Individual artists, art monographs Books
Hirmer Verlag John Baldessari: The Städel Paintings
Book SynopsisJohn Baldessari is an important American conceptual artists and the last member of the American postwar avant-garde. His large collages, created for the Frankfurt exhibition, draw on masterpieces at the Städel, from Lucas Cranach the Elder to Maria Lassnig. A multifaceted opposition and juxtaposition of old and new art is revealed by the texts and photographs. By destroying all of his paintings created from 1953 to 1966 in 1970, John Baldessari (*1931) paved the way for an independent and unmistakeable pictorial style between painting and photography, text and image. He employs classic Modernist pictorial strategies such as montage and the integration of everyday elements in order to confront these with artistic practices of the post-war avant-gardes, such as discourses on consumerism and the media. Baldessari intertwines media and materials and thereby combines entirely distinct groups of artistic subjects. In the process, the unambiguousness of the pictorial language has given way to a multi-layered readability.
£30.60
Hirmer Verlag Gerhard Richter - Brigid Polk: Königsklasse III
Book SynopsisIn 1970 in Munich Gerhard Richter met Brigid Berlin alias Brigid Polk, Andy Warhol’s legendary muse and enfant terrible of New York’s high society. This meeting gave rise to Richter’s important “Brigid Polk” series, based on Polaroid self-portraits by the eccentric artist: a dialogue between America and Europe, photography and painting, artist and muse. The series about Brigid Polk is an important record of Gerhard Richter’s photo paintings. It is exemplary of his struggle for a new self-concept of painting in dialogue with photography. This volume is the first to pay extensive tribute to this multifaceted series and traces the history of its creation, which revolved Heiner Friedrich, an important gallery owner in Munich. The personal reminiscences of those who were present at the time are particularly evocative of the avant-garde art scene of the 1970s.
£13.46
Hirmer Verlag An Artist’s Life: By Eleanora Antinova
Book SynopsisHistory is fiction and personal identity nothing more than historical illusion: Eleanora Antinova is the renowned US contemporary artist Eleanor Antin – Eleanor Antin is Eleanora Antinova, a black American ballerina. Shifting the boundaries between art and life this book publishes the exciting memoirs of Antinova found by Eleanor Antin. The ballerina Eleanora Antinova could be called an artist of oblivion. Years ago, the contemporary artist and femininist Eleanor Antin, found an unpublished manuscript of the ballerina’s memoirs: the stories of her early modernist forgotten ballets, her romantic entanglements and her friends at the glamorous Ballet Russe with its great maestro, Serge Diaghilev. Generations later Eleanor Antin lived for three weeks in New York as Antinova. Her journal of that time brings back the now forgotten ballerina. For the first time this publication brings together the journal and the memoirs of Antin and Antinova accompanied by a selection of photographs from the performances of the artists..
£17.95
Hirmer Verlag Façades: Photography - Roland Fischer
Book SynopsisRoland Fischer’s “Façades” are spectacular photographic pictures: a visual grammar of architectural structures, an alphabet of abstract forms full of art-historical references. Roland Fischer (b. 1958), whose work is exhibited worldwide in important museums, lives and works in Munich and Beijing. Since the 1990s the artist has been photographing the exteriors of buildings, of banks, corporate headquarters and museums in the metropolises of the world, including Beijing, Tokyo, Shanghai, New York, Hong Kong, Melbourne, Osaka, Boston, Brasilia, Los Angeles, Paris, São Paulo, Singapore, Dallas, Madrid, Washington, Mexico City, Chicago, Toronto, Chongqing and Montreal. The results of this breathtaking project form an unusual series of some 100 façades: a vocabulary of global architecture, an inventory of city landmarks. The structures and colours of the contemporary metropolitan universe are transformed into pictures that resemble abstract paintings.
£19.80
Hirmer Verlag Eavesdropper on an Age: Ludwig Meidner in Exile
Book SynopsisApocalypse, the city, war, religion, the portrait, exile and existential trauma – Ludwig Meidner (1884–1966) is regarded as one of the outstanding artists of German Expressionism. With the accuracy of a seismograph he recorded in his pictorial and literary works the shocks which reverberated through his time. To mark the 50th anniversary of the death of the Jewish artist Ludwig Meidner attention has been focused on the works produced during his period of exile in London between 1939 and 1953 – sketchbooks, watercolours and charcoal and chalk drawings produced under the most difficult conditions. They represent an intense mixture of internal experience and contemporary commentary. With merciless directness and symbolic condensation the works tell of terror, isolation, persecution and destruction as well as a grotesquely absurd world which Meidner spotlighted in an idiosyncratic way, combining mockery with mordant humour and sarcasm with bizarre exaggeration.
£25.50
Hirmer Verlag Monika Fioreschy: Strip-Cut-Collage
Book SynopsisTearing, cutting, shredding in order to reassemble the elements and create something new: strip by strip the Austrian artist Monika Fioreschy applies lengths of torn paper to her canvases, thereby creating large-format abstract works filled with a harmonious formal language and offering an unexpected wealth of detail when observed more closely. Paper is the main medium used in the new cycles of works by Monika Fioreschy, whereby the strength of her works lies in the reduction of materials and forms. Line by line our eyes follow the course of the collages; the observer is seduced into reading her art. The strict regularity of the works is interrupted by changes in colour, the arrangement of the folds, gaps and overpasting, whereby the real wealth of detail only becomes evident through intensive study. In his essay accompanying the full-page reproductions of the works, art theorist Bazon Brock explains how Fioreschy’s training in classic weaving skills can be rediscovered in these works and the role they play in the artist’s oeuvre as a whole.
