Pat Steir & Ugo Rondinone
Waterfalls & Clouds
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Lévy Gorvy |
| Author(s) | Barry Schwabsky |
| Design | Book Book, Berlin |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Size | 24,5 x 31,5 cm |
| Pages | 56 |
| Illustrations | 54 |
| Language(s) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-075-0 |
The imposing installation Waterfalls & Clouds consists of three sculptures by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) and nineteen paintings by the American Pat Steir (b. Newark, NJ, 1940; lives and works in New York). The three large gray monoliths of concrete, sand, and gravel bear the titles Faces, Look, and Twisted and are part of a series of twenty works created in 2018. They are surrounded by nineteen tall and narrow black oil paintings titled Flags for Ugo #1 through #19 (2021); with colorful or white paint streaming down the canvases, they hark back to Steir’s Waterfall series from the 1980s. A symbiotic relationship connects the works: the sculptures, in which erosion is integral to the art, embody time, while the pictures symbolize gravity and hence nature as such.
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Winston Roeth
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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.
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Alexandru Chira
42€ Add to cartAlexandru Chira’s (b. Tăușeni, Romania, 1947; d. Bucharest, 2011) oeuvre systematically and comprehensively maps a fictional field of research. His paintings, drawings, and objects, whose individual elements recall switches, screens, keyboards, and levers, were designed to “bring rain and rainbows,” to promote prosperity and prevent floods. Working in his art laboratory, Chira resembled a farmer tilling his field. He sowed symbols across his paintings, sometimes transplanted them to create new semiotic interconnections, then reaped them and stored up his harvest in painted machines of varying shapes and dimensions. In the 1990s—by then Chira held a professorship and was a widely recognized artist—he fulfilled a lifelong dream by building the “Tăușeni Ensemble,” the largest monument single-handedly created by one man in Transylvania. Much of his oeuvre accordingly consists of sketches and elaborations relating to the monument. In the course of his decades-long fascination with an agrarian aesthetic, architecture, design, astronomy, history, magic, ufology, mysticism, shamanism, and theosophy fused, yielding a kind of practical knowledge as well as spiritual speculations sustaining his endeavor.
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Dietmar Lutz
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Dietmar Lutz studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and rose to renown with large-format paintings in which he portrays situations from ordinary life and weaves references to the histories of film and literature. Lutz is a cofounder of the German-British artists’ collective hobbypopMuseum, with which he has exhibited at the 1st Athens Biennale; Deitch Projects, New York; Tate Britain, London; and elsewhere.
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Glückliche Tage
32€ Add to cartWe see in contrasts. Freedom from pain follows pain, and felicity is the more radiant after a period of misfortune. Happiness, that is to say, displaces unhappiness and is perhaps its recompense; what is certain is that, as antonyms, they are (at least in this world) inconceivable without each other. The contrast they form also underlies the tensions inherent in the works in this catalogue. Some take us straight from the pinnacle of happiness down into the abyss, while in others the gradients of ascent or descent are so gentle that no culmination is perceptible. What all oeuvres gathered in the book have in common is that they furnish the human being, a social creature, with an experience of resonance. Happiness and unhappiness reverberate between the art and the beholders, leaving, in the best case, a lasting impression. Opening the catalogue—a metaphor for the human condition materialized in paper—one overhears this serenely melancholy echo of the works.
Artists: Rui Chafes, Tamara Eckhardt, Nan Goldin, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Barbara Hammer, Carsten Höller, Ken Lum, Johanna von Monkiewitsch, Yoko Ono, Heike Weber, Stefan Wissel
With contributions by: Yevgenia Belorusets, Nell Sophie Bender, Elias Bendfeldt, Laura Berestecki, Annabella Ernst, Annika Gaeth, Hristina Georgieva, Markus Heinzelmann, Malwin Kraßnigg, Max Florian Kühlem, Natascha Laurier, Martin Middeke, Navaz Mirhosseini, Vanessa Joan Müller, Julia Neumann, Martin Paul, Caroline Planert, Maike Prause, Arne Rautenberg, Kira Sophie Röller, Gina Marie Schwenzfeier
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Matthias Dornfeld
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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.
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Philip Loersch
Renteninformation 202230€ Add to cartA satirical audiobook, read by Johannes Steck
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You’ve read right, and you’re going to hear it: a bureaucratic document—we’re all familiar with it, for a new one arrives every year—is the subject of this inspired collaboration between the graphic artist Philip Loersch and the virtuoso vocalist Johannes Steck.
