YAEL BARTANA
THE BOOK OF MALKA GERMANIA
 | |
|---|---|
| Editor(s) | Shelley Harten, Gregor Lersch, Jewish Museum Berlin |
| Author(s) | Yael Berda, Sami Berdugo, Christina von Braun, Michael Brenner, Max Czollek, Shelley Harten, Alexander van der Haven, Elke Morlok, Cas Mudde, Griselda Pollock, Julia Roth, Lavie Tidhar |
| Design | Avi Bohbot, Gila Kaplan in cooperation with the artist |
| Cover | Clothbound hardcover |
| Size | 24 x 34 cm |
| Pages | 200 |
| Illustrations | 130 |
| Language(s) | English |
| ISBN | 978-3-96912-036-1 | English edition not available anymore |
She Is Hope. She Is the Leader. She Is the Messiah. She Is History. She Is Fake.
The video artist Yael Bartana (b. Kfar Yehezkel, Israel, 1970; lives and works in Amsterdam and Berlin) makes work that explores the visual language of identity and the politics of commemoration. The critical scrutiny of collective expectations of political or religious salvation is a central concern in her art. In the video installation Malka Germania—Hebrew for “Queen Germany”—Bartana creates alternative realities from the German-Jewish past and present that bring scenes of the collective unconscious to light. The publication follows the epiphany of Malka Germania, a female redeemer figure, in five chapters whose layout is modeled on that of the Talmud, the central text in Rabbinical Judaism. This organization reflects the polyphonic complexity, rich nuance, and ambivalence that the work casts into visuals and underscores that there is no simple answer. The book includes an interview with the artist and contributions by Sami Berdugo, Christina von Braun, Michael Brenner, Max Czollek, and others. It is published on occasion of the exhibition Yael Bartana—Redemption Now at the Jewish Museum Berlin.
Yael Bartana studied at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design, Jerusalem, the School of Visual Arts, New York, and the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam. Her work is held by collections all over the world and has been presented in solo exhibitions at venues including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Pérez Art Museum Miami, and the Moderna Museet, Malmö.
Click here for the German edition.
English edition not available anymore
More books
-
Michelle Jezierski
Simultaneous Spaces34€ Add to cartMichelle Jezierski’s (b. Berlin, 1981; lives and works in Berlin) paintings unfurl simultaneous spaces that are awash in light. Contrasts between bright and dark and muted as well as lucent hues engender a singular atmosphere characterized by depth and dynamism. The artist is as invested in the perception of these constructed spaces as in the capaciousness of natural landscapes. In her paintings, luminous colors and geometric disturbances achieve shifting balances between the extremes of order and chaos, light and shadow, interior and exterior, structure and flux. Simultaneous Spaces, the artist’s first comprehensive monograph, presents forty-five works painted between 2017 and 2022.
Michelle Jezierski studied with Tony Cragg at the Berlin University of Arts and graduated from Valérie Favre’s class in 2008. She also received a fellowship for a semester abroad at Cooper Union, New York, where she studied with Amy Sillman.
-
MS 00 22
Michael Sailstorfer – Works 2000–202245€ Add to cartMS 00 22 – Michael Sailstorfer: Works 2000–2022
Michael Sailstorfer (b. Velden/Vils, Germany, 1979; lives and works in Berlin) is one of the most renowned German sculptors and object artists of his generation. His sculptural creations, which often require extensive planning and complex production processes, are the results of reflections on and reinterpretations of everyday objects: intriguing, bizarre, and sometimes humorous experimental arrangements and artifacts that interact with their environments, create spaces, or self-deconstruct. These transformative processes combine conceptual depth with poetic allure and tell stories of the passage of time and disintegration. Many of Sailstorfer’s installations depend on the beholder’s active engagement for their effect. He typically documents his sculptural experiments with the camera and later shares them with the public in the form of videos or photographs.
The extensive monograph MS 00 22 presents the most important works from Sailstorfer’s creative career. Formally diverse writings and conversations with the artist offer profound insight into his practice.
Michael Sailstorfer studied with Olaf Metzel at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 1999 until 2005 and at Goldsmiths College, London, in 2004–05. He has won a number of art awards, including the Kunstpreis junger westen (2011) and the Vattenfall Contemporary (2012). Selected solo exhibitions: Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2007); Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (2010); Kunsthalle Nürnberg (2011); Contemporary Arts Center, Cincinnati, Ohio (2014).