£27.20
Hirmer Verlag Gabriela von Habsburg: 2016-1996
Book SynopsisFor the first time a single volume assembles a work complex from the oeuvre of Gabriela von Habsburg which has not been shown before: the sculptures, some of them made of metal or stone in different formats and some of them immovable, introduce the artist’s works in the public space that are scattered across the United States and throughout Europe. Together with lithographs, photos of the artist working on her artworks and of her studio round out this exquisite volume. Since earliest times the performing arts have always been one of the most important forms of expression for mankind. With her sculptures Gabriela von Habsburg goes new ways in the politicisation of aesthetics, uniting her work as ambassador, politician and creative artist. Her many years as an ambassador for the Republic of Georgia in Berlin are reflected in the choice of the fall of the Iron Curtain as a subject in the execution of her unusual sculpture monument at Sopron and the Rose Monument of Tbilisi, an act of homage to the bloodless revolution there. A profound and exclusive glimpse into the committed work of a sculptor.
£27.20
Hirmer Verlag Janaina Tschäpe
Book SynopsisTaking the female body for her muse, Janaina Tschäpe explores themes of the body and landscape, sex, death, renewal and transformation in paintings, drawings, photographs and video installations. To experience Tschäpe's work is to swim through universes of polymorphous landscapes amongst embryonic forms, ambiguous characters and exotic botanical life. She seeks to give form to the trance of art making, portraying not a dream world, but the sensation of being in one. "Janaina Tschäpe shares her forename with a Brazilian water goddess, and, not coincidentally, her photographs and performances-to-video feature sumptuously organic, watery, distorted female figures," writes Frieze. Her use of organic lines and ethereal forms in her paintings create a network of relationships, linking the process of artistic practice to lifecycles found in nature. In Brazil, nature is overwhelming. Everything is growing on top of something else - there is always a plant breaking through a wall or a tree shooting out of the ground. When she returns to the city, she paints with these memories. Her paintings exist in a state of their own becoming. They are systems of palimpsests; each brushstroke, a materially emphatic note, partially occludes a previous mark. In this way, forms are built and colors orchestrated through layers of accumulation.Table of ContentsSeeking an End Without End By Louisa Duarte Tschäpe the Dragon By Germano Celant Works List of works Janaina Tschäpe
£999.99
Hirmer Verlag Max Mannheimer: The Marriage of Colours
Book SynopsisMax Mannheimer (* 1920) survived the Holocaust as a Jew in a concentration camp. His moving life history has been published in several books in different languages. However, few people are aware of his paintings, which were created under his Hebrew name “ben jakov”. This volume assembles a selection of 70 of his works. Max Mannheimer’s oeuvre follows his poetic motto “I marry colours”. Starting from a completely independent artistic position, since 1955 he has demonstrated tremendous pleasure in experimentation and has created a total of more than one thousand works. His dynamic abstract paintings and drawings are signed “ben jakov” (Son of Jakob) in memory of his father, who was killed in concentration camp. They bear witness to the horror as well as the joy of an eventful life. Together with an introductory essay by Gottfried Knapp, the publication provides for the first time an overview of the paintings of Ma x Mannheimer which have been created away from the public eye
£27.20
Hirmer Verlag Andrea Bischof: Color Truth
Book SynopsisAndrea Bischof is one of Austria’s most important contemporary artists and has made a name for herself through the subtleness of the coloration and exceptional harmony of her compositions. She achieves this through weeks of patiently juxtaposing dazzling tones that. The alluring interplay between surface and depth literally makes the pictures begin to breathe and pulsate. Bischof has always felt a strong affinity with French art and, in her work, continues in the footsteps of the Impressionists, Nabis and Fauves. Like the Abstract Expressionist artists Bischof has also made a close study of the fulminant late work of the great French master Claude Monet. This volume portrays Bischof’s development form the monochrome works of her early period and the arcane depths of her Reflections, over the experimental works on paper to the strongly colored, expressive large-formats of the magnificent Pulsations series. An interview with the artist and a lavishly illustrated biography complete this overview.
£999.99
Hirmer Verlag Sovak.: Clear Vision(s) - Catalogue Raisonné 1995
Book SynopsisPravoslav Sovak (*1926) is one of the most important graphic artists of our time. With his drawing skills and delight in technical experimentation he focuses his critical attention on society and institutions. Sometimes he lets us immerse ourselves in travel and landscape impressions. A reading book and catalogue raisonné in one, this volume traces Sovak’s multi-layered oeuvre since 1994. The artist from Bohemia is a path-blazer for Postmodernism and an unparalleled master of graphic techniques. With virtuoso skill he combines complex processes from etching to the rarely used helioogravure. With his finely balanced nuances he allows virtually every print to become an original. Sovak’s pictorial themes, from the sterility of the media society or the elemental experience of nature in the wilderness to an autobiographical collage, entrance viewers with a crystalline precision of design. Clear, almost minimalistic structures, networks and grid lines predominate, convincing the viewer with their fine obfuscation and powerful objectivity.
