Sebastian Stöhrer
Residents
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Overbeck-Gesellschaft, Kunstverein Lübeck, St. Petri zu Lübeck |
| Author(s) | Daniel Birnbaum, Christoph Keller, Cecily Ogunjobi, Bernd Schwarze |
| Design | Harald Pridgar |
| Size | 20 x 30 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Pages | 136 |
| Illustrations | 100 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-206-8 |
If there’s an artist whose oeuvre merits the title “creation,” it is Sebastian Stöhrer. Shaping clay—essentially, soil—he molds his “residents”: colorful and friendly-looking sculptural beings, some of them enhanced with sticks or branches reminiscent of limbs. Despite their air of levity and humor, they are not the products of mere momentary inspiration or a whim. It takes decades of dedicated experimentation with the kiln based on the millennia-old art of ceramics as well as expert knowledge of chemistry and physics to create such colors and shapes. Stöhrer has been called an alchemist, and indeed he has made it his mission to vindicate this researcher’s craft, an ancestor of the natural sciences. Alchemy, like Stöhrer’s oeuvre, combines pure rationality with coincidence and a scintilla of magic. The artist plays an intuitive and sensual game with his clay and the virtually incalculable chromaticity of the glazes—chaos, anarchy, and irrepressible urges being an integral dimension of all creation. In Stöhrer’s “residents,” we encounter the embodiments of that creation: likenesses of ourselves and perhaps also heralds of a future more good-natured version.
More books
-
Museum Brot und Kunst
Forum Welternährung24€ Add to cartFood, Art, and Consumption
The craving for food and the desire to avoid being hungry have been among humanity’s central concerns for millennia. Economic activity, science, politics, culture—our basic need for sustenance informs and influences every domain of our lives. The catalogue accompanying the permanent exhibition at the Museum Brot und Kunst—Forum Welternährung sheds light on nineteen thematic foci around the significance of bread as the quintessential food. Founded in 1955, the Museum of Bread and Art was the first institution of its kind in the world dedicated to this subject; its collection comprises a large number of artifacts from across several centuries that speak to the histories of culture, society, and technology. The generously illustrated publication presents a panorama of the wide field of human nourishment in dialogue with art, helping the reader grasp the complexities of the world in which we live.
With works by Ernst Barlach, Bernhard Johannes Blume, Pieter Brueghel, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Simone Demandt, Agnes Denes, Frans Francken, Georg Flegel, Erich Heckel, Christian Jankowski, Markus Lüpertz, Gerhard Marcks, Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso, Claire Pentecost, Thomas Rentmeister, Daniel Spoerri, Andy Warhol and others.
The book was included in the shortlist of the competition “Schönste Deutsche Bücher 2021”.
-
Francis Alÿs
The Nature of the Game
Special Edition60€ Add to cartSPECIAL EDITION in clothbound slipcase
The Belgian artist Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) makes work that is as multifaceted as it is poetically subversive. Straddling the line between performative conceptual art and community intervention, his films and drawings chart the political and social realities of urban spaces. One of his most imposing long-term projects is Children’s Games, for which he documents children playing all over the world, from Paris and Mexico City to the Yezidi refugee camp Sharya in Iraq. The richly illustrated book contains ideas and sketches he compiled in preparation for this series. It lets us glimpse into the engine room of his artistic practice, revealing key elements of his filmic poetics. An essay by the ethnographer and filmmaker David MacDougall embeds Alÿs’s observations of children’s play in the contexts of childhood studies as well as the history of ethnographic documentary film.
Francis Alÿs (b. Antwerp, 1959) is widely regarded as one of the foremost artists working today. His oeuvre, which has garnered numerous prizes and been featured in solo exhibitions around the world, encompasses films, photographs, performances, drawings, and paintings, many of them explorations of the social and political realities of urban spaces. Since 1986, Alÿs, who trained as an architect, has lived in Mexico City, where he moved after the major earthquake of 1985 to help in the rebuilding effort.
