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
-
Pharaonengold
3.000 Jahre altägyptische Hochkultur27,50€ Add to cartThe Mysterious World of the Pharaohs and their Magical Relationship to Gold
Hardly any other culture fascinates as much as the high culture of ancient Egypt. At its center were the pharaohs, those legendary kings who, according to the beliefs of the ancient Egyptians, descended directly from the gods. Gold was ascribed a special symbolic and religious power; it stood for eternity and indestructibility and, as the “flesh of the gods,” was a sacred metal. The book brings together 150 exhibits from pharaonic tombs from the Old Kingdom of the Third Dynasty (circa 2680 B.C.E.) and the oldest gold statue of an Egyptian pharaoh to Tutankhamun and Horemheb (circa 1330–1310 B.C.E.).
-
João Onofre
Untitled (in awe of)25€ Add to cartJoão Onofre’s works are tributes to art history and pop. He gleans what is in danger of being lost right now, realigns it, and translates it into something sublime. His art encourages the beholders to reconsider a past that has faded in collective memory with a critical eye and make peace with it. His creative process is guided by the material and a clearly defined concept that nonetheless does not restrict a work’s finding its own way. That is why he does not commit to a particular medium, making videos, performances, installations, and much more. What all his works have in common is that they probe the limitations of their medium and our perceptive capacities in novel ways. This catalogue presents three recent works in which the essence of Onofre’s art becomes manifest: he molds myths and symbols into awe-inspiring images, sounds, and forms—not for nothing have critics labeled him an alchemist. In the catalogue, his tangible compressions of cultural history are rendered in imposing pictures and flanked by an ambitious essay that places them in their context.
- Release January 2026
Bettina Buck
Finding Form45€ Add to cartThe German sculptor Bettina Buck (1974-2017) called attention to herself with her “performative sculptures,” which she often presented vis-à-vis museal objects. Buck’s preferred materials came from the hardware store: corrugated cardboard, ceramic tiles, pressed foam, or plastic foil, which are all not meant to last. Out of these materials she created a kind of changeable and transient “protagonists,” who didn’t have a final form but rather emphasized the actual process of finding form (as well as losing form). In a provocative action in 2015, Buck dragged an oversized foam bloc through a museum collection and let it rest next to famous artworks, which gained a new dynamic in this interplay. Buck herself said once that her works were meant to “simultaneously attract and alienate the viewer.” In the exhibition space the objects should “create a tremor, a vibration and a conversation with its surroundings.”
Finding Form, a posthumous monograph presents Bucks complete sculptural works on over 300 pages and contains texts by Phyllida Barlow, Paolo Icaro, Cecilia Canziani, and Andrea Maria Popelka. The book was conceived and published by the artist’s estate, Bureau Bettina Buck.
-
Dietmar Lutz
Ein Jahr40€ Add to cartDay by Day
For a full year, from August 2020 until August 2021, Dietmar Lutz (b. Ellwangen, 1968; lives and works in Düsseldorf) painted or drew a picture every day in which he rendered a scene or detail from his day-to-day life. All 365 works appear here in chronological sequence, either in reproductions or in photographs showing them in the setting in which they were created. Taken together, the series constitutes a radically subjective review of one year. The paintings capture memories, but although they invariably owe their existence to a particular situation, they do not necessarily frame it as a memorable event. The artist observes himself in his world and defines his role in it. Painting as a daily task seems to structure time rather than the other way around. Each picture opens up a new space in which the different facets of time manifest themselves to the senses.
Dietmar Lutz studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Fine Arts and rose to renown with large-format paintings in which he portrays situations from ordinary life and weaves references to the histories of film and literature. Lutz is a cofounder of the German-British artists’ collective hobbypopMuseum, with which he has exhibited at the 1st Athens Biennale; Deitch Projects, New York; Tate Britain, London; and elsewhere.
-
Andreas Wegner
Wir fahren mit der Schneckenpost, weil die uns keinen Pfennig kost50€ Add to cartThe art of Andreas Wegner is an inquiry into capitalist urbanity. His interventions explore alternative models for urban interaction, trade, city development, traffic, or the use of public space. Inspired by Joseph Beuys’s social sculpture and Charles Fourier’s social utopias, Wegner founded, e.g. a cooperative department store in Berlin, a grocery store in Vienna, and conducted real estate business as a form of creative resistance. This monograph illustrates the artist’s most important projects with ample imagery, essays by renowned authors, interviews, and his own texts. Alongside collective initiatives, installations, photography, film, and sculpture, painting remains a constant in Wegner’s oeuvre to this day.
