


On Trickling Away
Concepts of Time in Contemporary Art
![]() | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Holger Kube Ventura |
| Design | Thomas Schmid |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover |
| Size | 19 x 26 cm |
| Pages | 204 |
| Illustrations | 120 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-066-8 |
Time, like space, is one of the key coordinates of human existence. The great mysteries of our lives revolve around it, only to remain unresolved when death inevitably ends our days. What is time’s role in art? The vanitas, a genre that was popular with painters in the seventeenth century, is hardly the earliest form that artists have devised to grapple with it. Holger Kube Ventura’s book On Trickling Away. Concepts of Time in Contemporary Art presents the ideas of contemporary artists who approach time from diverse angles. In the twenty-first century, their interest appears to have shifted from visualizations of future raptures to visions of slowness, of the distension, repetition, and standstill of moments in time. Bernard Aubertin (FR), Inge Dick (AT), Rom Gaastra (NL), Gosbert Gottmann (DE), Tommi Grönlund & Petteri Nisunen (FI), Manuela Kasemir (DE), Timo Klos (DE), Dimitry Orlac (FR), George Rickey (US), Patrik Söderlund & Visa Suonpää (FI), and John Woodman (UK) hone our awareness of how subjective the passage of time is and convey vivid experiences of its trickling away.
More books
- Out of stock

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.
- Release Spring 2026

Jorinde Voigt
Trust42€ Add to cartJorinde Voigt (b. Frankfurt am Main 1977, lives and works in Berlin), declared about the title of the book “Trust is a hybrid of longing for something and the engagement to reach it”. Voigt has thus decided to compile her works, which she realized from May 2019 to spring 2021, under the sign of confidence, connectedness, reliability and integrity. Many of the works presented place themselves in the continuity of those in Immersion, a book that brought together works from the period 2018-2019.
In the extensive volume Trust, sculptures and mobiles are shown alongside the works on paper for which she is known – here immersed in a pigment bath and then worked on with pastel, ink, India ink, oil pastels and gold leaf–.
Jorinde Voigt studied philosophy and modern German literature at the University of Göttingen from 1996. In 1998 she moved to Berlin and studied sociology, philosophy and general and comparative literature at the Free University of Berlin. 1999-2003 she studied art in multimedia at the University of the Arts with Christiane Möbus and visual arts and photography with Katharina Sieverding, whose master student she became in 2004. 2014-2019 she was professor of conceptual drawing and painting at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich. Since 2019 she is professor at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts.
-

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.
-

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.
-

Michelle Jezierski
Simultaneous Spaces34€ Add to cartMichelle Jezierski’s (b. Berlin, 1981; lives and works in Berlin) paintings unfurl simultaneous spaces that are awash in light. Contrasts between bright and dark and muted as well as lucent hues engender a singular atmosphere characterized by depth and dynamism. The artist is as invested in the perception of these constructed spaces as in the capaciousness of natural landscapes. In her paintings, luminous colors and geometric disturbances achieve shifting balances between the extremes of order and chaos, light and shadow, interior and exterior, structure and flux. Simultaneous Spaces, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, presents forty-five works painted between 2017 and 2022.
Michelle Jezierski studied with Tony Cragg at the Berlin University of Arts and graduated from Valérie Favre’s class in 2008. She also received a fellowship for a semester abroad at Cooper Union, New York, where she studied with Amy Sillman.
-

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.
-

Laura Schawelka
Double Issues24€ Add to cartSales Spaces without Merchandise
In her installations, Laura Schawelka (b. 1988, Munich; lives and works in Berlin) makes use of photography, video, and sculpture in a multilayered dialogue. In her latest works, the artist focuses on the role of photography in the development of modern consumer society. What does it mean if goods are only communicated through other goods, such as computers, cell phones, tablets? If this withholding of the genuine object is precisely what prompts the desire for it? The artist creates sales spaces without merchandise, in which images, photographs, and videos have replaced consumer goods of any kind.
Laura Schawelka studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main as a student of Tobias Rehberger master-class. In 2015, she was awarded the Master of Fine Arts at the California Institute of the Arts in Los Angeles, and in 2017 she moved to Paris as the recipient of a studio bursary of Hessische Kulturstiftung.
- Release September 2021