Francis Alÿs – The Nature of the Game is the official publication of the Belgian pavilion at the 59th Biennale di Venezia, curated by Hilde Teerlinck.
-
Sabrina Fritsch
syntaxerror28€ Add to cartSabrina Fritsch’s (b. Neunkirchen/Saar, 1979; lives and works in Cologne) paintings explore the potentials of the compositional process and the mechanisms of perception. Many of them feature coarse structures, textile surfaces, and delicate superimpositions. In this publication, Fritsch, who was recently appointed professor at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts, presents a résumé of the painterly oeuvre she has developed since her graduation from the same school in 2008. It encompasses two related books, each of which undertakes a structured study of a major strand in Fritsch’s art. One offers a chronological survey of a representative selection of works created between 2008 and 2019 that illustrate her playful and experimental engagement with the constituents of the painted picture: the picture-as-object, the organization of pictorial space, and the phenomenology of physical color. In addition to works on canvas boasting a wide variety of applications of materials and paint, it also covers serial variations in prints. The other showcases three exhibitions and bodies of work dating from 2020 and 2021 that are dedicated to the three color systems RGB, black-and-white (BAW), and CMYK.
-
Philip Loersch
Renteninformation 202230€ Add to cartA satirical audiobook, read by Johannes Steck
with free download link on the inside
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.”
Johannes Steck (b. Würzburg, 1966) is one of Germany’s best-known audiobook narrators, having sold over four million copies, including of books by Simon Beckett and Ken Follett, in a three-decade career. Television viewers also know his voice from trailers on Kabel 1 and DMAX and documentaries on ZDF, BR, and Sky. His work has garnered awards including the 2012 HörKules.
-
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.
-
Filip Henin
10€ Add to cartThe events captured in Filip Henin’s (b. Mayen, 1986; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are set in a world beyond time and place, as though on an empty stage prepared for a Samuel Beckett production. It is virtually impossible to say whether a picture shows a coastal region or a craggy slope up in the mountains, whether a field of blue represents the sea or a band of open sky. Henin strips landscapes down no less than human figures, subtracting specific features to isolate basic forms that might be found in the hill country around his hometown in western Germany or in Tuscany. His work integrates quotations from antiquity, Romantic landscape painting, and postmodernism as well as Italian Transavanguardia, the mysticism of Francesco Clemente and Sandro Chia, and the figurative painting of the 1990s. Without veering into drama or pathos, he harnesses two utterly antithetical energies: the reflection on painting and the history of art and the need to be simple.
-
Ugo Rondinone
nuns + monks20€ Add to cartContemplation and Communion with the World
Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is a conceptual and installation artist whose oeuvre spans abstract painting, photography, and sculpture. Nature is where he has long found inspiration, regeneration, and comfort: “In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the secular vibrate against one another.” Rondinone’s works oscillate between the extremes of interiority and engagement with the wider world; stone is often present in his art as a recurrent material and symbol. The sculptures in the series nuns + monks originated as limestone models; the artist made three-dimensional scans and then cast the works in bronze. As a reflection of the inner self in the outside world, the friable mineral contrasts with the solidity of the bronze; the natural genesis of the millennia-old stones with the presence of the polychrome casts in the here and now. nuns + monks attest to a visibility while also giving the impression of flinching from the gazes to which they expose themselves.
Ugo Rondinone studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His work has been presented at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, the Swiss National Museum, Zurich, MoMA/PS1, New York, and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, among others.
-
Maria Braune
Keep Away From Fire28€ Add to cartMaria Braune’s (b. Berlin, 1988; lives and works in Munich and Bamberg) work revolves around a material she developed; named Migma, it consists of eight different renewable natural resources. She heats it, then casts and molds it in a process that continues for weeks. The resulting sculptures and installations sprawl throughout the space like sensuous organisms. Associations of growth and symbiosis emerge, but discontinuities and disintegration come into view as well. Braune’s creative process is part of an ecosystem and thoroughly anchored in the now. Her material is a vitally alive substance to which she responds in an immediate engagement, connecting it to mythological and narrative significations and setting it in relation to her own world.
