Stephan Kaluza
Die dritte Natur
 | |
|---|---|
| Author(s) | Stephan Kaluza |
| Design | Book Book, Berlin |
| Cover | Softcover |
| Size | 12 x 18 cm |
| Pages | 112 |
| Language(s) | German |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-029-3 |
The Nature of Art as Totality and Idyll
The philosophy of nature is central to the artist Stephan Kaluza’s (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) work. As he sees it, there exists a succession of different natures: first nature is Kaluza’s designation for a world as immediately felt by (early) humans, part of an encompassing and close-range experiential totality they labeled ‘nature’ and perceived as a physical, but also spiritual and emotional concatenation of events. Second nature is stripped down to an objective and utilitarian quality; nature becomes a resource, the basis of life, the environment. In a kind of linguistic turn, speech mediates a surrogate, an alternative world, that positions nature as culture’s opposite; the former becomes replaceable in favor of latter. Yet this culture is far from devoid of yearnings for the immediacy that it has lost, and so develops an ‘artificial idyllic nature’ in turn. This third nature of the arts—a purely human nature—harks back to the archetypes of a first nature in escapism and totalized immersion.
More books
-
Maria Braune
Keep Away From Fire28€ Add to cartMaria Braune’s (b. Berlin, 1988; lives and works in Munich and Bamberg) work revolves around a material she developed; named Migma, it consists of eight different renewable natural resources. She heats it, then casts and molds it in a process that continues for weeks. The resulting sculptures and installations sprawl throughout the space like sensuous organisms. Associations of growth and symbiosis emerge, but discontinuities and disintegration come into view as well. Braune’s creative process is part of an ecosystem and thoroughly anchored in the now. Her material is a vitally alive substance to which she responds in an immediate engagement, connecting it to mythological and narrative significations and setting it in relation to her own world.
Maria Braune studied woodcarving at the Fachhochschule für Bildhauerei in Berchtesgaden, Germany, in 2009–2011, then fine arts with Hermann Pitz at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where she graduated in 2017.
-
Jakob Ganslmeier
Lovely Planet. Polen / Poland16€ Add to cartAn Unconventional and Humorous Guide to a Country of Contrasts
In 2015, the photographer Jakob Ganslmeier (b. Munich, 1990; lives and works in Berlin) went on an extended tour of Poland in search of shots that captured the country’s social realities and way of life at a time of wrenching changes. The title of his project evokes associations with Lonely Planet, one of the world’s best-selling series of travel guides, and the artist took inspiration from the format of the popular books, where recommendations for readers exploring strange lands are grouped by categories. Crisscrossing Poland—he covered over ten thousand kilometers—Ganslmeier encountered widely different people and draws our attention to places that would never make it into a guidebook. His pictures show a country of extremes, between boomtown optimism and decline, consumerism and poverty, gleaming façades and bleak village streets.
Jakob Ganslmeier studied at the Ostkreuzschule für Fotografie, Berlin, and at the Bielefeld University of Applied Sciences. His pictures, which have garnered numerous awards, are frequently featured in leading German media and have been shown in exhibitions in Germany and abroad, including at the Brandenburgisches Landesmuseum für moderne Kunst, Cottbus, the Nobel Peace Center, Oslo, the Triennale der Photographie Hamburg, and the Fondation Calouste Gulbenkian, Paris.
-
Barbara Armbruster
Meins Mine24€ Add to cartAn Intercultural Artistic Narrative between Germany and Egypt
In her works, Barbara Armbruster (b. Bad Waldsee; lives and works in Stuttgart) deals with cultural and social spaces, structures, and identities. Influenced by many years of residence in Cairo, Armbruster’s diverse works are points of relationship between two completely different cultural spaces. In her paintings, drawings, photographs, installations, and performative videos, the artist pursues a cross-cultural approach that tells of her time in Egypt and Germany on both a documentary and personal level. The monograph provides fascinating insight into Armbruster’s continuously developed language of expression between Arabic calligraphy, stylized ornamentation, and the photographic staging of everyday architecture.
Barbara Armbruster studied Graphic Art at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart, where she later held a teaching position. Her works have been widely exhibited at, among others, the Goethe-Institut in Cairo, the Landesmuseum Württemberg in Stuttgart, and the Kunstverein Freiburg.
- temporarily not available
Der tanzende Blick
Roman Novitzkys Stuttgarter BallettRead moreWeightlessness, Grace, Emotions
The photographs by Roman Novitzky (b. 1984 in Bratislava) reveal the entire vocabulary of dance—and yet convey much more than this. With his camera, the first soloist of the Stuttgart Ballet not only captures hidden moments in rehearsal or from the side stage, but also opens the door to his own cosmos for the viewer. He depicts sweat and tension, doubt and euphoria, and gives the audience intimate insight behind the scenes of the Stuttgart Ballet. Roman Novitzky’s first monograph comprises more than sixty photographs of the ballet hall, the cloakroom, and guest performances. It not only stands for his two passions, dance and photography, but also describes his photographic approach, shaped by years of dance experience, which gives the viewer familiar insights into his everyday surroundings.
