SOMA
Collective SineUmbra
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Eva Fischer-Hausdorf |
| Author(s) | Ernest Ah, Eva Fischer-Hausdorf, Radek Krolczyk, Giulia Scandolara, Mona Schieren, Dominik Schindler |
| Design | Cabinet Gold van d’Vlies |
| Cover | Coil binding |
| Size | 20 x 25 cm |
| Pages | 96 |
| Illustrations | 48 |
| Language(s) | Italian, German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-022-4 |
On the Disappearance of Italian Culture
Under the collective label SineUmbra, the artists Luisa Eugeni (b. Assisi, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and Mattia Bonafini (b. Legnago, Italy, 1980; lives and works in Bremen) develop interdisciplinary projects that they realize as sprawling multimedia installations comprising video projections, sound, and performative elements. The point of departure for their project SOMA was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 essay Disappearance of the Fireflies, which probes the wrenching transformation that Italian society and the country’s very landscapes have undergone since the 1960s. SOMA melds performance art, the visitors’ movements, geography, and psychology in a space of experience that speaks to all senses for an exploration of the impact that traumata inflicted on individuals and communities by natural disasters and social changes have on the human soul and perceptual capacities. In keeping with the artists’ collective and dynamic creative vision, the catalogue embeds the multimedia installation in a context fleshed out by rich photographic documentation and numerous texts.
On occasion of the master class graduate exhibition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 2019, the two artists were awarded the renowned Karin Hollweg Prize for Fine Art. The publication accompanies their first solo show at Kunsthalle Bremen.
More books
- Out of stock
Thomas Lehnerer
Freies Spiel44€ Read moreThe function of art in human existence
Throughout his short life, the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (1955–1995) did not take the existence of art for granted. In his writings, above all in Methode der Kunst (Methods of Art), he developed a concept of art in the continuation of key texts from the fields of aesthetics, cultural theory, and art history, which can also be found in his own artistic work. The small-format figurative sculptures by Lehnerer, as well as his drawings, watercolors, and early installations, follow theoretical premises and address comprehensive themes of human existence. The present volume documents his examination of human existence, which is deepened by the inclusion of cultural historical figures and idols.
-
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.
- Out of stock
Voré
Stückwerk Mensch18€ Read moreHistorically Anchored Installations with Current Political References
The sculptures by Voré (b. 1941 in Karlsruhe, lives and works in Ettlingen) reflect the artist’s examination of the conditions of human existence and the human state of mind. Finely polished forms, splinters, and rough fractures become a statement of content and at the same time constitute the formal tension of the respective object. The process of creation can be seen in the rough remaining parts and traces of the various tools. Parallel and closely related to this, drawings and collages are created as independent works or as components of installations. Formal impulses of the sculptural concept are taken up, graphically processed, and projected back into the sculptural work. The present volume presents projects from six decades with numerous illustrations.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Fragmente eines Ängstlichen28€ Add to cartA Novel on Coping with Guilt or the Feeling of Having Violated Life
The filmmaker Castner and the anthropologist Pollock not only share the similarity of their names with those of Castor and Pollux, the fabled twins of Greek myth, but also a hard fate: an irreparable guilt whose motifs run through the entire novel. Pollock is forced to admit to himself that, in his role as a scientist, he was involved in a genocide against indigenous people in Panama; Castner, meanwhile, tries to get a handle on his bouts of excessive hypochondria. In episodic flashbacks and an interview that gradually turns into an emotional dispute between them, the two characters analyze the minutiae of their life stories and arrive at a surreal insight.
Castor and Pollux were known in antiquity as the patrons of sailors, who took their bearings from the twins’ constellation. That is why water figures in this novel as the element that unites all narrative planes. Water—like life—will fill any vacant space regardless of shape and adapt to all circumstances.
Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a visual artist, working in the media of photography and painting, and a writer whose output includes plays, novels, and nonfiction books. The philosophy of nature is a central theme in both Kaluza’s art and his fiction.
-
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.
-
Simone Demandt
Movers / Beweger38€ Add to cartMotorways are Europe’s lifelines. The products we buy every day arrive on supermarket shelves after traveling along these arteries on the backs of thousands of trucks steered by hard-working drivers. Glancing up into the cabs of their hulking vehicles, we can just barely make out their heads sticking up above the steering wheels. In this overdue volume, Simone Demandt lets us see more of the heroes of the road who confidently posed for her camera. The pictures demonstrate Demandt’s knack for discovering “the intimate in the anonymous and the narrative element in the matter-of-factly” (Matthias Winzen). She has condensed the truckdrivers’ lifeworld into documentary black-and-white shots in which she shows these people as whole persons and individuals—very different from how we perceive them when they’re in the next lane. Movers lets us peek into the cabs through Demandt’s nonjudgmental lens, broadening our horizons hardly less than travelling would and helping us overcome our prejudices about teamsters. If you’ve always wanted to know whom we really have to thank for those never-empty supermarket shelves, you should not miss out on this book.