-
Nadira Husain
Manzil Monde30€ Add to cartNadira Husain’s (b. Paris, 1980; lives and works in Berlin, Paris, and Hyderabad) work combines figures, symbols, and ornaments from different cultures in complex imageries that reflect her own multicultural experience. To achieve a harmonious, though by no means placid, coexistence of all elements, the artist harnesses painting, drawing, printing processes, traditional artisan practices, and a range of materials including textile and ceramics, recognizing no hierarchy of media or genre. Hybridization and the translocation of motifs serve her to tease out similarities as well as divergences between myth and pop culture: the Indian deity, the cartoon character, and the fashion label appear as equals in the universe of her art.
The book contains several essays that explore Nadira Husain’s oeuvre as a significant contribution to the discourse around postmigration, transculturality, and feminism in contemporary art.
Nadira Husain studied at the École nationale supérieure des beaux-arts in Paris and the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. She is currently a visiting professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, where she co-teaches with the Belarusian artist Marina Naprushkina.
-
Philip Loersch
Renteninformation 202230€ Add to cartA satirical audiobook, read by Johannes Steck
with free download link on the inside
You’ve read right, and you’re going to hear it: a bureaucratic document—we’re all familiar with it, for a new one arrives every year—is the subject of this inspired collaboration between the graphic artist Philip Loersch and the virtuoso vocalist Johannes Steck.
The “Renteninformation”—an official letter on cheap paper informing the recipient about their expected future retirement benefits—makes many cultural workers, and others, crack up or break out in tears: arriving unexpectedly, it launches us on an emotional roller coaster between excitement, fascination, resignation, and sheer madness.
The manuscript for this audiobook is Loersch’s actual Renteninformation for 2022. Its intonation is the culmination of a series of works the artist has pursued since 2016. Every year, he has produced a naturalist colored-pencil drawing of his Renteninformation, embedding it in idyllic scenes—in the garden on a summer afternoon, amid autumn foliage, or on a frozen lake, delicately and accurately executed down to the smallest leaf of grass and the tiniest letter.
“Renteninformation 2022” is the ideal gift for all vinyl lovers who need to close a “pension gap” in their collections and a stunning audio experience that redefines what the satire of reality itself and conceptual art can do.
Philip Loersch (b. Aachen, 1980) is best known for his unconventional drawings. His works combine painstaking imitations of printed writing with hyperrealist colored-pencil drawings; for instance, he transfers pages from encyclopedias not only onto paper, but also onto three-dimensional objects such as soapstone. His art has been exhibited at renowned institutions such as Kunsthaus Zürich, Museum Kunstpalast Düsseldorf, and Hamburger Kunsthalle. He has won numerous fellowships and awards, including the Kunstpreis Berlin für Bildende Kunst, and helped initiate the exhibition series “Drawing Wow.”
Johannes Steck (b. Würzburg, 1966) is one of Germany’s best-known audiobook narrators, having sold over four million copies, including of books by Simon Beckett and Ken Follett, in a three-decade career. Television viewers also know his voice from trailers on Kabel 1 and DMAX and documentaries on ZDF, BR, and Sky. His work has garnered awards including the 2012 HörKules.
-
Billy Al Bengston
Watercolors48€ Add to cartThe Pop Artist as Master of Watercolor Painting
Billy Al Bengston (b. 1934, Dodge City; lives and works in Venice, California, and Honolulu, Hawaii) is a master of the watercolor. Themes and motifs that also determine the painterly work gain a special expressiveness here: bizarre landscapes and opulent blossoms, fantastic celestial bodies and colorful abstractions. This opulent volume presents this part of Bengston’s oeuvre for the first time in great breadth with roughly 400 works. They demonstrate the skill of an artist who has brought watercolor to extreme precision and enriched it with numerous new aspects.
Billy Al Bengston attended the California College of Arts and Crafts, Oakland, and the Otis Art Institute, Los Angeles. His works can be found in outstanding permanent collections, including the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
-
auf Erkundung
Anne Deuter und Monika Supé25€ Add to cartA Dialogue on Time
The two artists Anne Deuter (b. 1986, Halle; lives and works in Halle) and Monika Supé (b. 1967, Munich; lives and works in Munich) engage in self-exploration to find ways to convey an experience of body, space, and time. Grappling with formalist elements, they devise their compositional practices in graphite and ink and in words and images, respectively. Enhanced by selected works by contemporary poets, the publication opens up new perspectives on what it means to exist in time.
