





Ossian Fraser
DISSOLVING ACTS
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Christian Ganzenberg, Lydia Korndörfer |
Author(s) | Andreas Merkl, Ilze and Heinrich Wolff, Jean Troillet, Laura Helena Wurth |
Design | Parat, Munich |
Size | 22 x 30,5 cm |
Cover | Softcover |
Pages | 152 |
Illustrations | 58 |
Language(s) | English |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-148-1 |
Ossian Fraser (b. Edinburgh, 1983; lives in Munich and Berlin) molds and captures evanescent moments. Working with volatile materials such as water, dust, or light, the artist exposes the latent potentials of unremarkable situations in the urban fabric and natural scenes. A tunnel in a city, a rock face in the mountains become points of departure and elementary components of his site-specific interventions, which he records in photographs. The book is the first to offer comprehensive insight into Fraser’s artistic practice. Series of pictures showcasing his conceptual and poetic pieces alternate with conversations that not only demarcate the framework in which his art operates, but also touch on the great issues of our time.
Ossian Fraser studied fine arts and sculpture at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, Bonn, from 2006 until 2009 and at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, from 2009 until 2013, rounding out his education in Albrecht Schäfer’s master class in 2013–2014.
More books
-
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.
-
auf Erkundung
Anne Deuter und Monika Supé25€ Add to cartA Dialogue on Time
The two artists Anne Deuter (b. 1986, Halle; lives and works in Halle) and Monika Supé (b. 1967, Munich; lives and works in Munich) engage in self-exploration to find ways to convey an experience of body, space, and time. Grappling with formalist elements, they devise their compositional practices in graphite and ink and in words and images, respectively. Enhanced by selected works by contemporary poets, the publication opens up new perspectives on what it means to exist in time.
Anne Deuter studied visual art and art history at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald. She rounded out her education in the book art program at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. Monika Supé studied architecture at the Technischen Universität München and completed a doctorate on visual perception training at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. Since 1995, she has taught in the design divisions of various universities.
-
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 -
Franziska Opel
Close and Cold32€ Add to cartWith sex toys, the potential for misinterpretation and ill-advised use is vast, as countless slapstick comedies illustrate. Steering clear of quick laughs, Franziska Opel deftly harnesses this anarchic power of misunderstanding to explode our perceptions and worldview. Her works are painstakingly planned experimental arrangements in which she modifies or deforms mundane objects as well as those sex toys in subtle ways or powers them up in series, making us see them with fresh eyes. They cast a spell over us with their sensual allure, while our associative circuits processing what we see spark a certain sense of irritation. Curiosity, attraction, bewilderment, shame—expertly staged in photographs for this catalogue, the works elicit a wide range of emotions. Their energizing contradictions are elaborated by contributions from gifted writers: standalone poetic-narrative writings that reflect on several key aspects of Opel’s art in offhanded yet challenging ways.
-
Barthélémy Toguo
10€ Add to cartBarthélémy Toguo’s art is a call for community and love, but there is nothing naïve about it. His paintings, graphic art, sculptures, performances, and installations explicitly grapple with colonialism, migration, and inequality; he directs our attention to the devastations wrought by humans, to the slow deaths of nature and cultures. But he does not dwell in this abyss. He aspires to something greater: to create work that establishes non-hierarchical connections; to build, as he puts it, a “world of solidarity and generosity” that knows neither ego nor identity, a community of all forms of life that flourish and pass away so that new living beings can sprout from their remains—Endless Blossoms. His choice of words and the aesthetic of the works gathered in this catalogue suggest that he is not alone in this undertaking. He stands with Ellen Gallagher, Wangechi Mutu, Louise Bourgeois, Marlene Dumas, and Kiki Smith. With them and with all of us, Toguo envisions a colorful future, a universe of exuberant energy and joie de vivre.
-
Silke Eva Kästner
Panta Rhei36€ Add to cartSilke Eva Kästner (lives and works in Berlin and Uckermark) developed her creative approach while traveling in India, New York, and Japan. She creates temporary on-site paintings as well as conceptual pieces in which the viewer comes upon prepared materials and becomes part of—or even alters—the picture. Kästner documents these encounters in photographs or filmic traces out of which she compiles films in the editing suite. Probing the potentials of painting as communication, she foregrounds the active intervention and process. In the gallery no less than the urban scene, Kästner places painting in relation to architecture in order to frame it in varying perspectives.
The monograph offers insight into the foci of Kästner’s art; the works are grouped in chapters rather than arranged in chronological sequence. This structure makes the book a space of experience that gives the reader a vivid sense of her ephemeral creations.