- Out of Stock
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.
-
Roland Schappert & Wolfgang Ullrich
Aktualitätsjetzt16€ Add to cartPhilistinism, climate change, legitimation discourses—in a tour de force sustained by profound knowledge of the phenomena in question, AKTUALITÄTSJETZT blazes trails through the jungle of contemporary art and its current debates. Over the course of two years, the art scholar and author Wolfgang Ullrich initiated 14 dialogues on Schappert’s word paintings, murals, and interventions. Their distinctive formal features and conceptual and substantial dimensions inspired illuminating conversations that range far beyond the specific works to explore today’s art world and questions of the philosophy of art and the sociology of culture. The best volume of dialogues on art since David Sylvester’s interviews with Francis Bacon.
-
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.
- 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.
- Release September 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.
-
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.
- Release August 2025
Ernst Wilhelm Nay
Monographie68€ Add to cartThe Great German Artist’s Imposing Oeuvre
Ernst Wilhelm Nay (b. Berlin, 1902; d. Cologne, 1968) was one of the most interesting painters of European modernism. Spanning the decades from the 1930s to his death in Cologne in 1968, his output encompasses paintings as well as an abundance of works on paper. The new monograph surveys all periods in Nay’s oeuvre, from the “Fishermen paintings” to the striking late pictures, which leave no doubt about the artist’s outstanding gift for color. Nay’s evolution is embedded in the history and ideas of his time, on which he reflected in lectures, writings, and notes. The volume unlocks a wide spectrum of fresh insights into Nay’s life and art.
-
FLATZ
Hitler. Ein Hundeleben18€ Add to cartAn Attempt to Break a Taboo – Trivial and Provocative
A black, pure-bred Great Dane named Hitler accompanied the Austrian performance artist and documenta participant FLATZ (b. 1952, Dornbirn; lives and works in Munich and London) like a shadow through the 1990s. The naming—as well as the subtitles of the photographs created—relates the banal everyday life of the dog to the inglorious life of its namesake, thus opening up an extremely provocative range of possible associations. “Hitler is always with me,” says the artist, “just as we always carry the historical Hitler around with us, because he is part of our history, which—as long as it is suppressed, transfigured, or tabooed—is not overcome.”
With more than 350 illustrations, Hitler. Ein Hundeleben is an extended and revised reprint of the book published in 1992, which has been out of print for a long time.
-
Susanne Rottenbacher
Radiationen40€ Add to cartIn expansive compositions in light, Susanne Rottenbacher (b. Göttingen, 1969; lives and works in Berlin) visualizes the fire of life in its timebound and fluid dimension. Plotinus called fire the “spiritual potency of beauty.” Pursuing a similar vision, Rottenbacher’s works orchestrate light as energy in space. To this end, the artist, who studied light and stage design in the United States and the United Kingdom, creates weightless luminous choreographies realized in colorful LED technology in combination with acrylic glass as a translucent vehicle of form. The results are installations in three dimensions that are deeply silent yet unfold in a magical ecstasy of light.
In Christian sacred architecture, light has been deployed and perceived since the Middle Ages as the aesthetic equivalent of the divine mind’s lucidity. The history of light art, by contrast, is much younger, going back to the years after the First World War. Having built her creative practice over the past fifteen years, Rottenbacher not only continues a century-old tradition of light art in Europe and the U.S.; her works also anticipate a future in which humanity will have room for feelings no less than for scientific knowledge.
-
Stefan Knauf
10€ Add to cartStefan Knauf (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) uses selected materials such as construction supplies or plants to investigate the histories of botany, migration, trade, science, and architecture and critique an idealized and anthropocentric conception of nature that is still prevalent. His sculptures, geometric-abstract pictures, and installations, with echoes of constructivism and minimal art, are contact zones in which everything is related to everything: human and non-human history, the natural and the artificial, ecology and ideology. Knauf’s works do not propose to unravel these entanglements. Rather, they suggest alternative perspectives and topographies guided by the idea of the “modified landscape” and devise material and alchemistic forms of knowledge and a novel and multiperspectival approach to the history and reality of the Anthropocene.