Anne Deuter studied visual art and art history at the Ernst-Moritz-Arndt-Universität Greifswald. She rounded out her education in the book art program at Burg Giebichenstein Kunsthochschule Halle. Monika Supé studied architecture at the Technischen Universität München and completed a doctorate on visual perception training at the Technische Universität Kaiserslautern. Since 1995, she has taught in the design divisions of various universities.
- temporarily not available
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.
-
Alexandru Chira
42€ Add to cartAlexandru Chira’s (b. Tăușeni, Romania, 1947; d. Bucharest, 2011) oeuvre systematically and comprehensively maps a fictional field of research. His paintings, drawings, and objects, whose individual elements recall switches, screens, keyboards, and levers, were designed to “bring rain and rainbows,” to promote prosperity and prevent floods. Working in his art laboratory, Chira resembled a farmer tilling his field. He sowed symbols across his paintings, sometimes transplanted them to create new semiotic interconnections, then reaped them and stored up his harvest in painted machines of varying shapes and dimensions. In the 1990s—by then Chira held a professorship and was a widely recognized artist—he fulfilled a lifelong dream by building the “Tăușeni Ensemble,” the largest monument single-handedly created by one man in Transylvania. Much of his oeuvre accordingly consists of sketches and elaborations relating to the monument. In the course of his decades-long fascination with an agrarian aesthetic, architecture, design, astronomy, history, magic, ufology, mysticism, shamanism, and theosophy fused, yielding a kind of practical knowledge as well as spiritual speculations sustaining his endeavor.
The extensive monograph with more than 750 illustrations surveys Alexandru Chira’s output of four decades and synthesizes years of research undertaken at the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Bucharest. It contains numerous transcriptions of textual parentheses, legends, and instructions on how to decode the works and poetic fragments embedded in Chira’s pictures.
-
Ilit Azoulay
Facts and Tales. Truth be Told120€ Add to cartIn an era in which multiple perspectives and oral histories are increasingly vital, Facts and Tales—Truth Be Told delves into the haunting work of Ilit Azoulay. The artist, who was born in Jaffa in 1972, transforms objects, archives, and museum holdings into vessels, challenging traditional hierarchies of knowledge. In her most recent solo exhibition Mere Things at the Jewish Museum, New York, Azoulay presents works that probe the delicate balance between factual representation and nuanced storytelling.
The publication accompanying the exhibition includes archival pages, the artist’s notes, and depictions of the works as well as an introduction by curator Shira Backer and an essay by the art critic, curator, and writer Sarit Shapira, who passed away in 2018. Titled Houses of Junk and Specters: On Ilit Azoulay’s Early Works, it underscores the importance of honoring both factual accuracy and oral histories and invites readers to explore the complex interplay between concrete evidence and the rich and nuanced stories.
Azoulay has devised a singular method to shed light on the blanks in hegemonic narratives and expose them. As though to produce an extortion letter, she clips her pictures from archival materials and photographs of the walls of abandoned buildings and composes them in collages interweaving a multiplicity of views. The resulting works question the exclusive truth claim of museum expertise and reveal its constructed quality. The catalog of her works, designed as a box replete with texts and images, reflects this approach, aiming to dismantle established narratives and open up diverse perspectives.
Box containing 6 different standalone publications, limited edition of 500 copies
-
MK Kaehne
Π = 3,1415935€ Add to cartThe biography of conceptual artist MK Kaehne (b. Vilnius, 1963; lives and works in Berlin) oscillates between Vilnius, Moscow and Berlin. Influenced by Russian Constructivism, he draws and builds suitcase sculptures with a department store aesthetic, a reversal of the readymade principle. His focus gradually shifted from the formal to the psychological, towards life-size figures such as It’s me (2023): a hyper-realistic replica of himself, lying upside down in the mud, with a garden gnome next to him. Kaehne’s work is strictly analytical, but the results are full of tragedy and irony. Unintentional drawings, in which biographical, Dadaist and political elements merge, accompany his oeuvre. A total work of art that traces personal and social development.
