






Plastique Fantastique
A Journey through an ephemeral Realm
![]() | |
---|---|
Author(s) | Daniel Felgendreher, Lidia Gasperoni, Marco Canevacci, Mateo Feijóo, Yena Young |
Design | Marco Canevacci |
Size | 21 x 27 cm |
Cover | Hardcover |
Pages | 180 |
Illustrations | 138 |
Language(s) | English |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-129-0 |
In the wake of Frank Lloyd Wright’s pioneering work, visionary architects including Frei Otto and Buckminster Fuller established bubbles as a recognized artistic and architectonic form. The Berlin-based art duo Plastique Fantastique (Marco Canevacci and Yena Young) go one step further and harness them as a medium of temporary social interactions. The philosopher Vilém Flusser conceived of space in the digital universe as a network of relational settings in which humans can be in multiple places at one, as a “bubble that extends into the future.” Plastique Fantastique transform our urban and rural environments into laboratories for such spaces in which urgent social, political, and aesthetic questions are negotiated. Oversized translucent bubbles, traffic islands ringed by diaphanous tubes, giant lifebelts, air-filled sausages that the audience at a Peaches concert pass over their heads: Plastique Fantastique’s installations fuse art, performance, people, and architecture in a multisensory experience that blurs the conventional boundaries of art and focuses our attention on the larger bubble in which human existence is contained. Richly illustrated with exceptional photographs, this monograph is the first to document a representative selection from the duo’s projects of the past two decades.
More books
-
John M Armleder
CA. CA.19€ Add to cartCommentaries on our Present Day Realities and the Status of Art
John M Armleder (b. 1948, Geneva; lives and works in Geneva and New York) is one of the most influential contemporary conceptual, performance and object artists. The profound and the banal, control and coincidence, high culture and everyday life coalesce in Armleder’s work to create a unique experience. The works of the Swiss – often humorous or ironically twisted commentaries on contemporary reality – draw on the formal repertoire of Classical Modernism, as well as on video and design. The book focuses on large-scale, site-specific installations and wall pieces, showing in detail the broad spectrum of Armleder’s work.
John M Armleder studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Geneva. He represented Switzerland 1986 at the 42nd Biennale di Venezia and participated in documenta 8 one year later. His work has been exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Palais de Tokyo, Paris, and Belvedere, Vienna, amongst others.
-
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.
- 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.
-
Jenny Michel
Doors, Windows and Cells38€ Add to cartThe Detritus of Our Society
For around two decades, the artist Jenny Michel (b. Worms, 1975; lives and works in Berlin) has devoted herself to minute particles such as dust, cobwebs, and electromagnetic fields in space. Her fascination with orders of knowledge, symbolism, and utopian visions is reflected by installations, drawings, prints, and sculptures that she exhibits in carefully composed sprawling ensembles. Aggregating fantastic fragments of the world manufactured from paper, adhesive tape, staples, and other industrially made small parts, Michel builds disconcertingly dense structures—human knowledge is transformed into the debris of civilization, its legibility lost beneath palimpsestic layers of meanings and resignifications. The extensive monograph surveys major series in the artist’s oeuvre and presents new works on paper.
Jenny Michel studied at Kunsthochschule Kassel and the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. Her work has been on view at Museum Wiesbaden, the Draiflessen Collection, the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt, and Berlinische Galerie, among other venues. In 2010, Michel was honored with the HAP Grieshaber Prize.
-
Arantxa Etcheverria
Doors38€ Add to cartThe Mythical Power of Grids
Arantxa Etcheverria’s (b. 1975, France; lives and works in Bucharest) creative practice encompasses painting, sculpture, performance, photography, and film. Since 2006, she has been especially interested in modernist architecture, a ubiquitous sight in her adopted country, Romania. Blending rationalism with speculation, the artist draws on historical references including post-Communist turbo architecture, Op art, and minimalism for works that balance between figuration and abstraction, construction and deconstruction. This book documents Etcheverria’s more recent panel paintings and installations, seen in interaction with actors in monochrome costumes. With essays by the Paris-based Romanian curator and critic Ami Barak and the art historian and curator Alina Şerban.
Arantxa Etcheverria studied fine arts at Villa Arson, Nice, and stage design at the Théâtre national de Strasbourg.
- Out of stock
Hans Karl Zeisel
Hundred and more34,95€ Read morePossibilities of concrete art
What is possible without turning away from the cocrete? In the Bauhaus tradition, the typographer, graphic artist, designer and author Hans Karl Zeisel opens up countless design options with basic forms. His wooden cuboids demand a humorous approach to sculpture. They are creativity training, study tools and meditation game all in once. A playful experiment that reveals the diversity of concrete art.
