ODOR
Immaterial Sculptures
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|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Thomas Thiel, Florian Waldvogel |
| Author(s) | Antonie Bierling, Ilona Croy, Regine Dee, Jim Drobnick, Hanns Hatt, Lea März, Thomas Thiel, Florian Waldvogel |
| Design | Bureau Mario Lombardo: Mario Lombardo, David Heuer |
| Size | 20 x 27 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover with debossing |
| Pages | 200 |
| Illustrations | 70 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-176-4 |
The effect of odor is immediate. Smells arouse feelings in us, put us in moods, awaken recollections. They color the other senses and shape our perceptions more profoundly than we are aware. Scents create closeness and distance at the same time. They become imprinted on our memories and consolidate our experiences. And yet their existence in the world of three dimensions remains invisible, and the act of picking up a scent is fleeting.
The publication Odor—Immaterial Sculptures zooms in on the power of smells. Contributions from curators, artists, scientists, and scholars frame a variety of perspectives on this evanescent phenomenon, examining the olfactory sense and the qualities of the immaterial. Full-page plates conceived by the artists provide additional information, imagery, and contexts around the individual works, which put odor as an olfactory and spatial experience at the center of the engagement with art. The works operate between the poles of time and space, individual and community, consciousness and the subconscious, visibility and invisibility, the everyday and the miraculous, the sense of self and the perceptions of others, presence and absence, life and death.
Artists : Jason Dodge, Carsten Höller, Koo Jeong A, Oswaldo Maciá, Teresa Margolles, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sissel Tolaas, Clara Ursitti, Luca Vitone
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Dissonance
Platform GermanyRead moreA Changed Vision—New Painting from Germany
Post-reunification Germany has emerged as an important forum for international painting. The generation of artists born in the 1970s and 1980s eschew alignment with collective tendencies and resist clearly definable influences. Meanwhile, their art has registered the cultural and sociological dislocations and divergences since the fall of the Iron Curtain with seismographic precision.
The editors of Dissonance – Platform Germany present eighty-one of the most significant painters living and working in Germany in the past two decades. They have the courage of strong opinions, turn the spotlight on unsuspected treasures, and tease out the unexpected value in aesthetically thrilling achievements of programmatic pluralism. A vital survey of one of the most exciting chapters in the more recent history of art in Germany.
Some of the presented artists have graciously agreed to allow DCV to release limited editions of their works, which you can find here.
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Konrad Mühe
Guide38€ Add to cartAn Artist’s Book as an “Optical Illusion”
Konrad Mühe’s (b. Karl-Marx-Stadt, East Germany, 1982; lives and works in Berlin) works interrogate the construction of our identities by uncovering the technological and media apparatuses that sustain it and confronting it with the autonomous lives of objects. Their basic formal principle is the installation hybridizing sculpture and digital moving image, with a particular focus on the projector and the interaction of pedestal or suspension and projection screen. Where the classical black box in the movie theater or exhibition venue seeks to conceal the technical equipment in favor of an immersive visual experience, Mühe brings it to the fore and sets it out in the gallery space as sculpture and installation. Yet his works also undercut the conventional display regime in the white cube: the process of projection emerges as the true creative medium and subject. This book acts as a descriptive illustrated Guide to Mühe’s projects.
Konrad Mühe was Hito Steyerl’s master student and trained at the Berlin University of the Arts and the Burg Giebichenstein University of Art and Design Halle. His works have been featured at numerous film festivals including the 61st Berlinale and in exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, and elsewhere.
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Aline Schwibbe
Now It’s Dark28€ Add to cartAline Schwibbe (b. Hamm 1988; lives and works in Berlin) studied both psychology and art and her interest lies in observing the cyclical nature of events and experiences—in memory, in dreams and in the reality of the present. Her films and her photographic and mixed-media sequences often appear like fragments of occurrences snatched from the dark and exposed multiple times in an attempt to make them visible.