The “Renteninformation”—an official letter on cheap paper informing the recipient about their expected future retirement benefits—makes many cultural workers, and others, crack up or break out in tears: arriving unexpectedly, it launches us on an emotional roller coaster between excitement, fascination, resignation, and sheer madness.
The manuscript for this audiobook is Loersch’s actual Renteninformation for 2022. Its intonation is the culmination of a series of works the artist has pursued since 2016. Every year, he has produced a naturalist colored-pencil drawing of his Renteninformation, embedding it in idyllic scenes—in the garden on a summer afternoon, amid autumn foliage, or on a frozen lake, delicately and accurately executed down to the smallest leaf of grass and the tiniest letter.
“Renteninformation 2022” is the ideal gift for all vinyl lovers who need to close a “pension gap” in their collections and a stunning audio experience that redefines what the satire of reality itself and conceptual art can do.
Philip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980) is best known for his unconventional drawings. His works combine painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions such as Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst, and helped initiate the exhibition series “Drawing Wow.”
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Soaplands, the title of Sonja Yakovleva’s first monograph, is a nod to Japanese bathhouses where men receive personal care, massages, and sexual services. Most recently, a number of soaplands have opened that cater to women with male prostitutes. Similarly, in the paper cuts in the book, which were created between 2018 and 2023, women have seized sexual power and conquered the patriarchal system. Unchecked by shame, they use men as objects to satisfy their desires.
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Simone Demandt
Movers / Beweger38€ Add to cartMotorways are Europe’s lifelines. The products we buy every day arrive on supermarket shelves after traveling along these arteries on the backs of thousands of trucks steered by hard-working drivers. Glancing up into the cabs of their hulking vehicles, we can just barely make out their heads sticking up above the steering wheels. In this overdue volume, Simone Demandt lets us see more of the heroes of the road who confidently posed for her camera. The pictures demonstrate Demandt’s knack for discovering “the intimate in the anonymous and the narrative element in the matter-of-factly” (Matthias Winzen). She has condensed the truckdrivers’ lifeworld into documentary black-and-white shots in which she shows these people as whole persons and individuals—very different from how we perceive them when they’re in the next lane. Movers lets us peek into the cabs through Demandt’s nonjudgmental lens, broadening our horizons hardly less than travelling would and helping us overcome our prejudices about teamsters. If you’ve always wanted to know whom we really have to thank for those never-empty supermarket shelves, you should not miss out on this book.
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MEUSER
Werke 2012–2023 (GERMAN)48€ Add to cartEver since his studies with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich, since his first exhibitions – for instance at ‘Kippenberger’s Office’ in 1979 – Meuser (b. Essen 1947, lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been a solitaire. His sculptures are unyielding and unruly, just as much as they are vulnerable and tender. They are witty and heart-touchingly charming.
Meuser finds his material in the scrapyard. Confidently and empathically, he reinstates form and dignity to the remnants and vestiges of industrial society. As a romantic, he grants things a life of their own and turns them into self-reliant protagonists, once more. Unwaveringly, he works to re-poetize a standardized and maltreated world.
The lavishly designed monograph is published on the occasion of Meuser’s 75th birthday, presenting works and exhibitions from the past ten years. Eight international authors and scholars create a dazzling mosaic and reveal how Meuser boldly holds his own in face of Duchamp, Minimalism, and Social Sculpture. An open-ended outlook.
Meuser studied 1968–1976 at Art Academy, Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich. 1991 he received the ars viva award. 1992-2015 professorship at Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe.
Since 1976, numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions and works in international collections: Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; documenta IX / Fridericianum, Kassel; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Joanneum, Graz; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul; Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe.
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Ralf Cohen
Synthese25€ Add to cartThe First Comprehensive Overview of the Work of the Photo Artist from 1972 to the Present Day
Ralf Cohen (b. 1949, Solingen; lives and works in Karlsruhe) makes use of the entire material complex of photographic image production for his own creative purposes. He works exclusively with analog processes and explores the limits of the medium with a variety of experiments in the darkroom, altering his photographs through solarization, long-term exposure, light/dark reversal, chromatic filtering, and further manual processing. This comprehensive volume presents Cohen’s works, from the high-contrast black-and-white architectural photographs of the early period and the work groups of people in cities from the late 1980s to the latest photographic series with their enigmatic light effects, seemingly glowing planetary surfaces, hails of stars, and fantastical islands. Ralf Cohen’s fascinating cosmos of imagery breaks viewing habits and, with his imaginary universes, opens up a new perception of the world.
