Winston Roeth
Speed of Light
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Museum Wiesbaden, Jörg Daur, Lea Schäfer |
| Author(s) | Jörg Daur, Andrew Jensen, Lea Schäfer |
| Design | Frank Bernhard Übler |
| Cover | Hardcover with flush cut |
| Size | 24 x 30 cm |
| Pages | 136 |
| Illustrations | 109 color and 2 b/w |
| Language(s) | German, English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-010-1 |
Color Is Light
Intense monochrome areas of color, radiant pigments, and multifaceted surfaces are the characteristics of the art of Winston Roeth (b. Chicago, 1945; lives and works in Beacon, New York, and Waldoboro, Maine). He has devoted himself to abstract color field painting since the 1970s, with the grid as a leitmotif running through his oeuvre; both are fraught with painterly memories of light, “a light that can jump out and grasp the beholders, a color saturation that throbs with a deep glow,” as the artist himself puts it. It emanates from the strata of paint in his pictures, encountering the light that, falling upon his works, molds their chromatic effect. Roeth experiments with pure pigments, which he mixes by hand to make paints he applies in layers to diverse media including paper, aluminum, honeycomb, slate, and wood panels. The book documents a tour of an exhibition, presenting works dating from between the early 1990s and 2020.
More books
-
Susanne Rottenbacher
Radiationen40€ Add to cartIn expansive compositions in light, Susanne Rottenbacher (b. Göttingen, 1969; lives and works in Berlin) visualizes the fire of life in its timebound and fluid dimension. Plotinus called fire the “spiritual potency of beauty.” Pursuing a similar vision, Rottenbacher’s works orchestrate light as energy in space. To this end, the artist, who studied light and stage design in the United States and the United Kingdom, creates weightless luminous choreographies realized in colorful LED technology in combination with acrylic glass as a translucent vehicle of form. The results are installations in three dimensions that are deeply silent yet unfold in a magical ecstasy of light.
In Christian sacred architecture, light has been deployed and perceived since the Middle Ages as the aesthetic equivalent of the divine mind’s lucidity. The history of light art, by contrast, is much younger, going back to the years after the First World War. Having built her creative practice over the past fifteen years, Rottenbacher not only continues a century-old tradition of light art in Europe and the U.S.; her works also anticipate a future in which humanity will have room for feelings no less than for scientific knowledge.
-
Justine Otto
New Traditionalists38€ Add to cartJustine Otto (b. Zabrze, Poland, 1974; lives and works in Hamburg and Berlin) is one of the most promising artists on the contemporary painting scene. An aficionado of the absurd, she unfolds a metaphysical-psychedelic and often gaudily lustrous cosmos in pictures in which representation clashes with abstraction. In her early work, girls, women, and animals were here preferred subjects; more recently, she has painted heroes—the protagonists in myths of masculinity. After generals, officers, and strategists, she has now turned her attention to cowboys, who appear on horseback or resting under a tree, musical instrument in hand.
Justine Otto studied fine art and painting with Peter Angermann and Michael Krebber at the State Academy of Fine Arts (Städelschule) in Frankfurt am Main and obtained an MFA in 2003. She also worked as a scene designer at Städtische Bühnen Frankfurt, the city’s municipal theater company. Her paintings are held by collections including the Hessisches Landesmuseum, Darmstadt; Museum Franz Gertsch, Burgdorf, Switzerland; and the Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Fragmente eines Ängstlichen28€ Add to cartA Novel on Coping with Guilt or the Feeling of Having Violated Life
The filmmaker Castner and the anthropologist Pollock not only share the similarity of their names with those of Castor and Pollux, the fabled twins of Greek myth, but also a hard fate: an irreparable guilt whose motifs run through the entire novel. Pollock is forced to admit to himself that, in his role as a scientist, he was involved in a genocide against indigenous people in Panama; Castner, meanwhile, tries to get a handle on his bouts of excessive hypochondria. In episodic flashbacks and an interview that gradually turns into an emotional dispute between them, the two characters analyze the minutiae of their life stories and arrive at a surreal insight.
Castor and Pollux were known in antiquity as the patrons of sailors, who took their bearings from the twins’ constellation. That is why water figures in this novel as the element that unites all narrative planes. Water—like life—will fill any vacant space regardless of shape and adapt to all circumstances.
Stephan Kaluza (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) is a visual artist, working in the media of photography and painting, and a writer whose output includes plays, novels, and nonfiction books. The philosophy of nature is a central theme in both Kaluza’s art and his fiction.