-
Michael Williams
New Paintings40€ Add to cartAwkward Uncertainty
Michael Williams (b. 1978, Doylestown, Pa.; lives and works in Los Angeles) makes work that interrogates the history of painting, often by dismantling its components into their constituent parts. His pictures employ form to reflect on the complexity and contradictions of modern life. He works on canvas, availing himself of a range of techniques including oil painting, collage, and inkjet prints. In his new works, Williams examines the relationship between painting and photography, transferring the chilly aloofness that is characteristic of the latter onto the former. The photographic “negative” yields a smooth canvas disencumbered of its painterly qualities and the medium’s historic ballast. The book includes several foldout plates that illustrate Williams’s creative approach, and a brief essay by his Austrian fellow painter Tobias Pils.
Michael Williams studied fine arts at Washington University, St. Louis, and has exhibited widely, including at the Wiener Secession, Vienna, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York.
- out of print
Shara Hughes
58€ Read moreBoisterous Compositions
At first glance, Shara Hughes’s (b. Atlanta, GA., 1981; lives and works in Brooklyn) colorful and extravagant landscapes are chock full of everything we love in famous paintings: the palette of Henri Matisse or David Hockney, the stylistic inventiveness of Edvard Munch or Paul Cézanne, the painterly gestures of Philip Guston or Josh Smith, perhaps even van Gogh’s brushwork. She quotes this masculine tradition in landscape painting deliberately and unabashedly. This monograph is the first to present a comprehensive overview of Shara Hughes’s work.
Shara Hughes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design and later attended the Skowhegan School of Painting & Sculpture in Madison, ME. She has had solo shows at the Arts Club, London, the Metropolitan Opera, New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, Atlanta. In 2017, she participated in the Whitney Biennial, New York.
- Out of stock
Eva Jospin
Wald(t)räume22€ Read moreThe Forest as a Place of Longing: Eva Jospin’s Magical Corrugated Cardboard Sculptures
The French artist Eva Jospin (b. 1975, Paris; lives and works in Paris) cuts and layers corrugated cardboard to create sculptures and reliefs. Handcraft and precision are essential aspects of her work. The artist retains the original color of the cardboard, since, for her, the material itself already contains sufficient color variations and nuances. The recurring motif is the forest — consisting of numerous trunks, branches, and twigs in extreme density and interspersed with black shadows. They suggest depth and stimulate the viewer’s imagination. Eva Jospin does not reproduce nature one to one, but conveys the feelings of fear, anarchy, or freedom that it triggers: The forest as a universal place of longing.
-
Fabian Treiber
For a While Longer34€ Add to cartUnstable Prototypes of a Reality We Know
Fabian Treiber’s (b. Ludwigsburg, 1986; lives and works in Stuttgart) paintings show what appear to be interiors while interrogating subjective projections and our perceptions of reality. The artificial spaces bear witness to human existence even though there are no people to be seen. In his still lifes, Treiber negotiates classical questions of painting: form and structure, color and composition, representation of space and organization of the surface. His paintings primarily implement formal rather than narrative decisions. This lets the artist provoke a deliberate breach in which the ostensibly fallacious emerges as the essential quality of painting—the effect is that of works that seem somehow off but are actually just right.
Fabian Treiber studied painting and intermedia design at the Stuttgart State Academy of Art and Design (ABK Stuttgart). His works have won him a Karl Schmidt Rottluff Fellowship; he was also a finalist for the 2021 Hans Purrmann Grand Prize. He has had numerous solo shows, including at Kunsthalle Nürnberg, Nuremberg; Kunstverein Ludwigsburg; and Galerie Ruttkowski;68, Cologne; and contributed to group exhibitions at Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; Villa Merkel—Galerien der Stadt Esslingen a.N.; and Staatliche Kunsthalle Baden-Baden. For a while longer is published on occasion of his first solo exhibition at Haverkampf Galerie.
-
Erich Hörtnagl
to be a man38€ Add to cart“A photograph is a secret about a secret. The more it tells you, the less you know.” The witty remark, attributed to Diane Arbus, succinctly captures the twofold code at work in Erich Hörtnagl’s (b. Innsbruck, 1950) pictures. Aesthetically appealing photographs, mostly in black and white, show men (and women) in a wide variety of cultural, social, and religious contexts: from Swedish bikers and drag queens to monks in Myanmar, from Turkish belly dancers to Tyrolean performers in traditional attire. What looks at first glance like a conventional photobook soon reveals itself to be a brilliantly staged interactive riddle around clichéd notions of masculinity with positive and negative connotations, around gender roles and persistent stereotypes. With the deftly composed visual meta-narrative in to be a man, Hörtnagl, a seasoned theater and film director, lures us into a trap, and the only way out is by taking the challenge head-on: by engaging in self-reflection and questioning our own prejudices and ideas.