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Beyond the Box
Dohmen Collection30€ Add to cartBreaking the Mold of Convention
Presenting installations, sculptures, objects, and paintings from Mexico, Cuba, West Africa, Israel, Bulgaria, Russia, South Korea, and Japan, rounded out by extraordinary works from the U.S. and Europe, this selection from the Dohmen Collection features artists from countries that did not typically register on “Western” art radars until fifteen years ago. It was the seminal documenta 11 (2002), curated by a team led by Okwui Enwezor, that ushered in a departure from the contemporary art world’s entrenched geopolitical ideas. This book showcases a treasure that has long been ahead of its time yet did not attract public attention: the private collection of Werner Dohmen, a physician in Aachen. It includes works by Mariana Castillo Deball, Wim Delvoye, Jimmie Durham, Diango Hernández, Rodney McMillian, Pavel Pepperstein, Nora Turato, Haegue Yang, and other artists who continue to provoke audiences, ask probing questions, and prompt fresh thinking.
Dr. med. Werner Dohmen has been head of the board of Neuer Aachener Kunstverein since 1988. In addition to building his own collection, he has been a committed supporter of the intercultural project No es arte, which advocates for the return of goldwork of the pre-Colombian Tairona people that was stolen from sacred sites during the colonial conquest of South America.
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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.
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HALBwertsZeit
Zum Umgang mit ‚abgelaufenen‘ Sammlungen28€ Add to cartDo collections have an expiration date? Shifting interests, evolving social contexts, and discursive developments influence when a collection or its presentation is said to be outdated and what that implies for the constraints on, or options for, the actions to be taken in response. The revision or reorientation of a collection presuppose a critical engagement with the criteria regarded as valid at the time, which concern the origins, composition, objectives, and significance of a collection, among other aspects.
The contributions to this volume intertwine historical case studies with contemporary questions about the reasons and circumstances that give rise to the assessment that a collection has outlived its shelf life.
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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.
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Me, Family
Portrait of a Young Planet40€ Add to cartA Journey Through Many Worlds
In these times of great uncertainty, the themes that surface in the works of the thirty-six international artists gathered in Me, Family are more relevant than ever. Compiled by Francesco Bonami with a nod to Edward Steichen’s historic exhibition The Family of Man, the volume paints a multifaceted portrait of humanity in the early decades of the twenty-first century. The original installation of photographs and excerpts from writers opened at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1955 and then went on a seven-year tour of one hundred and fifty museums all over the world. Matching the radicalism of Steichen’s conception, Me, Family presents works by contemporary artists who harness a wide range of media and genres to explore the ways in which humans today engage with their manifold coexistent histories and the diverse challenges they confront. Including reproductions of contemporary art as well as representations of social networks, fashions, information technologies, advertising, sound, music, and performances, the book captures a reality that is beautiful, dramatic, and intoxicating by turns. With writings by Roland Barthes, Francesco Bonami, Edward Steichen, and others.
With works by Lawrence Abu Hamdan, Doug Aitken, Sophia Al Maria, Yuri Ancarani, Darren Bader, Lara Baladi, Cao Fei, Cheng Ran, Clément Cogitore, István Csákány, Christian Falsnaes, Harun Farocki, Simon Fujiwara, Rainer Ganahl, Theaster Gates, Jack Goldstein, Andreas Gursky, Thomas Hirschhorn, Hassan Khan, Ga Ram Kim, Olia Lialina, Li Ming, Cristina Lucas, Karolina Markiewicz & Pascal Piron, Eva & Franco Mattes, Shirin Neshat, Philippe Parreno, Mario Pfeifer, Jon Rafman, Cindy Sherman, Marianna Simnett, Rudolf Stingel, Thomas Struth, Wolfgang Tillmans, Jordan Wolfson, Wong Ping, and Akram Zaatari.
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Michelle Jezierski
Verge28€ Add to cartHow does a simple line become a horizon? When do we begin to see colors and shapes as a landscape? Michelle Jezierski’s painting homes in on the tipping point at which our perception begins to oscillate between color/surface and space/representation. At that very point, she captures the essence of the landscape as such, which is not a concrete place but a metaphor for inner states of affairs. To get there, Jezierski distills what she sees in her surroundings down to the elements of painting—shapes and colors—which just barely intimate a pictorial space while persistently drifting toward abstraction. The defining feature of her technique is that she layers several pictorial planes and spaces on the canvas in staggered arrangements. “Perpetually discovering new ways to unsettle the visual space,” as she puts it, she engenders ruptures and structures that open up multiple perspectives and a portal for reflection on one’s own perception. Above all, however, the cuts lend her pictures a peculiar rhythm that powerfully pulls in the gaze, making the reader paging through this catalogue forget time and space.
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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.
