On Air
Der Klang des Materials in der Kunst der 1950er bis 1970er Jahre
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Sylvia Martin |
| Author(s) | Maike Aden, Katia Baudin, Christina Dörfling, Marcus Erbe, Sylvia Martin, Dietmar Rübel |
| Design | Anna Wesek, buchtypo |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Size | 19,5 x 25 cm |
| Pages | 304 |
| Illustrations | 100 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-109-2 |
On 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.
More books
-
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.
-
Elsa Salonen
Stories Told by Stones15€ Add to cart“I find the question of a consciousness of stones genuinely inspiring, captivating, and provocative!”
Elsa Salonen (b. 1984, Turku; lives and works in Berlin and Finland) produces colored crystals from the pigments of flowers, draws stellar constellations with finely ground meteorite dust on glass, or distils liquid from plants. The Finnish artist experiments with a wide range of “poetic” materials, reviving lost animistic rituals and magical practices. Her subtle works in the field of tension between installa-tion, painting, and conceptual art combine mysti-cism with science, ancient knowledge with recent findings — supported by a great respect for nature. This volume documents her artistic search for consciousness as the primary source of all physical matter.
- Release February 2026
BOOM!
7 Jahre nova space48€ Add to cartFrom 2019 to 2025, nova space, Bauhaus-Universität Weimar’s university gallery put up 21 projects, which this volume documents in image and text. As both an experimentation field and meeting place, nova connected international artists, students, faculty, and the public under the enthusiastic direction of curator Katharina Wendler. Her essay provides insight into the unique history of this mobile and interdisciplinary gallery, its program as well as the continuous development of new curatorial formats. The final act of nova is an exhibition in book form, for which artists, architects, designers, typographers, and filmmakers were invited to create work that freely associates around the theme of BOOM!—inspired by the image of the supernova.
ARTISTS: A.O. LAURA ABERHAM, MARGRÉT H. BLÖNDAL, ZUZANNA CZEBATUL, BJÖRN DAHLEM, DAVID DIAO, HANNAH SOPHIE DUNKELBERG, NADINE FECHT, LIAM GILLICK, JANA GUNSTHEIMER, NSCHOTSCHI HASLINGER, STEF HEIDHUES, JUDITH HOPF, VERENA ISSEL, CHRISTIN KAISER, IAN KIAER, RAGNAR KJARTANSSON, VERA KOX, SCHIRIN KRETSCHMANN, YUTAKA MAKINO, STEFAN MARX, ERIC MEIER, AD MINOLITI, BRUCE NAUMAN, PRINZ GHOLAM, HANNAH RATH, KARIN SANDER, FETTE SANS, KATRIN STEIGER, JAN TICHY, WOLFGANG TILLMANS, IGNACIO URIARTE, ROBIN WAART, YOUNG BOY DANCING GROUP, FRANCIS ZEISCHEGG, KARLA ZIPFEL AND MANY MORE
-
Jean-Marie Biwer
D’après nature42€ Add to cartPainterly Investigations of the Present
For over four decades, Jean-Marie Biwer (b. 1957, Dudelange, Luxembourg; lives and works in Basbellain, Luxembourg) has made art that records his fine-grained observations. Grappling with the grand themes of art history – the landscape, the human figure, the still life – Biwer consistently questions the role painting can play in a world shaped by a deluge of images and information. Responding to the omnipresence of the latter and reacting to the increasingly frantic pace of our lives, he creates paintings that allow the intensity of the present moment to unfold. The richly illustrated book gathers his most important works since 2005.
“These things are there, we just need to look at them. They are simple, but today they have the power to bring so much to people.”—Jean-Marie Biwer
Jean-Marie Biwer’s work has been shown throughout Europe and in 1993 he represented Luxembourg at the 45th Biennale di Venezia. His works can be found in the Musée National d’Histoire et d’Art Luxembourg, IKOB, Museum of Contemporary Art, Eupen, and Mudam Luxembourg – Musée d’Art Moderne Grand-Duc-Jean amongst others.
-
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.
