Sonja Yakovleva
Soaplands
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Anna Gien, Sabrina Günther, Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, Egor Sofronov |
| Design | Correspondence (Justus Gelberg, Berlin & Lukas Engelhardt, Amsterdam) |
| Size | 25 x 32 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Pages | 256 |
| Illustrations | 164 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-145-0 |
Sonja Yakovleva’s (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) silhouettes are informed by her sex-positive feminist views. They mix and match pornography with art-historical references, folkloristic motifs, fairy tales, and myths that have served to ingrain misogynistic, racist, and homophobic ideologies in the collective consciousness since the Middle Ages. The dissemination of such materials was facilitated by the paper cut, a medium that encouraged simplified graphical representations and was seen as domestic and appropriate for women. Yakovleva’s intentions in adopting it, however, are contrarian: her iridescent silhouettes grapple with women’s stories, precarious gray areas, power relations, representation, sexuality, and violence in novel ways.
Soaplands, the title of Sonja Yakovleva’s first monograph, is a nod to Japanese bathhouses where men receive personal care, massages, and sexual services. Most recently, a number of soaplands have opened that cater to women with male prostitutes. Similarly, in the paper cuts in the book, which were created between 2018 and 2023, women have seized sexual power and conquered the patriarchal system. Unchecked by shame, they use men as objects to satisfy their desires.
You may also like…
-
Sonja Yakovleva
10€ Add to cartSonja Yakovleva (b. Potsdam, 1989; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) uses pornographic representations and images from the internet as templates for papercuts, some in large formats, that grapple with personal and public stories about women, power relations, sexuality, and violence. The silhouettes show popular motifs that have served to ingrain fairy tales, myths, and ideologies in the collective consciousness from the colonial era to modernism and the early twenty-first century. Yakovleva, whose art is often associated with sex-positive feminism, appropriates this folkloristic visual idiom and hybridizes and sexualizes it. Dessous and strap-on dildos, for example, figure as preserved specimens of butterflies and insects, bringing historic scientific expeditions to mind. Yet her work also addresses the capitalist urge to categorize, evaluate, and market every kink.
More books
-
Aline Schwibbe
Now It’s Dark28€ Add to cartAline Schwibbe (b. Hamm 1988; lives and works in Berlin) studied both psychology and art and her interest lies in observing the cyclical nature of events and experiences—in memory, in dreams and in the reality of the present. Her films and her photographic and mixed-media sequences often appear like fragments of occurrences snatched from the dark and exposed multiple times in an attempt to make them visible.
The artist’s first monograph is published on the occasion of her solo exhibition Now It‘s Dark at the EIGEN+ART Lab Berlin. The book introduces Schwibbe’s extensive multidisciplinary practice, which besides drawing, photography and video also includes sculpture, animation, sound installations, and textile projects.
-
Pat Steir & Ugo Rondinone
Waterfalls & Clouds20€ Add to cartThe imposing installation Waterfalls & Clouds consists of three sculptures by the Swiss artist Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) and nineteen paintings by the American Pat Steir (b. Newark, NJ, 1940; lives and works in New York). The three large gray monoliths of concrete, sand, and gravel bear the titles Faces, Look, and Twisted and are part of a series of twenty works created in 2018. They are surrounded by nineteen tall and narrow black oil paintings titled Flags for Ugo #1 through #19 (2021); with colorful or white paint streaming down the canvases, they hark back to Steir’s Waterfall series from the 1980s. A symbiotic relationship connects the works: the sculptures, in which erosion is integral to the art, embody time, while the pictures symbolize gravity and hence nature as such.
- 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.
-
Sabine Hornig
Passage through Presence45€ Add to cartLayered Spacetimes in Large Formats
Sabine Hornig (b. 1964; lives and works in Berlin) has earned international acclaim with sculptures, photographs, and architectural interventions that interweave image, perspective, and space in distinctive ways. Her works feature translucent pictorial planes on glass panes; integrating these sculptural elements into the setting, she creates environments in which meaning unfolds as viewers allow their gazes—and themselves—to wander. For her new works, which engage with architecture, the artist superimposes enormous photographs on entire façades and concourses. This publication is the first to put the focus on Sabine Hornig’s art in three dimensions, detailing her process from the building of sculptural models and the combination with transparent photographic layers to her creation of works in public settings. It showcases her largest installation to date, at LaGuardia Airport in New York City, which she discusses in a conversation with Nicholas Baume, director and chief curator, Public Art Fund, New York.
