



X x X
Semjon Contemporary
![]() | |
---|---|
Editor(s) | Semjon Contemporary |
Author(s) | Semjon H. N. Semjon, Jan Maruhn |
Design | Frank Zimmer, Semjon H. N. Semjon |
Cover | Hardcover |
Size | 23 x 30 cm |
Pages | 448 |
Illustrations | 809 |
Language(s) | German, English |
ISBN | 978-3-96912-112-2 | Release November 2022 |
Founded 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.
Release November 2022
More books
-
Franz Erhard Walther
Manifestations. Catalogue Raisonné of the Posters, Books and Drafts 1958–202068€ Add to cart”I don’t make any artistic difference between a poster design and my Work Drawings.“—Franz Erhard Walther
Franz Erhard Walther (b. 1939, Fulda; lives and works in Fulda) is a German sculptor and creator of conceptual, installation, and process-based art whose work often stands in relation to his, or the beholder’s, body. For four decades, Walther designed artist’s posters, a genre that has become an anachronism in our contemporary digital world. This book is the first to gather his extensive output in the format in a single volume, rounded out by a wide-ranging survey of his designs and artist’s books.
”Artists give so much time, passion, and energy to their books that they are as important as very big installations. ‚Manifestations‘ is a very important artist book.“
Hans Ulrich Obrist, Artistic Director, Serpentine Galleries, London”The new catalogue raisonné by Franz Erhard Walther is a masterpiece of parergon aesthetics. With his ‚Manifestations‘, the blurring of the boundaries between work and design, Franz Erhard Walther, after his performative sculptures, has achieved another great success for the emancipatory differentiation of the concept of the work of art.“
Peter Weibel, Director, ZKM | Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe”Franz Erhard Walther is nothing less than an exceptional 20th-century artist who has consistently questioned and fundamentally changed what a work of art can be. The innovative power of his comprehensive oeuvre is, of course, primarily evident in his art, but this publication of his manifold designs also provides an overview that is as wonderful as it is extraordinary.“
Andreas Beitin, Director, Kunstmuseum WolfsburgFranz Erhard Walther studied at the Werkkunstschule Offenbach am Main and the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste – Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main. He completed his education with a stint at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, where Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke were among his fellow students. His works were on display at documenta 5, 6, 7, and 8, and in 2017, Walther received the Golden Lion at the 57th Biennale di Venezia.
-
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.
-
Nikolaus List
Analphabetismus Nr. 737€ Add to cartBeguilingly colorful, balancing opulence with restraint, Nikolaus List’s (b. Frankfurt am Main, 1965; lives and works in Berlin) pictures scrutinize the relation between nature and art. Observations of natural scenes around Berlin blend with the artificiality of baroque gardens or early videogames. As List studies the operation of human perception, the painted space alternates between the depth of one-point perspective and a schematized flatness. The rhythmically organized compositions suspend the hierarchical distinction between foreground and background, an effect that is heightened by the often dissonant selection of colors and lends List’s art a “decidedly anti-sublime and anti-minimal” quality. A fallen tree, luminous rampantly growing and coiled branches become a metaphor for our relationships, our existence, for becoming and passing away, renewal and time.
Nikolaus List studied with Thomas Bayrle, Peter Kogler, and Christa Näher at the Academy of Fine Arts—Städelschule in Frankfurt. He has taught painting at the Weißensee School of Art and Design and the Berlin Art Institute.
-
Stephan Kaluza
Die dritte Natur14€ Add to cartThe Nature of Art as Totality and Idyll
The philosophy of nature is central to the artist Stephan Kaluza’s (b. Bad Iburg, 1964; lives and works in Düsseldorf) work. As he sees it, there exists a succession of different natures: first nature is Kaluza’s designation for a world as immediately felt by (early) humans, part of an encompassing and close-range experiential totality they labeled ‘nature’ and perceived as a physical, but also spiritual and emotional concatenation of events. Second nature is stripped down to an objective and utilitarian quality; nature becomes a resource, the basis of life, the environment. In a kind of linguistic turn, speech mediates a surrogate, an alternative world, that positions nature as culture’s opposite; the former becomes replaceable in favor of latter. Yet this culture is far from devoid of yearnings for the immediacy that it has lost, and so develops an ‘artificial idyllic nature’ in turn. This third nature of the arts—a purely human nature—harks back to the archetypes of a first nature in escapism and totalized immersion.
-
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.