After studying with Katharina Grosse at the Weißensee School of Art and Design Berlin, Silke Eva Kästner won the Mart Stam Prize; she honed her craft in India on a NaFöG fellowship and in New York on a yearlong DAAD fellowship. Funding support from the Institut für Auslandsbeziehungen (ifa) enabled her to initiate an ongoing exchange project between Kashmir and Berlin. Her work has been on view at numerous institutions including the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt; the Devi Art Foundation, Delhi; Berlinische Galerie, Berlin; the Queens Museum of Art, New York; Künstlerhaus Bethanien, Berlin; and the Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin.
-
Tamara Suhr
Skulpturen24€ Add to cartHesitant yet Immediately Present
As a sculptor, Tamara Suhr (b. 1968, Tübingen; lives and works in Ludwigsburg) has devoted herself unswervingly to the human figure. Her subjects are figures of children whose hesitancy always embodies a certain curiosity, a sense of expectation. In their form reduced to the essential, indeed almost archaic, they radiate calm and serenity—supported by balance with regard to both the motif and possible associations. In their small size and vulnerability, Suhr’s figurative sculptures, painstakingly crafted in bronze, seem apparently in need of protection, yet they appear strong and courageous. They stand, gaze, crouch, fish, swim or balance. They are present, in the here and now, a symbol for the children of the world.
- Out of stock
Thomas Lehnerer
Grott18€ Read moreA Facsimile by the Theologian and Artist
The genesis of images is a central aspect of the work of the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (b. Munich, 1955; d. ibid., 1995). In drawings and sculptures, as well as in spatial and conceptual works, the production of images creates a counter-world to our own lives. By transferring fundamental experiences of human existence into art, Lehnerer creates an equivocal, anthropological space for observation and reflection. The artist’s book Grott, published in 1986, contains ambiguous elements. All drawings are positioned on the right page. In the not yet dried state, a double image was formed on the left side, which relativizes the “primary image.” The depictions of animals, people, and the environment were drawn nearly without interruption from a single line. In this style of continuous movement, the overall image can be traced back to its beginning. For Lehnerer, it was important to understand human (self-)consciousness from the perspective of the history of evolution, since there are countless models of thought and belief within this narrative. Grott refers in the title, as well as in the drawings, to the charged relationship between the earthly and the spiritual.
- temporarily not available
Der tanzende Blick
Roman Novitzkys Stuttgarter BallettRead moreWeightlessness, Grace, Emotions
The photographs by Roman Novitzky (b. 1984 in Bratislava) reveal the entire vocabulary of dance—and yet convey much more than this. With his camera, the first soloist of the Stuttgart Ballet not only captures hidden moments in rehearsal or from the side stage, but also opens the door to his own cosmos for the viewer. He depicts sweat and tension, doubt and euphoria, and gives the audience intimate insight behind the scenes of the Stuttgart Ballet. Roman Novitzky’s first monograph comprises more than sixty photographs of the ballet hall, the cloakroom, and guest performances. It not only stands for his two passions, dance and photography, but also describes his photographic approach, shaped by years of dance experience, which gives the viewer familiar insights into his everyday surroundings.
-
Tobias Pils
Drawings55€ Add to cartDrawings is the first book dedicated exclusively to the painter Tobias Pils’s (b. Linz, 1971; lives and works in Vienna) drawings. His graphical forms—the lines, figurations, even the intervening spaces—constantly change the direction in which they set out. Their ambivalence destabilizes any attempt at interpretation. One would think that the indeterminacy of Pils’s visual idiom must torment him, yet in fact this state of existential tension fills him with absurd pleasure. Rather than conceiving his works with a clear objective in mind, he allows himself to fall into them. He—his art—remains open to everything that happens in the creative process. Taken together, Pils’s drawings operate along the diffuse boundary between order and disorder, as though, acknowledging the disordered present (the life we lead), they came from an ordered past (the life we have constructed for ourselves).
Tobias Pils studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1990 until 1994. His works have been displayed in museums around the world, including at the mumok, Vienna (2021); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); the Musée Picasso, Paris (2020); the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2020); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); the Aspen Art Museum (2018); the Chinati Foundation’s John Chamberlain Building, Marfa (2016); and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010). In 2020, he executed a large wall painting at the École normale supérieure in Paris-Saclay.
-
Language/Text/Image
32€ Add to cartSpoken words, writing, and images originate in social and cultural contexts and so are fraught with meanings, are vehicles of values and norms. They inevitably also demarcate boundaries, serving to class people as members of groups or outsiders. This adds to the urgency of the question of what can in fact be said and shown, and who or what determines those limits. The present catalog addresses these concerns through a survey of eminent art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The works gathered in it speak to mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion, to categorizations and the narratives that were created to sustain them. And they remind us that these phenomena are human-made, which is also to say, susceptible to change—that we share responsibility for them.
