Vera Mercer
New Works
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Matthias Harder |
| Author(s) | Sergio Fabio Berardini, Matthias Harder |
| Design | Jonas Kirchner |
| Cover | Hardcover |
| Size | 24 x 28 cm |
| Pages | 104 |
| Illustrations | 50 |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-049-1 |
Beauty and Melancholy, Joie de Vivre and Vanity
The American photographer Vera Mercer’s (b. Berlin, 1936; lives and works in Omaha and Paris) oeuvre defies easy summary. She started taking pictures in Paris in the 1960s, making portraits of her then husband Daniel Spoerri—who, like she, was initially training as a dancer—and other members of the Fluxus group and Nouveaux Réalistes, including Emmett Williams and Robert Filiou, Jean Tinguely and Jacques Villeglé. Around the same time, she also photographed Andy Warhol and Marcel Duchamp for various magazines; her friends Eva Aeppli and Niki de Saint Phalle were among her favorite sitters.
In the 1970s, she took a long creative hiatus: after moving to Omaha, Nebraska, she poured all her energy into starting a number of restaurants and developing an entire downtown neighborhood. But then, in the early years of the new millennium, she returned to photography, capturing breathtaking neo-baroque still lifes featuring flowers, fruits, freshly killed game, antique glasses, and illuminating candles in large formats.
Vera Mercer’s fourth monograph presents her most recent opulent still lifes in color, as well as a novelty in her oeuvre: restrained black-and-white flower pictures and portraits realized as small-format platinum prints.
More books
-
Fiona Rae
Row Paintings24€ Add to cartElements of Energy and Complexity
Fiona Rae’s (b. Hong Kong, 1963; lives and works in London) abstract paintings attracted the attention of broad audiences when she participated in the legendary exhibition Freeze at London’s Docklands in 1988. It put her on the map as an early member of the group known as Young British Artists, who would revolutionize not only the English art world. To this day, Rae’s distinctive creations, which are rooted in a conceptual engagement with the problems and potentials of abstract painting, have remained prominent and seminal contributions to the field. In 2011, she was appointed professor of painting at the Royal Academy, one of the first women to hold this position. The catalogue is the first to feature the most important pictures from this period: the Row Paintings. They mark the inception of the artist’s internationally acclaimed oeuvre. An essay by Terry R. Myers offers an appraisal of the Row Paintings’ significance in their historic context as well as the contemporary discourse of painting.
-
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.
-
Elias Sime
Echo የገደል ማሚቶ35€ Add to cartEthiopia’s multi-award-winning artist Elias Sime (born 1968 in Addis Ababa) impresses with monumental wall reliefs made of ornamentally interwoven wires and cables or sawn-up circuit boards. For years, together with his team, he has been tirelessly
reworking discarded electronic components into complex and colorful assemblages. In doing so, he draws on traditional Ethiopian techniques of weaving, braiding and carving. Sime is interested in the “biography of the material” and each collage is a search for traces (of the local and global past). The artist obtains the electronic waste, which the countries of the global North are known to like to “dispose of” in the African continent, from the flea markets in Addis Ababa. His friezes are monuments both to the throwaway society and to global networking and interaction.
Echo የገደል ማሚቶ, a richly illustrated book, gives an overview over the artist’s fascinating career and is published on the occasion of the solo show at the Kunstpalast Düsseldorf. The volume includes insightful essays by Felicity Korn and Andria Hickey as well as an important conversation with Hans-Ulrich Obrist from 2016. Also discussed is the Zoma Museum complex, which was initiated by Sime (together with the curator Meskerem Assegued)—a total work of art that is exemplary for sustainability and community building.
-
Petra Arnold
Beyond Starlight39,90€ Read moreThe Fischer Family of Circus Artists: A Photographic Long-term Observation
For more than a decade, the photographer Petra Arnold has shadowed the Zirkus Starlight troupe and the Fischers, a family of performers, taking analog photographs, mostly black-and-white, of their life behind the scenes. When she began the project, the Fischers were a large family, with thirty grandchildren. Over time, the company has had to downsize – the business environment is difficult, and few people can make a living as circus artists these days. Arnold’s photographs peek behind the curtain for a study of an existence between circus family and family circus – mostly outside the limelight. The portraits and unstaged scenes are documents of contemporary history and draw attention to the steady decline of circus culture.
- 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.