- Release March 2025
Kensise Anders
10€ Add to cartKensise Anders’s work grapples with the reality of Black people’s lives. Born in Haiti, she was adopted by a German family when she was two. After a difficult childhood, with stints in a psychiatric institution and a boarding school, she eventually found art as a medium that lets her work through her experiences. She uses the crochet needle to create masks with which she ironically appropriates white identities and play carpets that show the world of her childhood—apartment blocks, streets; the “hole,” as she calls this environment. She also arranges crocheted threads on the canvas as though they were brushstrokes. One series of pictures is dedicated to a Black doll; another, to naked female bodies, including the artist’s own, with references to Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866). The works are acts of resistance to the prudishness of whites. Black dolls became popular in this country during the colonial era and never quite went away, like the racism in our society and in our heads. Anders’s weapon against that racism is the crochet needle, which she wields patiently and with flair as well as the necessary radicalism.
-
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.
-
Photography of Presence
24€ Add to cartThe Importance of the Moment in Artistic Photography
Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. “There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment,” Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible.
With works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn as well as texts by Holger Kube Ventura.
-
CHRISTIAN ROTHMANN
The Light Touch45€ Add to cartA Monograph of Curiosity
Christian Rothmann (b. Kędzierzyn, Poland, 1954; lives and works in Berlin) is an artistic jack-of-all-trades, a builder of bridges between cultures, and a restless globetrotter and traveler across time. He takes photographs wherever he goes, especially when he is on the road, gathering documentaries with a creative edge, spontaneous yet powerfully symbolic pictures, or conceptual series. His motifs have included basketball hoops in the most unbelievable places, toys in restaurants and stores, exotic dishes, and—in the sequence Legs of the World—beautiful legs, of real-world women, but also of advertising-poster idols and art objects. He has a special knack for recruiting accomplices from all age groups and across social and cultural differences, as for his series you and me or Mother & Daughter. Fierce large-format paintings and delicate watercolors on small paper formats from Rothmann’s studio in Berlin-Kreuzberg complement his long-term photographic projects. The Light Touch presents the artist’s variegated visual art on almost five hundred pages.
-
Gabriele Basch
fortuna24€ Add to cartPaper and Foil Cut‑Outs in an Innovative Language of Forms: An Overview of the Works of Gabriele Basch from 2008 to 2019
Since the 1990s, Gabriele Basch (b. 1964, Bad Homburg; lives and works in Berlin) has been working with cut-outs and translating the age-old tradition of silhouettes into an idiosyncratic and innovative language of forms. The artist interweaves creation and destruction, planning and chance into a complex, multi-layered reality and makes views into the spatial environment an integral part of her work. In her paper and foil cut-outs, foreground and background, materiality and void combine to form a whole that oscillates between painting and drawing, as well as between urban structures and hints of the biomorphic – in delicate color gradients, swirling structures, spontaneous gestures, and stenciled surfaces. The generously illustrated monograph offers a comprehensive overview of the artist’s work from 2008 to 2019.
-
Art in a Conflicted World
34€ Add to cartTrans-European Perspectives in the Age of Cultural Fragmentation
Since the turn of the millennium, much of the world has become an increasingly unstable and dissonant place. Sharp disruptions define many aspects of our social, cultural, and political relations. Art in a Conflicted World addresses this evolving reality, featuring critical positions articulated by visual artists and writers from Ukraine, Russia, and Great Britain—regions embroiled in extraordinary strife and upheaval. The publication takes a frank look at these multifaceted states of social dissonance and reflects them in diverse artistic and literary inquiries and responses. The contributions are the fruits of an interdisciplinary fellowship program at Kulturstiftung Schloss Wiepersdorf that offers the participants an opportunity to gain fresh creative and cultural insights, test ways of engaging with complexity, and develop models for the future that transcend national boundaries.
The publication presents works by Sarah Dobai, Nikita Kadan, Ali Eisa, and Sebastian Lloyd Rees (Lloyd Corporation) as well as writings by Alisa Ganieva and Tanya Zaharchenko.
The project was mentored by Wolfgang Tillmans, Tom McCarthy, Katharina Raabe, and Mark Gisbourne and received funding support from the German Federal Foreign Office.
- Release January 2025
Stephan Grunenberg
10€ Add to cartStephan Grunenberg (b. 1954) paints peculiar portraits: not heads or sitting and reclining figures but seemingly independent feet, legs, trousers, socks or soles of shoes. These and other under-appreciated motives are playfully arranged in captivating compositions which take issue with our hierarchical habits while looking at art. “Leaving out the ‘civilized’, educated head and centering on neglected parts such as the legs, including the lower abdomen—which is either eroticized or made taboo—is the artist’s point”, writes Oliver Koerner von Gustorf in an essay that accompanies the images inside this small and attractive new book. The paintings reproduced in this volume were all exhibited in Grunenberg’s latest exhibition in 2024, which was titled tongue-in-cheek „Representatives Regional To Earth.”