-
GOTT&GILZ
Supernatural Beings54€ Add to cartGOTT&GILZ clothe provocative nudity into the guise of art-historical classics
The female nude is a constant of art history whose vicissitudes illustrate changing forms of representation and the wild swings of public morality. Many a nude was initially condemned as smut only to be reclassified a few years later as beautiful and becoming and inducted into the hallowed halls (the opposite has also happened). GOTT&GILZ’s photographic paintings build on this long tradition of depictions of naked women by men—theirs is the proverbial “male gaze.” It is a debt they are quick to acknowledge, with nods to Klimt, Schiele, Pollock, et al. No wonder some have responded to their work with kneejerk indignation. Unlike in those art-historical references, then, the impudence lies not in the shattering of traditional norms of representation but in quoting them: the past as affront. The women in the pictures as well as the artists themselves flaunt their desires, shamelessly and relentlessly confronting us with the historic roots of our social and psychological realities.
Freedom is the key idea in the two artists’ oeuvre: the freedom to be authentic and express oneself without shame. Their subtly provocative play with aesthetic conventions and taboos has not only made a splash on the arts scene, it has also prompted vital discussions about gender roles, body images, and the right to sexual self-determination.
By letting it all hang out, they allow us to see ourselves as we are instead of presenting a picture of what we (supposedly) should be like. The insolence of it!
-
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.
-
Roland Schappert
Coronasehnsucht14€ Add to cartThe coronavirus pandemic hit us in a time of disparate foci of attention. A fundamental lack of comprehension and hate speech contrast sharply with an unspoken consonance of ideas as well as feelings. What do reality, statistics, love, and yearnings do to us? They are playing a game with reality, sans fiction. Relationships sustain our lives. What was unmistakable before is now manifest, with stark certainty. Are we ready for loving dissension? Can we bear to think only as far ahead as we can see? How do our emotions answer these questions, and how does our intellect? The Cologne visual artist and writer Roland Schappert retraces his personal voyage through this sun-kissed rain-drenched time. The book is a diary-like tour de force of digital amorous overtures, an attempt to explain the world of art via WhatsApp, and the real challenges of life as a single artist in a major German city in precarious circumstances.
-
Cahier #1
Heinz Gappmayr22€ Add to cartDo we think in images or in language? Can writing visualize time? Heinz Gappmayr (1925-2010) was interested in text as a spatial event and in letters as architecture. Although his works were often presented in the context of Visual Poetry, Gappmayr himself preferred the more neutral term text to lyricism. His understanding of written language as a conceptual medium and typography as an indicator of physicality was closer to Lawrence Weiner’s approach than to that of the Concrete Poets. This volume accompanies an exhibition at the Tiroler Landesmuseum and includes Gappmayer’s most important art-in-architecture projects, as well as a complete notebook from 1961, with commentary by Gaby Gappmayr, the artist’s daughter. A conversation with her provides valuable philosophical insights into her father’s work.
-
Beate Passow
Monkey Business24€ Add to cartDrawing on the Past to Build a Better Future
Beate Passow (b. Stadtoldendorf, Germany, 1945; lives and works in Munich) creates installations, photodocumentaries, and collages that seek to salvage her subjects from oblivion, though as she sees it, her art is an effort to come to terms not so much with the past as with the present. When her compositional inventions touch on painful memories, their objective is not to arrive at new insights. Rather, she aims to uncover visible and verifiable states of affairs and throw them into sharp relief. In her cycle of pictures Monkey Business, the artist unfolds a mysterious fairy-tale world with a political edge. Strange animals and mythical figures populate the large-format black-and-white tableaux, which a closer look reveals to be woven tapestries. The unusual protagonists roam readily identifiable locations: Gibraltar, New York’s Wall Street, Brussels, or the island of Lampedusa. Behind these ostensibly simple facts of geography loom the darker aspects of contemporary European politics: Passow’s work calls for a debate on the systems, economic structures, and political movements that rule the continent.
- Release January 2026
Valentina Jaffé
Dripping Folds and Melting States23€ Add to cartDripping Folds and Melting States is published in conjunction with the young artist Valentina Jaffé’s most extensive institutional solo exhibition to date. Blending artist’s book and catalogue, the volume gathers works from the past five years by Jaffé, who lives and works in the Rhine–Neckar metropolitan region. Taking an interdisciplinary and inter-media approach, she continually refines the conception of collage that is central to her art. Her creative universe is informed by intersections, imbrications, and the exploration of in-between states—by the concurrence of mutability and constancy.
Created out of long-fibered paper and awash in color, the artist’s visual spaces are transformed with each new environment and have an air of breathing membranes. Her ceramics, meanwhile, play with contrasts of hardness and softness, fragility and stability, coldness and warmth. The book reflects Jaffé’s multifaceted experimentation and is enhanced by scholarly contributions by Carolin Heel and Fedra Benoli, who add depth to her engagement with space, body, and material.
-
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.
