





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evolving social contexts, and discursive developments influence when a collection or its presentation is said to be outdated and what that implies for the constraints on, or options for, the actions to be taken in response.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.
More books
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Jan Zöller
Ritual Believer40€ Add to cartJan Zöller’s (b. Haslach, 1992; lives and works in Karlsruhe) paintings, sculptures, and installations probe the discrepancy between economic production and the spiritual and magical dimension of art. The artist’s book Ritual Believer surveys the so-called charcoal paintings series, created between 2019 and 2023. For these works, the artist paints directly in charcoal on the unprimed canvas, making it impossible to correct “blunders.” Another distinguishing feature is the virtual absence of color; the austerity of the compositions contrasts with Zöller’s other, often intensely colorful paintings. The motifs that are the hallmark of his oeuvre—birds, running legs—are complemented by writing and text. Another aspect of this shift is that the works’ titles play a central part and almost figure as a creative element in their own right. For the text in the book, the artist sent the titles of the works shown to his brother, who wove them into a story. An appendix presents scanned archival materials. Notebooks and zines Zöller produced between 2015 and 2017 provide interesting insight into how he finds his motifs and his compositional process.
Jan Zöller studied with Marijke van Warmerdam and Leni Hoffmann at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe from 2012 until 2017 and with Jean-Marc Bustamante and Götz Arndt at the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts de Paris in 2016.
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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.
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Hans Karl Zeisel
Hundred and more34,95€ Add to cartPossibilities 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.
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Ingo Mittelstaedt
Courtesy15€ Add to cartPerception and Comprehension in Photography
Ingo Mittelstaedt (b. 1978, Berlin; lives and works in Berlin and Hamburg) creates staged photographs, combining and contrasting them with diverse objects in expansive installations. His pictorial arrangements probe a variety of concerns and imageries that he sources from museum settings or the modes of representation in ordinary advertising brochures. Gestures of showing, pointing, bringing out, and uncovering are leitmotifs in Mittelstaedt’s canny and subtly humorous exploration of the potentials and limitations of the photographic medium.
Ingo Mittelstaedt studied fine arts at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste Braunschweig and received numerous emerging-artist awards, including the New York fellowship of the Niedersächsische Sparkassenstiftung. His work has been shown at Kunstverein Hannover, the Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Marta Herford, and elsewhere.
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Ion Bitzan
48€ Add to cartThe painter and object artist Ion Bitzan (b. Limanu, 1924; d. Bucharest, 1997) belonged to the generation of Romanian artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, broke through their country’s isolation to connect to the international avant-garde. His creativity and the quality of his artistic experiments, which drew inspiration from conceptual art, Dada, and other sources, made him a leading figure in the Romanian art of the Ceaușescu era. This book also sheds light on the complex relationship between artistic innovation and political (propaganda) art behind the Iron Curtain during this period, in which nothing was ever black or white. Bitzan represented Romania at the Venice (1964) and São Paulo Biennales (1967, 1969, 1981). In 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest mounted a major retrospective of his oeuvre.
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Karlheinz Bux
über Linie …15€ Add to cartClarity, Complexity, and Linearity
The defining artistic means in the work of Karlheinz Bux (b. 1952 in Ulm, lives and works in Karlsruhe) is the line. As edges and folds, they determine vertically oriented sculptures, which simultaneously convey compactness and openness, dynamism and repose. In Bux’s pencil drawings and photo-based works, they form the subject of the image in the form of complex linear structures. This present book documents the artist’s large-format works and provides insight into his oeuvre, with texts by Michael Hübl, Christine Reeh-Peters, and Carmela Thiele.
Karlheinz Bux studied at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe and taught as a lecturer at Pforzheim University and as a visiting professor at the Mainz University of Applied Sciences. His works are represented in private and public collections, including the Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, the Hurrle Collection, and the Würth Collection.
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Ivonne Thein
TECHNO BODIES28€ Add to cartIn her multidisciplinary work, Ivonne Thein (born 1979 in Meiningen, lives and works in Berlin) addresses the current body images of a digital culture that is undergoing fundamental change due to extensive technologization. Today, new technologies are profoundly shaping both the physical body and its virtual representations in the visual culture of our time. Thein works with AI systems for her installations and places the question of the problem of imitating nature, and thus the relationship between art, technology and body, at the center of her artistic work. To do this, she combines digital techniques with sculptures that she creates by hand from silicone. Thein thereby evokes an intrusive closeness in the exhibition space, as the images generated with the AI no longer remain just a pure data set on the screen. The book presents works from 2020–2023.