£23.80
Hirmer Verlag Gert & Uwe Tobias: Grisaille
Book SynopsisThe twins Gert & Uwe Tobias are among the most famous German artists in the field of printed graphics; their international success has taken them as far as New York and the Museum of Modern Art. To this day their inimitable signature has lost nothing of its radical approa ch. Their most recent group of works, GRISAILLE, matches up to the promises inherent in the artists’ reputation. Exuberant imagination, craftsmanlike perfection and humorous depth characterise the large - format woodcuts, luminous collages and delicately nu anced typewriter drawings of the artist duo Gert & Uwe Tobias. In their new group of works GRISAILLE, which was created exclusively for the Munich exhibition, the artists rediscovered the centuries - old technique of “grey - in - grey painting” and at the same t ime interpret it in a new manner through the medium of the woodcut. Via the twilight of a monochrome colour scheme hitherto unknown in their work, the realm of shadows in their fabulous pictorial inventions not only acquires ambiguity, but is also carried to extremes once more.
£32.30
Hirmer Verlag Roland Fischer: Refugees
Book SynopsisRoland Fischer was inspired by the current political and social events relating t o the topic of refugees to create a collective portrait consisting of over 1,000 separate photographs. Central questions about identity and solidarity, which are the subject of discussion in the socio - political debate, are raised and treated in an artistic manner. The term “refugees” is removed from its abstract context and real people appear in the viewer’s field of vision, complete with name. As regards motif and topic, a collective portrait like this one, for which the artist mounted 1,000 individual por traits, hovers between the individual and the collective. While refugees and migrants are perceived primarily as an abstract collective and an indeterminate mass, especially as a result of the reporting in the media, Roland Fischer and his art project poin t out that this collective is comprised of many individuals with personal, individual fates.
£17.95
Hirmer Verlag Stella Hamberg
Book SynopsisStella Hamberg is an exceptional figure in contemporary sculpture. Starting out from a reflected contemporary vocabulary of forms, her sculptures feature mainly human figures, but also animals, suffused with an elemental intensity that comprises self - asser tion and vitality as well as failure and death. The sculptress Stella Hamberg (b. 1975) usually opts for the classical material bronze which has traditionally combined durability with metamorphosis, if only in the amalgamation of different metals achieved through melting. Essential to the figures she creates are their existence in time and ability to transform, as well as eternity in the moment. Seeking to express the spiritual in the physical forms — from the overall pose down to the subtleties of sculptu ral detail and the surface shimmer — has been a concern of sculptors ever since antiquity. The reinterpretation of this grand tradition is one aspect of the topicality of her works.
£32.00
Hirmer Verlag Werner Graeff: Ein Bauhauskünstler berichtet /
Book SynopsisWerner Graeff – painter, graphic artist, typographer, photographer and sculptor – is an important Bauhaus artist and a significant representative of Constructivism in Germany. Prompted by his friend Mies van der Rohe he wrote his moving autobiography “Hürdenlauf durch das 20. Jahrhundert” (The Obstacle Race of the 20th century), which this volume publishes for the first time with a representative selection of texts. Werner Graeff ( 1901 – 1978 ) was a student at the Bauh aus in Weimar and from 1921 a member of the De Stijl Dutch artists’ group. Together with Willi Baumeister he was also closely associated with the “ring neue werbegestalter” founded in 1927 by Kurt Schwitters. At an early stage he focused much of his attent ion on film and photography, but in 1951 after his return to the Ruhr region from exile in Switzerland he once again increasingly devoted himself to his work as an independent artist. Illustrated with a large number of paintings, pictograms, multiples, dra wings and graphic works from the artist’s estate, this volume leads the reader through Graeff’s life and works and is at the same time a fascinating journey through the German art history of the 20 th century.
£29.75
Hirmer Verlag Katharina Sieverding: Art and Capital
Book SynopsisThe German photographer Katharina Sieverding is one of the celebrated international artists who made use of unusual pictorial invention and innovative media - based artistic praxis from an early stage in order to revive the artistic potential of photography. This volume, designed to a large extent by the artist herself, presents 42 groups of works from the years 1967 – 2017 . Sieverding became famous for the unparalleled consistency with which she h as applied her greatlyenlarged portraits in film and photographs since the 1960 s by manipulating them in a variety of ways. Since the 1970 s she has developed large - format montages on the state of the world whichwere presented to the public for the first ti me at documenta 6 in 1977 . In doing so she challenges the accelerated picture processes of the present day in a critical manner and in the light of responsibility, also towards herself. Her oeuvre is spotlighted from all angles in illustrations of herworks , details and installation photos as well as texts on the use of media, the self - portrait and analogue and digital photography
£31.96
Hirmer Verlag Heinz Mack: Licht / Light / Lumière
Book SynopsisLight is the original phenomenon which has been made visible in the works of Heinz Mack. The search for the possibilities for visualising light kept the multi - faceted oeuvre of this artist from the Zero circle ev er open to new ideas for half a century and provided inspiration with regard to both form and technique. There is nothing which makes people so aware of life as our existence in light. Heinz Mack (*1931) was addicted to light as if to a magic potion which inspired him to innovative experiments with highly varied experimental arrangements. His works break through the traditional genres of art and add unknown techniques and materials to the creative aspect. This book was compiled by the art ist himself from his entire creative oeuvre. It reveals the spectrum of natural and artificial light as it can only be experienced in the imagination of a mystic who commands confident control of the rational means of the modern age.