Maria Braune studied woodcarving at the Fachhochschule für Bildhauerei in Berchtesgaden, Germany, in 2009–2011, then fine arts with Hermann Pitz at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where she graduated in 2017.
-
Michael Bertram
mehr licht35€ Add to cartThe Mülheim-Kärlich Nuclear Power Station, 1975–2019
In 1975, construction began in Mülheim-Kärlich on what was to be the only nuclear power plant in the state of Rhineland-Palatinate. After numerous court battles and only two years of trial and regular operation, the plant was decommissioned in 1988 and dismantled starting in 2001. The 530-foot cooling tower, taller than Cologne Cathedral, was the point of reference, landmark, and eyesore of an entire region; its time-consuming demolition became a symbol of the perennial political polarization over the decision to phase out nuclear power.
Michael Bertram (b. Mendig, 1968; lives and works in Mayen) took photographs of the reactor looming between homes and factories in order to record the future past in pictures. The plant cost seven billion deutschmarks to build and one billion euros to take back down: vast resources expended on a temporary installation that lasted forty years and left a lasting mark on the landscape, the surrounding communities, and the people who lived in its shadow. Starting with the demolition, the book presents an inverted timeline in eighty-one black-and-white photographs. The object seems to rise before our eyes until, at the end of the series, five color photographs conjure up a past that was very much present only a moment ago—a singular document of Germany’s industrial heritage.
- Release October 2025
Werner Hahn
Kailas. Berg und Gott72€ Add to cartKailas is far more than just a mountain—it is a symbol of spiritual quest, transcendence, and enlightenment. In this book, the painter and photographer Werner Hahn (b. Karlsbad, now Czech Republic, 1944) approaches the holiest peak in Asia from a unique perspective: as an artist, traveler, and profound connoisseur of its cultural history. This book interweaves art, mythology, and historical accounts from Buddhism and Hinduism. Hahn’s personal travel experiences, complemented by reflections on Western travel literature and spiritual sources, enter into a dialogue with ancient traditions, revealing Kailas as a place of both deep personal experience and artistic contemplation. A visual pilgrimage to one of the most significant mountains in the world.
-
“Das Quadrat muss den Raum beherrschen!”
Aurélie Nemours und Zeitgenossen15€ Add to cartDoes everything in the world obey a mathematical logic, can everything be calculated? In our present age of probability, some would say the answer is a straightforward yes, inevitably prompting the question: Even art? Yes, even art, or so the defenders of Concrete Art would respond, a twentieth-century movement that took abstraction as a focus on the “idea of art itself” (W. Kandinsky) to the next level. The act of painting was now to be subject to preconceived organizing principles as though they were laws of nature. One prominent exponent of the genre was Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005), who had a penchant for the square; her credo was that it needed to “rule space.” That is why the equilateral quadrangle is the defining shape in this catalog, which brings Nemours’ oeuvre into focus. Her iconic position is flanked by works by seventeen others that similarly grapple with the square, including pictures and sculptures with square basic forms, grids, or canvases. All these works derive their force from the stern authority of the square: only when art constrains its means can it bring its full potential to bear.
ARTISTS:
JOSEF ALBERS, GÖTZ ARNDT, MAX BILL, AD DEKKERS, HELMUT FEDERLE, GOTTFRIED HONEGGER, KATHRIN KAPS, FRITZ KLINGBEIL, JOHN MEYER, GEROLD MILLER, AURÉLIE NEMOURS, JOHN NIXON, PETER ROEHR, JAN SCHOONHOVEN, ANTON STANKOWSKI, KLAUS STAUDT, HERMAN DE VRIES, GERHARD WITTNER - temporarily not available
Andreas Eriksson
Read moreAll is related, from the outside in. Look what’s behind it.
