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
-
Fabian Treiber
For a While Longer34€ Add to cartUnstable Prototypes of a Reality We Know
Fabian Treiber’s (b. Ludwigsburg, 1986; lives and works in Stuttgart) paintings show what appear to be interiors while interrogating subjective projections and our perceptions of reality. The artificial spaces bear witness to human existence even though there are no people to be seen. In his still lifes, Treiber negotiates classical questions of painting: form and structure, color and composition, representation of space and organization of the surface. His paintings primarily implement formal rather than narrative decisions. This lets the artist provoke a deliberate breach in which the ostensibly fallacious emerges as the essential quality of painting—the effect is that of works that seem somehow off but are actually just right.
Fabian Treiber studied painting and intermedia design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (ABK Stuttgart). His works have won him a Karl Schmidt Rottluff Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the 2021 Hans Purrmann Grand Prize. He has had numerous solo shows, including at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; and Galerie Ruttkowski;68, Cologne; and contributed to group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Villa Merkel—Galerien der Stadt Esslingen a.N.; and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. For a while longer is published on occasion of his first solo exhibition at Haverkampf Galerie.
-
Michael Bielicky
Perpetuum mobile54€ Add to cartContemporary Media Art
The German-Czech artist Michael Bielicky (b. Prague, 1954; lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been an innovator in the fields of photography, video, and web-based installation art for over four decades. In an ongoing dialogue with emerging technological developments, his works probe the history of his media from the deepest strata to the magical mathematical practices of the medieval Cabalists: idiosyncratic hybrids that straddle the boundary between the analog and digital worlds. Operating on the interfaces between real and virtual spaces, his media art prompts a critical reflection on the nature of technology, its material and immaterial significations, and the ways in which it informs our perceptions and actions. The book Perpetuum mobile is the first to offer a comprehensive survey of Bielicky’s rich and diverse oeuvre. The layout, designed by the artist himself, integrates the experimental images into a graphic “stream of consciousness.”
Michael Bielicky moved to Germany in 1969 and initially studied medicine. After an extended stay in New York, he studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts from 1984 until 1990, first with Bernd Becher and then in Nam June Paik’s master class. He was made professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Prague in 1991, then professor of new media at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design in 2006. Bielicky participated in numerous major exhibitions, including the São Paulo Biennial (1987); Videonale, Bonn (1988, 1990, 1992); Ars Electronica, Linz (1992, 1994, 1995); and the Havana Biennial (2012).
-
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.
-
Katharina Arndt
While waiting for Death38€ Add to cartLife for the most part consists of banalities. What to make of it? Katharina Arndt has decided to dip thick brushes into luminous bold acrylic paints, which she applies expansively without regard for the ostensible gray areas of life. Every stroke is valid, there’s no remorse or trepidation, everything is foreground, all elements of a picture are equipollent. The people in Arndt’s paintings from 2022–23 gathered in this catalog are simply there, for the moment, gaping into their cell phones, stuffing themselves with burgers. Nothing more. That makes her works distorted depictions of our hedonistic society with its craving for sensuality, even as we always have one eye riveted on the virtual. The harder, then, to face up to physical reality; with all photo filters off, its imperfections are unmistakable. And so, although we clearly delight in these gaudy colors, the pictures contain intimations of melancholy and death, too. Knowing that the hour of farewell is near, Arndt’s figures stimulate their senses. They kill time down to the very end with jarring trivia, agitated Sisyphuses wallowing in their glittering inadequacy.
-
Michel Majerus 2022
49€ Add to cartMichel Majerus (1967–2002) ranks among the most interesting painters of his generation and left a singular and multifaceted oeuvre that still speaks powerfully to contemporary concerns. His works quote phenomena of everyday culture such as comic strips, advertisements, and videogames as well as sources of inspiration from art history ranging from minimalism to Pop Art. Decontextualizing the different elements of pictures, he integrated them into novel contexts of meaning by, for instance, setting them on a par with art-historical references.
Twenty years after his death, a series of exhibitions throughout Germany showcase different periods and aspects of his creative output. Five solo exhibitions at the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, the Neuer Berliner Kunstverein (n.b.k.), the Kunstverein in Hamburg, the Michel Majerus Estate, and Galerie neugerriemschneider, Berlin, pay tribute to Michel Majerus’s art in unprecedented breadth.
Concurrently, thirteen museums mount presentations of works by Michel Majerus from their collections: Ludwig Forum Aachen; Kunsthalle Bielefeld; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Sprengel Museum Hannover; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Kunsthalle Mannheim; Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, Munich; Neues Museum Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Saarlandmuseum—Moderne Galerie, Saarbrücken; Kunstmuseum Stuttgart; Staatsgalerie Stuttgart; and Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg.
The extensive publication accompanying the exhibition series Michel Majerus 2022 includes three essays and two artists’ contributions as well as visual documentation of the exhibitions and presentations from the collections. It is rounded out by a biographical sketch of Michel Majerus, a history of exhibitions of his work, and archival photographs.
