


Wolfgang Gäfgen
Photographic Miracles
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| Author(s) | Christian Gögger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad, Michel Poivert |
| Design | Bureau Progressiv, Benjamin Kivikoski |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover |
| Size | 24 x 29 cm |
| Pages | 304 |
| Illustrations | 245 |
| Language(s) | German, English, French |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-024-8 |
A Mysterious Play of Light and Shadow
While Wolfgang Gäfgen’s (b. Hamburg, 1936; lives and works in Stuttgart and Esslingen) hand drawings and woodprints are widely acclaimed, only connoisseurs are familiar with his photographic oeuvre. The extensive body of analog black-and-white and color photographs spans the decades from the late 1960s to the present and is no less accomplished than the artist’s graphic works and prints. This book, with essays by Christian Gögger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad and Michel Poivert, is the first to gather a large selection of these pictures, illustrating the interdependencies between works in the different visual media of expression. Artfully arranged still lifes breathe a spectral animation into ostensibly trivial everyday objects. The human figures that appear now and then seem to be engaged in cultic performances; many of the photographic works are accompanied by ironic quotes from the earlier history of art or allusions to historic myths.
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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.
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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.
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Sam Falls
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Ion Bitzan
48€ Add to cartThe painter and object artist Ion Bitzan (b. Limanu, 1924; d. Bucharest, 1997) belonged to the generation of Romanian artists who, in the 1960s and 1970s, broke through their country’s isolation to connect to the international avant-garde. His creativity and the quality of his artistic experiments, which drew inspiration from conceptual art, Dada, and other sources, made him a leading figure in the Romanian art of the Ceaușescu era. This book also sheds light on the complex relationship between artistic innovation and political (propaganda) art behind the Iron Curtain during this period, in which nothing was ever black or white. Bitzan represented Romania at the Venice (1964) and São Paulo Biennales (1967, 1969, 1981). In 2017, the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC) in Bucharest mounted a major retrospective of his oeuvre.
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ODOR
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The publication Odor—Immaterial Sculptures zooms in on the power of smells. Contributions from curators, artists, scientists, and scholars frame a variety of perspectives on this evanescent phenomenon, examining the olfactory sense and the qualities of the immaterial. Full-page plates conceived by the artists provide additional information, imagery, and contexts around the individual works, which put odor as an olfactory and spatial experience at the center of the engagement with art. The works operate between the poles of time and space, individual and community, consciousness and the subconscious, visibility and invisibility, the everyday and the miraculous, the sense of self and the perceptions of others, presence and absence, life and death.
Artists : Jason Dodge, Carsten Höller, Koo Jeong A, Oswaldo Maciá, Teresa Margolles, Pamela Rosenkranz, Sissel Tolaas, Clara Ursitti, Luca Vitone
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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.
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Anders Goldfarb
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Nam Kim
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Sprache/Text/Bild
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Maximilian Rödel
Celestial Artefacts50€ Add to cart“One must break free from wanting something and confine oneself instead to being something.” — Maximilian Rödel
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Emmanuel Bornstein / Lotte Laserstein
Pensée20€ Add to cartHow do artists’ identities and the histories of their families influence their art? Where might a creative affinity sustained by a legacy of trauma take an artist? Lotte Laserstein (1898–1993) and Emmanuel Bornstein (b. 1986) are connected by such a bond, tied by Bornstein’s grandmother, a Résistance fighter and, like Lotte Laserstein, a Jew who survived the Nazis. Bornstein discovered Laserstein’s works by coincidence and without knowing of this connection, and he was fascinated right away: “It was actually what I’d been trying to make for years!” There are in fact parallels between their oeuvres—both feature people who are waiting and flower bouquets, and a melancholy aspect and a subtle menace can be felt in both. Yet there are also discrepancies, and the dialogue between their works would be far less inspiring without them: Bornstein’s omnipresent toxic cadmium, which contrasts with Laserstein’s muted tones; the paint application; the brushwork. What the artists have in common, in any case, is that Sweden became their abode in times of danger and painting, their only true home. This catalog celebrates their creative homecoming.
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Anna Virnich
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Slawomir Elsner
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International audiences know Sławomir Elsner (b. Wodzisław Śląski, Poland, 1976; lives and works in Berlin) for his naturalistic paintings and abstract watercolors, but it was his brilliantly executed colorful drawings that made him famous. The technique of his work in crayons is as formidable as it is singular and underlies his many adaptations of legendary works from the history of painting that seem blurry but are actually drawn in accurate lines.