£52.00
Hirmer Verlag Marcus Jansen: Aftermath
Book SynopsisHe is considered the innovator and pioneer of a new urban Expressionism in painting. The nearly 50 - year - old New Yorker Marcus Jansen, now living in Fort Myers, already commands high prices in the United States and is making his way into Europe’s gallery and museum world. This is a companion volume to the artist’s first major European touring exhibition in 2017 – 2018. Since Neo Rauch’s appearance no such powerful artistic expressiveness has blazed a trail between America and Europe as in the work of Marcus Jansen. With this monograph three of Germany’s leading art publicists — Manfred Schneckenburger, Gottfried Knapp, and Dieter Ronte — convincingly explain how and why Jansen’s post - apocalyptic scenarios so captivate the viewer. Central paintings as well as prev iously unpublished works on paper by this internationally celebrated artist with German and Jamaican roots are presented.
£32.30
Hirmer Verlag In) Formation: On the philosophy and art of Alice
Book SynopsisAlice Teichert’s paintings are known for their holographic depth and unique lunimosity, for their visual poetry and mutifacetted proximity to music. With lines, shapes and colour, she unfolds new realms that when looked at reveal themselves, once the viewer stops trying to “decipher”. With a background in graphic art, music and literature, from very early on, Teichert develops her artistic vocabulary to which she keeps adding new expressive dimensions. She creates graphic works, visual poetics and paintings with up to thirty layers of glazes. She is also inspired by old masters. Illuminated books and manuscripts from the medieval period play a most important role. With their written traces, they often are as illegible as Alice Teichert’s scribbles, which have become her signature. This lavishly illustrated monograph is a first to offer a comprehensive insight into her unique oeuvre.
£27.20
Hirmer Verlag Burhan Dogancay
Book SynopsisThe wall was his passion. If we look at urban walls with the eyes of Burhan Dogancay, a completely different world opens up: half - ripped posters on rough brickwork, covered in graffiti, scribblings, messages, signs, stickers. From this rich stock of struct ures, signs and symbols the artist created his wall fragments, his “Urban Walls”. Dogancay (1929 – 2013) was born in Istanbul and settled in New York in 1964, where he moved within the art scene around Robert Rauschenberg und Jasper Johns. His subject is the visual perception of texture, place and memory, which he researches in serial wor ks. For his “Urban Walls” he records house walls and façades all over the world in a variety of media, using a wide range of materials and techniques such as photography, collage and painting. His works are archives of past decades which capture the spirit of the times. From the 1970s and 1980s he progresses from these works to develop his “Ribbons” – calligraphic paintings of poetic charm.
£25.60
Hirmer Verlag Gerhard Richter: About Painting / early works
Book SynopsisGerhard Richter (*1932) is an exceptional personality – not because his pictures are world famous, but because he has demonstrated a new approach to painting. His art masterfully moves between abstraction and representation, sensuousness and denial – ambiv alent attitudes which he demonstrated even in his early work. Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre overcomes the division between abstract and representational art. His pictures neither cultivate a modest interplay of colours and forms nor do they deliver an intact p icture of reality. Richter is a sceptical artist who questions the reality of his art even when the prime subject of his paintings is the tangible. This applies in particular to his door, curtain and window pictures of the 1960s, which form the central foc us of this volume. They stage a playful examination of the illusory nature of art, which always questions what painting shows or conceals. This lavishly appointed volume is published to mark the artist’s 85th birthday.
£23.96
Hirmer Verlag Encounters
Book Synopsis“Art is art and everything else is everything else.” With this quotation after Ad Reinhardt, Wolfgang Felten hit the nail squarely on the head: art obeys its own rules. The author and photographer have joined together in a unique illustrated book to show this without surrendering the visual to the argumentative. People who know something about art also know how irritating talking about art can often be. In this book the connoisseur Wolfgang Felten undertakes to reveal artworks as areas for experience. From a Khmer Buddha statue or an African mask to the photograph of a façade or a drawing by Alberto Giacometti – the artist’s very personal commitment is to explaining the phenomenon: how it can be that inanimate material can bring forth something that is alive, that inspires and moves, and to understand why this happens. He appeals to our willingness to see; independently, intensively and in a way that remains open for new experiences.
£54.40
Hirmer Verlag Blue Land and City Noise: An Expressionist Stroll
Book SynopsisColourful, emotional, impulsive and modern – these are the qualities which characterise our ideas of German Expressionist painting. It is hard to believe that the works caused a scandal when they were first created. And yet, artists and writers were united in the vision of a new beginning combined with fundamental social criticism. Many aspects like the social problems of the big city, the sleazy glamour of the world of entertainment and the rejection of new technology remain surprisingly topical to this day. Immerse yourself in the powerful images and texts of world literature and embark on a journey of discovery through the world of the early 20th century with its atmosphere of change and decay. With works by Max Beckmann, Heinrich Campendonck, Lyonel Feininger, George Grosz, Erich Heckel, Alexej von Jawlensky, Wassily Kandinsky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paul Klee, Oskar Kokoschka, August Macke, Franz Marc, Ludwig Meidner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Otto Mueller, Gabriele Münter, Emil Nolde, Max Pechstein, Marianne von Werefkin et al. With texts by Walter Benjamin, Gottfried Benn, Anton Chekhov, Alfred Doblin, Theodor Fontane, Oskar Maria Graf, Franz Kafka, Else Lasker-Schuler, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Thomas Mann, Robert Musil, Vladimir Nabokov, Rainer Maria Rilke, Joseph Roth, Arthur Schnitzler, Herwarth Walden, Stefan Zweig et al.