-
6 U L
Lust and Desire in Art and Design28€ Add to cart“Whose Jizz is this?” Sechs-u-ell: to make sense of the publication title, trust your college German and your phonetic ear. “Sexual,” here, comprises the entire broad spectrum of what we associate with carnal pleasure. Lust, desire, ecstasy, repression, obsession—the world of art, fashion, and design abounds with specimens of eroticism and sexuality in their infinite variety, shopworn stereotypes be damned. Looking back on the thorough revision of society’s ideas about sexuality in the past three decades, the book inquires into how the works of visual artists, fashion creatives, and designers reflect today’s public debates over biological and social gender roles, power structures, and sexual violence or the fading of taboos over sexual practices. With works and designs by Walter Van Beirendonck, Monica Bonvicini, Tracey Emin, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jürgen Klauke, Peaches, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Vivienne Westwood, and many more. This book documents a grand exhibition scheduled for the past summer at the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts, Leipzig, which had to be canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
-
Jakob Ganslmeier
Lovely Planet. Polen / Poland16€ Add to cartAn Unconventional and Humorous Guide to a Country of Contrasts
In 2015, the photographer Jakob Ganslmeier (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) went on an extended tour of Poland in search of shots that captured the country’s social realities and way of life at a time of wrenching changes. The title of his project evokes associations with Lonely Planet, one of the world’s best-selling series of travel guides, and the artist took inspiration from the format of the popular books, where recommendations for readers exploring strange lands are grouped by categories. Crisscrossing Poland—he covered over ten thousand kilometers—Ganslmeier encountered widely different people and draws our attention to places that would never make it into a guidebook. His pictures show a country of extremes, between boomtown optimism and decline, consumerism and poverty, gleaming façades and bleak village streets.
Jakob Ganslmeier studied at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin, and at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. His pictures, which have garnered numerous awards, are frequently featured in leading German media and have been shown in exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus, the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, the Triennale der Photographie Hamburg, and the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris.
-
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.
- Release August 2025
Bettina Buck
Finding Form45€ Add to cartThe German sculptor Bettina Buck (1974-2017) called attention to herself with her “performative sculptures,” which she often presented vis-à-vis museal objects. Buck’s preferred materials came from the hardware store: corrugated cardboard, ceramic tiles, pressed foam, or plastic foil, which are all not meant to last. Out of these materials she created a kind of changeable and transient “protagonists,” who didn’t have a final form but rather emphasized the actual process of finding form (as well as losing form). In a provocative action in 2015, Buck dragged an oversized foam bloc through a museum collection and let it rest next to famous artworks, which gained a new dynamic in this interplay. Buck herself said once that her works were meant to “simultaneously attract and alienate the viewer.” In the exhibition space the objects should “create a tremor, a vibration and a conversation with its surroundings.”
Finding Form, a posthumous monograph presents Bucks complete sculptural works on over 300 pages and contains texts by Phyllida Barlow, Paolo Icaro, Cecilia Canziani, and Andrea Maria Popelka. The book was conceived and published by the artist’s estate, Bureau Bettina Buck.
-
Female Gaze
From Virtual to Reality25€ Add to cartWorks of Art Take a Stance
The “female gaze” embodies a stance that is the polar opposite of the “male gaze.” The latter term came into use in the movie and advertising industries in the 1970s to describe the fact that women typically appear in films in supporting roles, as accessories to men, rather than as protagonists. The male gaze originated in a patriarchal society that has begun to change. The female gaze champions a modern form of emancipation that challenges men to abandon entrenched structures. Much more importantly, it encourages women to become aware of the strength that lies in their femininity and make it the source of their own creative expression and their own perspective on the world. For many years, the writer Silke Tobeler has visited artists in their studios, collecting the photographs she took there and her conversations with her hosts on her blog, Female Gaze.
- Release November 2022
X x X
Semjon Contemporary50€ Add to cartFounded by Semjon H. N. Semjon in 2011, the gallery Semjon Contemporary has built a distinctive and singular profile that has earned it an unrivaled position in the art world. It represents international positions in contemporary art that, their divergences notwithstanding, are united by the extraordinary intelligence of their engagement with the material. The result is an unmistakable visual language that permits of no modification of established choices. Despite the considerable differences of material, technique, and expression, the artists’ works enter into dialogue with one another, as parallel solo presentations and special exhibitions showcasing numerous visiting artists have demonstrated.
The book features Colin Ardley, Edward L. Buchanan, Takayuki Daikoku, Dittmar Danner aka Krüger, Ute Essig, Experimental Setup (Kata Hinterlechner and Bosko Gastager’s collective moniker), Katja Flint, Andreas Fux, Dave Grossmann, Renate Hampke, Marc von der Hocht, Nataly Hocke, Michael Kutschbach, Henrik U. Müller, Cornelia Nagel, Susanne Knaack, Katja Kollowa, Susanne Pomrehn, Thomas Prochnow, Dirk Rathke, Ursula Sax, Gerda Schütte, Gil Shachar, Li Silberberg, Karina Spechter, Klaus Steinmann, Stefan Thiel, Hitomi Uchikura, Royden Watson, and Bettina Weiß in dedicated chapters. It is rounded out by statements from collectors including Thomas Lenhart, Cornelie Kunkat, Gabriele Quandt, Roland Schnell, Nobert Fuhr and Klaus Werner, Roswitha and Jürgen König, and Helmut Ließ. Remarks by art critics and scholars and an interview with Semjon by Jan Maruhn provide additional insight into the gallery’s work.