The artist’s first monograph is published on the occasion of her solo exhibition Now It‘s Dark at the EIGEN+ART Lab Berlin. The book introduces Schwibbe’s extensive multidisciplinary practice, which besides drawing, photography and video also includes sculpture, animation, sound installations, and textile projects.
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DAWN OF HUMANITY – ART IN PERIODS OF UPHEAVAL
37€ Add to cartThe book and exhibition present works from the first two decades of the twentieth century from the Kunstmuseum Bonn’s collection in dialogue with contemporary creative positions. What the works have in common across the distance of a century is their genesis in, and reflection on, a time of major social and political crisis. Back then, life had been profoundly changed by the industrial revolution; nowadays, climate change, wars, and the rising political power of right-wing ideologies are transforming the life of our communities. The presentation conceives art as a tool that lets us interrogate the world and imparts fresh intellectual impulses, and so also plays an active part in our societies. The title Menschheitsdämmerung – Dawn of Humanity – is borrowed from the poetry anthology of the same title released by Kurt Pinthus in 1919, which samples the Expressionist lyric poetry of the young century in four chapters: “Downfall and Outcry”; “Love Human Beings”; “Awakening of the Heart”; “Entreaty and Indignation.” Florian Illies, who already wrote an afterword for the 2019 centenary edition of Menschheitsdämmerung – the bestselling poetry anthology in the history of German literature – contributed the keynote essay in the book.
Artists: Nevin Aladağ, Francis Alÿs, Kader Attia, Yael Bartana, Rebekka Benzenberg, Monica Bonvicini, Andrea Bowers, Heinrich Campendonk, Louisa Clement, Max Ernst, Georg Herold, Franz M. Jansen, Alexej von Jawlensky, Käthe Kollwitz, Wilhelm Lehmbruck, Max Liebermann, August Macke, Helmuth Macke, Goshka Macuga, Marie von Malachowski-Nauen, Carlo Mense, Zanele Muholi, Heinrich Nauen, Grace Ndiritu, Anys Reimann, Deborah Roberts, Daniel Scislowski, Paul Adolf Seehaus, Tschabalala Self, Monika Sosnowska, William Straube, Emma Talbot, Hans Thuar, Lawrence Weiner
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CHRISTIAN ROTHMANN
The Light Touch45€ Add to cartA Monograph of Curiosity
Christian Rothmann (b. Kędzierzyn, Poland, 1954; lives and works in Berlin) is an artistic jack-of-all-trades, a builder of bridges between cultures, and a restless globetrotter and traveler across time. He takes photographs wherever he goes, especially when he is on the road, gathering documentaries with a creative edge, spontaneous yet powerfully symbolic pictures, or conceptual series. His motifs have included basketball hoops in the most unbelievable places, toys in restaurants and stores, exotic dishes, and—in the sequence Legs of the World—beautiful legs, of real-world women, but also of advertising-poster idols and art objects. He has a special knack for recruiting accomplices from all age groups and across social and cultural differences, as for his series you and me or Mother & Daughter. Fierce large-format paintings and delicate watercolors on small paper formats from Rothmann’s studio in Berlin-Kreuzberg complement his long-term photographic projects. The Light Touch presents the artist’s variegated visual art on almost five hundred pages.
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Andreas Wegner
Wir fahren mit der Schneckenpost, weil die uns keinen Pfennig kost50€ Add to cartThe art of Andreas Wegner is an inquiry into capitalist urbanity. His interventions explore alternative models for urban interaction, trade, city development, traffic, or the use of public space. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Charles Fourier’s social utopias, Wegner founded, e.g. a cooperative department store in Berlin, a grocery store in Vienna, and conducted real estate business as a form of creative resistance. This monograph illustrates the artist’s most important projects with ample imagery, essays by renowned authors, interviews, and his own texts. Alongside collective initiatives, installations, photography, film, and sculpture, painting remains a constant in Wegner’s oeuvre to this day.
