Peter Zimmermann
abstractness
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Leopold-Hoesch-Museum |
| Author(s) | Anja Dorn, Markus Mascher |
| Design | buchtypo |
| Size | 21 x 25 cm |
| Pages | 112 |
| Illustrations | 100 |
| Cover | Softcover with flush cut |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-947563-65-4 |
Treading the Limits of Originality
Peter Zimmermann (b. 1956, Freiburg; lives and works in Cologne) is one of the most important conceptual media artists. With his work, he consistently experiments with visual reproduction techniques and gained international recognition in the late 1980s with his Book Cover Paintings: motifs from book covers such as that of the Diercke Weltatlas or the Polyglott travel guides, which Zimmermann transfers to the canvas with oil and epoxy resins. The relationship between original and copy is the central theme of his work, with which he addresses the ambivalence of artistic and digital authorship. This monograph brings together early works and a selection of current productions.
Peter Zimmermann studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and was professor at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne, from 2002 to 2007.
More books
- Release September 2025
The Magnificent Seven+
Strong Contemporary Female Artists44€ Add to cartWhen The Magnificent Seven hit the silver screen in 1960, heroism was firmly men’s business. Now it is women artists who are redefining the art world with visionary energy. Sebastian C. Strenger portrays outstanding women making art today, including Ingeborg Lüscher, Elfie Semotan, Xenia Hausner, Valérie Favre, Sandra Vásquez de la Horra, and Cristina Lucas. Their works question power structures, play with identity, or deconstruct prevailing narratives. Their art is figurative or abstract, narrative or conceptual, political or introspective. These women are changing the art market and dominate the new canon at international institutions by calling existing structures in question and opening up spaces for fresh thinking.
-
Larry Rivers
An American-European Dialogue38€ Add to cartBetween French Modernism and the New York School
The American painter, musician, and filmmaker Larry Rivers (b. 1923, New York; d. 2002, New York) is considered one of the most influential protagonists of the New York art scene in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s. He played with Miles Davis and Charlie Parker, was a close friend of Frank O’Hara, and pioneered Pop Art. In dealing with contemporary artist colleagues and historical role models, he always strived to making painting visible as a medium of reflection. From an early age, Rivers was preoccupied with French painting of the late nineteenth century. During his stay in Paris in 1961/62, he met Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle, whereupon the range of materials he used was extended to wood, cardboard, and electric light. For the first time, the present volume – the first monograph in twenty years – sheds light on Larry Rivers’ idiosyncratic art with a view to the tension between traditional French painting and Abstract Expressionism around Willem de Kooning.
-
André Butzer
Miettinen Collection30€ Add to cartAndré Butzer (b. Stuttgart, 1973; lives in Berlin) rose to renown with pictures he describes as “science fiction expressionism” and iconic characters like the “Peace Siemense,” the “Men of Shame,” or the “Woman” as well as seemingly abstract compositions. Artistic predecessors he admires and emulates include Walt Disney, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Henry Ford. Butzer’s utopian artistic vision is anchored in the fictional place “NASAHEIM”, a kind of pilgrimage destination in outer space. Yet his paintings should not be mistaken for illustrations of narrative structures; they articulate something that could not be said before. Similes of a sort, they embody the forever recurring extremes of history as emblems of human existence.
André Butzer briefly studied at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, before enrolling at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), from which he was expelled after two semesters in 1996. He went on to found the autonomous and anti-institutional Akademie Isotrop (1996–2000), where over twenty artists including Markus Selg, Jonathan Meese, and, in loose association, John Bock trained one another. In 2001, Butzer teamed up with Björn Dahlem to establish the Institute for SDI Dream Research.
-
GABRIELE BASCH, GESA LANGE
UND_NEWS_FROM_NOW_HERE18€ Add to cartBeyond Painting
Gabriele Basch’s (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) cut-outs and Gesa Lange’s (b. 1972, Tongeren, Belgium; lives and works in Hamburg) drawings are meditations on construction and deconstruction as well as doubts and how to overcome them. Both artists expand the range of painting: Basch, with incisions into the medium and a creative handling of the tinged shadows that transform the painted panel into a wall-mounted object; Lange, by embroidering her canvases with colorful threads that open up the pictorial space on all sides. The book presents works by both artists, initiating an animated and dynamic dialogue between their nonrepresentational visual idioms. Gabriele Basch is professor of painting at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. Gesa Lange is professor of graphic art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. She has received the Kunsthalle Rostock Prize and other awards.
- Out of stock
Ernst Gamperl
Zwiesprache Dialogue34€ Read moreUnique wooden sculptures as the result of a ten‑year process
Ernst Gamperl (b. 1965, Munich; lives and works in Tremosine) is fascinated by the dialogue with living material and the quality of the unpredictable. He creates room-sized wooden objects, into the design of which he incorporates the natural drying process, cracks, and irregularities—a revolutionary technique of woodturning which has led to completely new standards, technically often at the limits of what is feasible. In a ten-year process, Gamperl transformed a roughly 230-year-old uprooted oak into an ensemble of vessels and sculptures. The artist’s book conveys the fascination of the material and the craft, brings us close to the objects, and documents the challenging work process.