-
On Air
Der Klang des Materials in der Kunst der 1950er bis 1970er Jahre40€ Add to cartOn Air showcases a distinctive art form, the sound sculpture, retracing its evolution from the early 1950s, when artists begin dismantling the conventional boundaries of art, to the early 1970s. In no more than a quarter-century, the range of possible answers to the question “What is art?” grows vastly larger. Propelled by the idea of the work of art as a machine and instrument, sounds, noises, tones, vibrations, silence, words, breath become a “tangible” sculptural material. Artists enrich visual perception by adding the acoustic dimension, interweave seeing and hearing, explore time and space with fresh zeal. In emerging artistic genres such as performance, installation, or media art, sound is an integral component of the work. The book focuses on sound objects by Yaakov Agam, Joseph Beuys, Hermann Goepfert, Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, David Tudor, Timm Ulrichs, and others.
With five scholarly essays and numerous illustrations and notes on individual works, the comprehensive publication offers an attractive introduction to the subject.
-
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.
-
Jan Muche
Agora42€ Add to cartTracing the Wear of the Life of Labor
The visual art of Jan Muche (b. 1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century’s ideologies – Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing Socialism. Muche’s roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as his engagement with yesteryear’s “heroes of labor” into focus.
Jan Muche trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin.
-
Hofmann’s Ways
Early Drawings (1898-1937)24,80€ Add to cartA Re-Discovery: the Early Graphic Work of Hans Hofmann
A representative of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann (b. 1880, Weißenburg; d. 1966, New York) was one of the most important artistic personalities of the 20th century. He began his career as a teacher and artist in the United States in the mid-1930s. The previously unpublished graphic oeuvre presents the highly varied development process that preceded Hans Hofmann’s influential painting of the post-war period.
-
Chunqing Huang
Painter’s Portrait II18€ Add to cartThe artist Chunqing Huang’s (b. Heze, China, 1974) Painters’ Portraits are anything but conventional likenesses. The portraits of artists including Louise Bourgeois, Anselm Kiefer, Martin Kippenberger and Imi Knoebel are acts of gestural-expressive abstraction and probing visual studies of the artist’s own recollections. Chunqing Huang paints meditations on art itself, systematically working through the vocabulary of abstract painting from Germany to the United States. The series Painter’s Portrait II features Chunqing Huang’s thirty most recent works from a series the artist has been transferring to canvases measuring 40 x 30 cm since 2016.
Painter’s Portrait II represents Chunqing Huang’s personal reflections on her influences, from Impressionism to expressive tendencies in abstract painting, which now make its début in book form. The catalogue showcases the portraits, each of which is distinguished by its own gestural quality and individual palette.
Chunqing Huang studied painting and interdisciplinary art at the Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, where Wolfgang Tillmans and Peter Angermann were her teachers, and graduated from Hermann Nitsch’s master class. The German-Chinese artist’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions. A first selection from the Painter’s Portrait series was on view at Kunsthalle Wiesbaden and Museum Wiesbaden in the summer of 2021; the catalogue Painter’s Portrait II is released in conjunction with her exhibition of the same title at 68projects, Berlin.
-
Aline Schwibbe
Now It’s Dark28€ Add to cartAline Schwibbe (b. Hamm 1988; lives and works in Berlin) studied both psychology and art and her interest lies in observing the cyclical nature of events and experiences—in memory, in dreams and in the reality of the present. Her films and her photographic and mixed-media sequences often appear like fragments of occurrences snatched from the dark and exposed multiple times in an attempt to make them visible.
The artist’s first monograph is published on the occasion of her solo exhibition Now It‘s Dark at the EIGEN+ART Lab Berlin. The book introduces Schwibbe’s extensive multidisciplinary practice, which besides drawing, photography and video also includes sculpture, animation, sound installations, and textile projects.
-
Wege in die Abstraktion
Marta Hoepffner und Willi Baumeister24,90€ Add to cartUnknown Influences of Modern Painting and Photography
Marta Hoepffner (b. 1912, Pirmasens; d. 2000, Lindenberg) is considered a pioneer of experimental photography. For the first time, this book compares the artist’s early photographic experiments, portraits, and color photographic studies with the paintings of Willi Baumeister (b. 1889, Stuttgart, d. 1955 Stuttgart). As professor at the Frankfurter Kunstschule – today’s Städelschule – Baumeister had a decisive influence on the development of his student Hoepffner. An extraordinary book that presents more than fifty works from the 1910s to the 1970s.
