Search results for ""Author Nina Zimmer""

Max Bill (1908–1994), a key figure of modernism in his native Switzerland and internationally, was a true renaissance man. Equally accomplished as a painter, sculptor, graphic and product designer, and architect, he was also an eminent theorist and educator, curator, and prolific publicist. Moreover, he engaged in Swiss politics and was an activist both in Switzerland and abroad. Throughout his career he connected with fellow artists and other leading figures of modernism, maintaining a lifelong and worldwide artistic and political dialogue. This book, published in conjunction with a major exhibition at Zentrum Paul Klee in Bern, Switzerland, takes a fresh look both at Bill’s remarkable achievements across his diverse fields of creative activity and at his international network, highlighting his contribution to art and society as a whole. Max Bill Global features some 120 of Bill’s own works in all disciplines and a selection of his designed products that went into industrial production, as well as work by some of his artist friends. Published alongside are topical essays investigating Bill’s interaction and networking with fellow artists in Dessau, Paris, Zurich, São Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York.

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Hannah Höch (1889–1978) moved between differing worlds: as an editorial assistant with a major Berlin-based magazine publisher, and as the only woman who could hold her own in the German capital’s vibrant Dada scene of the 1920s. Höch broke with the traditions of representation and vision. Her works dissected a world marked by the catastrophe of the Great War and an intense consumer culture, and reassembled it in revolutionary, poetic, and often ironic ways. Höch kept to her artistic means and her poetic-radical imagination, shimmering between social observation and dream world, even in the post-WWII period. Scissors and glue were the weapons of her art of montage, of which she was a co-inventor. Cutting and montage also shaped film, still a new medium in the 1920s, which strongly influenced Höch’s art: she understood her assembled pictures as static films. This richly illustrated and expertly annotated book explores comprehensively for the first time Höch’s fascination with film and the visual culture of the modern industrial age. It demonstrates how montage evolved in a field of tension between artistic experimentation, commercial exploitation, and political appropriation. A text-collage on the history of montage, in which major protagonists of Modernism and Avant-garde such as Sergej Eisenstein, Raoul Hausmann, László Moholy-Nagy, Walter Ruttman, Kurt Schwitters, Theo van Doesburg, and Dsiga Wertow, have their say, rounds out the volume.

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The book offers representative excerpts from the manuscript reviewed by the artist in the early 1990s. Stylistically aware and (self-)critical, the author comments on the cultural and social climate in postwar Germany. He offers new insights into the German art scene of the postwar period and its European network, the relations between the SPUR group and the Situationist International around Guy Debord - provocations and scandals included.

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Korea is still a divided country that apparently never found its way out of the Cold War. The differences between the socialist North, which follows a dynastic leadership cult, and the capitalist South, with its developed democracy, could hardly be greater. Encompassing all areas of life, this divergence is also reflected in the art of the two countries: through the vibrant contemporary art scene in South Korea and the socialist-realist tradition of painting in North Korea, two diametrically opposed artistic attitudes exist in parallel, reflecting the incompatibility of the political systems and the stark differences in the way of life of the populations. To mark the exhibition of both North and South Korean works from the Sigg Collection at the Kunstmuseum Bern, a comprehensive, richly illustrated catalogue is being published, which sheds light upon the theme of the border in contemporary Korean art from both sides.

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Markus Raetz (1941–2020) is widely recognised as one of Switzerland’s most significant contemporary artists. His multifaceted oeuvre includes some 1,500 sculptures, installations, and objects. They are works that make us playfully aware of how strongly our perception of the world depends on the point of view we take. This bilingual French–German book, published in conjunction with a major Markus Raetz retrospective at the Kunstmuseum Bern in summer 2023, focuses on the artist’s objects and mobiles, most of which have only so far been sporadically on public display. Essays by curator Stephan Kunz and French art historian and curator Didier Semin explore this part of Raetz’s work and place it within the overall context of his art. These are complemented by images newly taken by Swiss photographer Alexander Jaquemet in Raetz’s preserved studio, thus providing a direct insight into the artist’s former working environment. Text in French and German.

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