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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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Jan Zöller
Keine Zeit zum Baden38€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach im Kinzigtal, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) art brims with personal references and experiences that he translates into his distinctive personal visual idiom. His paintings are theatrical arrangements for which he draws on a multifarious repertoire of motifs. Zöller’s first monograph Keine Zeit zum Baden presents new works engaging with the exhibition space such as a floating installation with blue tiles from the exhibition of the same title at Städtische Galerie Ostfildern and videos and large-format paintings from the cycle Badebrunnen that were created between 2019 and 2022. The bathtubs in the pictures hint at private moments of relaxation; the fountains, at the “eternal cycle” of nature. The title Keine Zeit zum Baden (No Time for Bathing), then, gestures toward the subjects of the works, but also suggest the dilemma of striking a healthy balance between life, work, and one’s vocation.
Jan Zöller studied with Marijke van Warmerdam und Leni Hoffmann at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe from 2012 until 2017 and with Jean-Marc Bustamante at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016. He won the Federal Prize for Art Students of the Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn, in 2018, followed by Stiftung Kunstfonds’s working fellowship in 2021.
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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.
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Verena Issel
Yellow Pages. Installations and their individual components45€ Add to cartVerena Issel’s installations feel friendly and inviting, they are soft, round, colorful—we cannot but smile when we look at them. The sculptures and pictures she makes for them are replicas, sometimes laced with irony, of familiar objects from nature and culture—palm trees, ancient columns, and more—which she manufactures out of materials that surround us in everyday life and the domestic sphere such as an old bag, foamed plastic fragments, or a drainpipe. They are awkward giants, monochrome, simplified, two- and three-dimensional forms that wish us no ill. Taking a closer look, we realize that they embody what has been lost, that they are a plastic version of what we are destroying or have destroyed already: nature, obviously, but also ourselves and our cultural and social achievements. Their merriment and sympathy are tinged with melancholy, and the loss is doubly painful when we consider that the sculptures and graphic art are filled with no more than an imitation of life, and an exaggerated one. This catalogue presents a survey of Issel’s diverse and sprawling oeuvre. Expertly choreographed shots of the colorful works convey vivid impressions of her installations.
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Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
Special Edition60€ Add to cartSPECIAL EDITION in clothbound slipcase
The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
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Cristina Lucas
Immobile Engine29€ Add to cartMechanisms of Power
The Spanish artist Cristina Lucas (b. Jaén, 1973; lives and works in Madrid) works in a wide range of media and genres. Central concerns include the confrontation of subjective and political historiographies and a critical examination of cultural stereotypes. The publication’s point of departure is the multichannel video installation Unending Lightning, begun in 2013, in which Lucas undertakes a painstaking study of the history of aerial warfare. The book also showcases works that limn a contemporary perspective on value chains and the capitalization of time and landscape. Moreover, the artist has developed a corpus of critical cartographic models that offer algorithmic, philosophical, poetic, or, in some instances, humorous visualizations of unexpected nexuses. The first German-language publication on Cristina Lucas’s art, it offers a comprehensive survey of her oeuvre to date.
Cristina Lucas studied fine arts at the University of California and the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. She has had residencies in Paris, Amsterdam, and New York. Her work has been exhibited at MUDAM, Luxembourg; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Chile, and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Kiasma, Helsinki; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.
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Vera Mercer
New Works28€ Add to cartBeauty and Melancholy, Joie de Vivre and Vanity
The American photographer Vera Mercer’s (b. Berlin, 1936; lives and works in Omaha and Paris) oeuvre defies easy summary. She started taking pictures in Paris in the 1960s, making portraits of her then husband Daniel Spoerri—who, like she, was initially training as a dancer—and other members of the Fluxus group and Nouveaux Réalistes, including Emmett Williams and Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé. Around the same time, she also photographed Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp for various magazines; her friends Eva Aeppli and Niki de Saint Phalle were among her favorite sitters.
