Stephan Grunenberg
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Robert Grunenberg |
| Author(s) | Oliver Koerner von Gustorf |
| Design | Herman Visual |
| Size | 15 x 21 cm |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Pages | 38 |
| Illustrations | 24 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-231-0 | Release January 2025 |
Stephan 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.”
Release January 2025
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Larissa Kikol
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Katharina Arndt
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Alexandru Chira
42€ Add to cartAlexandru Chira’s (b. Tăușeni, Romania, 1947; d. Bucharest, 2011) oeuvre systematically and comprehensively maps a fictional field of research. His paintings, drawings, and objects, whose individual elements recall switches, screens, keyboards, and levers, were designed to “bring rain and rainbows,” to promote prosperity and prevent floods. Working in his art laboratory, Chira resembled a farmer tilling his field. He sowed symbols across his paintings, sometimes transplanted them to create new semiotic interconnections, then reaped them and stored up his harvest in painted machines of varying shapes and dimensions. In the 1990s—by then Chira held a professorship and was a widely recognized artist—he fulfilled a lifelong dream by building the “Tăușeni Ensemble,” the largest monument single-handedly created by one man in Transylvania. Much of his oeuvre accordingly consists of sketches and elaborations relating to the monument. In the course of his decades-long fascination with an agrarian aesthetic, architecture, design, astronomy, history, magic, ufology, mysticism, shamanism, and theosophy fused, yielding a kind of practical knowledge as well as spiritual speculations sustaining his endeavor.
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