-
Marx Collection
40 Works29€ Add to cartSelected works from one of the most renowned collections of modern and contemporary art in Germany
Marx Collection – 40 Works is the first publication on this collection that focuses on important individual works. The selection ranges from the early 1960s to the present, encompassing one of the most exciting periods in recent art history. An illustrated chronicle provides background information on the historical context of the Marx Collection and its exhibition at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin. With work by Matthew Barney, Georg Baselitz, Joseph Beuys, Ross Bleckner, Francesco Clemente, Martin Disler, Rainer Fetting, Dan Flavin, Günther Förg, Peter Halley, Keith Haring, Candida Höfer, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, William Kentridge, Anselm Kiefer, Jeff Koons, Roy Lichtenstein, Richard Long, Gerhard Merz, Robert Rauschenberg, Ugo Rondinone, Thomas Ruff, Julian Schnabel, Cindy Sherman, Thomas Struth, Sam Taylor-Johnson, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, Rachel Whiterea
Dies ist die englische Ausgabe, hier geht’s zur deutschen Ausgabe
-
Peter Zimmermann
abstractness26€ Add to cartTreading the Limits of Originality
Peter Zimmermann (b. 1956, Freiburg; lives and works in Cologne) is one of the most important conceptual media artists. With his work, he consistently experiments with visual reproduction techniques and gained international recognition in the late 1980s with his Book Cover Paintings: motifs from book covers such as that of the Diercke Weltatlas or the Polyglott travel guides, which Zimmermann transfers to the canvas with oil and epoxy resins. The relationship between original and copy is the central theme of his work, with which he addresses the ambivalence of artistic and digital authorship. This monograph brings together early works and a selection of current productions.
Peter Zimmermann studied at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart and was professor at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne, from 2002 to 2007.
-
Simone Haack
HAIR30€ Add to cartSimone Haack (b. 1978 in Rotenburg/Wümme, lives and works in Berlin) has always made the inwards legible in the outer appearance of her figures in her painting. This is also the case in her block of works in the exhibition of the same name, Hair. Already in the late 17th century, magic and superstition were attributed to hair. In it one suspected the whole power of the soul. The artist, who was formed in the painting class of Katharina Grosse and Karin Kneffel, symbolically reveals the fragility of the DNA of human beings through her hair landscapes, which are sometimes placed macroscopically in the picture in the spirit of a New Magic Realism. At the same time, her accompanying exhibition publication always also tells of the triangle of tension of physical as well as psychological existence, which in her case runs through the painterly psychoanalysis.
-
Ottmar Hörl
Second Life – 100 Arbeiter14,80€ Add to cartThe Workman Sculptures at Völklinger Hütte Steelworks
Sculptures on topics of everyday life are at the center of the work of Ottmar Hörl (b. 1950, Nauheim; lives and works in Frankfurt/Main and Wertheim). His major projects gained international recognition, they are based on the artist’s concept of art as a communication model. For the Völklingen Ironworks World Heritage Site, Hörl conceived the sculpture project Second Life, which features 100 figures modeled on the Völklingen ironworker with helmet and work clothes. The book documents the impressive project that focuses on the universal theme of the Völklingen Ironworks: work and the working people.
- Shortlist German Photo Book Award 2019/2020
Arina Dähnick
The MIES Project45€ Add to cartIn the Footsteps of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
In her photographic works, Arina Dähnick (b. 1965, Krefeld; lives and works in Berlin) deals with urbanity, spatial reality and visual perception. She discovered the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 2012, when, after a thunderstorm, she perceived the Neue Nationalgalerie in a both fascinating and paradoxical spatial experience of boundless vastness – and a simultaneous feeling of being held. From then on she photographed the building under various conditions until its closure in 2015, afterwards following in Mies van der Rohe’s footsteps from Berlin to Brno, from Chicago to New York. Dähnick captured his most famous buildings – including the Villa Tugendhat, the Seagram Building, and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments – in impressive photo series, which have been exhibited during the Chicago Architecture Biennial amongst others. The book was awarded the silver medal of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis.