-
Alexander Ruthner
Cour: Sommer36€ Add to cartContemplating Nature in a Reduced-Mobility Environment
“The events of the year 2021, which was defined by lockdowns, the pandemic, and restrictions, has brought out the resonance in my pictures of Gustave Courbet’s realism,” Alexander Ruthner (b. Vienna, 1982; lives and works in Vienna) says about his most recent works: oil paintings featuring lush green vegetation and veritable down comforters painted all-over in saturated color gradients. The works will make their public début as the publication is released in the summer of 2021, hence the word “Sommer” in the title. The other word, “Cour,” is a nod to the first syllable of the French painter’s name as well as French for “court,” a term the artist creatively reinterprets as a synonym for the solitary “castle of the mind” to which we have retreated under pandemic conditions. Ruthner, who studied with Peter Kogler, Daniel Richter, and Albert Oehlen, revisits the boscage and pasture painting of past eras in new works that propose a distinctive personal interpretation of that tradition’s charm.
Alexander Ruthner’s work has been shown at Kunsthalle Wien, the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and the National Museum of Montenegro, among other venues.
-
Christian Boltanski
Die Zwangsarbeiter – Erinnerung in der Völklinger Hütte27,50€ Add to cartErinnerungen | Souvenirs | Memoirs
Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris; lives and works in Paris) combines industrial architecture with relics of the working culture in his impressive installation for the Völklingen ironworks – a highly emotional approach to the subject of forced labor.
-
Billy Al Bengston
Paintings & Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe First Monograph on the Californian Pop Artist Since More Than Thirty Years
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is the very personification of the cheerful, carefree attitude towards life in California – with his work as well as his person: a former surfer and motorcycle racer, an extravagant artist and key figure of West Coast Pop Art. After studying at the California College of Arts and Crafts and the Otis Art Institute, he exhibited at the legendary Ferus Gallery in 1957 and was the central figure among a group of artists that included Frank Gehry, Edward Kienholz, Ed Ruscha, and Ken Price. BAB, as he apostrophizes himself, inserts car and motorcycle parts as motifs into his otherwise abstract paintings, using lacquer and spray paint instead of oil, and aluminum panels with at times dented surfaces instead of the traditional canvas. Art and lifestyle combine to create the individual “Bengston iconography” of California Cool.
-
6 U L
Lust and Desire in Art and Design28€ Add to cart“Whose Jizz is this?” Sechs-u-ell: to make sense of the publication title, trust your college German and your phonetic ear. “Sexual,” here, comprises the entire broad spectrum of what we associate with carnal pleasure. Lust, desire, ecstasy, repression, obsession—the world of art, fashion, and design abounds with specimens of eroticism and sexuality in their infinite variety, shopworn stereotypes be damned. Looking back on the thorough revision of society’s ideas about sexuality in the past three decades, the book inquires into how the works of visual artists, fashion creatives, and designers reflect today’s public debates over biological and social gender roles, power structures, and sexual violence or the fading of taboos over sexual practices. With works and designs by Walter Van Beirendonck, Monica Bonvicini, Tracey Emin, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Jürgen Klauke, Peaches, Cindy Sherman, Kara Walker, Vivienne Westwood, and many more. This book documents a grand exhibition scheduled for the past summer at the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts, Leipzig, which had to be canceled due to the Covid-19 pandemic.
- Out of stock
Idee – Entwurf – Konzept
48€ Read moreArt in the Preliminary and Provisional Stage
In this sumptuous volume, Künstlerbund Baden-Württemberg, the association of visual artists in Baden-Württemberg, puts the focus on visualizations of inchoate impulses, spontaneous flashes of inspiration, and the euphoria of that first spark rather than the painstaking process of hammering out a work. Structured as a complex compendium comprising contributions by more than 240 artists, the book highlights the experimental circumstances in which the individual creative mind experiences the nascency of ideas—without regard for the specialized skills and technical accomplishment that distinguish the finished work. Perfunctory sketches, doodles, drawings, notes and material collages, photographs and other media images provide insight into very intimate stages of the creative process that are not usually revealed to visitors to an exhibition of contemporary art.