-
wolfgang thiel
skulpturale standpunkte38€ Add to cartWolfgang Thiel (b. Zweibrücken, 1952; lives and works in Plochingen) is a sculptor who makes figurative work. He is especially interested in the southern German tradition of colorfully painted sculpture, which he seeks to bring into the twenty-first century. His experimental handling of various genres and materials suggests a researcher’s mind. Switching between different materials is key to Thiel’s approach because their particular characteristics demand his constant attention. Å playful aspect is essential to all his works, which include large-format sculptures in public settings (more than thirty have been installed in Germany) as well as sculptural garden landscapes, stage designs, and costumes.
The opulent wide-format book containing almost three hundred illustrations offers a representative overview of Wolfgang Thiel’s oeuvre and includes the first complete chronological catalogue raisonné of his works in wood.
Wolfgang Thiel studied at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design from 1970 until 1976 and later taught at his alma mater from 1987 until 1991. From 2008 until 2018, he held a teaching position at the Hochschule für Technik Stuttgart. In 1990, he won the Art Award of the City of Stuttgart. Since 1977, Thiel’s work has been showcased in numerous solo exhibitions in Switzerland, France, and Germany.
-
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.
-
Cudelice Brazelton IV
Mortal Surface35€ Add to cartCudelice Brazelton IV’s works are magnets. He uses them to glean what he finds in the urban landscape, in the street, in factories and studios: fabric, leather, metal, cardboard, and all sorts of implements. He arranges these materials and things atop one another and side by side in collages, assemblages, and sculptures, staging encounters also between the contexts in which they originated and what he calls their “undercurrents,” their subtexts. Such frames of reference, including that of the exhibition space, play a key role in his art, an aspect he will occasionally engage quite explicitly, creating site-specific works for some settings. This makes the space the context and a part of the piece, sometimes physically so, as when Brazelton works directly on the walls. The recent works gathered in this catalogue were displayed in a former railcar repair workshop. It is hard to imagine a more industrial, “metallic” environment. There, as between the covers of this catalogue, Brazelton’s works appear to their fullest advantage, becoming veritable magnets drawing the gaze.
-
Elsa Salonen
Stories Told by Stones15€ Add to cart“I find the question of a consciousness of stones genuinely inspiring, captivating, and provocative!”
Elsa Salonen (b. 1984, Turku; lives and works in Berlin and Finland) produces colored crystals from the pigments of flowers, draws stellar constellations with finely ground meteorite dust on glass, or distils liquid from plants. The Finnish artist experiments with a wide range of “poetic” materials, reviving lost animistic rituals and magical practices. Her subtle works in the field of tension between installa-tion, painting, and conceptual art combine mysti-cism with science, ancient knowledge with recent findings — supported by a great respect for nature. This volume documents her artistic search for consciousness as the primary source of all physical matter.
-
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.
-
Joanna Pousette-Dart
32€ Read more„A kind of Dialogue between Myself and the Horizon.“
The works of Joanna Pousette-Dart (b. 1947, New York; lives and works in New York) are deeply rooted in the vast expanse of the American desert landscape, without ever committing themselves to a strict objectivity. As early as the 1970s, the artist abandoned the rectangular form of her canvas in favor of dynamically balanced panels that open out to the respective space. This volume presents her fascinating paintings from 2004 till 2019, which oscillate between landscape and abstraction, line and form. Born in New York to abstract expressionist painter and founding member of the New York School of painting, Richard Pousette-Dart, Joanna Pousette-Dart’s experience as a painter rises from rich tradition. Her work is held in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, amongst others.
-
10 Jahre Württembergische Volksbühne
Reprint der Festschrift von 192915€ Add to cartCentennial Publication of the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen
In 2019, the Württembergische Landesbühne Esslingen (WLB)—one of the oldest regional theatres in Germany—is celebrating its 100th anniversary. On the occasion of this anniversary, the tenth commemorative publication by the Württembergische Volksbühne from 1929 is being reprinted. The unique document of the time visualizes in a special way the important role that the topics of cultural education and culture in rural areas, which are still relevant today, played in the young Weimar Republic immediately after the First World War. The brochure also documents both the mission and the daily work of the theater. In addition, the reprint is complemented by an essay from Joachim J. Halbekann, the principal of municipal archive of Esslingen, providing—for the first time in the history of the WLB—a comprehensive historical essay that examines the time betweeen 1919 and 1933/34.
-
B.A.R.O.C.K.
24,80€ Add to cartArtistic Interventions in the Caputh Palace. Contemporary Parallels to the Baroque Era
Four international women artists spent more than three years studying Caputh Palace near Potsdam and creating works specifically for this magnificent location. The tapestries by Margret Eicher (b. 1955, Viersen; lives and works in Berlin), the floral scans by Luzia Simons (b. 1953, Quixadá, Brazil; lives and works in Berlin), the wax sculptures by Rebecca Stevenson (b. 1971; lives and works in London), and the ceiling painting projections by Myriam Thyes (b. 1963, Luxembourg; lives and works in Düsseldorf) blend into the surrounding space both naturally and surprisingly. With twelve double-page collages, the large-sized catalog is an artistic commentary on the ambitious project.