Paul Uwe Dreyer
Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken68€ Add to cartA Painter, Draftsman, and Draftsman of Concrete Art
Paul Uwe Dreyer (b. 1939, Osnabrück; d. 2008, Stuttgart) taught painting as a professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart for more than three decades. His oeuvre shows the hallmarks of geometric constructive art: inspired by subjective experiences of reality, Dreyer’s compositions visualize the dialectics of organizing principles and their potentials for variation, a guiding interest that is already evident in his early work since the 1960s and especially in the pairs and series of pictures he begins creating in the early 1970s. His art unfolds a fascinatingly dynamic yet nonhierarchical dialogue between colors, surfaces, and lines. The chronological catalogue raisonné reveals the consistency with which motifs evolve from his early to his late oeuvre, from architectural, figural, and ornamental tokens through elements resembling symbols and icons to complex penetrations of spaces.
-

The Power of Wonder – New Materialisms in Contemporary Art
34€ Add to cartFor the longest time, physical matter was seen as no more than a passive and lifeless object. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, however, visual artists and scientists alike have initiated a change of thinking, conceiving matter as active, unruly, and autonomous. The ethnologist Hans Peter Hahn has called it the “willfulness of things,” while the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers has underscored the “power of wonder”—the bracing sense of marvel and surprise instilled by a material world that sometimes defies the attempt to put it into words.
This pioneering publication features six selected artistic positions that highlight the New Materialism’s significance for contemporary art. The artists employ materials that are millions of years old such as rocks from an open-pit mine as well as classic inorganic staples like ceramics and cutting-edge materials like digital products transformed in high-tech procedures into hitherto unseen hybrid objects. Their work lends art a powerful voice in contemporary debates around man’s position vis-à-vis his environment, around sustainability, participation, and justice.
With works by Ilana Halperin, Agata Ingarden, David Jablonowski, Markus Karstieß, Robert Smithson, and SUPERFLEX.
-

Etsu Egami
Rainbow18€ Add to cartWhat is worth talking about in art eludes language. Aesthetic experience is without words, like a human encounter that touches upon our innermost being. Etsu Egami is interested in the margins of understanding, where the communication of ideas and feelings threatens to fail, where forms become illegible. That is the point on which she homes in with her brush, which she wields in a rough calligraphic style, putting almost translucent oil paints on the canvas. Spectral faces emerge that dissolve into abstraction; abstract forms, beheld from the corner of one’s eye, momentarily coalesce into a likeness. Painting, to Egami, is a physical and performative act, the brush an extension of her arm, bringing a picture into being in sweeping rhythmical motions. As we contemplate her work, that momentum imparts itself to us: first our eyes begin to wander, then we feel our bodies stir, and finally the spirit, too, pulsates in the rhythm of the brush. Gathering Egami’s most outstanding works, this catalogue is a universal invitation to join a peculiar dance, an arc of light the artist traces across all barriers to understanding and that speaks to our senses.
-

Stephen Buckley
Close Cousins. Paintings48€ Add to cartThe Artist’s First Publication in more than Thirty Years
For more than forty years Stephen Buckley (b. 1944, Leicester) has concerned himself with addressing the major themes of the twentieth century through a personal style oscillating between the matière of Kurt Schwitters, the dandyism of Francis Picabia and the intellectual rigour of Marcel Duchamp. He takes the two most basic components of a conventional painting (canvas and stretcher), and makes multi-dimensional constructions, joins groups of single canvases together in overlapping structures, makes shaped canvases, cuts a stretcher with a variegated edge, stitches and weaves together strips of canvas, patches pieces of canvas onto another support, and adds cardboard tubing, rope, found objects and cut out shapes. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Buckley saw extended prominence in the art press, starting with the artist being described as “the Punk Rock of contemporary painting” and ending with him gaining the title of “the ubiquitous Stephen Buckley”. There is now a large portfolio of themes, references, motifs and symbols which are continually reworked and reinvented. Since then, he has made some of his most compelling paintings, lush pop canvases full of symbols and colour, a far cry from the pared-down, industrial feel of some of his early works.
- Out of stock