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Andreas Wegner
Wir fahren mit der Schneckenpost, weil die uns keinen Pfennig kost50€ Add to cartThe art of Andreas Wegner is an inquiry into capitalist urbanity. His interventions explore alternative models for urban interaction, trade, city development, traffic, or the use of public space. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Charles Fourier’s social utopias, Wegner founded, e.g. a cooperative department store in Berlin, a grocery store in Vienna, and conducted real estate business as a form of creative resistance. This monograph illustrates the artist’s most important projects with ample imagery, essays by renowned authors, interviews, and his own texts. Alongside collective initiatives, installations, photography, film, and sculpture, painting remains a constant in Wegner’s oeuvre to this day.
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Justine Otto
New Traditionalists38€ Add to cartJustine Otto (b. Zabrze, Poland, 1974; lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin) is one of the most promising artists on the contemporary painting scene. An aficionado of the absurd, she unfolds a metaphysical-psychedelic and often gaudily lustrous cosmos in pictures in which representation clashes with abstraction. In her early work, girls, women, and animals were here preferred subjects; more recently, she has painted heroes—the protagonists in myths of masculinity. After generals, officers, and strategists, she has now turned her attention to cowboys, who appear on horseback or resting under a tree, musical instrument in hand.
Justine Otto studied fine art and painting with Peter Angermann and Michael Krebber at the State Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main and obtained an MFA in 2003. She also worked as a scene designer at Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, the city’s municipal theater company. Her paintings are held by collections including the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt; Museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf, Switzerland; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
- Release November 2022

X x X
Semjon Contemporary50€ Add to cartFounded by Semjon H. N. Semjon in 2011, the gallery Semjon Contemporary has built a distinctive and singular profile that has earned it an unrivaled position in the art world. It represents international positions in contemporary art that, their divergences notwithstanding, are united by the extraordinary intelligence of their engagement with the material. The result is an unmistakable visual language that permits of no modification of established choices. Despite the considerable differences of material, technique, and expression, the artists’ works enter into dialogue with one another, as parallel solo presentations and special exhibitions showcasing numerous visiting artists have demonstrated.
The book features Colin Ardley, Edward L. Buchanan, Takayuki Daikoku, Dittmar Danner aka Krüger, Ute Essig, Experimental Setup (Kata Hinterlechner and Bosko Gastager’s collective moniker), Katja Flint, Andreas Fux, Dave Grossmann, Renate Hampke, Marc von der Hocht, Nataly Hocke, Michael Kutschbach, Henrik U. Müller, Cornelia Nagel, Susanne Knaack, Katja Kollowa, Susanne Pomrehn, Thomas Prochnow, Dirk Rathke, Ursula Sax, Gerda Schütte, Gil Shachar, Li Silberberg, Karina Spechter, Klaus Steinmann, Stefan Thiel, Hitomi Uchikura, Royden Watson, and Bettina Weiß in dedicated chapters. It is rounded out by statements from collectors including Thomas Lenhart, Cornelie Kunkat, Gabriele Quandt, Roland Schnell, Nobert Fuhr and Klaus Werner, Roswitha and Jürgen König, and Helmut Ließ. Remarks by art critics and scholars and an interview with Semjon by Jan Maruhn provide additional insight into the gallery’s work.
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Katharina Arndt
While waiting for Death38€ Add to cartLife for the most part consists of banalities. What to make of it? Katharina Arndt has decided to dip thick brushes into luminous bold acrylic paints, which she applies expansively without regard for the ostensible gray areas of life. Every stroke is valid, there’s no remorse or trepidation, everything is foreground, all elements of a picture are equipollent. The people in Arndt’s paintings from 2022–23 gathered in this catalog are simply there, for the moment, gaping into their cell phones, stuffing themselves with burgers. Nothing more. That makes her works distorted depictions of our hedonistic society with its craving for sensuality, even as we always have one eye riveted on the virtual. The harder, then, to face up to physical reality; with all photo filters off, its imperfections are unmistakable. And so, although we clearly delight in these gaudy colors, the pictures contain intimations of melancholy and death, too. Knowing that the hour of farewell is near, Arndt’s figures stimulate their senses. They kill time down to the very end with jarring trivia, agitated Sisyphuses wallowing in their glittering inadequacy.
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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.
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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.
