa Genzken, Glaser/Kunz, Thomas Grünfeld, Sam Jinks, Josh Kline, Krištof Kintera, Reiner Maria Matysik, Alex May and Anna Dumitriu, Fabien Mérelle, Patricia Piccinini amongst others.
-
James Francis Gill
Catalogue Raisonné of Original Prints, Vol. 239€ Add to cartThe Catalogue Raisonné of the Co-Founder of American Pop Art
James Francis Gill (b. 1935, Tahoka; lives and works in Texas) is one of the most important artists of American Pop Art. His paintings, often based on photographs, provide an unusually personal approach to the icons of the 1950s and 60s. Gill suddenly became Hollywood’s most celebrated artist when his Marilyn Triptych was added to the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962 – even before the works of Andy Warhol. Through friendships with celebrities such as John Wayne, Martin Luther King, and Marlon Brando, Gill became the contemporary artist-witness of an entire generation. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from the exuberant Hollywood of the time and surprisingly withdrew in 1972, only to reappear on the art market thirty years later. This catalogue raisonné in two volumes impressively documents his work from the early political motifs to the Pop Art icons of his late work.
-
Tobias Pils
Drawings55€ Add to cartDrawings is the first book dedicated exclusively to the painter Tobias Pils’s (b. Linz, 1971; lives and works in Vienna) drawings. His graphical forms—the lines, figurations, even the intervening spaces—constantly change the direction in which they set out. Their ambivalence destabilizes any attempt at interpretation. One would think that the indeterminacy of Pils’s visual idiom must torment him, yet in fact this state of existential tension fills him with absurd pleasure. Rather than conceiving his works with a clear objective in mind, he allows himself to fall into them. He—his art—remains open to everything that happens in the creative process. Taken together, Pils’s drawings operate along the diffuse boundary between order and disorder, as though, acknowledging the disordered present (the life we lead), they came from an ordered past (the life we have constructed for ourselves).
Tobias Pils studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1990 until 1994. His works have been displayed in museums around the world, including at the mumok, Vienna (2021); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); the Musée Picasso, Paris (2020); the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2020); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); the Aspen Art Museum (2018); the Chinati Foundation’s John Chamberlain Building, Marfa (2016); and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010). In 2020, he executed a large wall painting at the École normale supérieure in Paris-Saclay.
-
Harte Zeiten
Ciężkie Czasy34€ Add to cartIncreasingly pressing global political and societal challenges are always also rewarding subjects of creative engagement, and sometimes artists devise anticipative approaches to real-world problems.
Harte Zeiten—Ciężkie Czasy is a cooperative venture launched by Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg; Port25—Raum für Gegenwartskunst, Mannheim; and Galeria Miejska bwa, Bydgoszcz, Poland. It showcases works by altogether ten Polish and ten German contemporary artists. Putting the principle that art knows no boundaries into practice, the publication, with statements from Wolfgang Ullrich, Joanna Kiliszek, Schamma Schahadat, and others as well as documentation of the symposium held in September 2021, inspires forward-looking reflections on the conditions in which cultures thrive and similarities and differences between the two countries and beyond.
-
Nicola Staeglich
Color Light Matter Mind36€ Add to cart“This painting springs from the ambition to paint color into the air.” (Ulrich Loock)
Nicola Staeglich’s (b. Oldenburg, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) work with color achieves a distinctive intermediate state between physical presence and atmospheric radiance. She stages painting now as a performative action with broad propositions in color, now as an installation in three dimensions with multilayered translucent painted panels. Color Light Matter Mind is Staeglich’s first monograph, setting recent works in relation to her earlier output (1998–2021). From the spiral-shaped reliefs to her Liquid Lights, the artist opens up a fresh dimension for color.
Nicola Staeglich studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz, and the Chelsea College of Art, London. She won numerous fellowships and has been professor of painting/graphic art at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste Essen since 2015. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad and is held by private and public collections.
-
MK Kaehne
Π = 3,1415935€ Add to cartThe 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.
- Release April 2025
Fidel Martínez
Todesfuge. Das Leben des Dichters Paul Celan26€ Add to cartThe Spanish graphic artist Fidel Martínez Nadal’s (b. Seville, 1979) graphic novel Todesfuge recounts the life of Paul Celan (1920–1970), one of the most eminent lyric poets of the twentieth century. The narrative interweaves biographical and literary aspects of Celan’s life, including his Jewish identity, his lifelong trauma as a Holocaust survivor, and his acclaimed poem Todesfuge. Martínez’s expressive and somber illustrations visualize Celan’s struggles with feelings of guilt, memory, and his creative efforts to find words for the unspeakable. An artistically brilliant homage to Paul Celan’s oeuvre, Todesfuge is an impressive contribution to the engagement with the Shoah in the medium of the graphic novel pioneered by Art Spiegelman.
- Out of stock
Banksy’s Dismaland & Others
14,80€ Read morePhotographs by Barry Cawston
The two projects by the British street artist Banksy, Dismaland and Walled Off Hotel, received an outstanding response worldwide. The book presents for the first time the documentation of the two extraordinary works from the perspective of Barry Cawston, the artist’s official photographer.
-
On Air
Der Klang des Materials in der Kunst der 1950er bis 1970er Jahre40€ Add to cartOn Air showcases a distinctive art form, the sound sculpture, retracing its evolution from the early 1950s, when artists begin dismantling the conventional boundaries of art, to the early 1970s. In no more than a quarter-century, the range of possible answers to the question “What is art?” grows vastly larger. Propelled by the idea of the work of art as a machine and instrument, sounds, noises, tones, vibrations, silence, words, breath become a “tangible” sculptural material. Artists enrich visual perception by adding the acoustic dimension, interweave seeing and hearing, explore time and space with fresh zeal. In emerging artistic genres such as performance, installation, or media art, sound is an integral component of the work. The book focuses on sound objects by Yaakov Agam, Joseph Beuys, Hermann Goepfert, Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, David Tudor, Timm Ulrichs, and others.