£21.21
Hirmer Verlag Elka Härtel: Rapunzel
Book SynopsisRapunzel, the famous fairy - tale character of the Brothers Grimm, comes from the world of magic. She is the girl, lover, woman and mother who escapes from imprisonment. Elke Härtel awakens Rapunzel to new life, modelled in clay and then cast in plaster and bronze. The publication documents the fascinating process of creation with lavish illustrations. Elke Härtel draws on inner pictorial worlds as well as on fairy tales, myths and religious concepts. She takes her strong, usually female figures from the depths of dreams and from literary references. Born in 1978, she studied at the Weißensee Academy of Art Berlin and the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. Her sculptures and large - format drawings have already been shown in the Lenbachhaus München and in the Diocesan Museum in Freising, amongst other places. Thanks to her numerous projects in the public space she occupies an influential position in contemporary sculpture, as this evocative pictorial volume impressively demonstrates .
£999.99
Hirmer Verlag Ally: Janine Antoni, Anne Halprin, Stephen
Book SynopsisAlly brings together three artist personalities who are all outstanding in their fields: the sculptor and photographer Janine Antoni and the dancers and choreographers Anna Halprin and Stephen Petronio. Together they created a series of works – sculptures and installations as well as film and performance artworks – which the volume reproduces in impressive photographs. When invited to create a retrospective of her sculptural works, t he artist Janine Antoni preferred to ask herself what her works would look like when interpreted by other artists and translated into movement. Together with the choreographers Anna Halprin and Stephen Petronio she created unique perfomance artworks whose main focus lies on corporeality. It reveals the enormous potential that lies in the combination of sculpture and dance. Critical essays by writers and art theorists accompany the encounter between artists from different generations and genres and show how they have created together a new pictorial lan guages.
£27.20
Hirmer Verlag Andy Warhol: Drag & Draw: The Unknown Fifties
Book SynopsisThis book highlights two series of little known drawings from the 1950's, drawings where Andy Warhol first explored the controversial and for him deeply personal subject of drag. His oeuvre during the first decade of his career, before he became the god father of Pop, has proven to be enormously influential on his life's work but remains little known. In 1953, Warhol created two unique series of drawings, quite different from his commissioned work. In one series, he developed an ensemble of spirited wome n that were derived from photographs of stage divas and — of men in drag. He delved deeper into the art of dressing as the opposite sex with his second series, a set of portraits of men posing in high and low drag. This book considers Warhol's work and its d ebt to newly discovered photographs that his friend, photographer Otto Fenn, staged explicitly for Warhol’s purpose. Drag & Draw sheds light on New York's secret gay and drag scenes during the repressive 1950s
£27.20
Hirmer Verlag Innovative Impressions: Prints by Cassatt, Degas,
Book SynopsisInnovative Impressions explores an under-examined aspect of three impressionists’ careers: their groundbreaking prints and the new techniques they developed through collaboration and experimentation. In 1879, Mary Cassatt, Edgar Degas, and Camille Pissarro formed the most active core of a group of artists planning a periodical to feature their prints. Through this collaborative effort they challenged each other to develop a new language of printmaking whose visual and expressive potential went well beyond the traditional reproductive purpose of the medium. Indeed, the intimacy of small-scale works on paper at times spurred the artists to be even more daringly creative than they were in their paintings. Their interactions and engagement with printmaking varied over time, culminating in the 1890s, when each developed distinctive methods of introducing color into their work. For much of their careers this unlikely trio of artists inspired and challenged each other, and these dynamics played a crucial role in their creative processes.
£999.99
Hirmer Verlag Joan Jonas
Book SynopsisJoan Jonas (b. 1936, New York) is one of the most highly regarded and influential artists working today. This book focuses on her new exhibition, film screenings and performances at Tate Modern and Haus der Kunst, and includes several interviews with the artist, giving valuable insights into her interdisciplinary approach and artistic processes. A pioneer of performance art in the 1960s, Joan Jonas’s experimental installations include projections, videos, drawings, soundscapes, props and masks. Featuring her new exhibition at Tate Modern and Haus der Kunst, this publication focuses on new and past interviews with the artist. Jonas reveals her artistic processes, her influences and inspirations, from literature and Noh Theatre to rituals, and speaks of collaborations with Babette Mangolte or Jason Moran. Joan Jonas (b. 1936, New York) has exhibited and performed her work extensively at an international level, including Documenta and the U.S. Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennial.
£23.96
Hirmer Verlag Gerhard Berger: Between Worlds
Book SynopsisIn decades of artistic production Gerhard Berger (born in 1933) has arrived at a unique, characteristic visual language. His representation of humans, oscillatin g between figurative and abstract painting, is rooted in the great myths of humankind and in the religious visual conceptions of the world’s cultures. Gerhard Berger approaches his works deliberately: each picture is preceded by a long w ork process of sketching and testing the projected figurative forms in a previously established grid of the visual space. The graphic techniques learned in his youth, in particular typography, remain recognisable in this working process. Berger also impart ed his precise method of working during his tenure at the Academy of Visual Arts in Munich. Since 1999 he has dedicated himself entirely as a freelance painter and graphic artist to his own visual universe, one that invites the observer to read and analyse its play of forms.
£30.60
Hirmer Verlag James Loeb: Collector
Book SynopsisJames Loeb (1867 – 1933), the son of a German - Jewish banker in New York, followed his artistic and art historical inclinations and used his tremendous financial wealth for the purpose of cultural and social philanthropism. This publication examines the patron’s life and work and outlines his scholarly achievements. Classical scholar, art collector, and philanthropist – James Loeb is one of the impressive personal ities of the twentieth century. Coming from a well - off family, he lived for his artistic interests and owned an outstanding collection of Greek, Etruscan, and Roman artworks, which nowadays is kept in the State Collection of Antiquities in Munich. He is th e founder of the Loeb Classical Library and provided extensive support for educational and social institutions. In this publication, renowned German and American authors for the first time take a comprehensive look at the life and work of the collector and patron who was active in Munich and Murnau.