- Release December 2025
Stefan Reiterer
Inflection Point38€ Add to cartThe Austrian artist Stefan Reiterer (born 1988, lives in Vienna) transfers digital maps and satellite images into analog physical space through abstract painting. He manipulates data from sources such as Google Earth or NASA, transforming them into illusory topologies and pseudo-cartographies to challenge our perception. What is recognized, discovered, rejected? Where is the viewer’s location? Andrea Kopranovic writes of Reiterer’s painted emptiness as a “pitting” and projection surface “for glitches, black holes, and abysses” and a metaphor for potential “interpretations, enrichments, and yet unimagined spaces of possibility.” This richly illustrated book documents Reiterer’s 2025 exhibition at the Museum Gegenstandsfreier Kunst in Otterndorf.
-
Stephen Buckley
Close Cousins. Paintings48€ Add to cartThe Artist’s First Publication in more than Thirty Years
For more than forty years Stephen Buckley (b. 1944, Leicester) has concerned himself with addressing the major themes of the twentieth century through a personal style oscillating between the matière of Kurt Schwitters, the dandyism of Francis Picabia and the intellectual rigour of Marcel Duchamp. He takes the two most basic components of a conventional painting (canvas and stretcher), and makes multi-dimensional constructions, joins groups of single canvases together in overlapping structures, makes shaped canvases, cuts a stretcher with a variegated edge, stitches and weaves together strips of canvas, patches pieces of canvas onto another support, and adds cardboard tubing, rope, found objects and cut out shapes. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Buckley saw extended prominence in the art press, starting with the artist being described as “the Punk Rock of contemporary painting” and ending with him gaining the title of “the ubiquitous Stephen Buckley”. There is now a large portfolio of themes, references, motifs and symbols which are continually reworked and reinvented. Since then, he has made some of his most compelling paintings, lush pop canvases full of symbols and colour, a far cry from the pared-down, industrial feel of some of his early works.
-
GABRIELE BASCH, GESA LANGE
UND_NEWS_FROM_NOW_HERE18€ Add to cartBeyond Painting
Gabriele Basch’s (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) cut-outs and Gesa Lange’s (b. 1972, Tongeren, Belgium; lives and works in Hamburg) drawings are meditations on construction and deconstruction as well as doubts and how to overcome them. Both artists expand the range of painting: Basch, with incisions into the medium and a creative handling of the tinged shadows that transform the painted panel into a wall-mounted object; Lange, by embroidering her canvases with colorful threads that open up the pictorial space on all sides. The book presents works by both artists, initiating an animated and dynamic dialogue between their nonrepresentational visual idioms. Gabriele Basch is professor of painting at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. Gesa Lange is professor of graphic art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. She has received the Kunsthalle Rostock Prize and other awards.
-
Olaf Breuning
Paintings37€ Add to cartThe multimedia artist Olaf Breuning (b. Schaffhausen, Switzerland, 1970; lives and works in Upstate New York) has built a multifaceted oeuvre in installation art, photography, video, sculpture, drawing, and performance that questions contemporary reality. In a recent series of paintings, he playfully grapples with pressing concerns such as global warming. Like his earlier work, the new ensemble manifests his unorthodox approach. Breuning devised a unique painterly technique involving large-format wooden stamps with which he presses paint onto the canvas. The result is unconventional and fresh.
The publication—the first book dedicated exclusively to Breuning’s paintings—presents two dozen pictures as well documentation of the production process in the form of wooden stamps and sculptures. A dialogue between Katharina Beisiegel, director of the Kirchner Museum, Davos, and Gianni Jetzer, designated director of the Kunstmuseum St. Gallen, delves into parallels and differences between the oeuvres of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and Olaf Breuning.