-
Bilder des Wohnens
18€ Add to cartThe Cognitive Registers of Photography
All over the world, housing shortages and living conditions are urgent concerns of political and academic debates. Scholars at the FH Bielefeld conducted a three-year research project on Bilder des Wohnens. Architekturen im Bild, focusing on questions of the representation of space and hybrid forms of visualization between documentation and staging as well as photography as an archive of architectural knowledge and tool in the planning process. The book draws on studies of twentieth-century social utopias such as Tashkent, Uzbekistan, an embodiment of the urban-planning ideal of Soviet modernism, and explorations of social and cultural spaces along the coasts of northern Morocco and southern Spain, as well as a photographic typology of urban fabrics in Germany and other sociocultural studies that grapple with the significance of living spaces today.
-
Considering Finland
14€ Add to cartContemporary Art from Finland
With fourteen artistic positions from the fields of photography, video, and installation, Considering Finland offers fascinating insight into the Finnish art scene. The themes of the artists from one of the least populated and most densely forested countries in Europe is the relationship between humankind and nature, as well as the political, social, and economic implications of this. Their works point to cultural dispositions and standardizations of the individual within a society based on unattainable maxims, such as permanent success, lasting recognition, and limitless growth. Pictorial traditions, geographical structures, and socio-political and infrastructural factors are the bases of a mental construction that summarizes their artistic work under a national heading. With works by Kenneth Bamberg, Elina Brotherus, Ville Lenkkeri, Aurora Reinhard, Iiu Susiraja, Nestori Syrjälä, and Pilvi Takala.
-
Anna Leonhardt
Touching Space34€ Add to cartAnna Leonhardt’s (b. Pforzheim, 1981; lives and works in New York and Leipzig) paintings probe her own experiences and moods, while also referencing works of literature and quoting phenomena in the history of her craft. Abstract surfaces composed of numerous layers that break the two-dimensional bounds of the canvas engender a physical and imagined space that is further expanded by the interrelations between the pictorial elements, an imaginary communication with other works of art, and the beholders. The publication Touching Space presents Anna Leonhardt’s most recent works. A compendium of writings on the subject of space by the phenomenologist Franz Xaver Baier and the artist’s correspondence with the curator Sophia Pietryga complement the imposing illustrations. The book is released in conjunction with the eponymous solo exhibition at Galerie She BAM! Laetitia Gorsy, Leipzig.
Anna Leonhardt studied painting and graphic art at the Dresden University of Fine Arts (HfBK) from 2002–2008, completing her education with postgraduate training with Ralf Kerbach until 2010.
-
Sibylle Springer
Ferne Spiegel / Distant Mirrors35€ Add to cartThe paintings of Sibylle Springer (born 1975, lives in Bremen) focus on the role of women in the art world of the digital age. For her portrait series Feed, she has painted 40 female artists to date, based on staged photographs from their Instagram feeds. “Is social media an instrument of emancipation, or does it even lead to new forms of objectification?” (Kohout) In Wait for It, Springer copied pop stars from the internet, but used a silver paint that oxidizes the canvases, thus aging the eternally youthful icons before our eyes—precisely what digital image control seeks to prevent. In her more recent textile objects, Springer interweaves female artists of the past and present. This informative book accompanies her exhibition at the Kunstverein Bremen.
Die Malerei von Sibylle Springer (geb. 1975, lebt in Bremen) widmet sich der Rolle von Frauen in der Kunstwelt des digitalen Zeitalters. Für ihre Portraitserie Feed malte sie bisher 40 Künstlerinnen, basierend auf fotografischen Selbstinszenierungen aus deren Instagram-Feeds. “Sind Soziale Medien Instrumente der Emanzipation oder führen sie gar zu neuen Formen der Objektifizierung?” (Kohout) Für Wait for It kopierte Springer Popstars aus dem Netz, aber benutzte ein die Leinwände oxidierendes Silber, das die ewig-jungen Ikonen vor unseren Augen altern lässt, gerade das, was digitale Imagekontrolle zu verhindern sucht. In neueren, textilen Objekten verknüpft Springer Künstlerinnen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Dieses informative Buch begleitet ihre Ausstellung im Kunstverein Bremen.
