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
- Release November 2025
Charles Moore
On painting16€ Add to cartFor On Painting, New York-based art historian and curator Charles Moore, interviewed four women artists about their practice, asking them to reveal their motives and aspirations. This publication consists of four interviews, each containing an introduction by Moore and illustrations of the artist’s works. Danielle Mckinney, who paints exclusively Black women, reflects on her experiences as a woman growing up in the US South. Nicola Staeglich creates subtle layered abstract works to evoke new perspectives and the potential for change. Nirit Takele elaborates on how her Ethiopian Jewish heritage has shaped her painting practice. Jorinde Voigt, who creates complex installations inspired by notation systems, discusses the use of algorithms and the beauty to be found in the unexpected.
- 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.
-
Clemens Krauss
Antidot | Gegengift40€ Add to cartClemens Krauss restlessly shuttles across history; his vehicles are painting, video art, sculpture, and performance. Yet Krauss is not “just” an artist, he is also a psychoanalyst and physician. As such, he has first-hand experience of time as the defining factor of existence, daring him to play with it. The bosom of painting is where he feels safest after his hazardous excursions back into his youth and forward into death. Executed in thick paints, his work is physical, material, which is also to say, it exists in time: everything passes away, even the picture. Evanescent, more than anything, are encounters of the sort Krauss stages as part of his psychoanalytical practice; all that remains is the indelible impression they leave. To be indelible, to recall the past, while also “letting happen what has never happened,” as he puts it, these are the ambitions he pursues in his art. Preserved between the covers of the present catalogue and reproduced in thousands of copies, his works now fan out in an instant to circulate for an indeterminate period of time among countless hands, whence they will effortlessly penetrate the barriers of our inner lives to bring us one step closer to transcendence.
-
Johannes Schütz
Die Unterbrechung / The Interruption48€ Add to cartJohannes Schütz (b. Frankfurt am Main, 1950; lives in Berlin) is one of the best-known stage designers and directors working today. His style may be characterized as “simple, clean, and radical.” All major theatres and opera houses in the German-speaking countries and beyond have showcased Schütz’s work. He trained with Wilfried Minks and created his first stage setting for Luc Bondy in 1971. His career then took him to Berlin’s Schillertheater and the Kammerspiele in Munich, later he became head of stage design at the Bremer Theater and the Schauspielhaus Bochum. Schütz taught scenography at the ZKM Center for Art and Media Karlsruhe from 1992 until 1998 and has been professor of stage design at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts since 2010.
In his book Die Unterbrechung, he meets Annette Storr to discuss his new work for the stage, which is documented by maquettes and photographs and, most often, by stills from the performances. The productions represented include Penthesilea by Heinrich von Kleist, Landestheater Salzburg, 2018; Hamlet by William Shakespeare, Schauspielhaus Bochum, 2019; Reich des Todes by Rainald Goetz, Deutsches Schauspielhaus Hamburg, 2020; Richard II by William Shakespeare, Burgtheater, Vienna, 2021; and Der Idiot by Dostoevsky, Thalia Theater, Hamburg, 2021.
-
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.
-
Slawomir Elsner
Precision and Chance38€ Add to cartComplex Processes of Abstraction
International audiences know Sławomir Elsner (b. Wodzisław Śląski, Poland, 1976; lives and works in Berlin) for his naturalistic paintings and abstract watercolors, but it was his brilliantly executed colorful drawings that made him famous. The technique of his work in crayons is as formidable as it is singular and underlies his many adaptations of legendary works from the history of painting that seem blurry but are actually drawn in accurate lines.
More generally, Elsner’s art probes the effect of different media and the stories they tell. He interrogates the images they transport and challenges the consumers to subject their own visual experiences to a similar critical review. Do pictures represent reality or distort it? That is the question that guides his inquiries.
Elsner works almost exclusively in series. What makes this book special is that it includes an index in which eleven of these bodies of work are reproduced in their entirety. The Old Masters series alone comprises 143 works made in the years after 2014. It is complemented by the series Windows on the World (2008–2010), Feuerwerk- und Luftabwehr (2004), Unsere Sonnen (2004–2005), the watercolors of Tagstücke and Nachtstücke (2014–2021), and others.
Many of the works frame accidents, disasters, wars, nuclear tests, or other horrible events. By harnessing the means of art to detach their depiction from a documentary setting, Sławomir Elsner achieves an unrivaled degree of aestheticization; his works are fascinating at first glance, only to fill the beholder with a creeping dread.
