Olaf Breuning
Paintings
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Gianni Jetzer |
| Author(s) | Katharina Beisiegel, Gianni Jetzer |
| Design | Hubertus Design, Zurich |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Size | 24,5 x 34 cm |
| Pages | 76 |
| Illustrations | 51 |
| Language(s) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-101-6 |
The 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.
More books
-
Emmanuel Bornstein
Wildwechsel25€ Add to cartLike the deer that tests our vigilance by suddenly crossing the road, Emmanuel Bornstein’s (b. Toulouse, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) art, which is rarely winsome and often disturbing, forces us to grapple with reality. In his earlier work, the German-French artist often focused on the Holocaust and the Second World War, creating pictures profoundly informed by his own family’s story. Exploring Berlin, the epicenter of that dark history, inspired searching meditations in series that turned the spotlight on traces of what had happened. More recently, Bornstein has sought to disentangle his art from subjective experience, shifting his focus to the analysis and reconstruction of contemporary events. Wildwechsel retraces the evolution of his oeuvre as reflected in his biography, which exemplifies the cultural exchange between Germany and France.
Emmanuel Bornstein studied painting first at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris, then at the Berlin University of the Arts. His works are held in numerous private and institutional collections in New York, Paris, Berlin, Vienna, Madrid, and Istanbul.
-
Irmel Droese. Felix Droese
Die Fruchtbarkeit der Polarität28€ Add to cartA Tribute to the Artist Couple
Irmel Droese (b. 1943, Landsberg an der Warthe) and Felix Droese (b. 1950, Singen/Hohentwiel) first met in 1970, when both were students in Joseph Beuys’s class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. In a decades-long partnership in life and art, they have built oeuvres that, both each for itself and in dialogue with each other, scrutinize a rapidly changing reality. Irmel Droese creates expressive stage characters, sculptural oil paper figures, and depictions of humans on paper, while Felix Droese’s diverse ensembles and large-format papercuts grapple with money, economic questions, and the rising predominance of commercial considerations. His art gained international renown with his participation in documenta 7 in 1982 and the 43rd Biennale di Venezia in 1988. Designed in close collaboration with the artists, the publication documents their separate and joint oeuvres, drawing attention to societal questions.
-
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.
-
Stefan Knauf
10€ Add to cartStefan Knauf (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) uses selected materials such as construction supplies or plants to investigate the histories of botany, migration, trade, science, and architecture and critique an idealized and anthropocentric conception of nature that is still prevalent. His sculptures, geometric-abstract pictures, and installations, with echoes of constructivism and minimal art, are contact zones in which everything is related to everything: human and non-human history, the natural and the artificial, ecology and ideology. Knauf’s works do not propose to unravel these entanglements. Rather, they suggest alternative perspectives and topographies guided by the idea of the “modified landscape” and devise material and alchemistic forms of knowledge and a novel and multiperspectival approach to the history and reality of the Anthropocene.
-
Larissa Kikol
Neue abstrakte Malerei26€ Add to cartAbstract painting has reinvented itself: rid of political and ideological burdens, it now stands for pure creative autonomy. From the Abstract Expressionism of the postwar era to today’s expansive ease—in essays and conversations, Larissa Kikol sheds light on how this art form broke free of the narratives that attended its emergence and performed a “great reset.” From the seminal innovations of Katharina Grosse or Albert Oehlen and radically subjectivist approaches in Cecily Brown or André Butzer to cutting-edge tendencies like Dirty Minimalism and Post Vandalism, the book presents thrilling insights into a painting that puts emotion, color, and shapes center stage. An inspiring look at the renaissance of abstract art in the 21st century and a must-have reference work for all art lovers.