Andreas Eriksson (b. 1975 in Björsäter, lives and works in Medelplana, Sweden) is one of Sweden’s most notable contemporary artists. His artistic practice is based on a traditional painterly language, but he constantly expands this field to also encompass a vast production of textile works. He examines different histories through conceptual twists and turns in sculpture and prints. This monograph, the artist’s first, seeks to explain and illustrate Eriksson’s development and thoughts behind the meandering array of works he produces. It is a close look behind the canvas.
Andreas Eriksson studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Stockholm from 1993 to 1998 and represented Sweden with the Nordic Pavilion at the 54. Biennale di Venezia. His most comprehensive solo exhibition to date took place in 2014 at Bonniers Konsthall, Stockholm.
-
Freeters
HELP! Artistic Intelligence38€ Add to cartFREETERS stands for an artist collective that designs, creates, transforms and plays with spaces, for and with the people who experience their time there. The artistic intelligence used in the process transforms into spaces for thinking, working, living, playing and learning, creating identity, emotion and inspiration.
This book is about the mediation of artistic thinking and artistic action in processes. The artistic practice of Freeters is characterized by strategies of thought and action that are needed in a society with constantly changing conditions, in a working world that overturns itself in its dynamics. The necessity of shaping the present through artistic thought and action can no longer be limited to the art context.
FREETERS’ AI approach should be understood less as a scientific methodology and more as a call not to reduce our intelligence to only rational thought processes with a utility maxim. Of course, AI has already made impressive progress in many areas of our public services via the hard components of machine learning. However, it is doubtful whether this approach alone can really give rise to a superintelligence that will one day create a resource-saving paradise on earth. Nor is it guaranteed that we as Homo Sapiens will be assigned a place in this paradise by such a unilaterally gifted superintelligence. Cognitively, this machine will be superior to us in any case – only the necessary feeling of happiness of a consensual coexistence does not seem quite conceivable.
-
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).
-
PULS 20
New Entries in the MNAC Collection36€ Add to cartPULS 20 unites the most valuable finds from a communal treasure hunt. Exponents of the Romanian arts scene and representatives of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest teamed up to review the oeuvres of countless eminent Romanian artists and select works of outstanding quality that reflect the diversity of the country’s creative production over the past fifty years. In time for the celebrations of MNAC’s twentieth anniversary in 2020, the institution acquired the 180 works reproduced in this catalogue. That makes PULS 20 a singular document in two respects: it gathers a selection of key works of Romanian art that is unprecedented in its breadth between the covers of a book; and it is the result of a successful cooperative curatorial process, an organic discourse involving a wide variety of participants, demonstrating that democratic dialogue in art is not just possible but also extraordinarily fruitful and indeed necessary. All in all, this catalogue is the perfect choice both for newcomers to Romanian contemporary art and for specialists.
-
Rainer Jacob
justICE30€ Add to cartRainer Jacob (b. Jena, 1970; lives and works in Leipzig) has anonymously installed objects made of ice in public settings in cities including Berlin, Leipzig, Paris, Moscow, Oslo, Prague, and Budapest since 2013. He then allows them to dematerialize and records the process in photographs. Radiators, wall outlets, QR codes, and the Duchampian pissoir are among his recurrent motifs. The impermanence of the ice objects builds bridges to street art, Fluxus, and action art. Critical observations on the unequal distribution of resources and political power in contemporary society, his works reflect on our perceptions and question the idea of originality in art while also probing the outer limits of sculpture.
The publication showcases the ice objects of the past ten years, embedding them in a decade that has marked a sea change in the life of humankind: JustICE captures an artist’s distinctive perspective on societal processes.