- temporarily not available
Dissonance
Platform GermanyRead moreA Changed Vision—New Painting from Germany
Post-reunification Germany has emerged as an important forum for international painting. The generation of artists born in the 1970s and 1980s eschew alignment with collective tendencies and resist clearly definable influences. Meanwhile, their art has registered the cultural and sociological dislocations and divergences since the fall of the Iron Curtain with seismographic precision.
The editors of Dissonance – Platform Germany present eighty-one of the most significant painters living and working in Germany in the past two decades. They have the courage of strong opinions, turn the spotlight on unsuspected treasures, and tease out the unexpected value in aesthetically thrilling achievements of programmatic pluralism. A vital survey of one of the most exciting chapters in the more recent history of art in Germany.
Some of the presented artists have graciously agreed to allow DCV to release limited editions of their works, which you can find here.
-
Was ist Wiener Aktionismus?
50€ Add to cartBlows were dealt. An artist exposed and cut himself, others urinated in glasses, daubed themselves with dirt, and masturbated over the Austrian flag. Meanwhile, music was playing, including the national anthem; someone read pornographic writings. Vienna in the late 1960s: what had started in the artists’ homes and studios was now brough out on the grand stage, and taboos were broken in full view of the public.
The Vienna Actionism Museum’s first publication is dedicated to the idea of Vienna Actionism in the dynamic context of abstract realism, Fluxus, and the international Happening scene. The book relates the story of one of art history’s most influential art movements, spearheaded by the Actionists Günter Brus and Otto Muehl, Hermann Nitsch and Rudolf Schwarzkogler.
-
Museum Brot und Kunst
Forum Welternährung24€ Add to cartFood, Art, and Consumption
The craving for food and the desire to avoid being hungry have been among humanity’s central concerns for millennia. Economic activity, science, politics, culture—our basic need for sustenance informs and influences every domain of our lives. The catalogue accompanying the permanent exhibition at the Museum Brot und Kunst—Forum Welternährung sheds light on nineteen thematic foci around the significance of bread as the quintessential food. Founded in 1955, the Museum of Bread and Art was the first institution of its kind in the world dedicated to this subject; its collection comprises a large number of artifacts from across several centuries that speak to the histories of culture, society, and technology. The generously illustrated publication presents a panorama of the wide field of human nourishment in dialogue with art, helping the reader grasp the complexities of the world in which we live.
With works by Ernst Barlach, Bernhard Johannes Blume, Pieter Brueghel, Marc Chagall, Salvador Dalí, Simone Demandt, Agnes Denes, Frans Francken, Georg Flegel, Erich Heckel, Christian Jankowski, Markus Lüpertz, Gerhard Marcks, Max Pechstein, Pablo Picasso, Claire Pentecost, Thomas Rentmeister, Daniel Spoerri, Andy Warhol and others.
The book was included in the shortlist of the competition “Schönste Deutsche Bücher 2021”.
-
WORLD FRAMED
Zeitgenössische Zeichenkunst der Sammlung Schering Stiftung im Kupferstichkabinett38€ Add to cartIn 2008, the Schering Stiftung began acquiring outstanding contemporary works on paper for the Kupferstichkabinett (Museum of Prints and Drawings) in Berlin. The collection, which has since grown to 130 nonfigurative drawings and a small number of prints, emphasizes the close conjunction of art and science. The holdings also reflect central tendencies in the art of drawing: in addition to exploring the line and its multifaceted formulation, artists shed light on the bounds of their medium and its expansions and undertake forays into inter-media art within drawing. The lavishly designed publication WORLD FRAME—the title is borrowed from a work by the artist Matt Mullican—presents the works acquired thanks to this partnership. It inquires into how artists translate their perceptions of their world into pictures and which contexts and discourses inform those pictures. Which perspectives, which ideas frame the segment of reality an artist observes?
“World Framed,” exhibition, Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, July 7–October 8, 2023
-
Fabian Treiber
For a While Longer34€ Add to cartUnstable Prototypes of a Reality We Know
Fabian Treiber’s (b. Ludwigsburg, 1986; lives and works in Stuttgart) paintings show what appear to be interiors while interrogating subjective projections and our perceptions of reality. The artificial spaces bear witness to human existence even though there are no people to be seen. In his still lifes, Treiber negotiates classical questions of painting: form and structure, color and composition, representation of space and organization of the surface. His paintings primarily implement formal rather than narrative decisions. This lets the artist provoke a deliberate breach in which the ostensibly fallacious emerges as the essential quality of painting—the effect is that of works that seem somehow off but are actually just right.
