











Werner Schmidt
James Joyce und die Farben des Ulysses
![]() | |
|---|---|
| Design | Werner Schmidt and Frederik Zecheus |
| Size | 20 x 27 cm |
| Cover | Hardcover with debossing, bookmark ribbon and poster |
| Pages | 328 |
| Illustrations | ca. 243 |
| Language(s) | German, partly English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-242-6 |
This imposing volume is the fruit of the artist Werner Schmidt’s decades-long immersion in the preeminent literary monument of the twentieth century: James Joyce’s Ulysses.
What began as a personal reader’s voyage now attains definite form in an eloquently colorful, interdisciplinary and polyphonic tribute—a work between literary study, theory of color, visual art, and reflection on language.
In the book’s first part, Schmidt analyzes and visualizes the use of colors in Ulysses in unique chromatic diagrams and coded color stripes that were literally painted on the walls in exhibitions. They are complemented by a series of photographs taken in Dublin, the novel’s setting, and accompanied by probing meditations on literary and linguistic facets and aspects of politics and the history of religion in the Joycean universe.
The second part gathers the voices of twenty renowned Joyce scholars, who, in five thematically organized chapters, share their perspectives on the color, texture, structure, and effect of Ulysses.
A feast for all who revere Joyce—and a gift of anyone who would not just read but truly wrap their mind around literature in its boldest and most luminous incarnation.
With texts by Florian Arnold, Dorothée Bauerle-Willert, Erik Bindervoet, Heinz Brüggemann, Jakob Brüssermann, Michael Deckard, Toni Hildebrandt, Otto Jägersberg, Christa-Maria Lerm Hayes, Jūratė Levina, Susanne Peters, Christoph Poetsch, Saskia C. Quené, Dieter Ronte, Werner Schmidt, Fritz Senn, Dirk Teuber, Vega Tescari, Shane Walshe, Andreas Weigel, Keith Williams, Ursula Zeller
More books
-

Cahier 002
Silke Wagner. bürgersteig22€ Add to cartBetween 2001 and 2002, a VW bus bearing the inscription “Lufthansa Deportation Class” was on display in various German cities. It was part of the provocative bürgersteig action by Silke Wagner (born 1968, lives in Frankfurt) about Lufthansa providing aircraft for deportation purposes. The bus sparked heated debates and became a vehicle for activist networking and communication among citizens. The participatory art project was groundbreaking at the time in its collaboration with civil justice initiatives. Cahier 002 documents bürgersteig for the first time with all its aspects, disclosing the sources for the action as well as material on the legal conflicts that followed the project.
-

Larissa Kikol
Neue abstrakte Malerei26€ Add to cartAbstract painting has reinvented itself: rid of political and ideological burdens, it now stands for pure creative autonomy. From the Abstract Expressionism of the postwar era to today’s expansive ease—in essays and conversations, Larissa Kikol sheds light on how this art form broke free of the narratives that attended its emergence and performed a “great reset.” From the seminal innovations of Katharina Grosse or Albert Oehlen and radically subjectivist approaches in Cecily Brown or André Butzer to cutting-edge tendencies like Dirty Minimalism and Post Vandalism, the book presents thrilling insights into a painting that puts emotion, color, and shapes center stage. An inspiring look at the renaissance of abstract art in the 21st century and a must-have reference work for all art lovers.
Artists: Frederic Anderson, Karla Black, Frank Bowling, Andreas Breunig, Jenny Brosinski, Cecily Brown, André Butzer, Diamonds Crew, Willehad Eilers, Jadé Fadojutimi, Helen Frankenthaler, Katharina Grosse, Antwan Horfee, Aneta Kajzer, Joan Mitchell, Michael Müller, Oscar Murillo, NEU, NUG, Albert Oehlen, David Ostrowski, Over, Daisy Parris, Marco Pariani, Jackson Pollock, Christopher Wool
-

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.
- 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.
-

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!
-

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.
-

Simone Demandt
Movers / Beweger38€ Add to cartMotorways are Europe’s lifelines. The products we buy every day arrive on supermarket shelves after traveling along these arteries on the backs of thousands of trucks steered by hard-working drivers. Glancing up into the cabs of their hulking vehicles, we can just barely make out their heads sticking up above the steering wheels. In this overdue volume, Simone Demandt lets us see more of the heroes of the road who confidently posed for her camera. The pictures demonstrate Demandt’s knack for discovering “the intimate in the anonymous and the narrative element in the matter-of-factly” (Matthias Winzen). She has condensed the truckdrivers’ lifeworld into documentary black-and-white shots in which she shows these people as whole persons and individuals—very different from how we perceive them when they’re in the next lane. Movers lets us peek into the cabs through Demandt’s nonjudgmental lens, broadening our horizons hardly less than travelling would and helping us overcome our prejudices about teamsters. If you’ve always wanted to know whom we really have to thank for those never-empty supermarket shelves, you should not miss out on this book.
-