-
Fiona Rae
Row Paintings24€ Add to cartElements of Energy and Complexity
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Jenny Brosinski
Things I’ve Never Said58€ Add to cartJenny Brosinski’s (b. Celle, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) paintings in large formats look like uncoordinated abstract compositions with traces of wear deliberately left in place. This brings their materiality to the fore and reveals the creative process. Expressive oil paint on unprimed canvas, spray-painted lines, typographic elements, shoeprints, or pieces of masking tape on the canvas: on the one hand, these are experiments and statements; on the other hand, they are engagements with painting as such. The artist added sculpture to her repertoire in 2019, making figurative and sometimes colorfully painted imaginary beasts in bronze or stone—more evidence of her subtle sense of humor, which also manifests itself in her pictures and especially in their titles. The extensive monograph offers profound and comprehensive insight into Brosinski’s oeuvre.
Jenny Brosinski studied illustration and animation at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, the École supérieure des arts décoratifs, Strasbourg, and the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She completed her education with a master class in Berlin in 2010.
-
Kensise Anders
10€ Add to cartKensise Anders’s work grapples with the reality of Black people’s lives. Born in Haiti, she was adopted by a German family when she was two. After a difficult childhood, with stints in a psychiatric institution and a boarding school, she eventually found art as a medium that lets her work through her experiences. She uses the crochet needle to create masks with which she ironically appropriates white identities and play carpets that show the world of her childhood—apartment blocks, streets; the “hole,” as she calls this environment. She also arranges crocheted threads on the canvas as though they were brushstrokes. One series of pictures is dedicated to a Black doll; another, to naked female bodies, including the artist’s own, with references to Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866). The works are acts of resistance to the prudishness of whites. Black dolls became popular in this country during the colonial era and never quite went away, like the racism in our society and in our heads. Anders’s weapon against that racism is the crochet needle, which she wields patiently and with flair as well as the necessary radicalism.
- 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.
-
Margret Eicher
Lob der Malkunst38€ Add to cartContemporary Visual Communication in a Historic Weaving Technique
Margret Eicher’s (b. Viersen, Germany, 1955; lives and works in Berlin) large-format tapestries combine the baroque form of the woven picture with familiar motifs excerpted from contemporary media images. She digitizes her sources and then assembles them in painstaking editing work on the computer. The resulting ‘media tapestries’ occupy the interface between the traditional work of art as a physical object and the electronic noise of the digital realm: two worlds that at first glance would seem to be incompatible yet find themselves in harmonious union in Eicher’s art. In Göttliche Liebe (Divine Love), for example, Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns meets a kissing gay couple from a pro-tolerance campaign in Berlin, while Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is sampled together with a subway station in Frankfurt. In conceptual art production, the creative idea is central and its realization becomes secondary; in a final twist, Lob der Malkunst (Praise of Painting) elects this practice as its artistic lodestar. Eicher installs the painter Martin Kippenberger in the interior of Berlin’s Paris Bar, where he poses as a dandy and presides over a clash between the different tendencies in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
-
Wolfgang Gäfgen
Photographic Miracles45€ Add to cartA Mysterious Play of Light and Shadow
While Wolfgang Gäfgen’s (b. Hamburg, 1936; lives and works in Stuttgart and Esslingen) hand drawings and woodprints are widely acclaimed, only connoisseurs are familiar with his photographic oeuvre. The extensive body of analog black-and-white and color photographs spans the decades from the late 1960s to the present and is no less accomplished than the artist’s graphic works and prints. This book, with essays by Christian Gögger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad and Michel Poivert, is the first to gather a large selection of these pictures, illustrating the interdependencies between works in the different visual media of expression. Artfully arranged still lifes breathe a spectral animation into ostensibly trivial everyday objects. The human figures that appear now and then seem to be engaged in cultic performances; many of the photographic works are accompanied by ironic quotes from the earlier history of art or allusions to historic myths.
-
Clemens Krauss
Antidot | Gegengift40€ Add to cartClemens Krauss restlessly shuttles across history; his vehicles are painting, video art, sculpture, and performance. Yet Krauss is not “just” an artist, he is also a psychoanalyst and physician. As such, he has first-hand experience of time as the defining factor of existence, daring him to play with it. The bosom of painting is where he feels safest after his hazardous excursions back into his youth and forward into death. Executed in thick paints, his work is physical, material, which is also to say, it exists in time: everything passes away, even the picture. Evanescent, more than anything, are encounters of the sort Krauss stages as part of his psychoanalytical practice; all that remains is the indelible impression they leave. To be indelible, to recall the past, while also “letting happen what has never happened,” as he puts it, these are the ambitions he pursues in his art. Preserved between the covers of the present catalogue and reproduced in thousands of copies, his works now fan out in an instant to circulate for an indeterminate period of time among countless hands, whence they will effortlessly penetrate the barriers of our inner lives to bring us one step closer to transcendence.