Marta Hoepffner’s works have been exhibited at, among others, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the National Portrait Gallery in London. Willi Baumeister studied at the Kunstakademie in Stuttgart and was a member of the influential November Group. He was defamed as “degenerate” during the Nazi regime and is now considered one of the outstanding artists of modernism.
-
Maria Balea & George Crîngașu
The Mythenstein Project18€ Add to cartMaria Balea (b. Sighetu Marmației, 1990; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca, Romania) and George Crîngașu (b. Focșani, 1988; lives and works in Cluj-Napoca and Rome) are among the youngest members of the School of Cluj, which has attained international renown in Adrian Ghenie, Hortensia Mi Kafchin, and Ciprian Mureșan. The overarching theme in their works in a range of media is the lived reality of today’s young people between a physical world defined by uncertainties and a virtual parallel universe whose boundless possibilities make it a fascinating yet also often deceptive safe haven. Both artists roam this dizzying kaleidoscope of worlds on a quest for beauty: Balea, through a romantically idealized focus on remnants of untouched or deserted nature; Crîngașu, by abandoning himself to the graphical possibilities of the digital realm, where beauty is often bound up with the bending of natural laws and the physical impossibility of architecture. Yet both, the retreat to an ostensibly natural state and the escape into garish artificiality, are overshadowed by a nameless menace.
-
America! America!
How real is real?38€ Add to cartMyths, Projections, Aspirations
In times of fake news and alternative facts it is becoming even more clear how the American Dream is closely interwoven with emotional pictures and symbols. At the same time, it can be said that no other nation might have the same strong awareness of the power of images. Images of the American Way of Life, which are produced in media and entertainment, are able to consolidate existing power structures and perceptions of reality, but also question them in a radical way. The psychologically charged canvasses of Eric Fischl, the hermetic scenes of Alex Katz, the enormous film-noir-like graffiti paintings of Robert Longo dissect the dreams and fears of an insecure white middle class. Simultaneously, artists such as Jeff Wall or Cindy Sherman conquer scenes that critically reflect our media-influenced perception, becoming models for subsequent generations. By showing 70 masterpieces of US-contemporary art, the book shows how artists from the 1960s to date comment on the American reality.
-
Was ist Wiener Aktionismus?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
-
Secundino Hernández
Miettinen Collection36€ Add to cartSecundino Hernández’s (b. Madrid, 1975; lives and works in Madrid und Berlin) paintings and works on paper blend figuration and abstraction, the linearity of drawing and exuberant color, minimalism and gesture. Slowly and methodically moving across the canvas, Hernández sets down sinuous lines and marks, using a brush or applying the paint straight from the tube before rinsing and scratching off the surfaces. The resulting compositions feel organized yet charged with explosive energy and evince manifold references: a physicality reminiscent of Action Painting, cartoon-style terse figuration, and passages that bring to mind Old Masters and especially the Spaniards El Greco and Velázquez. As Hernández observes, his works “may look like Action Painting or Expressionism, but they represent a profound and painstaking scrutiny of these visual idioms, a way of articulating my own contemporary perspective on certain aesthetic movements.”
Secundino Hernández studied at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid from 1995 until 2000 and at the Royal Spanish Academy in Rome in 2005–2006.
-
Billy Al Bengston
Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe Pop Artist as Master of Watercolor Painting
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is a master of the watercolor. Themes and motifs that also determine the painterly work gain a special expressiveness here: bizarre landscapes and opulent blossoms, fantastic celestial bodies and colorful abstractions. This opulent volume presents this part of Bengston’s oeuvre for the first time in great breadth with roughly 400 works. They demonstrate the skill of an artist who has brought watercolor to extreme precision and enriched it with numerous new aspects.
Billy Al Bengston attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, and the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. His works can be found in outstanding permanent collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
-
Pharaonengold
3.000 Jahre altägyptische Hochkultur27,50€ Add to cartThe Mysterious World of the Pharaohs and their Magical Relationship to Gold
Hardly any other culture fascinates as much as the high culture of ancient Egypt. At its center were the pharaohs, those legendary kings who, according to the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, descended directly from the gods. Gold was ascribed a special symbolic and religious power; it stood for eternity and indestructibility and, as the “flesh of the gods,” was a sacred metal. The book brings together 150 exhibits from pharaonic tombs from the Old Kingdom of the Third Dynasty (circa 2680 B.C.E.) and the oldest gold statue of an Egyptian pharaoh to Tutankhamun and Horemheb (circa 1330–1310 B.C.E.).