-
Birgitta Thaysen
Amor and Psyche24€ Add to cartAspects of Love
The fine art photographer Birgitta Thaysen (b. Gelsenkirchen, Germany, 1962; lives and works in Düsseldorf) studied with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and in Nan Hoover’s master class. Her photographic oeuvre encompasses urban motifs as well as likenesses of humans. In black-and-white portrait shots, she revisits the ancient myth of Amor and Psyche; embodiments of the yearning for love and the bafflements of the soul, the title characters have long been vehicles for variegated interpretations in visual art. Thaysen chose to shoot her portraits at Künstlerverein Malkasten, Düsseldorf, where the tale is present in an adaptation as a lavishly made wallpaper from the nineteenth century. She captured the protagonists lying on the floor, bedded on cushions, their heads upside down, for a vertiginous exploration of states of mind between self-abandonment and doubt.
Birgitta Thaysen studied art with Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts. Her conceptual photographic series have been seen by wide audiences in numerous exhibitions.
- Shortlist German Photo Book Award 2019/2020
Arina Dähnick
The MIES Project45€ Add to cartIn the Footsteps of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe
In her photographic works, Arina Dähnick (b. 1965, Krefeld; lives and works in Berlin) deals with urbanity, spatial reality and visual perception. She discovered the architecture of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe in 2012, when, after a thunderstorm, she perceived the Neue Nationalgalerie in a both fascinating and paradoxical spatial experience of boundless vastness – and a simultaneous feeling of being held. From then on she photographed the building under various conditions until its closure in 2015, afterwards following in Mies van der Rohe’s footsteps from Berlin to Brno, from Chicago to New York. Dähnick captured his most famous buildings – including the Villa Tugendhat, the Seagram Building, and the Lake Shore Drive Apartments – in impressive photo series, which have been exhibited during the Chicago Architecture Biennial amongst others. The book was awarded the silver medal of the Deutscher Fotobuchpreis.
- Out of stock
Ernst Gamperl
Zwiesprache Dialogue34€ Read moreUnique wooden sculptures as the result of a ten‑year process
Ernst Gamperl (b. 1965, Munich; lives and works in Tremosine) is fascinated by the dialogue with living material and the quality of the unpredictable. He creates room-sized wooden objects, into the design of which he incorporates the natural drying process, cracks, and irregularities—a revolutionary technique of woodturning which has led to completely new standards, technically often at the limits of what is feasible. In a ten-year process, Gamperl transformed a roughly 230-year-old uprooted oak into an ensemble of vessels and sculptures. The artist’s book conveys the fascination of the material and the craft, brings us close to the objects, and documents the challenging work process.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Verena Issel
Yellow Pages. Installations and their individual components45€ Add to cartVerena Issel’s installations feel friendly and inviting, they are soft, round, colorful—we cannot but smile when we look at them. The sculptures and pictures she makes for them are replicas, sometimes laced with irony, of familiar objects from nature and culture—palm trees, ancient columns, and more—which she manufactures out of materials that surround us in everyday life and the domestic sphere such as an old bag, foamed plastic fragments, or a drainpipe. They are awkward giants, monochrome, simplified, two- and three-dimensional forms that wish us no ill. Taking a closer look, we realize that they embody what has been lost, that they are a plastic version of what we are destroying or have destroyed already: nature, obviously, but also ourselves and our cultural and social achievements. Their merriment and sympathy are tinged with melancholy, and the loss is doubly painful when we consider that the sculptures and graphic art are filled with no more than an imitation of life, and an exaggerated one. This catalogue presents a survey of Issel’s diverse and sprawling oeuvre. Expertly choreographed shots of the colorful works convey vivid impressions of her installations.
-
Bilder des Wohnens
18€ Add to cartThe Cognitive Registers of Photography
All over the world, housing shortages and living conditions are urgent concerns of political and academic debates. Scholars at the FH Bielefeld conducted a three-year research project on Bilder des Wohnens. Architekturen im Bild, focusing on questions of the representation of space and hybrid forms of visualization between documentation and staging as well as photography as an archive of architectural knowledge and tool in the planning process. The book draws on studies of twentieth-century social utopias such as Tashkent, Uzbekistan, an embodiment of the urban-planning ideal of Soviet modernism, and explorations of social and cultural spaces along the coasts of northern Morocco and southern Spain, as well as a photographic typology of urban fabrics in Germany and other sociocultural studies that grapple with the significance of living spaces today.
- Out of stock
Banksy’s Dismaland & Others
14,80€ Read morePhotographs by Barry Cawston
The two projects by the British street artist Banksy, Dismaland and Walled Off Hotel, received an outstanding response worldwide. The book presents for the first time the documentation of the two extraordinary works from the perspective of Barry Cawston, the artist’s official photographer.