-
Fahar Al-Salih
Beyond Fairy Tales39€ Add to cartBridges between East and West
The protection and sense of belonging one feels where one is at home, and what it is like to lose both of them: these are central concerns in the art of Fahar Al-Salih (b. Belgrade, 1964; lives and works in Karlsruhe). Having grown up in Kuwait, where a classical education in visual art was inconceivable, Al-Salih came late to his métier; Markus Lüpertz was among his teachers, and he completed his education in Hermann Nitsch’s master class. Seeing himself as a “bridge-builder” between the cultures of the Arab world and Europe, Al-Salih probes the different lived realities in which his itinerant biography has been set. No more linear than his path through life, his oeuvre is defined by subjects to which he keeps returning in a kind of cyclical motion. This publication offers unprecedented insight into Al-Salih’s creative approach and his articulations of individual yearnings, the comforts of safety, and political and social upheavals. His work achieves a deft interweaving of global perspectives and migrant realities.
-
André Butzer
Miettinen Collection30€ Add to cartAndré Butzer (b. Stuttgart, 1973; lives in Berlin) rose to renown with pictures he describes as “science fiction expressionism” and iconic characters like the “Peace Siemense,” the “Men of Shame,” or the “Woman” as well as seemingly abstract compositions. Artistic predecessors he admires and emulates include Walt Disney, Edvard Munch, Henri Matisse, Friedrich Hölderlin, and Henry Ford. Butzer’s utopian artistic vision is anchored in the fictional place “NASAHEIM”, a kind of pilgrimage destination in outer space. Yet his paintings should not be mistaken for illustrations of narrative structures; they articulate something that could not be said before. Similes of a sort, they embody the forever recurring extremes of history as emblems of human existence.
André Butzer briefly studied at the Merz Akademie, Stuttgart, before enrolling at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts (HFBK), from which he was expelled after two semesters in 1996. He went on to found the autonomous and anti-institutional Akademie Isotrop (1996–2000), where over twenty artists including Markus Selg, Jonathan Meese, and, in loose association, John Bock trained one another. In 2001, Butzer teamed up with Björn Dahlem to establish the Institute for SDI Dream Research.
-
Matilde Damele
New York 1999-201435€ Add to cartNew York and street photography were made for each other, which is why Matilde Damele (b. Bologna; lives and works in Rome), a master of the genre, left home for the big city in the late 1990s. She spent fifteen years in New York, and now her forays have congealed in this singular picture book. The light, the skyscraper-lined avenues, the pedestrians hurrying past and their loneliness in crowds—nimbly wielding her camera, Damele recorded all of it in classic black and white. The result is an outstanding portrait of a forward-looking metropolis that continually draws our attention to its past.
-
America! America!
How real is real?38€ Add to cartMyths, Projections, Aspirations
In times of fake news and alternative facts it is becoming even more clear how the American Dream is closely interwoven with emotional pictures and symbols. At the same time, it can be said that no other nation might have the same strong awareness of the power of images. Images of the American Way of Life, which are produced in media and entertainment, are able to consolidate existing power structures and perceptions of reality, but also question them in a radical way. The psychologically charged canvasses of Eric Fischl, the hermetic scenes of Alex Katz, the enormous film-noir-like graffiti paintings of Robert Longo dissect the dreams and fears of an insecure white middle class. Simultaneously, artists such as Jeff Wall or Cindy Sherman conquer scenes that critically reflect our media-influenced perception, becoming models for subsequent generations. By showing 70 masterpieces of US-contemporary art, the book shows how artists from the 1960s to date comment on the American reality.
-
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.
-
SOMA
Collective SineUmbra18€ Add to cartOn the Disappearance of Italian Culture
Under the collective label SineUmbra, the artists Luisa Eugeni (b. Assisi, Italy, 1987; lives and works in Berlin) and Mattia Bonafini (b. Legnago, Italy, 1980; lives and works in Bremen) develop interdisciplinary projects that they realize as sprawling multimedia installations comprising video projections, sound, and performative elements. The point of departure for their project SOMA was Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1975 essay Disappearance of the Fireflies, which probes the wrenching transformation that Italian society and the country’s very landscapes have undergone since the 1960s. SOMA melds performance art, the visitors’ movements, geography, and psychology in a space of experience that speaks to all senses for an exploration of the impact that traumata inflicted on individuals and communities by natural disasters and social changes have on the human soul and perceptual capacities. In keeping with the artists’ collective and dynamic creative vision, the catalogue embeds the multimedia installation in a context fleshed out by rich photographic documentation and numerous texts.
