HALBwertsZeit
Zum Umgang mit ‚abgelaufenen‘ Sammlungen
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|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Viola Vahrson, Lars Breuer |
| Author(s) | Sabine Beneke, Lars Breuer, Alexis Joachimides, Daniel Kothenschulte, Andrea Meyer, Thomas Ochs, Nina Schallenberg, Linnea Semmerling, Markus Stegmann, Phillip Teufel, Thomas Thorausch, Viola Vahrson |
| Design | Hilde Gahlen, Sven Burow, Chiara Toteda |
| Size | 16 x 24 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Pages | 200 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-179-5 |
Do 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evolving social contexts, and discursive developments influence when a collection or its presentation is said to be outdated and what that implies for the constraints on, or options for, the actions to be taken in response.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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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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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.
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Simone Haack – Untangling the Strands / Démêler les Fils
24€ Add to cartSimone Haack’s (b. Rotenburg/Wümme, 1978; lives in Berlin) most recent body of work delves into the theme of hair as a parameter of identity straddling the division between nature and culture. Her second publication with DCV is released on the occasion of two exhibitions: Untangling the Strands at Berlin’s Abguss-Sammlung Antiker Plastik, a collection of casts of ancient sculpture, which are seen in dialogue with her hair pictures; and Helix of Realism at Galerie Droste, Paris, which is part of the official program of events around the grand Surrealism exhibition held at the Centre Pompidou in celebration of the Surrealist Manifesto’s centennial. The new book is the first to shed light on the aspect of the surreal in the artist’s oeuvre and uncovers a major source of her visual inspiration: the dream diaries that Haack has kept since she was seventeen and the interest in the unconscious they reflect. It is above all the logic of the dream as well as feelings and moods that inform her paintings.
Haack: “My goal is to use the means of realism to visualize what cannot be seen. To get into an automatism that lets the unconscious speak in order to infuse the pictures with a life of their own. To shed light on the domain where the myths originate.”
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The Psyche of the Portrait
Liliane Tomasko meets Bonnard, van Dongen, Paolozzi and Auerbach44€ Add to cartThe evolution of the portrait through the ages—that is the subject of The Psyche of the Portrait featuring selected works from the collections of the Sheffield Museums. Presenting the contemporary Swiss artist Liliane Tomasko (b. 1967) in dialogue with masterpieces by Pierre Bonnard, Kees van Dongen, Eduardo Paolozzi, Frank Auerbach, and others, the book frames a psychological perspective on art history in which the exploration of consciousness and perception is reflected in the art of portraiture. After the emphasis on the integral person and their gestalt, Sigmund Freud redirected depth psychology to discover the unconscious. Fifty years later, Jacques Lacan inspired the way of seeing in the portraits of Frank Auerbach, an exponent of the New Figuration. These diverse approaches now encounter Tomasko’s works with their gestural and performative mode of expression.
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Feuer und Farbe
Gemälde und Grafiken von Walter Jacob35€ Add to cartWalter Jacob (1893-1964) was a painter whose oeuvre and life reflected the discontinuities of the twentieth century in condensed form. Contemplative natural scenes and the self-portraits were constants to which he hewed throughout his career; in stylistic terms, however, his oeuvre could hardly be more contradictory. Working first in the Impressionist, then in the Expressionist style, he eventually forged a form of expression tending toward abstraction, although he rejected modernist painting throughout his life. The Nazis considered his early work “degenerate,” which led him—a committed National Socialist and active member of the SA—to adapt not just his ideological convictions, but also his aesthetics to the new era: starting in the mid-1930s, he produced naturalistic depictions, sometimes suggestive of the New Objectivity, of “popular” motifs like landscapes, animals, soldiers, and more. Tellingly, though, the backs of some of his canvases are taken up by works that suggest the pleasure he took in experimenting with color and form. The same tension is palpable in the abstract landscapes of his late oeuvre. This catalog gathers works to retrace Jacob’s checkered career, complemented by (art) historical essays that embed his output in its context.
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Katja Aufleger
Schwindelerregende Höhen30€ Add to cartOn a Razor’s Edge: Evanescent Moments
Katja Aufleger’s (b. Oldenburg, 1983; lives and works in Berlin) works bring instants of suspense and uncertainty into focus in a variety of aesthetic forms. Their nuclei are typically everyday phenomena and physical models, which she combines with a range of concepts from cultural history and psychology. The publication presents several series, some of which capture explosive tensions. Among them are photographs of homemade Molotov cocktails for which the artist set perfume flacons on fire, making this most recent series a probing exploration of the potentials of material aesthetics and emotion. With an introductory essay by Julia Katharina Thiemann.
Katja Aufleger studied visual art the University of Fine Arts Hamburg (HFBK), where Andreas Slominski, Matt Mullican, and Michael Diers were her teachers.
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Queen Elizabeth II
Sammlung Luciano Pelizzari27,50€ Read moreErinnerungsstücke einer Legende
Im Leben von Elisabeth II. (geb. 21. April 1926 in London) spiegelt sich eine ganze Epoche. Die britische Königin hat alle deutschen Bundeskanzler und sämtliche englischen Premierminister von Winston Churchill bis Boris Johnson erlebt. Sie ist die am häufigsten abgebildete Person des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Das Buch präsentiert Fotos, Gemälde, Briefmarken und Münzen aus der Kollektion von Luciano Pelizzari, einer der größten Sammlungen dieser Art weltweit. Es zeigt die Queen als Mensch und Monarchin, dokumentiert ihr Zusammentreffen mit bedeutenden Persönlichkeiten und Ereignissen ihrer Regierungszeit und präsentiert sie in zahlreichen Darstellungen aus Kunst und Kultur.