- temporarily not available
Sonia Gomes
I Rise – I’m a Black Ocean, Leaping and WideRead more“My Work is Black, it is Feminine, and it is Marginal. I‘m a Rebel.”
The biomorphic sculptures of Sonia Gomes (b. 1948, Caetanópolis, Brazil; lives and works in Belo Horizonte, Brazil) have an eerie, almost magical presence. As the daughter of a black mother and a white textile industrialist, she grew up between two worlds. But the African culture and spirituality of her mother and grandmother, as well as an interest in rituals, processions, and myths, made a lasting impact on her life and her later work as an artist. As a teenager, Gomes began deconstructing textiles and items of clothing to create her own style and to make both items for practical use and craft objects. Having previously participated in the 56th Biennale di Venezia in 2015, Sonia Gomes now counts among the most influential artists in Brazil.
-
Brandon Lipchik
10€ Add to cartIn recent years, a Wagnerian night has settled over Brandon Lipchik’s (b. Erie, PA, 1993; lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, and Berlin) pictures. Moons rise; beasts and titans populate a homogeneous world of swimming pools, white picket fences, and neatly mowed lawns. Synthesized on a computer screen and then transferred to canvas by hand, the artist’s paintings revolve around the backyard as a mythically fraught scene of popular culture. The garishly lit multiperspectival pictures replicate characteristic shots from 1980s gay porn films and quote a clean American Apparel look. Lipchik subjects men’s bodies, spaces, plants, objects, and animals to digital deconstruction, obtaining rudimentary and abstract shapes. Staring at smartphones or gazing on water surfaces, his characters recall early digital animations and seem oddly hollow, like empty avatars waiting to be filled with new speculative content.
-
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.
-
Alexandra Tretter
24€ Add to cartThe art of Alexandra Tretter (*1988) is as deep as it is playful. Owing just as much to the gentle spirituality of Hilma af Klint’s late geometries as it does to Sonia Delaunay’s exuberant disc paintings, almost bursting with sheer chromatic pleasure. Her compassionately designed artist’s book combines monumental paintings with intimate works on paper, all of which are imbued with the contexts of Tretter’s own life as an artist, as a woman, as a mother.
Her kaleidoscopic figurations unfold from a center at rest in itself and multiply in symmetry and asymmetry towards all sides. She contrasts the circular form, the unchanging basic element of her compositions, with the oval, which constantly strives beyond itself, transforming itself in ever-new permutations from one figure into the next, into eyes, mouths, breasts, petals or vulvas.
Her images strive for composure, unfold and blossom, only to let go of all gestalt-like form. Once gained stability is instantly pushed into turmoil. Colors flare up violently or flow delicately about, lighten or shade each other, carry or throw each other off course. Tretter equally realizes materialization and dissolution as basic principles of her painting.
Whereby all, what her images absorb, preserve and release, is experience, growth and slow maturing. Her paintings are “figurations of affection”, in which each individual turns towards something else, doubts or grows, at times turns away or surrenders all the more consciously. They question everything, start anew and yet find their way back to themselves, into their very own.
-
Stephen Buckley
Close Cousins. Paintings48€ Add to cartThe Artist’s First Publication in more than Thirty Years
For more than forty years Stephen Buckley (b. 1944, Leicester) has concerned himself with addressing the major themes of the twentieth century through a personal style oscillating between the matière of Kurt Schwitters, the dandyism of Francis Picabia and the intellectual rigour of Marcel Duchamp. He takes the two most basic components of a conventional painting (canvas and stretcher), and makes multi-dimensional constructions, joins groups of single canvases together in overlapping structures, makes shaped canvases, cuts a stretcher with a variegated edge, stitches and weaves together strips of canvas, patches pieces of canvas onto another support, and adds cardboard tubing, rope, found objects and cut out shapes. In the 1970’s and 1980’s, Buckley saw extended prominence in the art press, starting with the artist being described as “the Punk Rock of contemporary painting” and ending with him gaining the title of “the ubiquitous Stephen Buckley”. There is now a large portfolio of themes, references, motifs and symbols which are continually reworked and reinvented. Since then, he has made some of his most compelling paintings, lush pop canvases full of symbols and colour, a far cry from the pared-down, industrial feel of some of his early works.