£25.46
Hirmer Verlag Beate Passow: Monkey Business
Book SynopsisIn her series of images “Monkey Business” the artist Beate Passow portrays a mysterious fairy - tale world of political dimensions. The black and white images, which upon closer observation turn out to be sophisticated tapestries, question the ruling syst ems, economic structures, and political movements of contemporary Europe. A Barbary macaque sits on a martial gun barrel in Gibraltar, a powerful bear mounts a bull, a skeleton - like figure strides over destroyed refugee boats on Lampedusa. The strange fi gures that inhabit “Monkey Business” narrate a penetrating mythology of the 21st century. In her narrative approach Passow subverts the established tapestry tradition, not praising rulers and heroes, but directing criticism – at today’s Europe. Once celebr ated as the stronghold of democracy and humanism, it is today marked by a military defensive stance at its borders, by a thoroughly corrupt capitalism, and by increasingly brazen Neo - Nazi movements.
£21.21
Hirmer Verlag John Grade: Reclaimed
Book SynopsisJohn Grade’s drawings, sculptures and installations are weathered, marked, worn and disintegrated. Made of reclaimed wood or paper, the works are buried for termites to devour, sunk into a bay to collect barnacles, or hung in forest trees for birds t o eat. Grade’s work represents our changing environment. An attraction to travel and to the land shapes the work, mirroring pattern s found in nature, such as wasp nests, erosion, honeycombs, rocks, trees and the passage of time. Grade invites natural forces to erode and change the work and its material, e x ploring both control and disruption and risk and measured thought. The works beg in from an ex - perience – a reaction to place and history or a trek into the landscape, whether it is the old growth forests of the Pacific Northwest or the hills of Iceland.
£39.96
Hirmer Verlag Christiane Baumgartner: Another Country
Book SynopsisChristiane Baumgartner: Another Country complements the artist’s first major M useum exhibition in the U.S. and offers an in - depth introduction to the artist’s work at mid - career. Baumgartner is best known for monumental woodcuts, handcarved prints that literally and conceptually expand the traditional boundaries of the medium beyond expectation. Leipzig - based artist Christiane Baumgartner (b. 1967) works at the intersection of old and new media to expand the conceptual and technical capacities of printmaking. Sourcing images from cinema and TV or from her own photographs and videos, she hand - carves woodcuts that defy convention and expectation. Often monumental in scale or undertaken in large series, the work is about speed and transmission, about human sight and its elusive capture, about cultural memory and modes of representation. Essays contextualise the work in relation to German printmaking and the Leipzig school; an interview with the artist surveys her praxis at mid - career.
£23.40
Hirmer Verlag Harald Sohlberg: Uendelige Landskap (Norwegian
Book SynopsisI 2019 er det 150-årsjubileum for Harald Sohlbergs fødsel. Utstillingen i Nasjonalgalleriet høsten 2018 og i London og Wiesbaden i 2019 vil danne en flott opptakt til aktiviteter og fornyet interesse for denne viktige norske kunstneren. Magiske landskaper, myke blomsterenger og kalde vinternetter: Sohlbergs motivkrets kombinerer elementer fra en romantisk naturoppfattelse med tendenser fra det samtidige kunstuttrykket. Hans bilder tilhørte ingen spesifikk kunstnerisk retning, selv om den er sterkt knyttet til symbolismen. Det er spenningen mellom det tradisjonstro og det moderne som gjør hans billedverden spesiell både i norsk og internasjonal sammenheng. Utstillingskatalogen presenterer rundt 60 malerier samt en rekke av kunstnerens tegninger, trykk og fotografier. Katalogtekstene setter Sohlberg inn i en kunstnerisk kontekst, både når det gjelder forholdet til tidligere tiders kunst og hans samtidige norske og internasjonale kollegaer. Sohlberg hadde noen spesifikke steder han hentet sine motiver fra. Den stedlige tilknytningen til Rondane, Røros, Oslo og Helgeroa inngår som et viktig gjentagende element i hans billedverden. Bildene til Sohlberg legger til rette for at betrakteren skaper sine egne fortellinger. I mange av landskapsmaleriene er fraværet av mennesker påfallende, ikke minst fordi de samtidig inneholder spor etter menneskelig aktivitet; landbruk, bygninger, veier, telegrafstolper, industri, for å nevne noe. Mennesket og det moderne liv i historiske omgivelser er et sentralt tema, ofte med et modernitetskritisk blikk.
£30.60
Hirmer Verlag King of the Animals: Wilhelm Kuhnert and the
Book SynopsisWilhelm Kuhnert was a pioneer. He was one of the first European artists to travel to the largely unexplored savannahs and jungles of the German colonies in North and East Africa. Under hazardous conditi ons he documented at close quarters the fascinating animal and plant world and then created in his Berlin studio monumental paintings which were much sought - after on the art market. Like no other artist of his time Wilhelm Kuhnert (1865 – 1926) has moulded our image of Africa. In his seductively realistic drawings, watercolours and paintings he recorded with almost scientific accuracy the characteristics of the animals and their habitat. It is not surprising, therefore, that his pictures illustrated on the o ne hand legendary reference works like Brehms Tierleben and adorned on the other the popular collector cards of the chocolate manufacturer Stollwerck. The volume shows a comprehensive, exciting portrait of Kuhnert’s unusual life and works and takes into account at the same time the current debate on attitudes to Germany’s colonial past.