Breuning trained as a photographer in Winterthur from 1988 until 1993 and completed a master class in photography from 1992 until 1995. In 1995–1996, he was enrolled in a postgraduate program at today’s Zurich University of the Arts. He has had solo exhibitions at the NRW-Forum, Düsseldorf; the Palais de Tokyo, Paris; the Chisenhale Gallery, London; and the Zentrum Paul Klee, Berne. He participated in the 2008 Whitney Biennial and has had work in group exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; the Haus der Kunst, Munich; Kunsthalle Zürich; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; the Jeu de Paume, Paris; the KW Institute for Contemporary Art, Berlin; the Whitechapel Gallery, London; and the Mori Art Museum, Tokyo.
-
MS 00 22
Michael Sailstorfer – Works 2000–202245€ Add to cartMS 00 22 – Michael Sailstorfer: Works 2000–2022
Michael Sailstorfer (b. Velden/Vils, Germany, 1979; lives and works in Berlin) is one of the most renowned German sculptors and object artists of his generation. His sculptural creations, which often require extensive planning and complex production processes, are the results of reflections on and reinterpretations of everyday objects: intriguing, bizarre, and sometimes humorous experimental arrangements and artifacts that interact with their environments, create spaces, or self-deconstruct. These transformative processes combine conceptual depth with poetic allure and tell stories of the passage of time and disintegration. Many of Sailstorfer’s installations depend on the beholder’s active engagement for their effect. He typically documents his sculptural experiments with the camera and later shares them with the public in the form of videos or photographs.
The extensive monograph MS 00 22 presents the most important works from Sailstorfer’s creative career. Formally diverse writings and conversations with the artist offer profound insight into his practice.
Michael Sailstorfer studied with Olaf Metzel at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 1999 until 2005 and at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2004–05. He has won a number of art awards, including the Kunstpreis junger westen (2011) and the Vattenfall Contemporary (2012). Selected solo exhibitions: Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2007); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2010); Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2011); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014).
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Yes To All
Die Schenkung Paul Maenz Gerd Vries42€ Add to cartThe catalog accompanying the exhibition YES TO ALL offers profound insight into a collection of over nine hundred works on paper—from postcards and drawings to photographs and posters—that was gifted to the Kupferstichkabinett in 2022, with subsequent additions over the years until 2025. The donors are Paul Maenz and Gerd de Vries, who ran a gallery for contemporary art in Cologne until 1990 and chaperoned the evolution of avant-garde art from the conceptualism of the late 1960s to the neo-expressive painting of the 1980s. The most recent works in the collection date from 2024. Several essays and a conversation with the donors invite the reader to experience the stylistic and thematic polyphony of Western art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries in new ways.
EXHIBITION:
YES TO ALL. THE GIFTS OF PAUL MAENZ GERD DE VRIES TO THE KUPFERSTICHKABINETT
KUPFERSTICHKABINETT, STAATLICHE MUSEEN ZU BERLIN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -
Jenny Brosinski
Things I’ve Never Said58€ Add to cartJenny Brosinski’s (b. Celle, 1984; lives and works in Berlin) paintings in large formats look like uncoordinated abstract compositions with traces of wear deliberately left in place. This brings their materiality to the fore and reveals the creative process. Expressive oil paint on unprimed canvas, spray-painted lines, typographic elements, shoeprints, or pieces of masking tape on the canvas: on the one hand, these are experiments and statements; on the other hand, they are engagements with painting as such. The artist added sculpture to her repertoire in 2019, making figurative and sometimes colorfully painted imaginary beasts in bronze or stone—more evidence of her subtle sense of humor, which also manifests itself in her pictures and especially in their titles. The extensive monograph offers profound and comprehensive insight into Brosinski’s oeuvre.
Jenny Brosinski studied illustration and animation at the Weißensee Kunsthochschule, Berlin, the École supérieure des arts décoratifs, Strasbourg, and the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences. She completed her education with a master class in Berlin in 2010.
-
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.
-
Sibylle Springer
Ferne Spiegel / Distant Mirrors35€ Add to cartThe paintings of Sibylle Springer (born 1975, lives in Bremen) focus on the role of women in the art world of the digital age. For her portrait series Feed, she has painted 40 female artists to date, based on staged photographs from their Instagram feeds. “Is social media an instrument of emancipation, or does it even lead to new forms of objectification?” (Kohout) In Wait for It, Springer copied pop stars from the internet, but used a silver paint that oxidizes the canvases, thus aging the eternally youthful icons before our eyes—precisely what digital image control seeks to prevent. In her more recent textile objects, Springer interweaves female artists of the past and present. This informative book accompanies her exhibition at the Kunstverein Bremen.