FERNE SPIEGEL / DISTANT MIRRORS
KUNSTHALLE BREMEN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -
Pieter Slagboom
Scent of Hypnosis42€ Add to cartPieter Slagboom’s drawings are about life and death. About how these ostensible antagonists are inseparable; how, in his imagination, they are even fused. In his enormous canvases, we are held by the essence of our existence as though by a steel vise: we come from the void and in the end shall return to it. Thousands upon thousands of sweeping lines, twisting like Moebius strips, make for an almost physical experience of this truth. The dead and the newborn emerge from the primeval soup of Slagboom’s lines, as do genitals; we spot larger-than-life fantasies of disturbing sexual acts. The circle of life as a short circuit. The energy of some of the pictures in Slagboom’s oeuvre is almost too much to bear—we shudder before the pigments materializing our latent knowledge: that death is suspended in life.
- Release February 2026
Roman Ondak
The Day After Yesterday48€ Add to cartThe internationally acclaimed Slovakian conceptual artist Roman Ondak (b. 1966) responds to the historical specificities of Central Europe while also reflecting on the functioning of society in today’s global world in works that highlight the cyclical nature of processes and the reciprocal mirroring of the past and the present. His distinctive creative traits include the use of ordinary objects and materials as well as everyday situations, which he transfers into the exhibition space. This richly illustrated catalogue with essays by Barbora Ropková and Dieter Roelstraete accompanies the exhibition The Day After Yesterday at Kunsthalle Praha and explores Ondak’s artistic universe, in which existential and societal themes naturally intertwine with a biography of his own family.
THE DAY AFTER YESTERDAY
KUNSTHALLE PRAHA, PRAGUE, CZECH REPUBLIC
NOVEMBER 13, 2025 UNTIL MARCH 9, 2026
more info here -
Isabelle Graw
In einer anderen Welt. Notizen 2014–201726€ Add to cartPersonal Observation as an Analytical Lens on Society
Isabelle Graw (b. 1962, Hamburg; lives in Berlin) is publisher of the magazine Texte zur Kunst and has been professor of art theory at the Staatliche Hochschule für bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main since 2002. In this book, she branches out from her work as an art historian and critic to offer reflections on a wide range of observations from her own life. Never before has Graw addressed her readers more frankly than in these 160 notes.
“She is blindingly frank, addressing the questions that envelop her days: waxing salons, the arrival of Syrian refugees in Germany, exhibitions and grief, electoral and family politics. Subtly, Graw reveals how impressions and beliefs arise out of circumstance.”
Chris Kraus, American filmmaker and author of I Love Dick“In crisp and striking vignettes, this book shows how self-scrutiny and minute observation of the world intermesh and form the dense web of her analysis. This is a unique and original book, literary, psychological and sociological, all at once.”
Eva Illouz, French-Israeli sociologist - Release November 2025
Frank Morrison
38€ Add to cartThe dynamic Neo-Mannerist images of painter and illustrator Frank Morrison (born 1971, lives in Atlanta) celebrate the resilience and dignity of African Americans in everyday life. A child of institutionalized racism in the US, he can testify that creativity and solidarity could never be suppressed in the segregated and brutally marginalized communities. Hip-hop and graffiti are resistance. Clichés of inner-city struggle are vividly refuted in this book. The volume documents Morrison’s recent exhibitions, one of which is dedicated to the younger generation: frame-braking images that interweave narrative forms of comics and pop art with illustration. Morrison’s gallery calls the book an explosive tribute to genius flourishing in institutionalized exile.
-
Emil Nolde
A Critical Approach by Mischa Kuball40€ Add to cartWhat is Visible and What is Not
Mischa Kuball (b. 1959, Düsseldorf; lives and works in Düsseldorf) investigates public and institutional spaces and the social and political discourses that shape them. At the invitation of the Draiflessen Collection and with support from the Nolde Stiftung, the conceptual artist grappled with the life and oeuvre of the painter Emil Nolde (1867–1956) and created a body of work titled Nolde/critique/Kuball. In piece after piece, Kuball drains Nolde’s works of the colors that made the Expressionist famous, challenging the beholder’s preconceptions and examining perception and its constituent processes. Laid out in black and white, the book accordingly directs our attention not only to what a picture shows, but also to how structures and organizing principles emerge into view.