Soulages
Malerei 1946–201942€ Read more“I paint not with black but with light.”
Pierre Soulages (b. Rodez, France, 1919; lives and works in Paris and Sète, France) is an eminent figure in abstract painting. A member of the Nouvelle École de Paris, he developed his first nonobjective pictures early on, in 1946, putting bars of bold color, typically black, on white grounds. His embrace of total non-representationality, an art that depicts nothing, that stands for nothing but itself, amounted to a radical challenge to the traditional values of painting. In 1979, his work entered a new phase, a painting he calls “outrenoir” or “beyond black.” Soulages now occupies a singular position, and not only by virtue of his choice of materials such as walnut stain and tar and implements like scrubbers, iron hooks, and spatulas. The book documents the arc of his oeuvre from his beginnings after World War II to the present. Illustrating the evolution of his art, it shows how he remained true to his creative vision, a consistency that is doubly imposing given the extraordinary length of his career.
Pierre Soulages studied at the École Régionale des Beaux-Arts, Montpellier, before moving to Paris in 1946. He contributed work to documentas I, II, and III and the 26th Biennale di Venezia. His work has been shown at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston; the Hermitage Museum, Saint Petersburg; the Musée du Louvre and the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Musée Fabre, Montpellier. The Musée Soulages in his native Rodez opened in 2014.
-

Joanna Pousette-Dart
32€ Read more„A kind of Dialogue between Myself and the Horizon.“
The works of Joanna Pousette-Dart (b. 1947, New York; lives and works in New York) are deeply rooted in the vast expanse of the American desert landscape, without ever committing themselves to a strict objectivity. As early as the 1970s, the artist abandoned the rectangular form of her canvas in favor of dynamically balanced panels that open out to the respective space. This volume presents her fascinating paintings from 2004 till 2019, which oscillate between landscape and abstraction, line and form. Born in New York to abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, Joanna Pousette-Dart’s experience as a painter rises from rich tradition. Her work is held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others.
-

Thyra Schmidt
Über Diebe und die Liebe. On Thieves and Love.15€ Add to cartAn artist’s book, an artist’s text
On twenty-two large-format typographic sheets, Thyra Schmidt (b. 1974, Pinneberg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) develops a narrative featuring moments in an amorous relationship. Thoughts and encounters between “her” and “him” are captured in poetically constructed, fragmentary units of meaning. Imaginary images are conjured in the mind’s eye: Close-ups and intimate insights into a delicate web of interpersonal incidents. Personal observations and experiences form the starting point of this artistic exploration of love. Yet the focus of her work is not on autobiographical rendering, but rather on the tracking down of elementary structures, a general understanding of intimacy.
-

100 Windows
Site-specific art installations at Berlin-Weekly project space28€ Add to cartEstablished in 2010 by Stefanie Seidl in a former gateway for horse-drawn carriages that is now enclosed by glazing at both ends, the project space BERLIN-WEEKLY offers the narrow yet exceptionally tall display space to artists as a highly visible public stage for installations that respond to the setting or site. Its unilateral orientation toward the street makes BERLIN-WEEKLY a creative intervention into the urban fabric that harnesses the shopwindow format. The book presents 100 selected window installations to illustrate the widely diverse ways in which individual artists have engaged with the venue, time and again transforming the unusually shaped small space.
With works by: Menno Aden, Alexandra Baumgartner, Isabelle Borges, Astrid Busch, Simon Faithfull, Moritz Frei, Max Frisinger, Wolfgang Flad, Dagmara Genda, Andreas Greiner & Armin Keplinger, Sabine Groß, Marc van der Hocht, Sabine Hornig, Irène Hug, Bettina Khano, Julia Kissina, Nikolaus List, Ulrike Mohr, Virginie Mosse, Piotr Nathan, Katja Pudor, Philip Topolovac, Inken Reinert, Sophia Schama, Geerten Verheus, Sinta Werner, Barbara Wille, and others
- Out of stock