In the 1970s, she took a long creative hiatus: after moving to Omaha, Nebraska, she poured all her energy into starting a number of restaurants and developing an entire downtown neighborhood. But then, in the early years of the new millennium, she returned to photography, capturing breathtaking neo-baroque still lifes featuring flowers, fruits, freshly killed game, antique glasses, and illuminating candles in large formats.
Vera Mercer’s fourth monograph presents her most recent opulent still lifes in color, as well as a novelty in her oeuvre: restrained black-and-white flower pictures and portraits realized as small-format platinum prints.
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FREIGEISTER
FRAGMENTS OF AN ART SCENE IN LUXEMBOURG AND BEYOND35€ Add to cartThinking Otherwise—the Mudam in Luxembourg at Fifteen
A free spirit, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, is someone who “thinks otherwise than is expected of him in consideration of his origin, surroundings, position, and office, or by reason of the prevailing contemporary views” (Human, All Too Human,1878). As the German philosopher saw it, one must seek to become “untimely” and remain a “stranger” to one’s time in order to question its premises. This view to states of alienation unites the positions of fourteen young Luxembourgish artists in Freigeister, the publication accompanying the celebrations on occasion of the fifteenth anniversary of the Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc Jean.
In recent years, Luxembourg’s art scene has grappled in a wide variety of ways with the challenges that come with the small yet economically successful country’s ongoing transformation. Charting realities between the familiar and the unknown, the artists featured in Freigeister employ photography, painting, and installation as well as film, sculpture, printmaking, and performance art to paint a carefully considered but by no means dispassionate portrait of today’s society in an effort to build bridges between identity and the future.
The book presents works by Yann Annicchiarico, Laurianne Bixhain, Aline Bouvy, Marco Godinho, Sophie Jung, Catherine Lorent, Filip Markiewicz, Karolina Markiewicz & Pascal Piron, Claudia Passeri, Daniel Reuter, Nina Tomàs, Daniel Wagener, and Jeff Weber.
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Jenny Brosinski
Things I’ve Never Said58€ Add to cartJenny Brosinski’s (b. Celle, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) paintings in large formats look like uncoordinated abstract compositions with traces of wear deliberately left in place. This brings their materiality to the fore and reveals the creative process. Expressive oil paint on unprimed canvas, spray-painted lines, typographic elements, shoeprints, or pieces of masking tape on the canvas: on the one hand, these are experiments and statements; on the other hand, they are engagements with painting as such. The artist added sculpture to her repertoire in 2019, making figurative and sometimes colorfully painted imaginary beasts in bronze or stone—more evidence of her subtle sense of humor, which also manifests itself in her pictures and especially in their titles. The extensive monograph offers profound and comprehensive insight into Brosinski’s oeuvre.
Jenny Brosinski studied illustration and animation at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, the École supérieure des arts décoratifs, Strasbourg, and the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She completed her education with a master class in Berlin in 2010.
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Sinje Dillenkofer
Archives Vivantes34€ Add to cartSinje Dillenkofer’s (b. Neustadt a.d.W., 1959) body of work ARCHIVES VIVANTES inquires into the idea of the “archive,” harnessing the means of visual art to allow us to see and perceive what the archive does not reveal. With staged photographs that combine conceptual rigor with a wide spectrum of creative techniques and devices, Dillenkofer’s pictorial essay turns the spotlight on specimens, artifacts, graphic art, and writings compiled by the explorer and naturalist Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) and the ornithologist Carlo von Erlanger (1872–1904). Examining the archive as a model of nature and reality as well as a mirror of “human nature,” the artist develops compositional ideas inspired by the peculiar features of the objects in the collections in visual analogies, pictorial spaces, and spatial compositions. Animals and plants that died long ago “in the service of science” are vividly embodied through the distinctive use of light and shadow. The resulting pictures consider the archive in a new context, framed by our complex relationships with nature, humankind, society and its values and ideals, circumstances and constellations of power. The pictures were taken in six German collection archives: at the Museum bei der Kaiserpfalz Ingelheim, the Naturhistorisches Museum Mainz, the Senckenberg Forschungsinstitut und Naturmuseum Frankfurt, the Stadtmuseum Berlin, and the Stuttgart State Museum of Natural History. Dillenkofer was the first artist to be invited by the Berlin State Library—Prussian Cultural Heritage to translate Humboldt’s American travel diaries into art.