More generally, Elsner’s art probes the effect of different media and the stories they tell. He interrogates the images they transport and challenges the consumers to subject their own visual experiences to a similar critical review. Do pictures represent reality or distort it? That is the question that guides his inquiries.
Elsner works almost exclusively in series. What makes this book special is that it includes an index in which eleven of these bodies of work are reproduced in their entirety. The Old Masters series alone comprises 143 works made in the years after 2014. It is complemented by the series Windows on the World (2008–2010), Feuerwerk- und Luftabwehr (2004), Unsere Sonnen (2004–2005), the watercolors of Tagstücke and Nachtstücke (2014–2021), and others.
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Hans Hofmann
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Ugo Rondinone
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Ugo Rondinone (b. Brunnen, Switzerland, 1964; lives and works in New York) is a conceptual and installation artist whose oeuvre spans abstract painting, photography, and sculpture. Nature is where he has long found inspiration, regeneration, and comfort: “In nature, you enter a space where the sacred and the profane, the mystical and the secular vibrate against one another.” Rondinone’s works oscillate between the extremes of interiority and engagement with the wider world; stone is often present in his art as a recurrent material and symbol. The sculptures in the series nuns + monks originated as limestone models; the artist made three-dimensional scans and then cast the works in bronze. As a reflection of the inner self in the outside world, the friable mineral contrasts with the solidity of the bronze; the natural genesis of the millennia-old stones with the presence of the polychrome casts in the here and now. nuns + monks attest to a visibility while also giving the impression of flinching from the gazes to which they expose themselves.
Ugo Rondinone studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna. His work has been presented at the Rockbund Art Museum, Shanghai, the Swiss National Museum, Zurich, MoMA/PS1, New York, and the Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, among others.
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Norbert Bisky
Im FreienRead moreThe beauty of male bodies, hedonism, bold colors—Norbert Bisky (b. Leipzig, 1970; lives and works in Berlin) is widely regarded as the most successful exponent of contemporary figurative painting in Germany. Now the artist has created a series of seventeen works on canvas and paper based on associations sparked by the oeuvre of the Expressionist Max Pechstein (1881–1955). The title “Im Freien” not only refers to the scenes they depict, which play out under the open sky; Bisky—who grew up in East Germany, which is to say, in what he calls “circumstances that were not free”—also grapples with the question of what liberty means to us today and what we do with it. The preoccupation with freedom led both painters to a quest for a personal utopia. Pechstein found it in the South Seas, where he had visited Palau, then a German colony, in 1914; the archipelago seemed paradisiacal to him, an idyll far removed from political and social reality. Bisky, by contrast, focuses less on the exotic landscape than on its residents, whom he stages as individual members of a globalized society.
Norbert Bisky enrolled at Humboldt-Universität in Berlin in 1994 to read German literature and art history but switched to the Berlin University of the Arts before year’s end; he studied painting with Georg Baselitz and entered Baselitz’s master class in 1999. He was a visiting professor at the Haute école d’art et de design, Geneva, in 2008–2010 and at the Braunschweig University of Art (HBK) in 2016–2018.
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Kai Schiemenz
Priel38€ Add to cartTidal creeks are watercourses that crisscross coastal mudflats. Running between sandbars, they flush deposits out into the sea with the falling tide, and when the tide rises, the water flows back in. In other works, tidal creeks are effectively rivers in the sea. Delving into the implications of this idea, the book presents Kai Schiemenz’s (b. Erfurt, 1966; lives and works in Berlin) major works and projects of the past four years. The publication offers insight into the provenance of selected bodies of work and their genesis. Kai Schiemenz’s art examines the city, spaces, and architecture. His small-format sculptures are self-contained creations that combine digital technologies with natural materials like wood or paper. At the same time, they function as models for expansive installations and outdoor and indoor architectures in which Schiemenz orchestrates sight lines to construct spaces whose permeability makes the audience an integral aspect of the work. If his sculptures are architecture, his exhibitions are landscapes in which the visitors encounter one another as they would in a park. Their central question, time and again, concerns the impact of the built environment and urban landscapes on their inhabitants.






