- Release July 2025
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, Jenny Brosinski, André Butzer, Cecily Brown, Andreas Breunig, Jadé Fadojutimi, Katharina Grosse, Antwan Horfee, Aneta Kajzer, Michael Müller, Oscar Murillo, NUG, Albert Oehlen, David Ostrowski, Daisy Parris, Marco Pariani, Christopher Wool
-
Michelle Jezierski
Verge28€ Add to cartHow does a simple line become a horizon? When do we begin to see colors and shapes as a landscape? Michelle Jezierski’s painting homes in on the tipping point at which our perception begins to oscillate between color/surface and space/representation. At that very point, she captures the essence of the landscape as such, which is not a concrete place but a metaphor for inner states of affairs. To get there, Jezierski distills what she sees in her surroundings down to the elements of painting—shapes and colors—which just barely intimate a pictorial space while persistently drifting toward abstraction. The defining feature of her technique is that she layers several pictorial planes and spaces on the canvas in staggered arrangements. “Perpetually discovering new ways to unsettle the visual space,” as she puts it, she engenders ruptures and structures that open up multiple perspectives and a portal for reflection on one’s own perception. Above all, however, the cuts lend her pictures a peculiar rhythm that powerfully pulls in the gaze, making the reader paging through this catalogue forget time and space.
-
Mirror
Collaborative Pictures by Merrick d’Arcy–Irvine x Julia Bajanova40€ Add to cartWe humans are social creatures. Without others to reflect our behavior back to us, we lose what defines us—language, culture, the capacity for creative expression. That is why photographer Merrick d’Arcy-Irvine and fashion designer Julia Bajanova are invested in intense encounters: not only with the people who appear in their pictures, but also with each other, as artists and as humans, and between their media and the materials out of which they are made. The materiality and sensual experience of these media in the physical world are the focus of the pictures gathered in this volume, which is why d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova eschewed all digital technologies. Sensuality forges an emotional bond between their creative universes, whose boundaries become permeable, as do the dividing lines between genres. Colors and forms are fused in a shared language of visual art and fashion in which d’Arcy-Irvine and Bajanova write their messages in light on photographic paper. They speak to what makes us human: creative energies untrammelled by the necessities of everyday life. The pictures in Mirror, then, are reflections of our existence and portals of self-knowledge.
-
Lovis Corinth
Maestro del colore – Maestro della grafica35€ Add to cartLovis Corinth (b. Tapiau, East Prussia, 1858; d. Zandvoort, Netherlands, 1925) ranks among the leading German Impressionists. But he has also been described as a precursor of Expressionism for his impulsive and passionate style in painting and graphic art as well his liberal handling of form, which vividly conveys agitated states of mind and powerful emotions. In addition to an eminent body of paintings and numerous drawings and watercolors, he left a graphic oeuvre encompassing over a thousand prints. In his paintings as in his etchings and lithographs, Corinth dedicates himself to a set of recurring themes: mythological and religious motifs, nudes, still lifes, landscapes, and portraits of his family and close friends. His graphic work also shows him engaging with the challenges of self-portraiture.
-
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.
-
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.
-
Christian Boltanski
Die Zwangsarbeiter – Erinnerung in der Völklinger Hütte27,50€ Add to cartErinnerungen | Souvenirs | Memoirs
Christian Boltanski (b. 1944, Paris; lives and works in Paris) combines industrial architecture with relics of the working culture in his impressive installation for the Völklingen ironworks – a highly emotional approach to the subject of forced labor.
-
Liam Gillick
Filtered Time (GERMAN)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.
- Out of Stock
Queen Elizabeth II
Sammlung Luciano Pelizzari27,50€ Read moreErinnerungsstücke einer Legende
Im Leben von Elisabeth II. (geb. 21. April 1926 in London) spiegelt sich eine ganze Epoche. Die britische Königin hat alle deutschen Bundeskanzler und sämtliche englischen Premierminister von Winston Churchill bis Boris Johnson erlebt. Sie ist die am häufigsten abgebildete Person des 20. und 21. Jahrhunderts. Das Buch präsentiert Fotos, Gemälde, Briefmarken und Münzen aus der Kollektion von Luciano Pelizzari, einer der größten Sammlungen dieser Art weltweit. Es zeigt die Queen als Mensch und Monarchin, dokumentiert ihr Zusammentreffen mit bedeutenden Persönlichkeiten und Ereignissen ihrer Regierungszeit und präsentiert sie in zahlreichen Darstellungen aus Kunst und Kultur.