£32.30
Hirmer Verlag Alfred Haberpointner
Book SynopsisAlfred Haberpointner (*1966 in Salzburg) is a sculptor of international repute. He became famous with his wooden sculptures, and he has subsequently expanded his work to include the use of materials like steel, lead and paper. This volume documents Haberpointner’s artistic development through all phases up to and including his large - scale works in the public space. Alfred Haberpointner’s deep - seated association with wood as a material has its roots in his biography. He grew up in the region around Salzburg and began at an early age to collect wood and to examine and shape it. After abandoning his originally naturalistic approach, in the 1990s he began to produce studies and first works series on the subjects of proportion and weight. His textural approach increasingly began to assume priority in his technique. The result was large spatial objects and wall sculptures with expressive surface structures and colours. In a major exclusive interview the artist speaks about all aspects and the background of his work.
£999.99
Hirmer Verlag Rubens's Great Landscape with a Tempest
Book SynopsisThe Great Landscape with a Tempest in Vienna is one of Peter Paul Rubens’s largest and most dramatic landscapes. Starting from the far-reaching discoveries during the latest restoration, the volume provides a comprehensive insight into the process of creation of this fascinating picture as well as its art-historical interpretation. Evidently produced for pleasure, the Great Landscape remained in Rubens’s possession until his death. As the restoration has shown, Rubens changed the painting several times and only added the story of Philemon and Baucis at the end. The poor elderly couple were the only ones to offer Jupiter and Mercury hospitality and were thus rescued from the punishment of the floods. The restoration procedures and the complex composition and creation of the painting are discussed together with its art-historical classification. A consideration of Rubens’s portrayal of nature and thus the outstanding position of this work in European landscape painting round out the presentation.
£23.96
Hirmer Verlag Shadows of Time: Giambologna, Michelangelo and
Book SynopsisGiambologna (1529 – 1606) is regarded as the most important European sculptor between Michelangelo and Bernini. How did he achieve this status? This volume investigates this question and examines above all Giambologna’s study of Michelangelo, his all-powerful role model, and how he successfully prevailed. The young Flemish artist Giambologna most probably embarked on his study trip to Rome in 1550. On his way home he visited Florence, decided to stay and became the star at the Medici court. They sent his sculptures to the princely courts of Europe, where they became sought-after gifts. Although we know a great deal about his success, we know little of his early years in Italy, because he first appeared on the scene as a sculptor from about 1560. The alabaster figures after Michelangelo’s “Times of Day” in Dresden, hitherto largely ignored, seem to be early works by the master sculptor. An examination of these sculptures promises to shed fresh light on the development of a genius.
£32.30
Hirmer Verlag Cao Fei
Book SynopsisThe artist Cao Fei (* 1978) lives in Beijing. In her work she makes use of the latest digital media. Her projects lie on the threshold between reality and fiction and reflect the societal and urban situation in China. The videos, photographs, drawings and multimedia installations represent her entire artistic oeuvre. In her works, which vary between the aesthetics of documentary, film and virtual reality, Cao Fei reflects the reality of life in China and the constant fundamental changes. In doing so she also draws on her personal surroundings in Beijing. As an artist she addresses questions which are universally valid: where is the development in big cities leading? What is my place within urban society? Am I a critical observer of gentrification processes and at the same time a part of the problem?
£23.80
Hirmer Verlag Peter Weber: Structure and Folding: Catalogue
Book SynopsisCreated in one piece and without cutting the surface, Peter Weber’s works position the phenomenon of folding in the field of vision of their viewers. The entire bandwidth of his oeuvre, extending back over 50 years, is now being compiled and acknowledged in a two-volume catalogue raisonné.After his studies in the Department of Design at the University of Applied Sciences in Hamburg, Peter Weber (*1944) continued to focus his entire attention on the creation of concrete art. His early years as a painter were determined by Op-Art and the imaginary space, but he soon became fascinated by the mathematical diversity of the techniques of folding. In addition to felt and paper the artist also uses materials such as linen, cotton, plastic and steel – always uncut and as a whole. The catalogue raisonné assembles in Volume 1 the seven main work groups with explanatory essays. Volume 2 lists chronologically over 1,700 works from all creative periods.
£90.00
Hirmer Verlag Uninterrupted Fugue: Art by Kamal Boullata
Book SynopsisUninterrupted Fugue offers a selection of critical essays about the art of Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata, covering 40 years of his career. Written by an international constellation of critics, art historians and museum curators coming together for the first time in one book, they reveal a wide range of analytical perspectives on the unfolding of abstract art in exile. Readers interested in contemporary art beyond the Western canon, will find in this lavishly illustrated book rare insights into an aesthetic where frontiers are crossed between verbal and visual expression, between modernity and traditions rooted in Byzantine and Islamic art.
£23.96
Hirmer Verlag Koho Mori-Newton: No Intention
Book SynopsisThe Japanese artist Koho Mori-Newton is a master when it comes to handling silk, which he places in an exciting dialogue with architecture. In this way he creates cult-like spaces which interact with light in a fasci nating way. In addition to the works in silk, this volume also shows various graphic work groups from the last 35 years as well as the Path of Silk, created especially for no intention. Koho Mori-Newton (*1951) is a master of intentional lack of intention. His works appear simple, but the aesthetic which lies behind them is complex. Time and again he investigates the basis of art itself, questions the concept of the originality of the artistic creative process and explores the boundaries of artworks. His oeuvre lures us into a world that exists beyond the obvious. Path of Silk, a labyrinthine installation of room-high panels of silk, worked in China ink by Mori-Newton, presents a fragile interplay of space and light, of heaviness and lightness. Further areas of focus in his creative work are repetition and copy, from which his graphic works derive their own special charm.