-
GOTT&GILZ
Supernatural Beings54€ Add to cartGOTT&GILZ clothe provocative nudity into the guise of art-historical classics
The female nude is a constant of art history whose vicissitudes illustrate changing forms of representation and the wild swings of public morality. Many a nude was initially condemned as smut only to be reclassified a few years later as beautiful and becoming and inducted into the hallowed halls (the opposite has also happened). GOTT&GILZ’s photographic paintings build on this long tradition of depictions of naked women by men—theirs is the proverbial “male gaze.” It is a debt they are quick to acknowledge, with nods to Klimt, Schiele, Pollock, et al. No wonder some have responded to their work with kneejerk indignation. Unlike in those art-historical references, then, the impudence lies not in the shattering of traditional norms of representation but in quoting them: the past as affront. The women in the pictures as well as the artists themselves flaunt their desires, shamelessly and relentlessly confronting us with the historic roots of our social and psychological realities.
Freedom is the key idea in the two artists’ oeuvre: the freedom to be authentic and express oneself without shame. Their subtly provocative play with aesthetic conventions and taboos has not only made a splash on the arts scene, it has also prompted vital discussions about gender roles, body images, and the right to sexual self-determination.
By letting it all hang out, they allow us to see ourselves as we are instead of presenting a picture of what we (supposedly) should be like. The insolence of it!
-
Anna Virnich
10€ Add to cartAnna Virnich’s (b. Berlin, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) works resemble a speculative narrative. The artist has collected fabrics, garments, and bedspreads since her childhood, which she cuts up, exposes to the elements, dyes, and sometimes paints on to construct pictures and spaces. Her works are paintings and objects at once and defined by a powerful physical presence in conjunction with a ghostly emptiness. They recall Helen Frankenthaler’s liquefied chromatic landscapes, Paul Thek’s post-minimalist physicality, and the silver-foil transcendence of Andy Warhol’s Factory. Everything in Virnich’s art is a shell or membrane through which something filters in or out, “a part of emerging networks and an exchange of substances, technology, bodies, imageries, of the light of the eyes,” as Baptist Ohrtmann writes. Gathered, the textiles unfold an abstract tale of becoming and passing away, of painting, birth, artificiality, and science fiction.
-
Nikolaus List
Analphabetismus Nr. 737€ Add to cartBeguilingly colorful, balancing opulence with restraint, Nikolaus List’s (b. Frankfurt am Main, 1965; lives and works in Berlin) pictures scrutinize the relation between nature and art. Observations of natural scenes around Berlin blend with the artificiality of baroque gardens or early videogames. As List studies the operation of human perception, the painted space alternates between the depth of one-point perspective and a schematized flatness. The rhythmically organized compositions suspend the hierarchical distinction between foreground and background, an effect that is heightened by the often dissonant selection of colors and lends List’s art a “decidedly anti-sublime and anti-minimal” quality. A fallen tree, luminous rampantly growing and coiled branches become a metaphor for our relationships, our existence, for becoming and passing away, renewal and time.
Nikolaus List studied with Thomas Bayrle, Peter Kogler, and Christa Näher at the Academy of Fine Arts—Städelschule in Frankfurt. He has taught painting at the Weißensee School of Art and Design and the Berlin Art Institute.
- Out of stock
Kurt Weidemann
Wo der Buchstabe das Wort führt49,95€ Read moreSignierte Sonderauflage
Kurt Weidemanns Ansichten über Schrift und Typografie ist das beeindruckende Ergebnis eines über Jahrzehnte erlebten und reflektierten Berufslebens als Schriftsetzer, Typograf, Autor, Lehrer und Berater. Das Buch schildert die persönlichen, philosophischen und fachlichen Ansichten seines Metiers.
-
Jürgen Claus
To the Oceans with Imagination18€ Add to cartThe Sea as a Space of Artistic Experience
Jürgen Claus’s (b. 1935, Berlin; lives and works in Aachen and Baelen, Belgium) oeuvre encompasses paintings, films, light and solar installations, and underwater art. He is also a prolific writer on art, with theoretical works that have sold over 100,000 copies. “Jürgen Claus is the first one to see the ocean through an artist’s rather than a scientist’s lens,” Michel Ragon writes. In this book, Claus intertwines his experiences working on the fascinating underwater installations with a pressing contemporary concern: the global efforts to restore the seas to health. The publication combines visual art, architecture, poetry, and music for a multifaceted engagement with the world’s oceans.
Jürgen Claus majored in theater studies at the Universität München and was a research associate at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and professor of media art at the Kunsthochschule für Medien Köln, Cologne.
-
Franz Erhard Walther
Manifestations. Catalogue Raisonné of the Posters, Books and Drafts 1958–202068€ Add to cart”I don’t make any artistic difference between a poster design and my Work Drawings.“—Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda; lives and works in Fulda) is a German sculptor and creator of conceptual, installation, and process-based art whose work often stands in relation to his, or the beholder’s, body. For four decades, Walther designed artist’s posters, a genre that has become an anachronism in our contemporary digital world. This book is the first to gather his extensive output in the format in a single volume, rounded out by a wide-ranging survey of his designs and artist’s books.