Luxus?!
34€ Read moreWhat is luxury today? How do designers perform the magic of transforming a utilitarian object into a must-have? Where does consumerism shade into obsession? When does more-is-more give way to less-is-more?
Luxury means breaking with convention, and this book showcases—and spawns—a cornucopia of ideas, products, and positions around luxury, featuring influential thinkers from the worlds of design, science, art, and society. The cultural theorists Wolfgang Ullrich and Lambert Wiesing exchange letters on the concept of luxury; Montblanc’s creative director Zaim Kamal lays out future strategies; the artist Jonathan Meese pens a gold manifesto; and Bazon Brock inquires into the asceticism of luxury. We live in a world full of things that resemble one another so closely that the only difference is how they are marketed. What might the precious objects of the future look like? The book presents examples from aspiring designers such as the fashion student Victoria Reize, whose collection counters luxury with arch defiance. Design, we learn, is not just about creating supreme values. Luxury is limitation and longevity, scarcity and refinement, yearning and sensuality.
With works by Assemble, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Daniel Chodowiecki, Kai Löffelbein, Jonathan Meese, Olaf Nicolai, Marcel Odenbach, Tobias Rehberger and Anna Skladmann.
-

Vanessa Henn
Same Same35€ Add to cartVanessa Henn’s (b. Stuttgart, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) objects and installations blend formal reduction with playful comedy. The handrails she makes out of a wide variety of materials run along walls, project into rooms, trace spirals, mark lines or arcs, and often solicit our active engagement. Besides banisters, her oeuvre, which straddles the line between architecture and sculpture, also comprises bridges, stairs, and fences. All her creations are energized by the tension between the static work of art and its dynamic environment, which the artist resolves by integrating her works into the goings-on of everyday life. A guardrail that runs perpendicular to a flight of stairs or abruptly ends in the ceiling or floor is relieved of its function; rather than helping us go where we are going, it is a companion who invites us on a stroll into the imaginary and uncertain. And that is what makes Vanessa Henn’s art so alluring.
The book presents Vanessa Henn’s latest works from the years 2019-2023.
Vanessa Henn studied sculpture at the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart (1992–2001) and at Edinburgh College of Art (1995–1996) and completed a Master of Fine Art at the University of Canterbury School of Fine Art in Christchurch, New Zealand (1999–2000).
-

nolde/kritik/documenta (English)
42€ Add to cartEmil 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.
-

Roland Schappert
Liebe +–24€ Add to cartRoland Schappert’s Liebe+– is a poetic voyage into the mysterious and paradoxical landscapes of love. Combining an unrelenting eye with lyrical precision, Schappert captures the fragile equilibrium between intimacy and distance, between the longing for union and the need for detachment. The +– in the title is a symbolic shorthand for the ambivalence of love: attraction and repulsion, delight and pain, their constant interplay defining the dynamic of love.
The terse and sometimes aphoristic writings enter into a dialogue with the author’s artful and enigmatic pictures and sculptures—text images sewn out of strings of beads or painted in Champagne chalk that subtly mirror and refract the emotional tension of the poems. Nimbly balancing on the fine line between devotion and disaffection, Schappert’s verses are interspersed with ironic allusions to our digital and urban contemporary world.
By forging a symbiosis of poetry and image, this artist’s book charts a world unto itself in which the boundaries between I and you blur and subject and object are fused in a collective we. It invites us to contemplate love with a fresh eye—as tender touch and fractious idea, as a play of expectation and disappointment that we begin anew every day.
‘Love in the age of social media and dating apps, but not from a Gen Z perspective – but from someone who has known this feeling for much longer. And who brings his experiences – which are certainly representative of many – in ever new combinations of text and images into a form that makes reading and viewing a memorable experience.’ – Wolfgang Ullrich
-

Candida Höfer
Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn35€ Add to cartThe Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn, Yesterday and Today
The imposing presence of architecture captured in the absence of humans: that is the defining characteristic of the photographs with which Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde; lives and works in Cologne) has risen to international renown. In 1992, she captured the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Rheinischen Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in ten analogue black-and-white pictures that have not been on public display. In 2020, Höfer returned to the institute to take more pictures using a digital camera. The two series now make their public début in the institute’s halls and are gathered in this book. Undertaking a historically and aesthetically captivating comparison, Höfer probes the ways in which university life has changed over almost three decades.
Candida Höfer was a member of Bernd Becher’s inaugural photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works were shown at documenta 11 in 2002, and in 2003, she and Martin Kippenberger represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia.





