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Candida Höfer
Editions 1987–202044€ Add to cartAll of Candida Höfer’s Editions in One Book
Candida Höfer’s (b. Eberswalde, 1944) shots of deserted libraries, opera houses, concert halls, churches, and museums have made her a member of the international photographic avant-garde. One strand in her acclaimed oeuvre are editions—photographic prints in small formats issued in larger numbers—that Höfer produces to support institutions and art publishers. Gathered for the first time in this book, with an introductory essay by Anne Ganteführer-Trier, the around one hundred such editions she created between 1987 and 2020 offer a representative cross-section of Candida Höfer’s art.
Candida Höfer studied in the first photography class of Bernd Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works have been exhibited at documenta 11 and in 2003 she represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia alongside Martin Kippenberger.
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Călin Dan
POLLIO34€ Add to cartThe oeuvre of the Romanian artist Călin Dan (b. Arad, Romania, 1955; lives and works in Bucharest) shows the influences of conceptual and minimal art. His book Pollio surveys his creative practice of the past decade, which straddles the media of installation and performance art, film, photography, and sculpture and is enriched by his work as an art historian, writer, and curator. In addition to the titular body of work, which wrestles with the Roman historian Gaius Asinius Pollio, the volume also documents the exhibition Alzheimer (2017). Călin Dan is a founding member of the artists’ group subREAL. His work was showcased at the Istanbul (1993), Venice (1993, 1999, 2001), São Paulo (1994), and Sydney Biennales (2006). He has been director of the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest since 2014.
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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!
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Anders Goldfarb
Passed Remains35€ Add to cartAbandoned Gas Stations and Burned-Out Buildings
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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.
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Chiharu Shiota
The Unsettled Soul48€ Add to cartWidely acclaimed for her distinctive visual language, which combines drawing, performance, sculpture, and installation art, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota (b. 1972 in Osaka, lives and works in Berlin) addresses fundamental human concerns. Creating large-scale thread installations that incorporate a variety of everyday objects and memorabilia, she forms powerful environments that evoke a sense of nostalgia, personal history, and collective memory. The catalog accompanies the exhibition The Unsettled Soul, the first presentation of the artist in the Czech Republic. In addition to extensive photographic documentation of the exhibition at Kunsthalle Praha, the publication features an essay by Jason Waite discussing Shiota’s early works as well as an interview with the artist conducted by the editor, Christelle Havranek, about her key themes and the creation of the Prague exhibition.
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Stephan Grunenberg
10€ Add to cartStephan Grunenberg (b. 1954) paints peculiar portraits: not heads or sitting and reclining figures but seemingly independent feet, legs, trousers, socks or soles of shoes. These and other under-appreciated motives are playfully arranged in captivating compositions which take issue with our hierarchical habits while looking at art. “Leaving out the ‘civilized’, educated head and centering on neglected parts such as the legs, including the lower abdomen—which is either eroticized or made taboo—is the artist’s point”, writes Oliver Koerner von Gustorf in an essay that accompanies the images inside this small and attractive new book. The paintings reproduced in this volume were all exhibited in Grunenberg’s latest exhibition in 2024, which was titled tongue-in-cheek „Representatives Regional To Earth.”
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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.
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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.
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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”.
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Gabriel Vormstein
40€ Add to cartGabriel Vormstein (b. Konstanz, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) explores themes of impermanence, temporality, and futility through a unique visual language. He paints using newspapers as a canvas, and creates installations out of tree branches and other organic matter. These “poor” materials subvert a prevailing notion in Western culture that an artwork should be eternally preserved. Through the adaptation of various styles and symbols, Vormstein’s paintings likewise speak to the transience of art historical and cultural trends. Over 300 pages, this richly illustrated book provides an overview of Vormstein’s oeuvre over the past two decades, while also offering an atmospheric glimpse into the artist’s source material and working methods. The publication is enriched by an essay by Gean Moreno, who characterizes Vormstein’s work as follows: “Gabriel Vormstein’s paintings and sculptures (…) announce their condition as withering artifacts, as if no other manner of existing was available to them (and maybe to us, as well).”
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Alexandra Tretter
24€ Add to cartThe art of Alexandra Tretter (*1988) is as deep as it is playful. Owing just as much to the gentle spirituality of Hilma af Klint’s late geometries as it does to Sonia Delaunay’s exuberant disc paintings, almost bursting with sheer chromatic pleasure. Her compassionately designed artist’s book combines monumental paintings with intimate works on paper, all of which are imbued with the contexts of Tretter’s own life as an artist, as a woman, as a mother.
Her kaleidoscopic figurations unfold from a center at rest in itself and multiply in symmetry and asymmetry towards all sides. She contrasts the circular form, the unchanging basic element of her compositions, with the oval, which constantly strives beyond itself, transforming itself in ever-new permutations from one figure into the next, into eyes, mouths, breasts, petals or vulvas.
Her images strive for composure, unfold and blossom, only to let go of all gestalt-like form. Once gained stability is instantly pushed into turmoil. Colors flare up violently or flow delicately about, lighten or shade each other, carry or throw each other off course. Tretter equally realizes materialization and dissolution as basic principles of her painting.
Whereby all, what her images absorb, preserve and release, is experience, growth and slow maturing. Her paintings are “figurations of affection”, in which each individual turns towards something else, doubts or grows, at times turns away or surrenders all the more consciously. They question everything, start anew and yet find their way back to themselves, into their very own.
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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.