Artists: Frederic Anderson, Karla Black, Frank Bowling, Andreas Breunig, Jenny Brosinski, Cecily Brown, André Butzer, Diamonds Crew, Willehad Eilers, Jadé Fadojutimi, Helen Frankenthaler, Katharina Grosse, Antwan Horfee, Aneta Kajzer, Joan Mitchell, Michael Müller, Oscar Murillo, NEU, NUG, Albert Oehlen, David Ostrowski, Over, Daisy Parris, Marco Pariani, Jackson Pollock, Christopher Wool
- Out of stock
Welt ohne Inventar
16,80€ Read moreThe stories by Katja Hachenberg (b. 1972, Rhineland-Palatinate; lives and works in Karlsruhe) bridge the gap between fiction and reality. They urge the familiar to disappear and the usual to dissolve. Hachenberg is interested in complex and broken characters who oppose the conventions: outsiders, jailbreaker, dropouts. The relief faces of the sculptor Reinhard Voss (b. Rendsburg; lives and works in Karlsruhe) are juxtaposed with her texts. In dialogue, a relational panopticon of figures emerges which invites the reader for a visual and imaginative stroll.
-
Michael Bertram
mehr licht35€ Add to cartThe Mülheim-Kärlich Nuclear Power Station, 1975–2019
In 1975, construction began in Mülheim-Kärlich on what was to be the only nuclear power plant in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. After numerous court battles and only two years of trial and regular operation, the plant was decommissioned in 1988 and dismantled starting in 2001. The 530-foot cooling tower, taller than Cologne Cathedral, was the point of reference, landmark, and eyesore of an entire region; its time-consuming demolition became a symbol of the perennial political polarization over the decision to phase out nuclear power.
Michael Bertram (b. Mendig, 1968; lives and works in Mayen) took photographs of the reactor looming between homes and factories in order to record the future past in pictures. The plant cost seven billion deutschmarks to build and one billion euros to take back down: vast resources expended on a temporary installation that lasted forty years and left a lasting mark on the landscape, the surrounding communities, and the people who lived in its shadow. Starting with the demolition, the book presents an inverted timeline in eighty-one black-and-white photographs. The object seems to rise before our eyes until, at the end of the series, five color photographs conjure up a past that was very much present only a moment ago—a singular document of Germany’s industrial heritage.
-
SOMA
Collective SineUmbra18€ Add to cartOn the Disappearance of Italian Culture
Under the collective label SineUmbra, the artists Luisa Eugeni (b. Assisi, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and Mattia Bonafini (b. Legnago, Italy, 1980; lives and works in Bremen) develop interdisciplinary projects that they realize as sprawling multimedia installations comprising video projections, sound, and performative elements. The point of departure for their project SOMA was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 essay Disappearance of the Fireflies, which probes the wrenching transformation that Italian society and the country’s very landscapes have undergone since the 1960s. SOMA melds performance art, the visitors’ movements, geography, and psychology in a space of experience that speaks to all senses for an exploration of the impact that traumata inflicted on individuals and communities by natural disasters and social changes have on the human soul and perceptual capacities. In keeping with the artists’ collective and dynamic creative vision, the catalogue embeds the multimedia installation in a context fleshed out by rich photographic documentation and numerous texts.
On occasion of the master class graduate exhibition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 2019, the two artists were awarded the renowned Karin Hollweg Prize for Fine Art. The publication accompanies their first solo show at Kunsthalle Bremen.
-
João Penalva
The Asian Books40€ Add to cartThe First Survey on the Exceptional Artist Books of João Penalva
Since 2007 João Penalva (b. 1949, Lissabon; lives and works in London) has exhibited large format unbound books, printed with archival inks on fine art paper, displayed on tables with chairs, to be handled freely. Each one is published in an edition of three and one artist’s proof. Those whose content relate to Asia, whether factually or fictionally, are collected here for the first time: Taipei Story, 2007; Portraits: Machines and Kabuki Wigs, 2009; The Toshiba Book of Happiness, 2009; Hello? Are you there?, 2009; Michio Harada, 2015; Boro, 2017.
João Penalva studied Fine Art at the Chelsea School of Art in London. His works have been shown in manifold international exhibitions. Penalva represented Portugal 2001 at the Venice Biennale and 1996 at the São Paulo Biennale.