Sinje Dillenkofer studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design and has taught at universities and art academies. Her work is held by the Victoria & Albert Museum in London, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe, the Staatsgalerie Stuttgart, and the Berlinische Galerie, among others.
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João Onofre
Untitled (in awe of)25€ Add to cartJoão Onofre’s works are tributes to art history and pop. He gleans what is in danger of being lost right now, realigns it, and translates it into something sublime. His art encourages the beholders to reconsider a past that has faded in collective memory with a critical eye and make peace with it. His creative process is guided by the material and a clearly defined concept that nonetheless does not restrict a work’s finding its own way. That is why he does not commit to a particular medium, making videos, performances, installations, and much more. What all his works have in common is that they probe the limitations of their medium and our perceptive capacities in novel ways. This catalogue presents three recent works in which the essence of Onofre’s art becomes manifest: he molds myths and symbols into awe-inspiring images, sounds, and forms—not for nothing have critics labeled him an alchemist. In the catalogue, his tangible compressions of cultural history are rendered in imposing pictures and flanked by an ambitious essay that places them in their context.
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Toni Mauersberg
Entre Nous28€ Add to cartToni Mauersberg (b. Hannover, 1989; lives and works in Berlin) is interested in the different layers of a picture’s signification: there is, in the first instance, what it depicts; then the larger tradition in which it is grounded; and finally, the conditions of its genesis. She employs a range of painterly strategies and techniques to uncover the potentials of paintings as a medium of understanding, insight, and storytelling. The question that animates her art is how it is possible, in this post-religious, post-rational, and post-individual age, to be one’s own person. In her most recent series, Pas de Deux, Mauersberg investigates the complex visual language of abstract painting, which originated in part in a quest for new ways of representing spirituality and emancipation. Combining nonrepresentational pictures with portraits, she draws attention to how both are products of “making,” composed of nothing but color, while enlarging their interpretative ambits. The dialogue between the paintings is meant to help the beholders chart their own course as they unlock what appear to be hidden laws encoded in pictures.
Toni Mauersberg studied Jewish studies at Freie Universität Berlin in 2008–2012 and fine arts with Leiko Ikemura at the Berlin University of the Arts from 2009. In 2017, she was Michael Müller’s master student.
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10 Jahre Württembergische Volksbühne
Reprint der Festschrift von 192915€ Add to cartCentennial Publication of the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen
In 2019, the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen (WLB)—one of the oldest regional theatres in Germany—is celebrating its 100th anniversary. On the occasion of this anniversary, the tenth commemorative publication by the Württembergische Volksbühne from 1929 is being reprinted. The unique document of the time visualizes in a special way the important role that the topics of cultural education and culture in rural areas, which are still relevant today, played in the young Weimar Republic immediately after the First World War. The brochure also documents both the mission and the daily work of the theater. In addition, the reprint is complemented by an essay from Joachim J. Halbekann, the principal of municipal archive of Esslingen, providing—for the first time in the history of the WLB—a comprehensive historical essay that examines the time betweeen 1919 and 1933/34.
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Tony Cragg
Points of View24€ Add to cartThe biomorphic and monumental sculptures of British sculptor Tony Cragg (born 1949, lives in Wuppertal) impress with their virtuosity and their dynamic appearance. They might even evoke movement, as if they are still becoming. Often exhibited outdoors, and in church or museum contexts, they blend into their surroundings like organic entities. Since the 1960s, Cragg’s search for sculptural form manifested through methods like layering and stacking existing materials, rearrangement, and assemblage. He now employs both traditional and new technologies and materials, yet his sculptures have to be seen in clear contrast to normative, repetitive industrial production. This book documents Cragg’s 2025 exhibition in the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie Dessau.