Artists: John Baldessari, Maria Bartuszová, Alice Bidault, Alejandro Cesarco, Ayşe Erkmen, Nadine Fecht, Gary Hill, Janice Kerbel, Gabriel Kladek, Gordon Parks, The National AIDS Memorial, Markus Vater, Gillian Wearing
- Release September 2025
Yes To All
Die Schenkung Paul Maenz Gerd Vries42€ Add to cartThe catalog accompanying the exhibition YES TO ALL offers profound insight into a collection of over nine hundred works on paper—from postcards and drawings to photographs and posters—that was gifted to the Kupferstichkabinett in 2022, with subsequent additions over the years until 2025. The donors are Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries, who ran a gallery for contemporary art in Cologne until 1990 and chaperoned the evolution of avant-garde art from the conceptualism of the late 1960s to the neo-expressive painting of the 1980s. The most recent works in the collection date from 2024. Several essays and a conversation with the donors invite the reader to experience the stylistic and thematic polyphony of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in new ways.
-
Ossian Fraser
DISSOLVING ACTS38€ Add to cartOssian Fraser (b. Edinburgh, 1983; lives in Munich and Berlin) molds and captures evanescent moments. Working with volatile materials such as water, dust, or light, the artist exposes the latent potentials of unremarkable situations in the urban fabric and natural scenes. A tunnel in a city, a rock face in the mountains become points of departure and elementary components of his site-specific interventions, which he records in photographs. The book is the first to offer comprehensive insight into Fraser’s artistic practice. Series of pictures showcasing his conceptual and poetic pieces alternate with conversations that not only demarcate the framework in which his art operates, but also touch on the great issues of our time.
Ossian Fraser studied fine arts and sculpture at the Alanus University of Arts and Social Sciences, Bonn, from 2006 until 2009 and at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, from 2009 until 2013, rounding out his education in Albrecht Schäfer’s master class in 2013–2014.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Stephan Grunenberg
10€ Add to cartStephan Grunenberg (b. 1954) paints peculiar portraits: not heads or sitting and reclining figures but seemingly independent feet, legs, trousers, socks or soles of shoes. These and other under-appreciated motives are playfully arranged in captivating compositions which take issue with our hierarchical habits while looking at art. “Leaving out the ‘civilized’, educated head and centering on neglected parts such as the legs, including the lower abdomen—which is either eroticized or made taboo—is the artist’s point”, writes Oliver Koerner von Gustorf in an essay that accompanies the images inside this small and attractive new book. The paintings reproduced in this volume were all exhibited in Grunenberg’s latest exhibition in 2024, which was titled tongue-in-cheek „Representatives Regional To Earth.”
-
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.
- 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.
-
Winston Roeth
Speed of Light32€ Add to cartColor Is Light
Intense monochrome areas of color, radiant pigments, and multifaceted surfaces are the characteristics of the art of Winston Roeth (b. Chicago, 1945; lives and works in Beacon, New York, and Waldoboro, Maine). He has devoted himself to abstract color field painting since the 1970s, with the grid as a leitmotif running through his oeuvre; both are fraught with painterly memories of light, “a light that can jump out and grasp the beholders, a color saturation that throbs with a deep glow,” as the artist himself puts it. It emanates from the strata of paint in his pictures, encountering the light that, falling upon his works, molds their chromatic effect. Roeth experiments with pure pigments, which he mixes by hand to make paints he applies in layers to diverse media including paper, aluminum, honeycomb, slate, and wood panels. The book documents a tour of an exhibition, presenting works dating from between the early 1990s and 2020.
-
Filip Henin
10€ Add to cartThe events captured in Filip Henin’s (b. Mayen, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are set in a world beyond time and place, as though on an empty stage prepared for a Samuel Beckett production. It is virtually impossible to say whether a picture shows a coastal region or a craggy slope up in the mountains, whether a field of blue represents the sea or a band of open sky. Henin strips landscapes down no less than human figures, subtracting specific features to isolate basic forms that might be found in the hill country around his hometown in western Germany or in Tuscany. His work integrates quotations from antiquity, Romantic landscape painting, and postmodernism as well as Italian Transavanguardia, the mysticism of Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and the figurative painting of the 1990s. Without veering into drama or pathos, he harnesses two utterly antithetical energies: the reflection on painting and the history of art and the need to be simple.