Mischa Kuball has been professor of public art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, and associate professor of media art at the Staatliche Hochschule für Gestaltung/ZKM Karlsruhe since 2007.
Note: This publication is released in German, English and Dutch. When ordering, please let us know which edition you would like to receive. Use the annotation box on the checkout page.
-
GABRIELE BASCH, GESA LANGE
UND_NEWS_FROM_NOW_HERE18€ Add to cartBeyond Painting
Gabriele Basch’s (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) cut-outs and Gesa Lange’s (b. 1972, Tongeren, Belgium; lives and works in Hamburg) drawings are meditations on construction and deconstruction as well as doubts and how to overcome them. Both artists expand the range of painting: Basch, with incisions into the medium and a creative handling of the tinged shadows that transform the painted panel into a wall-mounted object; Lange, by embroidering her canvases with colorful threads that open up the pictorial space on all sides. The book presents works by both artists, initiating an animated and dynamic dialogue between their nonrepresentational visual idioms. Gabriele Basch is professor of painting at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. Gesa Lange is professor of graphic art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. She has received the Kunsthalle Rostock Prize and other awards.
-
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.
- 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.
-
Nikolaus List
Analphabetismus Nr. 737€ Add to cartBeguilingly colorful, balancing opulence with restraint, Nikolaus List’s (b. Frankfurt am Main, 1965; lives and works in Berlin) pictures scrutinize the relation between nature and art. Observations of natural scenes around Berlin blend with the artificiality of baroque gardens or early videogames. As List studies the operation of human perception, the painted space alternates between the depth of one-point perspective and a schematized flatness. The rhythmically organized compositions suspend the hierarchical distinction between foreground and background, an effect that is heightened by the often dissonant selection of colors and lends List’s art a “decidedly anti-sublime and anti-minimal” quality. A fallen tree, luminous rampantly growing and coiled branches become a metaphor for our relationships, our existence, for becoming and passing away, renewal and time.
Nikolaus List studied with Thomas Bayrle, Peter Kogler, and Christa Näher at the Academy of Fine Arts—Städelschule in Frankfurt. He has taught painting at the Weißensee School of Art and Design and the Berlin Art Institute.
-
Alexander Ruthner
Cour: Sommer36€ Add to cartContemplating Nature in a Reduced-Mobility Environment
“The events of the year 2021, which was defined by lockdowns, the pandemic, and restrictions, has brought out the resonance in my pictures of Gustave Courbet’s realism,” Alexander Ruthner (b. Vienna, 1982; lives and works in Vienna) says about his most recent works: oil paintings featuring lush green vegetation and veritable down comforters painted all-over in saturated color gradients. The works will make their public début as the publication is released in the summer of 2021, hence the word “Sommer” in the title. The other word, “Cour,” is a nod to the first syllable of the French painter’s name as well as French for “court,” a term the artist creatively reinterprets as a synonym for the solitary “castle of the mind” to which we have retreated under pandemic conditions. Ruthner, who studied with Peter Kogler, Daniel Richter, and Albert Oehlen, revisits the boscage and pasture painting of past eras in new works that propose a distinctive personal interpretation of that tradition’s charm.
Alexander Ruthner’s work has been shown at Kunsthalle Wien, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Montenegro, among other venues.
- temporarily not available
Andreas Eriksson
Read moreAll is related, from the outside in. Look what’s behind it.
Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975 in Björsäter, lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden) is one of Sweden’s most notable contemporary artists. His artistic practice is based on a traditional painterly language, but he constantly expands this field to also encompass a vast production of textile works. He examines different histories through conceptual twists and turns in sculpture and prints. This monograph, the artist’s first, seeks to explain and illustrate Eriksson’s development and thoughts behind the meandering array of works he produces. It is a close look behind the canvas.
Andreas Eriksson studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1993 to 1998 and represented Sweden with the Nordic Pavilion at the 54. Biennale di Venezia. His most comprehensive solo exhibition to date took place in 2014 at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm.