Fabian Treiber studied painting and intermedia design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (ABK Stuttgart). His works have won him a Karl Schmidt Rottluff Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the 2021 Hans Purrmann Grand Prize. He has had numerous solo shows, including at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; and Galerie Ruttkowski;68, Cologne; and contributed to group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Villa Merkel—Galerien der Stadt Esslingen a.N.; and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. For a while longer is published on occasion of his first solo exhibition at Haverkampf Galerie.
-
Ugo Rondinone
winter, spring, summer, fall20€ Add to cartUgo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. For three decades, the conceptual and installation artist has built an oeuvre grappling with themes of time and impermanence, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Spanning diverse media—painting, sculpture, film, and installation art—his work is rooted in the transformation of outward reality into a subjective and emotionally charged world within, harnessing a multifaceted system of inspirations and references from German Romanticism to American Land Art and international pop culture. Balancing the mundane with the spiritual, the artist conjures suggestive atmospheres that capture the contemporary mood.
This book gathers four exhibitions of Ugo Rondinone’s work in 2021: a wall . a door . a tree . a lightbulb . winter at theSørlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU), Kristiansand, Norway; a sky . a sea . distant mountains . horses . spring at Sadie Coles hq, London; a rainbow . a nude . bright light . summer at Kamel Mennour, Paris; and a low sun . golden mountains . fall at Galerie Krobath, Vienna.
-
Philip Loersch
Renteninformation 202230€ Add to cartA satirical audiobook, read by Johannes Steck
with free download link on the inside
You’ve read right, and you’re going to hear it: a bureaucratic document—we’re all familiar with it, for a new one arrives every year—is the subject of this inspired collaboration between the graphic artist Philip Loersch and the virtuoso vocalist Johannes Steck.
The “Renteninformation”—an official letter on cheap paper informing the recipient about their expected future retirement benefits—makes many cultural workers, and others, crack up or break out in tears: arriving unexpectedly, it launches us on an emotional roller coaster between excitement, fascination, resignation, and sheer madness.
The manuscript for this audiobook is Loersch’s actual Renteninformation for 2022. Its intonation is the culmination of a series of works the artist has pursued since 2016. Every year, he has produced a naturalist colored-pencil drawing of his Renteninformation, embedding it in idyllic scenes—in the garden on a summer afternoon, amid autumn foliage, or on a frozen lake, delicately and accurately executed down to the smallest leaf of grass and the tiniest letter.
“Renteninformation 2022” is the ideal gift for all vinyl lovers who need to close a “pension gap” in their collections and a stunning audio experience that redefines what the satire of reality itself and conceptual art can do.
Philip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980) is best known for his unconventional drawings. His works combine painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions such as Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst, and helped initiate the exhibition series “Drawing Wow.”
Johannes Steck (b. Würzburg, 1966) is one of Germany’s best-known audiobook narrators, having sold over four million copies, including of books by Simon Beckett and Ken Follett, in a three-decade career. Television viewers also know his voice from trailers on Kabel 1 and DMAX and documentaries on ZDF, BR, and Sky. His work has garnered awards including the 2012 HörKules.
- out of print
Shara Hughes
58€ Read moreBoisterous Compositions
At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.
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 Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.
-
Jan Muche
Agora42€ Add to cartTracing the Wear of the Life of Labor
The visual art of Jan Muche (b. 1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century’s ideologies – Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing Socialism. Muche’s roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as his engagement with yesteryear’s “heroes of labor” into focus.
Jan Muche trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin.
-
Nicola Staeglich
Color Light Matter Mind36€ Add to cart“This painting springs from the ambition to paint color into the air.” (Ulrich Loock)
Nicola Staeglich’s (b. Oldenburg, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) work with color achieves a distinctive intermediate state between physical presence and atmospheric radiance. She stages painting now as a performative action with broad propositions in color, now as an installation in three dimensions with multilayered translucent painted panels. Color Light Matter Mind is Staeglich’s first monograph, setting recent works in relation to her earlier output (1998–2021). From the spiral-shaped reliefs to her Liquid Lights, the artist opens up a fresh dimension for color.
Nicola Staeglich studied at the Städelschule, Frankfurt, the Academy of Fine Arts Mainz, and the Chelsea College of Art, London. She won numerous fellowships and has been professor of painting/graphic art at the Hochschule der bildenden Künste Essen since 2015. Her work has been presented in numerous solo exhibitions in Germany and abroad and is held by private and public collections.