- temporarily not available
MEUSER
Works 2012–2023 (ENGLISH)Read moreEver since his studies with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich, since his first exhibitions – for instance at ‘Kippenberger’s Office’ in 1979 – Meuser (b. Essen 1947, lives and works in Karlsruhe) has been a solitaire. His sculptures are unyielding and unruly, just as much as they are vulnerable and tender. They are witty and heart-touchingly charming.
Meuser finds his material in the scrapyard. Confidently and empathically, he reinstates form and dignity to the remnants and vestiges of industrial society. As a romantic, he grants things a life of their own and turns them into self-reliant protagonists, once more. Unwaveringly, he works to re-poetize a standardized and maltreated world.
The lavishly designed monograph is published on the occasion of Meuser’s 75th birthday, presenting works and exhibitions from the past ten years. Eight international authors and scholars create a dazzling mosaic and reveal how Meuser boldly holds his own in face of Duchamp, Minimalism, and Social Sculpture. An open-ended outlook.
Meuser studied 1968–1976 at Art Academy, Düsseldorf with Joseph Beuys and Erwin Heerich. 1991 he received the ars viva award. 1992-2015 professorship at Academy of Fine Art, Karlsruhe.
Since 1976, numerous institutional solo and group exhibitions and works in international collections: Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn; Deichtorhallen, Hamburg; documenta IX / Fridericianum, Kassel; Fundació Joan Miró, Barcelona; Joanneum, Graz; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Museum of Contemporary Art, Monterrey; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; Museum Abteiberg, Mönchengladbach; Museum Folkwang, Essen; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna; Museum Morsbroich, Leverkusen; Rijksmuseum Twenthe, Enschede; Sakip Sabanci Museum, Istanbul; Städtische Galerie, Karlsruhe; Vanhaerents Art Collection, Brussels; ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe.
-
SOMA
Collective SineUmbra18€ Add to cartOn the Disappearance of Italian Culture
Under the collective label SineUmbra, the artists Luisa Eugeni (b. Assisi, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and Mattia Bonafini (b. Legnago, Italy, 1980; lives and works in Bremen) develop interdisciplinary projects that they realize as sprawling multimedia installations comprising video projections, sound, and performative elements. The point of departure for their project SOMA was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 essay Disappearance of the Fireflies, which probes the wrenching transformation that Italian society and the country’s very landscapes have undergone since the 1960s. SOMA melds performance art, the visitors’ movements, geography, and psychology in a space of experience that speaks to all senses for an exploration of the impact that traumata inflicted on individuals and communities by natural disasters and social changes have on the human soul and perceptual capacities. In keeping with the artists’ collective and dynamic creative vision, the catalogue embeds the multimedia installation in a context fleshed out by rich photographic documentation and numerous texts.
On occasion of the master class graduate exhibition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 2019, the two artists were awarded the renowned Karin Hollweg Prize for Fine Art. The publication accompanies their first solo show at Kunsthalle Bremen.
-
Candida Höfer
Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn35€ Add to cartThe Kunsthistorisches Institut Bonn, Yesterday and Today
The imposing presence of architecture captured in the absence of humans: that is the defining characteristic of the photographs with which Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde; lives and works in Cologne) has risen to international renown. In 1992, she captured the Kunsthistorisches Institut der Rheinischen Friedrich- Wilhelms-Universität Bonn in ten analogue black-and-white pictures that have not been on public display. In 2020, Höfer returned to the institute to take more pictures using a digital camera. The two series now make their public début in the institute’s halls and are gathered in this book. Undertaking a historically and aesthetically captivating comparison, Höfer probes the ways in which university life has changed over almost three decades.
Candida Höfer was a member of Bernd Becher’s inaugural photography class at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. Her works were shown at documenta 11 in 2002, and in 2003, she and Martin Kippenberger represented Germany at the 50th Biennale di Venezia.
-
Ute Bartel
mansionaticum25€ Add to cartAn unreal view of reality
In her works, Ute Bartel (b. 1961, Halle; lives and works in Cologne) deals with everyday circumstances, the “mansionaticum.” A term which at first glance seems epochal, but etymologically simply means “belonging to the household.” In a concrete confrontation with particular places and situations, she is interested in things in and of themselves, in their formal characteristics, such as their forms, colors, and structures. Using analog and digital techniques, she creates collages, objects, and works that project into the respective space. This generously illustrated monograph presents structures of familiar and yet unknown realities marked by highly pronounced forms and bold colors and provides comprehensive insight into one of the focal points of the artist’s oeuvre.
Ute Bartel studied at the Kunstakademie Münster, where she was a master student of Reiner Ruthenbeck. Her works have been widely exhibited at, among others, the Kunstverein Speyer, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster.