On occasion of the master class graduate exhibition at the Bremen University of the Arts in 2019, the two artists were awarded the renowned Karin Hollweg Prize for Fine Art. The publication accompanies their first solo show at Kunsthalle Bremen.
-
Felix Schramm
Things To Come44€ Add to cartFelix Schramm’s (b. Hamburg, 1970; lives and works in Düsseldorf) sculptural oeuvre reflects a probing engagement with space and the body. In works in a variety of media, including installations that intervene into a given setting, sculptures, and collages, the artist creates three-dimensional forms out of classical materials and industrial staples as well as detritus and dust. Deformations, rifts, cracks, or impurities undermine the existing order in his constructed formal ensembles, allowing novel correspondences in space and interconnections across time to emerge. The material and its subjection to form are held in a precarious balance; disintegration, which is an integral element of Schramm’s art, paves the way for artistic assertion and reformulation. The extensive publication gathers works and exhibitions of the past five years. It is Schramm’s first monograph, presenting a cross-section of his entire oeuvre with all bodies of work.
Felix Schramm studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti, Florence, from 1991 until 1993 and at the Academy of Fine Arts Düsseldorf, where he was in Jannis Kounellis’s master class, from 1994 until 1998. He rounded out his education with residencies in Tokyo in 2000 and at Villa Massimo in Rome in 2008.
- Out of stock
Thomas Lehnerer
Grott18€ Read moreA Facsimile by the Theologian and Artist
The genesis of images is a central aspect of the work of the Munich-based theologian and artist Thomas Lehnerer (b. Munich, 1955; d. ibid., 1995). In drawings and sculptures, as well as in spatial and conceptual works, the production of images creates a counter-world to our own lives. By transferring fundamental experiences of human existence into art, Lehnerer creates an equivocal, anthropological space for observation and reflection. The artist’s book Grott, published in 1986, contains ambiguous elements. All drawings are positioned on the right page. In the not yet dried state, a double image was formed on the left side, which relativizes the “primary image.” The depictions of animals, people, and the environment were drawn nearly without interruption from a single line. In this style of continuous movement, the overall image can be traced back to its beginning. For Lehnerer, it was important to understand human (self-)consciousness from the perspective of the history of evolution, since there are countless models of thought and belief within this narrative. Grott refers in the title, as well as in the drawings, to the charged relationship between the earthly and the spiritual.
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (ENGLISH)28€ Add to cartThe sculptor and object artist Liam Gillick (b. Aylesbury, UK, 1964; lives and works in New York) has created an intervention titled Filtered Time for the historic galleries of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin. Projections of light and color and acoustic effects condense six thousand years of cultural history into an immersive spatial experience. Gillick initiates a conversation between the iconic Processional Way and the Ishtar Gate from Babylon, the monumental sculptures of Tell Halaf, and other exhibits, engendering new layers of meaning across all historical periods. The first joint project of the Vorderasiatisches Museum and the Hamburger Bahnhof—Nationalgalerie der Gegenwart makes for a singular visual and sensory experience. Designed by the artist himself, the publication not only documents the richly colorful production, but also provides insight into the eventful history of the museum, which is approaching its centennial.
Liam Gillick studied at the Hertfordshire College of Art in 1983–1984 and at Goldsmiths, University of London from 1984 until 1987. Gillick is a prolific published writer as well, producing essays, reviews, fiction, and theatrical scenarios.
-
Katharina Arndt
While waiting for Death38€ Add to cartLife for the most part consists of banalities. What to make of it? Katharina Arndt has decided to dip thick brushes into luminous bold acrylic paints, which she applies expansively without regard for the ostensible gray areas of life. Every stroke is valid, there’s no remorse or trepidation, everything is foreground, all elements of a picture are equipollent. The people in Arndt’s paintings from 2022–23 gathered in this catalog are simply there, for the moment, gaping into their cell phones, stuffing themselves with burgers. Nothing more. That makes her works distorted depictions of our hedonistic society with its craving for sensuality, even as we always have one eye riveted on the virtual. The harder, then, to face up to physical reality; with all photo filters off, its imperfections are unmistakable. And so, although we clearly delight in these gaudy colors, the pictures contain intimations of melancholy and death, too. Knowing that the hour of farewell is near, Arndt’s figures stimulate their senses. They kill time down to the very end with jarring trivia, agitated Sisyphuses wallowing in their glittering inadequacy.