-
Austin Eddy
Selected poems40€ Add to cartSince 2018, the American painter and sculptor Austin Eddy (b. Boston, 1986; lives and works in Brooklyn) has probed the manifestations of modern painting in a world between abstraction and figuration. As a child and teenager, Eddy immersed himself in the imageries of comics, cartoons, and record covers. In the early 2010s, he studied in Chicago with Barbara Rossi, who had been one of the Chicago Imagists in the 1960s. The deconstruction of everyday objects into innumerable forms and hues became his central theme. Eddy’s works play with luminous colors, overlaid textures, animated bird motifs, and abstract planes of light while grappling with a human existence defined by loss and the passage of time. Situated on the margins of reality, his paintings and sculptures are like visual poems, celebrating the evanescent instant that exists only for a second before fading into the past.
Austin Eddy completed a BFA at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 2010.
-
Candida Höfer
Editions 1987–202044€ Add to cartAll of Candida Höfer’s Editions in One Book
Candida Höfer’s (b. Eberswalde, 1944) shots of deserted libraries, opera houses, concert halls, churches, and museums have made her a member of the international photographic avant-garde. One strand in her acclaimed oeuvre are editions—photographic prints in small formats issued in larger numbers—that Höfer produces to support institutions and art publishers. Gathered for the first time in this book, with an introductory essay by Anne Ganteführer-Trier, the around one hundred such editions she created between 1987 and 2020 offer a representative cross-section of Candida Höfer’s art.
Candida Höfer studied in the first photography class of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works have been exhibited at documenta 11 and in 2003 she represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia alongside Martin Kippenberger.
- out of stock
Drucksache Bauhaus
38€ Add to cartThe Early Years of the Weimar Print Workshop
At the Staatliches Bauhaus in Weimar, the print workshop began operation in the spring of 1919 as the first workshop. Printmaking corresponded to the basic idea of the Bauhaus in that it realized the unity of art and craftsmanship in an ideal manner. With the groundbreaking project Bauhaus-Drucke. Neue Europaeische Graphik, four portfolios were created in which forty-five representatives of the European artistic avant-garde participated. In the announcement brochure of 1921, it stated: “The many who do not yet know about the work of the Bauhaus, and who cannot know, are to be made aware of us through this work.” The book presents the portfolios published between 1921 and 1924, together with other works printed at the Bauhaus by Lyonel Feininger, Wassily Kandinsky, and Oskar Schlemmer. The Stuttgarter Prolog also sheds light on the influence of Adolf Hölzel, whose students and later Bauhaus masters Oskar Schlemmer and Johannes Itten brought many of his ideas to the Bauhaus.
-
Lars Breuer
The Love of the Gods32€ Add to cartThe art of Lars Breuer (b. Aachen, 1974; lives and works in Düsseldorf and Cologne) is set apart by its broad spectrum of systems of reference. In his large-format installations, text-based works in his own typography draw connections to literature and art history. They are complemented by figurative and abstract paintings and photographs.
In The Love of the Gods, Breuer presents 104 C-prints of photographs for which he pointed the camera’s lens into the barrels of disused rifles, pistoles, revolvers, and cannons. The pictures were taken on the artist’s travels to Athens, Bangkok, Buenos Aires, Copenhagen, Leverkusen, Ingolstadt, Melbourne, New York, Oslo, and Phnom Penh, in museums, palaces, and public squares. Breuer’s conceptual and meticulously sober-minded approach yields almost abstract compositions showing nothing but the round muzzles and the dark interiors of the weapons on a deep-black ground. We see only a ring-shaped ornament until it dawns on us that it is part of a lethal implement. A cruel constant of human existence stares us in the face: humans behind these weapons were perpetrators, humans in front of these weapons were victims. Lars Breuer’s turn the spotlight on what the aura of the ornaments conceals: they have wrought death.
-
Ed Sommer
Planetare Allianz22€ Add to cartA Monograph on the Pioneer of Op Art
The complex and extraordinary work of the Schwäbisch Gmünd-based artist Ed Sommer (1932–2015), who preferred to call himself a Bildsprachenmaler (painter of visual imagery), includes metal objects, formations of acrylic glass, gestural painting, erotic films, projection photography, dialogical portraits, and spoken texts. In 2014, the ZKM | Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe added a large number of works by the artist to its collection. This publication now presents the collection holdings, supplemented by further works by Ed Sommer.