Hofmann’s Ways
Early Drawings (1898-1937)24,80€ Add to cartA Re-Discovery: the Early Graphic Work of Hans Hofmann
A representative of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann (b. 1880, Weißenburg; d. 1966, New York) was one of the most important artistic personalities of the 20th century. He began his career as a teacher and artist in the United States in the mid-1930s. The previously unpublished graphic oeuvre presents the highly varied development process that preceded Hans Hofmann’s influential painting of the post-war period.
-

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.).
-

Sam Falls
After Life45€ Add to cartSam Falls (b. San Diego, 1984; lives and works in New York) delegates the authorship of his works to the phenomena of nature. Applying water-reactive dry pigments or plant parts to support media like canvas, aluminum, or tiles and then exposing them to the effects of sun, rain, and wind at selected sites for extended periods, he deliberately integrates the agency of chance into his art. The playful yet conceptually rigorous process is a metaphor for the impermanence of all bodily existence. Falls’s symbiotic work with nature and its elements evinces references to the technique of the photogram as well as land art. Melding diverse media—photography, sculpture, and painting—he bridges the gulf between artist, object, and beholder.
Sam Falls studied at Reed College in Portland, Maine, and at the International Center of Photography Bard in New York. He has had numerous solo exhibitions, including at the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles, the Mori Museum, Tokyo, and Frankfurter Kunstverein.
-

Thomas Lehnerer
Freies Spiel44€ Add to cartThe function of art in human existence
Throughout his short life, the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (1955–1995) did not take the existence of art for granted. In his writings, above all in Methode der Kunst (Methods of Art), he developed a concept of art in the continuation of key texts from the fields of aesthetics, cultural theory, and art history, which can also be found in his own artistic work. The small-format figurative sculptures by Lehnerer, as well as his drawings, watercolors, and early installations, follow theoretical premises and address comprehensive themes of human existence. The present volume documents his examination of human existence, which is deepened by the inclusion of cultural historical figures and idols.
- Release January 2026

PULS 22
36€ Add to cartPULS, an initiative of Bukarest’s National Museum for Contemporary Art (MNAC) began during the COVID-crisis. Since then, the museum supports Romanian artists by biennially purchasing more than 100 relevant creative works, carefully selected from a large pool of submissions by a democratic jury of artists and art professionals. PULS22 showcases in book-form MNAC’s most recent acquisitions and their subsequent exhibition. This volume, like the former PULS20, is an exciting panoramic snapshot of the country’s dynamic multigenerational art scene. The installation shots speak of an outstanding exhibition and the potential for future loans to curated shows elsewhere.
-

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.
-

Maxim Gunga
10€ Add to cartThe painter Maxim Gunga is utterly unafraid of physicality. His canvas is a riot of oil paints huddling up against one another, fusing like the beasts, the humans, and the urban landscape of Berlin that serve him as motifs. Body and soul, animal nature and architecture, the profane and the sacred, subculture and mass culture—everything interpenetrates in Gunga’s paintings in large formats, melded into hybrid bodies. The result is an ecstatic intimacy, a flowing of colors and more or less abstracted dynamic forms toward their primal state, toward the matrix, toward pure energy: eternal transformation. It makes sense, then, that his pictures also amalgamate diverse styles and periods in the history of painting. He borrows from (Neo-)Expressionism, from Art Brut, from Baselitz, Lüpertz, the Neue Wilde, from modernism and Fauvism, from van Gogh and Matisse. His pinpoint brushwork, which reveals his extensive training, interweaves art history with our contemporary lifeworld and our affects. All the specters of the past and the present come to meet us in the pictures gathered in this catalogue, in a frenzy of the senses, in the primordial soup of Berlin, into which we dive with joyful abandon.
-