-
Sonja Yakovleva
Soaplands50€ Add to cartSonja 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.
-
GETA BRĂTESCU
Film and Video 1977–201842€ Add to cartGeta Brătescu (b. Ploiești, 1926; d. Bucharest, 2018) is now widely regarded as one of Eastern Europe’s most important avant-gardists. In the Western art world, however, she was largely obscure until her participation in documenta 14 in 2017 and the Venice Biennale of the same year. Questions of abstraction, the political potential of the image, and the subjective experience of self, memory, and history inform her stylistically diverse oeuvre in a wide range of media, which evolved under the repressive conditions of the Ceaușescu regime yet kept pace with the discourses of the Western avant-gardes. This richly illustrated volume focuses on her collages and drawings as well as her works on film and video from the late 1970s until her death.
-
Jagoda Bednarsky
SHADOWLAND ET AL40€ Add to cartJagoda Bednarsky’s (b. Złotoryja, Poland, 1988; lives and works in Berlin) paintings are pop-cultural and nostalgic borrowings that she transfers into the grotesque register, with allusions to stereotyped role models between hypermasculinity and matriarchy. Unfurling pastel-colored hillscapes composed of breasts, breast pumps, vulvas, figures from Greek myth, and motifs from flora and fauna, Bednarsky’s Shadowland series interrogates traditional ideas of femininity and motherhood. The depiction of the female breast serves as a metaphor referring to the titular “Shadowland,” where this part of the body is still perceived as a sexualized object rather than as natural. The title, one might note, is borrowed from a culture magazine first published in New York in 1919 in which the artist spotted Art Deco illustrations that became a vital source of inspiration. Despite the dense aggregation of fraught symbols and referential gestures, the sensual, poetic, and richly imaginative works exude a lightness that stems from their translucency and subtle irony.
The comprehensive volume presents Bednarsky’s works from between 2018 and 2023 and a singular conversation with the artist.
Jagoda Bednarsky studied fine arts, first at Kunsthochschule Kassel (2008–2009), then at HfBK Städelschule, Frankfurt am Main, with Michael Krebber and Monika Baer (2009–2014).
-
100 Windows
Site-specific art installations at Berlin-Weekly project space28€ Add to cartEstablished in 2010 by Stefanie Seidl in a former gateway for horse-drawn carriages that is now enclosed by glazing at both ends, the project space BERLIN-WEEKLY offers the narrow yet exceptionally tall display space to artists as a highly visible public stage for installations that respond to the setting or site. Its unilateral orientation toward the street makes BERLIN-WEEKLY a creative intervention into the urban fabric that harnesses the shopwindow format. The book presents 100 selected window installations to illustrate the widely diverse ways in which individual artists have engaged with the venue, time and again transforming the unusually shaped small space.
With works by: Menno Aden, Alexandra Baumgartner, Isabelle Borges, Astrid Busch, Simon Faithfull, Moritz Frei, Max Frisinger, Wolfgang Flad, Dagmara Genda, Andreas Greiner & Armin Keplinger, Sabine Groß, Marc van der Hocht, Sabine Hornig, Irène Hug, Bettina Khano, Julia Kissina, Nikolaus List, Ulrike Mohr, Virginie Mosse, Piotr Nathan, Katja Pudor, Philip Topolovac, Inken Reinert, Sophia Schama, Geerten Verheus, Sinta Werner, Barbara Wille, and others
-
Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt – Wie eine Spinne im Netz
38€ Add to cartRuth Wolf-Rehfeldt (b. Wurzen, Germany, 1932; lives in Berlin) is one the few East German female artists who devoted themselves to graphic art produced on the typewriter. Working on her trusty “Erika,” she arranged letters, digits, commas, and plus signs to compose imaginative visual creations. Under her hands, the black and red characters were transformed into poetic verbal images, gently undulating waves, serial patterns, and architectonic or figurative formations. Sometimes verging on concrete poetry, these typewritings also evince unmistakable affinities with conceptual and minimalist art. In the 1980s, the artist expanded on them in collages that recall Hannah Höch’s Dadaist visual montages. With her graphic work, Wolf-Rehfeldt was also an active participant in the GDR’s mail-art program: she sent the typewritings to artists beyond the impassable borders of her country, building an extensive network of correspondences that spanned the globe.
The richly illustrated monograph underscores the diversity and contemporary relevance of Wolf-Rehfeldt’s works, which were created in the shadow of the Cold War and address the fragility of peace as well as early manifestations of the environmental devastation wrought by the industrial age.