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.
-
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.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Fragmente eines Ängstlichen28€ Add to cartA Novel on Coping with Guilt or the Feeling of Having Violated Life
The filmmaker Castner and the anthropologist Pollock not only share the similarity of their names with those of Castor and Pollux, the fabled twins of Greek myth, but also a hard fate: an irreparable guilt whose motifs run through the entire novel. Pollock is forced to admit to himself that, in his role as a scientist, he was involved in a genocide against indigenous people in Panama; Castner, meanwhile, tries to get a handle on his bouts of excessive hypochondria. In episodic flashbacks and an interview that gradually turns into an emotional dispute between them, the two characters analyze the minutiae of their life stories and arrive at a surreal insight.
Castor and Pollux were known in antiquity as the patrons of sailors, who took their bearings from the twins’ constellation. That is why water figures in this novel as the element that unites all narrative planes. Water—like life—will fill any vacant space regardless of shape and adapt to all circumstances.
Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a visual artist, working in the media of photography and painting, and a writer whose output includes plays, novels, and nonfiction books. The philosophy of nature is a central theme in both Kaluza’s art and his fiction.
-
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.
-
Pensive Images
16 Artists in Dialogue with W. G. Sebald35€ Add to cartOn Memories and Temporalities
Pensive Images examines the complex and invariably singular relationships through which images and memories are inextricably linked. The book relates to the work of the German writer W. G. Sebald (b. 1944, Wertach; d. 2011, Norfolk), especially to four fictional stories he published between 1990 and 2001, in which he inserted non-captioned blackand- white photographs of uncertain provenance and nature into the text like memories punctuating ways reminiscent of his writing. It brings together 16 artists who, in ways reminiscent of Sebald’s approach, explored the realms of memory and past from the perspective of experience and intertwining temporalities.
With works by Mathieu Kleyebe Abonnenc, Dove Allouche, Lonnie van Brummelen / Siebren de Haan, Moyra Davey, Tacita Dean, Jason Dodge, Félix González-Torres, Ian Kiaer, Jochen Lempert, Zoe Leonard, Helen Mirra, Dominique Petitgand, John Stezaker, Danh Vo and Tris Vonna-Michell.
-
Michelle Jezierski
Verge28€ Add to cartHow does a simple line become a horizon? When do we begin to see colors and shapes as a landscape? Michelle Jezierski’s painting homes in on the tipping point at which our perception begins to oscillate between color/surface and space/representation. At that very point, she captures the essence of the landscape as such, which is not a concrete place but a metaphor for inner states of affairs. To get there, Jezierski distills what she sees in her surroundings down to the elements of painting—shapes and colors—which just barely intimate a pictorial space while persistently drifting toward abstraction. The defining feature of her technique is that she layers several pictorial planes and spaces on the canvas in staggered arrangements. “Perpetually discovering new ways to unsettle the visual space,” as she puts it, she engenders ruptures and structures that open up multiple perspectives and a portal for reflection on one’s own perception. Above all, however, the cuts lend her pictures a peculiar rhythm that powerfully pulls in the gaze, making the reader paging through this catalogue forget time and space.
- temporarily not available
Shara Hughes
Day by Day by DayRead moreGraphic Manifestations of the Unconscious
The painter Shara Hughes (b. Atlanta, GA, 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA) is one of the rising stars of the American arts scene. Her colorful imaginary landscapes, executed in a radiant palette and with an expressive gesture, pay homage to the Symbolists, the Fauves, and the Expressionists, whose artful handling of lighting and depth she deftly emulates. In an intuitive approach, Hughes applies paints to the canvas that match her present state of mind. She calls her pictures “emotional landscapes” and notes that she does not know what will happen next; her work on them touches on a vulnerable boundary. The lavish book presents numerous works on paper, most of them in large formats, and contains an essay by the New York-based art critic Andrew Russeth.
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 Newport Art Museum, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, her work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