-
Matthew Davis
Kustodiev28€ Add to cartAn Expressive Instant in Painting
The art of Matthew Davis (b. 1969, Colchester, UK; lives and works in Berlin) operates between the micro and macro dimensions, between control and chance. Working with extraordinary precision, the artist applies drops of synthetic resin varnishes and enamel paints to canvases laid flat. The artist’s book Kustodiev showcases a recent innovative turn in Davis’s output, whose latest works were inspired by the lusciously colorful pictures of the Russian painter Boris Kustodiev (1878–1927). Kustodiev was manufactured using offset presses and Office Offset, a largely forgotten reproduction process based on miniature offset printing machines. The publication is released in a limited edition of 250 copies.
Matthew Davis studied at the Camberwell College of Arts, London, and the Norwich School of Art and Design. His work has been shown at the Konrad-Adenauer-Stiftung, Berlin; Künstlerhaus Wien, Vienna; Kunsthalle Wilhelmshaven; and other museums and galleries.
-
Maria Braune
Keep Away From Fire28€ Add to cartMaria Braune’s (b. Berlin, 1988; lives and works in Munich and Bamberg) work revolves around a material she developed; named Migma, it consists of eight different renewable natural resources. She heats it, then casts and molds it in a process that continues for weeks. The resulting sculptures and installations sprawl throughout the space like sensuous organisms. Associations of growth and symbiosis emerge, but discontinuities and disintegration come into view as well. Braune’s creative process is part of an ecosystem and thoroughly anchored in the now. Her material is a vitally alive substance to which she responds in an immediate engagement, connecting it to mythological and narrative significations and setting it in relation to her own world.
Maria Braune studied woodcarving at the Fachhochschule für Bildhauerei in Berchtesgaden, Germany, in 2009–2011, then fine arts with Hermann Pitz at the Academy of Fine Arts Munich, where she graduated in 2017.
-
“Das Quadrat muss den Raum beherrschen!”
Aurélie Nemours und Zeitgenossen15€ Add to cartDoes everything in the world obey a mathematical logic, can everything be calculated? In our present age of probability, some would say the answer is a straightforward yes, inevitably prompting the question: Even art? Yes, even art, or so the defenders of Concrete Art would respond, a twentieth-century movement that took abstraction as a focus on the “idea of art itself” (W. Kandinsky) to the next level. The act of painting was now to be subject to preconceived organizing principles as though they were laws of nature. One prominent exponent of the genre was Aurélie Nemours (1910–2005), who had a penchant for the square; her credo was that it needed to “rule space.” That is why the equilateral quadrangle is the defining shape in this catalog, which brings Nemours’ oeuvre into focus. Her iconic position is flanked by works by seventeen others that similarly grapple with the square, including pictures and sculptures with square basic forms, grids, or canvases. All these works derive their force from the stern authority of the square: only when art constrains its means can it bring its full potential to bear.
ARTISTS:
JOSEF ALBERS, GÖTZ ARNDT, MAX BILL, AD DEKKERS, HELMUT FEDERLE, GOTTFRIED HONEGGER, KATHRIN KAPS, FRITZ KLINGBEIL, JOHN MEYER, GEROLD MILLER, AURÉLIE NEMOURS, JOHN NIXON, PETER ROEHR, JAN SCHOONHOVEN, ANTON STANKOWSKI, KLAUS STAUDT, HERMAN DE VRIES, GERHARD WITTNER -
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.
-
Vera Mercer
New Works28€ Add to cartBeauty 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.
-
Horst Schwitzki (1932–2016)
Eine Werkmonografie38€ Add to cart“I have my place in concrete painting!”
Horst Schwitzki’s (b. Marburg/Lahn, 1932; d. Frankfurt/Main, 2016) talent was recognized early on by renowned painters including Arnold Bode and Fritz Winter. During his studies at the Werkakademie, today’s Kunsthochschule, in Kassel, Schwitzki came into contact with concrete art. The network he built there opened doors for him, leading to exhibitions with prestigious galleries such as Rolf Ricke’s and Rudolf Zwirner’s. By the 1970s, however, he found himself compelled to make a living by working first as a graphic artist for an advertising agency and then as a construction draftsman. Although these day jobs left him little time for painting, he kept working on his art until 2010. This book is the first to present a comprehensive survey of Schwitzki’s oeuvre, which spans almost six decades and shows him continually devising novel creative solutions within the formal repertoire of concretion. The biography, rounded out by statements from contemporaries, colleagues, and friends, offers profound insights into the highs and lows of an artist’s life that stands as a characteristic example of the experiences of the generation born in the 1930s.