-
Francesca Martí
Passage and Presence42€ Add to cartFrancesca Martí’s (b. Sóller, Mallorca; lives in Mallorca and Stockholm) art revolves around themes like transformation, communication, and deformation, the power of self-determination, the instability of memory, and the effects of the chaos caused by migration and the migration prompted by chaos. In a collaborative process, a multitude of performers, dancers, and musicians help make her vision a reality. The book presents performances, sculptures, and visual works from Francesca Martí’s most important exhibitions in Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, Slovakia, and China. The portraits of the various series the artist has developed over the past ten years, including Cocoon, Planet of Fusions, Migrant Angel, Dreamers & Believers, Copper and Flux, are rounded out by her drawings, photographs, and making-of shots from her studio in Mallorca.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Mechanik Sehnsucht. Kunsterzeugung und Betrachtung14€ Add to cartUngewohnte Antworten aus der Sicht des Kunsterzeugers
Die Frage, was Kunst ist und wie sie entsteht, wird gerne von denen beantwortet, die sie selbst nicht erzeugen. Die Betrachtung und Interpretation steht im Vordergrund und damit eine wissenschaftliche Distanz zur Kunst. Es gibt aber durchaus die Eigen-Betrachtung derer, die Kunst aktiv herstellen und naturgemäß einen inneren Blick auf die prozessualen Bedingungen haben, die überhaupt erst das entstehen lassen, was anschließend betrachtet und beurteilt wird. Diese Sichtweise ist nicht zwangsläufig identisch mit der von außen. Nicht die Interpretation oder eine deduktive Schlüssigkeit steht hier im Vordergrund, sondern ein ableitender und besonders ein schöpferischer Sinn, der sich aus dem Prozess des Kunstherstellens von selbst ergibt.
Die Arbeiten von Stephan Kaluza (geb. 1964 in Bad Iburg, lebt und arbeitet in Düsseldorf) wurden unter anderem im Ludwig Museum Koblenz, im State Contemporary Art Museum, Seoul, in der Kunsthalle Osnabrück, im Palacete des Artes Rodin, Salvador, im Museum on the Seam, Jerusalem, sowie in der KAI 10 | Arthena Foundation, Düsseldorf, ausgestellt.
-
Considering Finland
14€ Add to cartContemporary Art from Finland
With fourteen artistic positions from the fields of photography, video, and installation, Considering Finland offers fascinating insight into the Finnish art scene. The themes of the artists from one of the least populated and most densely forested countries in Europe is the relationship between humankind and nature, as well as the political, social, and economic implications of this. Their works point to cultural dispositions and standardizations of the individual within a society based on unattainable maxims, such as permanent success, lasting recognition, and limitless growth. Pictorial traditions, geographical structures, and socio-political and infrastructural factors are the bases of a mental construction that summarizes their artistic work under a national heading. With works by Kenneth Bamberg, Elina Brotherus, Ville Lenkkeri, Aurora Reinhard, Iiu Susiraja, Nestori Syrjälä, and Pilvi Takala.
-
On Air
Der Klang des Materials in der Kunst der 1950er bis 1970er Jahre40€ Add to cartOn Air showcases a distinctive art form, the sound sculpture, retracing its evolution from the early 1950s, when artists begin dismantling the conventional boundaries of art, to the early 1970s. In no more than a quarter-century, the range of possible answers to the question “What is art?” grows vastly larger. Propelled by the idea of the work of art as a machine and instrument, sounds, noises, tones, vibrations, silence, words, breath become a “tangible” sculptural material. Artists enrich visual perception by adding the acoustic dimension, interweave seeing and hearing, explore time and space with fresh zeal. In emerging artistic genres such as performance, installation, or media art, sound is an integral component of the work. The book focuses on sound objects by Yaakov Agam, Joseph Beuys, Hermann Goepfert, Yves Klein, Jannis Kounellis, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rauschenberg, Jean Tinguely, David Tudor, Timm Ulrichs, and others.
With five scholarly essays and numerous illustrations and notes on individual works, the comprehensive publication offers an attractive introduction to the subject.
-
Martin Noël
The Retrospective38€ Add to cartThe Protagonist of the Modern Woodcut
The German painter, draftsman, and graphic artist Martin Noël (b. Berlin, 1956; d. Bonn, 2010) played a leading role in reviving the linocut and the woodcut, two techniques that had long been eclipsed by other media. In his large-format works on paper, he staked out a widely regarded and distinctive position in contemporary art. Noël was especially interested in the compositional relationship between line and surface. Released on occasion of the retrospective of his oeuvre at the Albertina, Vienna, this book presents an overview of the most important periods in the artist’s creative evolution, with an emphasis on the woodcut carved into the printing plate and the woodblock’s subsequent emancipation as an art object in its own right. Particular attention is paid to the application of ink to the surface and its painterly structure as well as the picture’s migration from object to canvas. The resulting paintings are exemplary of Noël’s late oeuvre.
Martin Noël studied graphic art and painting at what is now the Cologne University of Arts and Sciences. His art garnered numerous prizes and other honors, including fellowships from Kunststiftung NRW, Stiftung Kunstfonds, and Letter Stiftung. Works by Noël are in the German Federal Collection of Contemporary Art, Kunstsammlung Chemnitz, and the collection of Museum Pfalzgalerie Kaiserslautern.