-
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.
- Release September 2021
Paul Uwe Dreyer
Werkverzeichnis der Gemälde, Zeichnungen und Druckgrafiken68€ Add to cartA Painter, Draftsman, and Draftsman of Concrete Art
Paul Uwe Dreyer (b. 1939, Osnabrück; d. 2008, Stuttgart) taught painting as a professor at the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Stuttgart for more than three decades. His oeuvre shows the hallmarks of geometric constructive art: inspired by subjective experiences of reality, Dreyer’s compositions visualize the dialectics of organizing principles and their potentials for variation, a guiding interest that is already evident in his early work since the 1960s and especially in the pairs and series of pictures he begins creating in the early 1970s. His art unfolds a fascinatingly dynamic yet nonhierarchical dialogue between colors, surfaces, and lines. The chronological catalogue raisonné reveals the consistency with which motifs evolve from his early to his late oeuvre, from architectural, figural, and ornamental tokens through elements resembling symbols and icons to complex penetrations of spaces.
-
Judit Reigl
Kraftfelder / Centers of Dominance28€ Add to cartBeginning in the 1950s, Judit Reigl (b. Kapuvár, Hungary, 1923; d. Marcoussis, France, 2020) builds a singular creative oeuvre between abstraction and figuration, between Surrealism and gestural painting. After studying art in Budapest, Reigl flees Hungary in 1950; arriving in Paris, she is introduced to André Breton, who organizes her first exhibition in 1954. Under the influence of the École de Paris, she branches out into écriture automatique, then shifts toward free expression. Like her contemporaries Jackson Pollock and Helen Frankenthaler in New York, she lays out ever larger unprimed canvases on the floor and works them with a brush, her fingers, or other instruments. After 1966, bodily shapes emerge from her abstractions, and figures reappear in the pictures.
On occasion of Reigl’s centenary and the gift of three major works, the Neue Nationalgalerie mounts the artist’s first solo exhibition at a museum in Germany. The book surveys the oeuvre of one of the most important protagonists of European art in the second half of the twentieth century.
Judit Reigl studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Budapest from 1942 until 1945 and was a fellow at the Hungarian Academy in Rome in 1947–48. From 1950 onwards, she lived and worked in France.
-
Adrian Schiess
The Song Element68€ Add to cartThe Renowned Swiss Artist and His Work in Its Architectural Setting
Smoothly painted panels laid out on the floor have earned Adrian Schiess (b. 1959, Zurich; lives and works in Mouans-Sartoux, France) international renown. His objects, which may be placed in a room as desired, are conceived as platforms of creative engagement with the appearance and disappearance of painting. They have become integral components of buildings by world-famous architects including Norman Foster and Herzog & de Meuron. For this book, Schiess has compiled spectacular series of photographs and extensive conversations that probe the peculiar quality of his work: hybrid and fluctuating and yet always utterly distinctive. It is the first publication to put the focus on this essential aspect of his output, documenting works created between 1993 and 2018.
Adrian Schiess studied at the Kunstgewerbeschule Zürich and trained as a graphic designer. His works were on display at the 44th Biennale di Venezia and at documenta IX.
-
Spaces Embodied (ENGLISH)
Draiflessen Collection32€ Add to cartWe live in spaces that we shape in accordance with our own ideas. Our everyday lives leave traces in them that speak to our habits. Spaces promise shelter and belonging, but they can also instill a sense of constraint. We grow into the spaces we inhabit—and they in turn become expressions of our personalities. Conversely, spaces, depending on their architecture and location, inform our existence. RÄUME HAUTNAH gathers works of art that, rather than conceiving of the human sphere and the spatial domain as separate, comprehend them in their complex entanglements: in bodily experience, emotional dependency, or the instinctive need for protection. An essay by Olesja Nein, the project’s curator, offers an introduction to the exhibition and takes the reader on a tour, describing each artist’s space of activity and supplying helpful information. Philipp Zitzlsperger, meanwhile, zooms in on a key aspect of the art in the exhibition, the imprint as an artistic technique with a distinctive aura, and illuminates its origins and significance since the dawn of modernism.
Artists: Absalon, Shannon Bool, Heidi Bucher, Eileen Gray, Do Ho Suh, Mary Mattingly, Tracey Snelling, Francesca Woodman