£25.46
Hirmer Verlag Nitsch: Spaces of Colour
Book SynopsisHermann Nitsch produced his first “poured” paintings around 1960. In this form of action painting, the artist is primarily concerned with the substance of the paint, which he investigates from one Painting Action to the next. This catalog illustrates the development of his painterly works from the early 1960s to the present day. The main focus of the content lies in the characteristics of the various work cycles. In addition to the first “splatter” paintings it shows floor “splatter” paintings from the Red Cycle (1995), works from the Six-Day Play (1989) or the yellow Resurrection Cycle (2002). While one colour dominates in the monochrome works, in others a real explosion of colours takes place. The paint is splattered or sprayed; it may be applied in liquid form or impasto. The artist may use a paintbrush or smear the paint with his hands. The focal point is the exploration of the state of the paint, which varies between liquid and solid.
£32.30
Hirmer Verlag Benjamin Katz: Berlin Havelhöhe 1960
Book SynopsisIn the 1950s the hospital Berlin-Havelhöhe (today the Clinic for Anthropo-sophical Medicine) took over the building that had originally been erected as the National Socialist State Academy for Aviation. It was also there that the pilots who had attacked Guernica in 1934 as part of the Condor Legion had been trained. In 1960, Benjamin Katz fell ill with tuberculosis for a period of one and a half years. He stayed in Havelhöhe and produced an extensive collection of photographs during this time. 48 enlargements together with 380 working prints from the negatives on 30 facsimiled DIN-A4 pages document on the one hand the everyday routine as a patient, but also the architecture and the traces of National Socialism.
£18.70
Hirmer Verlag Making Van Gogh
Book SynopsisMaking van Gogh focuses on the œuvre of Vincent van Gogh in the context of its reception. The publication examines the particular role which German gallerists, collectors, critics and museums played in the story of his success. At the same time it sheds light on the importance of van Gogh as a role model for the avant-garde generation of artists.“Van Gogh is dead, but the van Gogh-chaps are alive! And how alive they are! It is van Goghing everywhere”, was how Ferdinand Avenarius described it in 1910 in the magazine Der Kunstwart. Vincent van Gogh’s paintings exerted a particular fascination on young artists in Germany at the beginning of the twentieth century. Barely fifteen years after his death the Dutch artist was seen as one of the most important forerunners of modern painting. A selection of key works from all van Gogh’s creative phases are juxtaposed with works by Max Beckmann, Erich Heckel, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Münter, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff and others.
£36.00
Hirmer Verlag Ericka Beckman
Book SynopsisSince the mid-1970s, Ericka Beckman (b. 1951, Hampstead, NY) has forged a signature visual language in film, video, installation, and photography. Often shot against black, spatially ambiguous backdrops, her moving image works are structured according to the logic of child’s play, games, folklore, or fairy tales, and populated by archetypical characters and toy-like props in bright, primary colours. Throughout her work, Beckman engages profound questions of gender, role-playing, competition, power and control. The publication will include selected works spanning thirty years of Beckman’s career, providing the first opportunity to survey her contribution to the art world. With new scholarly essays on Beckman’s work that offer an art-historical consideration of her early Super-8 Films and a critical situating of the artist’s ongoing preoccupation with the structures of games, gambling, and capitalism, the exhibition catalogue contextualizes Beckman’s practice on the occasion of this major survey exhibition. More than 20 colour images in the catalogue include photo- documentation of Beckman’s works since 1983 and installation views of the MIT List Center exhibition.
£23.96
Hirmer Verlag Yoko Ono: Growing Freedom
Book SynopsisYoko Ono is a leading experimental and avant-garde artist. In Tokyo during the 1950s, she introduced original questions about the concept of art and the art object, breaking down the traditional boundaries between branches of art. She has since been associated with conceptual art, performance, Fluxus, and 1960s happenings. Through her performances and activism, she created a new kind of relationship with both spectators and fellow artists – including her late husband, John Lennon – by inviting them to play an active part in the creative process.Conceptually based in the spirit of the revolutionary pocketbook, this publication underscores the cornerstones of action, participation and imagination in the work of Yoko Ono. Presented in two parts, the first part will focus on her ‘instruction’ works and emphasize the role of the visitor in their completion. The second part will present the arc of collaborative projects for peace undertaken by Yoko Ono and John Lennon, among these, the Acorn Peace project, the War is Over peace campaign, and their Bed In projects that will have taken place fifty years ago as of March 2019. Ulti mately, this publication wishes to impart Yoko Ono’s massive impact on contemporary art practices, art reception, and activism through art. The urgency and spirit of her work remain a key reference for the indivisibility of art and life, as well as the importance of non-violent action to inspire political and social change.
£17.95
Hirmer Verlag Michael Triegel: Metamorphosis of the Gods
Book SynopsisMichael Triegel (1968) is among the most important representatives of the New Leipzig School. Along with landscape sketches, still lifes and portraits, it is principally mythological and religious subjects that bear witness to his very individual, multi-faceted idiom in the style of the great masters of the Italian Renaissance.
£31.96