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.
-

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.
-

Cristina Lucas
Immobile Engine29€ Add to cartMechanisms of Power
The Spanish artist Cristina Lucas (b. Jaén, 1973; lives and works in Madrid) works in a wide range of media and genres. Central concerns include the confrontation of subjective and political historiographies and a critical examination of cultural stereotypes. The publication’s point of departure is the multichannel video installation Unending Lightning, begun in 2013, in which Lucas undertakes a painstaking study of the history of aerial warfare. The book also showcases works that limn a contemporary perspective on value chains and the capitalization of time and landscape. Moreover, the artist has developed a corpus of critical cartographic models that offer algorithmic, philosophical, poetic, or, in some instances, humorous visualizations of unexpected nexuses. The first German-language publication on Cristina Lucas’s art, it offers a comprehensive survey of her oeuvre to date.
Cristina Lucas studied fine arts at the University of California and the Universidad Complutense, Madrid. She has had residencies in Paris, Amsterdam, and New York. Her work has been exhibited at MUDAM, Luxembourg; the Museo de Arte Contemporaneo, Santiago de Chile, and the Museo Nacional Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid; Kiasma, Helsinki; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris, among others.
- Release November 2022

X x X
Semjon Contemporary50€ Add to cartFounded by Semjon H. N. Semjon in 2011, the gallery Semjon Contemporary has built a distinctive and singular profile that has earned it an unrivaled position in the art world. It represents international positions in contemporary art that, their divergences notwithstanding, are united by the extraordinary intelligence of their engagement with the material. The result is an unmistakable visual language that permits of no modification of established choices. Despite the considerable differences of material, technique, and expression, the artists’ works enter into dialogue with one another, as parallel solo presentations and special exhibitions showcasing numerous visiting artists have demonstrated.
The book features Colin Ardley, Edward L. Buchanan, Takayuki Daikoku, Dittmar Danner aka Krüger, Ute Essig, Experimental Setup (Kata Hinterlechner and Bosko Gastager’s collective moniker), Katja Flint, Andreas Fux, Dave Grossmann, Renate Hampke, Marc von der Hocht, Nataly Hocke, Michael Kutschbach, Henrik U. Müller, Cornelia Nagel, Susanne Knaack, Katja Kollowa, Susanne Pomrehn, Thomas Prochnow, Dirk Rathke, Ursula Sax, Gerda Schütte, Gil Shachar, Li Silberberg, Karina Spechter, Klaus Steinmann, Stefan Thiel, Hitomi Uchikura, Royden Watson, and Bettina Weiß in dedicated chapters. It is rounded out by statements from collectors including Thomas Lenhart, Cornelie Kunkat, Gabriele Quandt, Roland Schnell, Nobert Fuhr and Klaus Werner, Roswitha and Jürgen König, and Helmut Ließ. Remarks by art critics and scholars and an interview with Semjon by Jan Maruhn provide additional insight into the gallery’s work.
-

GABRIELE BASCH, GESA LANGE
UND_NEWS_FROM_NOW_HERE18€ Add to cartBeyond Painting
Gabriele Basch’s (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) cut-outs and Gesa Lange’s (b. 1972, Tongeren, Belgium; lives and works in Hamburg) drawings are meditations on construction and deconstruction as well as doubts and how to overcome them. Both artists expand the range of painting: Basch, with incisions into the medium and a creative handling of the tinged shadows that transform the painted panel into a wall-mounted object; Lange, by embroidering her canvases with colorful threads that open up the pictorial space on all sides. The book presents works by both artists, initiating an animated and dynamic dialogue between their nonrepresentational visual idioms. Gabriele Basch is professor of painting at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. Gesa Lange is professor of graphic art at the Hochschule für Angewandte Wissenschaften Hamburg. She has received the Kunsthalle Rostock Prize and other awards.
-

ELASTE
1980 – 198649€ Add to cartThe story of ELASTE is the story of a movement – that of the New Wave generation in West Germany. Founded in 1980 in Hanover, the magazine was a beacon of cultural revolt and the first glossy indie magazine of the Federal Republic: self-published, a statement somewhere between pop avant-garde, subversion, and a sharp sense of style. Among those who shaped the look and spirit of the magazine were Jon Savage, Ellen von Unwerth, and Diedrich Diederichsen. No other magazine operated at the intersection of music, fashion, and society quite like ELASTE — with headliners such as Warhol, The Rolling Stones, and Kraftwerk. This book by the magazine’s editors Thomas Elsner and Michael Reinboth, looks back — at the pioneering spirit, the minds, and the stories behind the magazine.
Incl. download code card for 14 tracks from ELASTE RECORDS






