-
The Power of Wonder – New Materialisms in Contemporary Art
34€ Add to cartFor the longest time, physical matter was seen as no more than a passive and lifeless object. Since the early years of the twenty-first century, however, visual artists and scientists alike have initiated a change of thinking, conceiving matter as active, unruly, and autonomous. The ethnologist Hans Peter Hahn has called it the “willfulness of things,” while the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers has underscored the “power of wonder”—the bracing sense of marvel and surprise instilled by a material world that sometimes defies the attempt to put it into words.
This pioneering publication features six selected artistic positions that highlight the New Materialism’s significance for contemporary art. The artists employ materials that are millions of years old such as rocks from an open-pit mine as well as classic inorganic staples like ceramics and cutting-edge materials like digital products transformed in high-tech procedures into hitherto unseen hybrid objects. Their work lends art a powerful voice in contemporary debates around man’s position vis-à-vis his environment, around sustainability, participation, and justice.
With works by Ilana Halperin, Agata Ingarden, David Jablonowski, Markus Karstieß, Robert Smithson, and SUPERFLEX.
-
Art in a Conflicted World
34€ Add to cartTrans-European Perspectives in the Age of Cultural Fragmentation
Since the turn of the millennium, much of the world has become an increasingly unstable and dissonant place. Sharp disruptions define many aspects of our social, cultural, and political relations. Art in a Conflicted World addresses this evolving reality, featuring critical positions articulated by visual artists and writers from Ukraine, Russia, and Great Britain—regions embroiled in extraordinary strife and upheaval. The publication takes a frank look at these multifaceted states of social dissonance and reflects them in diverse artistic and literary inquiries and responses. The contributions are the fruits of an interdisciplinary fellowship program at Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf that offers the participants an opportunity to gain fresh creative and cultural insights, test ways of engaging with complexity, and develop models for the future that transcend national boundaries.
The publication presents works by Sarah Dobai, Nikita Kadan, Ali Eisa, and Sebastian Lloyd Rees (Lloyd Corporation) as well as writings by Alisa Ganieva and Tanya Zaharchenko.
The project was mentored by Wolfgang Tillmans, Tom McCarthy, Katharina Raabe, and Mark Gisbourne and received funding support from the German Federal Foreign Office.
-
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.
-
Tobias Pils
Drawings55€ Add to cartDrawings is the first book dedicated exclusively to the painter Tobias Pils’s (b. Linz, 1971; lives and works in Vienna) drawings. His graphical forms—the lines, figurations, even the intervening spaces—constantly change the direction in which they set out. Their ambivalence destabilizes any attempt at interpretation. One would think that the indeterminacy of Pils’s visual idiom must torment him, yet in fact this state of existential tension fills him with absurd pleasure. Rather than conceiving his works with a clear objective in mind, he allows himself to fall into them. He—his art—remains open to everything that happens in the creative process. Taken together, Pils’s drawings operate along the diffuse boundary between order and disorder, as though, acknowledging the disordered present (the life we lead), they came from an ordered past (the life we have constructed for ourselves).
Tobias Pils studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna from 1990 until 1994. His works have been displayed in museums around the world, including at the mumok, Vienna (2021); the Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2020); the Musée Picasso, Paris (2020); the Kunstmuseum Bonn (2020); Le Consortium, Dijon (2018); the Aspen Art Museum (2018); the Chinati Foundation’s John Chamberlain Building, Marfa (2016); and the National Art Museum of China, Beijing (2010). In 2020, he executed a large wall painting at the École normale supérieure in Paris-Saclay.
- temporarily not available
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.
- Release October 2025
Uwe Schütte
Deutschland in 50 Briefmarken24€ Add to cartThe postage stamp, the avid philatelist Walter Benjamin prophesied in 1928, would “not survive the twentieth century.” Time, then, for a look back: in fifty essays, Uwe Schütte embarks on a voyage through 175 years of German postal history to decode the mentalities that shaped it. Analyzing the visual language of the stamps and their significance for Germany’s collective memory, from the One kreuzer black to Deutsche Post’s cutting-edge crypto-stamp, he shows how the stamp broke the shackles of its function as a proof of postage paid to emerge in the early twentieth century as a medium of mass-circulation miniature-format graphic art. It went on to serve as an instrument of propaganda, was collected and counterfeited, and proved a capacious mirror of discourses in society.
The cultural essayist Uwe Schütte, born in Sauerland in 1967 and a philatelist since childhood, completed his doctorate in German Literature under W.G. Sebald. After two decades as a university lecturer in England, he now lives and works in Berlin. His work includes more than 30 books dealing with extremist art and occultism as well as advanced pop culture and contemporary literature.