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Tony Cragg
Points of View24€ Add to cartThe biomorphic and monumental sculptures of British sculptor Tony Cragg (born 1949, lives in Wuppertal) impress with their virtuosity and their dynamic appearance. They might even evoke movement, as if they are still becoming. Often exhibited outdoors, and in church or museum contexts, they blend into their surroundings like organic entities. Since the 1960s, Cragg’s search for sculptural form manifested through methods like layering and stacking existing materials, rearrangement, and assemblage. He now employs both traditional and new technologies and materials, yet his sculptures have to be seen in clear contrast to normative, repetitive industrial production. This book documents Cragg’s 2025 exhibition in the Anhaltische Gemäldegalerie Dessau.
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Margret Eicher
Lob der Malkunst38€ Add to cartContemporary Visual Communication in a Historic Weaving Technique
Margret Eicher’s (b. Viersen, Germany, 1955; lives and works in Berlin) large-format tapestries combine the baroque form of the woven picture with familiar motifs excerpted from contemporary media images. She digitizes her sources and then assembles them in painstaking editing work on the computer. The resulting ‘media tapestries’ occupy the interface between the traditional work of art as a physical object and the electronic noise of the digital realm: two worlds that at first glance would seem to be incompatible yet find themselves in harmonious union in Eicher’s art. In Göttliche Liebe (Divine Love), for example, Caravaggio’s Crowning with Thorns meets a kissing gay couple from a pro-tolerance campaign in Berlin, while Botticelli’s Birth of Venus is sampled together with a subway station in Frankfurt. In conceptual art production, the creative idea is central and its realization becomes secondary; in a final twist, Lob der Malkunst (Praise of Painting) elects this practice as its artistic lodestar. Eicher installs the painter Martin Kippenberger in the interior of Berlin’s Paris Bar, where he poses as a dandy and presides over a clash between the different tendencies in the art of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.
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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.
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Shara Hughes
Day by Day by DayRead moreGraphic Manifestations of the Unconscious
The painter Shara Hughes (b. Atlanta, GA, 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA) is one of the rising stars of the American arts scene. Her colorful imaginary landscapes, executed in a radiant palette and with an expressive gesture, pay homage to the Symbolists, the Fauves, and the Expressionists, whose artful handling of lighting and depth she deftly emulates. In an intuitive approach, Hughes applies paints to the canvas that match her present state of mind. She calls her pictures “emotional landscapes” and notes that she does not know what will happen next; her work on them touches on a vulnerable boundary. The lavish book presents numerous works on paper, most of them in large formats, and contains an essay by the New York-based art critic Andrew Russeth.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Newport Art Museum, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, her work was included in the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
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James Francis Gill
Catalogue Raisonné of Original Prints, Vol. 239€ Add to cartThe Catalogue Raisonné of the Co-Founder of American Pop Art
James Francis Gill (b. 1935, Tahoka; lives and works in Texas) is one of the most important artists of American Pop Art. His paintings, often based on photographs, provide an unusually personal approach to the icons of the 1950s and 60s. Gill suddenly became Hollywood’s most celebrated artist when his Marilyn Triptych was added to the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962 – even before the works of Andy Warhol. Through friendships with celebrities such as John Wayne, Martin Luther King, and Marlon Brando, Gill became the contemporary artist-witness of an entire generation. Nevertheless, he kept his distance from the exuberant Hollywood of the time and surprisingly withdrew in 1972, only to reappear on the art market thirty years later. This catalogue raisonné in two volumes impressively documents his work from the early political motifs to the Pop Art icons of his late work.
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Robbie Cornelissen
Terra Nova28€ Add to cartFuturistic / Fantastic
The Dutch artist Robbie Cornelissen’s (b. Utrecht, 1954; lives and works in Utrecht) oeuvre is endowed with unusual narrative power. His architectonic drawings in enormous formats, which often exude a futuristic aura, typically show deserted libraries, waiting halls, factory floors, or other oversized spaces. In alternation with his work on paper, the artist creates animated films out of thousands of drawings. This publication presents 250 drawings from Cornelissen’s new film Terra Nova, which explores an urgent contemporary concern: humanity’s responsibility for the earth and the open question of its long-term survival on the planet.
Robbie Cornelissen studied biology and ecology at Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht and at Vrije Akademie, Den Haag, and the Gerrit Rietveld Academie, Amsterdam. His work has been shown at Centraal Museum Utrecht, Hamburger Kunsthalle, the 11th Biennale de Lyon, and elsewhere.
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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.






