Die Malerei von Sibylle Springer (geb. 1975, lebt in Bremen) widmet sich der Rolle von Frauen in der Kunstwelt des digitalen Zeitalters. Für ihre Portraitserie Feed malte sie bisher 40 Künstlerinnen, basierend auf fotografischen Selbstinszenierungen aus deren Instagram-Feeds. “Sind Soziale Medien Instrumente der Emanzipation oder führen sie gar zu neuen Formen der Objektifizierung?” (Kohout) Für Wait for It kopierte Springer Popstars aus dem Netz, aber benutzte ein die Leinwände oxidierendes Silber, das die ewig-jungen Ikonen vor unseren Augen altern lässt, gerade das, was digitale Imagekontrolle zu verhindern sucht. In neueren, textilen Objekten verknüpft Springer Künstlerinnen der Vergangenheit und Gegenwart. Dieses informative Buch begleitet ihre Ausstellung im Kunstverein Bremen.
FERNE SPIEGEL / DISTANT MIRRORS
KUNSTHALLE BREMEN
UNTIL JANUARY 11, 2026 -
Sevina Tzanou
10€ Add to cartSevina Tzanou’s (b. Athens, 1994; lives and works in Bonn and Athens) large-format paintings show ecstatic bodies on the verge of abstraction that refuse to submit to categorization, cooptation, or control. They arise from the affect-laden situations the artist sets out to render in her paintings. She begins by priming the canvas with a monochrome coat of paint, on which she then sets down informal, expressive gestures, sometimes working with a mop or so-called “octopus brushes” that recall BDSM whips. The bodies depicted in the works are Tzanou’s painterly response to the abstract forms accreted on the canvas. Everything about her art is performative, the painterly process no less than the creation of bodies, gender, and sexual identity. Her subjects are drawn from ancient myths and motifs in the history of painting as well as contemporary debates.
-
Gabriele Basch
fortuna24€ Add to cartPaper and Foil Cut‑Outs in an Innovative Language of Forms: An Overview of the Works of Gabriele Basch from 2008 to 2019
Since the 1990s, Gabriele Basch (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) has been working with cut-outs and translating the age-old tradition of silhouettes into an idiosyncratic and innovative language of forms. The artist interweaves creation and destruction, planning and chance into a complex, multi-layered reality and makes views into the spatial environment an integral part of her work. In her paper and foil cut-outs, foreground and background, materiality and void combine to form a whole that oscillates between painting and drawing, as well as between urban structures and hints of the biomorphic – in delicate color gradients, swirling structures, spontaneous gestures, and stenciled surfaces. The generously illustrated monograph offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work from 2008 to 2019.
- With socks designed by the artist and augmented reality
JOHN BOCK
AURAAROMA-Ω-BEULE42€ Add to cartThe Augmented Reality Book for John Bock
John Bock (b. 1965 in Gribbohm, lives in Berlin) is one of the most important contemporary performance and video artists. In his works characterized by humor and absurdity, the artist places language, human bodies, everyday objects, and spaces in peculiar relationships to each other. He attained international recognition with the installation LiquidityAuraAromaPortfolio at the first Berlin Biennale in 1998. Together with his work Voll die Beule from 2013, it is now included in the collection of the Kunsthalle Mannheim. The present augmented reality book not only contextualizes his work, but also immerses the viewer/reader directly in his performances, in which the artist’s head emerges and a filled rubber glove leaks out. A completely new approach to the works of John Bock, packaged in a pair of socks designed by the artist.
John Bock studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts and since 2004 has taught at the State Academy of Fine Arts Karlsruhe as Professor of Sculpture. He has participated in the 55th Biennale di Venezia, and his works have been featured worldwide in solo exhibitions at, among others, the Berlinische Galerie, the Contemporary Austin, Texas, the Barbican Centre, London, and the Städel Museum, Frankfurt.
-
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.