”Artists give so much time, passion, and energy to their books that they are as important as very big installations. ‚Manifestations‘ is a very important artist book.“
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London”The new catalogue raisonné by Franz Erhard Walther is a masterpiece of parergon aesthetics. With his ‚Manifestations‘, the blurring of the boundaries between work and design, Franz Erhard Walther, after his performative sculptures, has achieved another great success for the emancipatory differentiation of the concept of the work of art.“
Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe”Franz Erhard Walther is nothing less than an exceptional 20th-century artist who has consistently questioned and fundamentally changed what a work of art can be. The innovative power of his comprehensive oeuvre is, of course, primarily evident in his art, but this publication of his manifold designs also provides an overview that is as wonderful as it is extraordinary.“
Andreas Beitin, Director, Kunstmuseum WolfsburgFranz Erhard Walther studied at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach am Main and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his education with a stint at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among his fellow students. His works were on display at documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8, and in 2017, Walther received the Golden Lion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia.
-
Corona, Queens
Photographs by Cara Galowitz32€ Add to cartFor seven years Cara Galowitz (b. 1964, lives and works in New York) walked the streets of Corona, Queens every day during her lunch break from her nearby museum job, where she worked as an art director. These photographs, which she calls “an exercise in seeing”, capture the vivid juxtapositions of one of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the world.
Through layers of irony, humor, and visual sophistication, these photographs evoke a place that is a continual work-in-progress, where the past, be it faded lettering or crumbling architecture, collides with the present in the form of spontaneous street decorations, signage, graffiti, and religious iconography. The images evoke the struggle and resilience of the people of Corona, as well as capturing the quirky beauty of the streets.
Cara Galowitz is a graduate of the Cooper Union School of Art where she focused on graphic design, photography, and fine art. She has pursued a long career as a museum art director and has shown work at the Newark Museum, the Museum of the City of New York, and the Grey Art Gallery.
-
Agostino Iacurci
10€ Add to cartAgostino Iacurci’s (b. Foggia, Italy, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings, sculptures, installations, and murals are based on vegetal forms and botanical subjects. Lucid compositions in radiant colors unfurl fantastical ornaments that transcend the division between figuration and abstraction and the hierarchical distinctions of applied art, design, fine art, and folk art. His central theme is the painted garden, in which he stages plants, humans, architecture, geometry, and decoration in a fashionably theatrical landscape. In Iacurci, the interpenetration of nature and civilization is real, integrating mythological motifs from across the history of art and culture, from antiquity to futurism and postmodernism, into his singular style.
Agostino Iacurci studied fine arts at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Rome. Since 2009, he has realized numerous large-format murals and installations for public and private institutions. He has also worked with international brands including Apple, Adidas, Hermès, and Starbucks.
-
Räume hautnah (GERMAN)
Draiflessen Collection32€ Add to cartWe live in spaces that we shape in accordance with our own ideas. Our everyday lives leave traces in them that speak to our habits. Spaces promise shelter and belonging, but they can also instill a sense of constraint. We grow into the spaces we inhabit—and they in turn become expressions of our personalities. Conversely, spaces, depending on their architecture and location, inform our existence. RÄUME HAUTNAH gathers works of art that, rather than conceiving of the human sphere and the spatial domain as separate, comprehend them in their complex entanglements: in bodily experience, emotional dependency, or the instinctive need for protection. An essay by Olesja Nein, the project’s curator, offers an introduction to the exhibition and takes the reader on a tour, describing each artist’s space of activity and supplying helpful information. Philipp Zitzlsperger, meanwhile, zooms in on a key aspect of the art in the exhibition, the imprint as an artistic technique with a distinctive aura, and illuminates its origins and significance since the dawn of modernism.
Artists: Absalon, Shannon Bool, Heidi Bucher, Eileen Gray, Do Ho Suh, Mary Mattingly, Tracey Snelling, Francesca Woodman
-
Felix Schramm
Things To Come44€ Add to cartFelix Schramm’s (b. Hamburg, 1970; lives and works in Düsseldorf) sculptural oeuvre reflects a probing engagement with space and the body. In works in a variety of media, including installations that intervene into a given setting, sculptures, and collages, the artist creates three-dimensional forms out of classical materials and industrial staples as well as detritus and dust. Deformations, rifts, cracks, or impurities undermine the existing order in his constructed formal ensembles, allowing novel correspondences in space and interconnections across time to emerge. The material and its subjection to form are held in a precarious balance; disintegration, which is an integral element of Schramm’s art, paves the way for artistic assertion and reformulation. The extensive publication gathers works and exhibitions of the past five years. It is Schramm’s first monograph, presenting a cross-section of his entire oeuvre with all bodies of work.
Felix Schramm studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, from 1991 until 1993 and at the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf, where he was in Jannis Kounellis’s master class, from 1994 until 1998. He rounded out his education with residencies in Tokyo in 2000 and at Villa Massimo in Rome in 2008.