With five scholarly essays and numerous illustrations and notes on individual works, the comprehensive publication offers an attractive introduction to the subject.
-
GETA BRĂTESCU
Film and Video 1977–201842€ Add to cartGeta Brătescu (b. Ploiești, 1926; d. Bucharest, 2018) is now widely regarded as one of Eastern Europe’s most important avant-gardists. In the Western art world, however, she was largely obscure until her participation in documenta 14 in 2017 and the Venice Biennale of the same year. Questions of abstraction, the political potential of the image, and the subjective experience of self, memory, and history inform her stylistically diverse oeuvre in a wide range of media, which evolved under the repressive conditions of the Ceaușescu regime yet kept pace with the discourses of the Western avant-gardes. This richly illustrated volume focuses on her collages and drawings as well as her works on film and video from the late 1970s until her death.
-
Fahar Al-Salih
Beyond Fairy Tales39€ Add to cartBridges between East and West
The protection and sense of belonging one feels where one is at home, and what it is like to lose both of them: these are central concerns in the art of Fahar Al-Salih (b. Belgrade, 1964; lives and works in Karlsruhe). Having grown up in Kuwait, where a classical education in visual art was inconceivable, Al-Salih came late to his métier; Markus Lüpertz was among his teachers, and he completed his education in Hermann Nitsch’s master class. Seeing himself as a “bridge-builder” between the cultures of the Arab world and Europe, Al-Salih probes the different lived realities in which his itinerant biography has been set. No more linear than his path through life, his oeuvre is defined by subjects to which he keeps returning in a kind of cyclical motion. This publication offers unprecedented insight into Al-Salih’s creative approach and his articulations of individual yearnings, the comforts of safety, and political and social upheavals. His work achieves a deft interweaving of global perspectives and migrant realities.
-
Ohne Schlüssel und Schloss
Chancen und Risiken von Big Data19,90€ Add to cartVon Kunsthandwerk zu digitaler Verschlüsselung
An jeder Haustür ziehen wir Grenzen, wir schließen auf und schließen ab. Und noch in jüngster Vergangenheit war eindeutig, was als Verschlusssache galt. Ganz anders stellt sich diese Frage im IT-Zeitalter. Ausgehend von der kunsthandwerklichen Sammlung des Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern wird deutlich, wie in früheren Jahrhunderten über mechanisch und symbolisch aufwendig gestaltete Schlösser, Schränke oder auch Reliquienbehältnisse Distanzen austariert wurden. Sie alle sind sichtbares Vehikel für die bewusste Wahrnehmung von innen und außen, zugehörig und ausgegrenzt, wissend und unwissend oder öffentlich und privat. Für Big Data gilt dies in keiner Weise mehr. Beim Digitalen werden Serviceleistungen mit Datenerhebungen verbunden, deren weiteren Einsatzbereiche wir weder unmittelbar verstehen noch überblicken können. Historische, technologische und philosophische Überlegungen bieten wichtige Beträge zur aktuellen Debatte und Einschätzung der Risiken und Chancen von Big Data.
-
Gabriele Basch
fortuna24€ Add to cartPaper and Foil Cut‑Outs in an Innovative Language of Forms: An Overview of the Works of Gabriele Basch from 2008 to 2019
Since the 1990s, Gabriele Basch (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) has been working with cut-outs and translating the age-old tradition of silhouettes into an idiosyncratic and innovative language of forms. The artist interweaves creation and destruction, planning and chance into a complex, multi-layered reality and makes views into the spatial environment an integral part of her work. In her paper and foil cut-outs, foreground and background, materiality and void combine to form a whole that oscillates between painting and drawing, as well as between urban structures and hints of the biomorphic – in delicate color gradients, swirling structures, spontaneous gestures, and stenciled surfaces. The generously illustrated monograph offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work from 2008 to 2019.
-
Steven Shearer
Working from Life58€ Add to cart“Today’s images are echoes of how people have always been depicted.”
Steven Shearer (b. New Westminster, BC, 1968; lives and works in Vancouver) works in a range of media including printmaking, sculpture, painting, drawing, and collages of found photographs. His portraits of individuals in decorated settings earned Shearer international acclaim. They show heroes from the past—protagonists of musical subcultures or the history of art. The archetypal creative minds in their studios appear together with their works; the interiors surrounding them reflect their psychological constitution. Shearer paints them in the style of Symbolism, the German Romantics, or the Fauves. Imitating the perspective painting of the Renaissance, he virtually pulls the beholder into his pictures.
Steven Shearer participated in the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design New York Summer Studio Programme in 1992 and studied at the Emily Carr College of Art, Vancouver, in 1992. In 2011, he represented Canada at the 54th Venice Biennale.
-
Franziska Opel
Close and Cold32€ Add to cartWith sex toys, the potential for misinterpretation and ill-advised use is vast, as countless slapstick comedies illustrate. Steering clear of quick laughs, Franziska Opel deftly harnesses this anarchic power of misunderstanding to explode our perceptions and worldview. Her works are painstakingly planned experimental arrangements in which she modifies or deforms mundane objects as well as those sex toys in subtle ways or powers them up in series, making us see them with fresh eyes. They cast a spell over us with their sensual allure, while our associative circuits processing what we see spark a certain sense of irritation. Curiosity, attraction, bewilderment, shame—expertly staged in photographs for this catalogue, the works elicit a wide range of emotions. Their energizing contradictions are elaborated by contributions from gifted writers: standalone poetic-narrative writings that reflect on several key aspects of Opel’s art in offhanded yet challenging ways.