-
Born in the Woods
Jems Koko Bi & HAP Grieshaber24€ Add to cartThe Political Substance of Wood
Jems Koko Bi (b. Sinfra, Côte d’Ivoire, 1966; lives and works in Kaarst, Germany, Dakar, and Abidjan) is world-renowned for the monumental wood sculptures he creates using a machine saw. This book juxtaposes his most recent body of works with the large-format woodcuts of HAP Grieshaber (b. Rot an der Rot, Germany, 1909; d. Eningen unter Achalm, 1981). Although the two artists never met, their oeuvres are characterized by similar themes, values, and materials. The central concern is the fate of the forests and its momentous political and social implications: Grieshaber’s woodcuts articulate his principled opposition to the predatory exploitation of nature in the 1970s—an issue that is more relevant than ever today in light of the climate crisis and the Fridays for Future movement. Koko Bi’s figural groups bring this tradition of political art into our time, making a global and universally compelling case for a sustainable husbandry of our resources.
Jems Koko Bi studied at the Institut National Supérieur des Arts et de l’Action Culturelle (INSAAC), Abidjan, and the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited widely, including at the Centre Pompidou, Paris; at documenta 13; the Havana Biennial; and several Venice Biennials and Dakar Biennials. In 2019, he founded the forest biennial Abidjan Green Arts.
HAP Grieshaber studied advertising art at the Staatliche Kunstgewerbeschule, Stuttgart. His work is regarded as a signal contribution to the renewal of the woodcut medium in the twentieth century. He participated in documentas I, II, and III, held a professorship at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe, and was honored with numerous awards and retrospectives.
-
Photography of Presence
24€ Add to cartThe Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography
Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.
With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.
- English edition not available anymore
YAEL BARTANA
THE BOOK OF MALKA GERMANIARead moreShe Is Hope. She Is the Leader. She Is the Messiah. She Is History. She Is Fake.
The video artist Yael Bartana (b. Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, 1970; lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin) makes work that explores the visual language of identity and the politics of commemoration. The critical scrutiny of collective expectations of political or religious salvation is a central concern in her art. In the video installation Malka Germania—Hebrew for “Queen Germany”—Bartana creates alternative realities from the German-Jewish past and present that bring scenes of the collective unconscious to light. The publication follows the epiphany of Malka Germania, a female redeemer figure, in five chapters whose layout is modeled on that of the Talmud, the central text in Rabbinical Judaism. This organization reflects the polyphonic complexity, rich nuance, and ambivalence that the work casts into visuals and underscores that there is no simple answer. The book includes an interview with the artist and contributions by Sami Berdugo, Christina von Braun, Michael Brenner, Max Czollek, and others. It is published on occasion of the exhibition Yael Bartana—Redemption Now at the Jewish Museum Berlin.
Yael Bartana studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, the School of Visual Arts, New York, and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. Her work is held by collections all over the world and has been presented in solo exhibitions at venues including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Moderna Museet, Malmö.
Click here for the German edition.
-
Julius Hofmann
Western Philosophies35€ Add to cartJulius Hofmann (b. Göttingen, 1983; lives and works near Göttingen) has mastered the traditional aspects of painting and commands a broad repertoire of creative techniques. This expertise enables him to call conventional painting in question by combining it with the aesthetic of 1990s computer graphics. The simple and often grotesque symbolism of the imperfect digital imagery contrasts with a perfectionistic figurative painting. This approach lends his pictures a disconcerting and unexpected quality.
Western Philosophies is an episode in Hofmann’s ongoing work confronting consumerist society with its dark secrets and its indifference. Meanwhile, his creative process is also an exploration of the artist’s personal fears and frustrations. In depicting his figures, landscapes, and machines, he draws our attention to the painterly originality of structures and surfaces. The protagonists, to his mind, play a subordinate role, typically serving him as vehicles—he is more interested in the “how” than in the “what.”
Julius Hofmann studied painting with Neo Rauch and Heribert C. Ottersbach at the Academy of Fine Arts Leipzig (HGB) from 2005 until 2011. His work is represented in international collections and institutions.
