Search results for ""druckverlag kettler""

In a world in which information is disseminated in no time across the globe via digital highways, the built and tarred roads appear as historical relics of a bygone era. What do roads tell us of the civilisation of those who constructed them? A road is a symbol of movement and progress, but also of flight and escape. It evokes dreams and projects an alternative, better life. Movement on a road signifies prosperity, development, and liberty in a democratised world. This book explores the basic principles of human thinking and acting that underlie the concept of the road, both from the vantage point of the history of ideas and in terms of its gradual transformation on a virtual level. The artists represented in the exhibition use photography and video to investigate the motif of the road and its relevance to the pressing challenges of our society, such as the issue of migrants and refugees, the global ecological impact of a mobile society, or the fact that all of us are becoming the object of omnipresent video surveillance, especially on roads and highways. Artists: Sue Barr, Thomas Bayrle, Julius Brauckmann, James Bridle, Ingrid Burrington, Emma Charles, Frauke Dannert, Hans Gremmen, Uschi Huber, Taiyo Onorato & Nico Krebs, Catherine Opie, Kathy Prendergast, Hans-Christian Schink, Henrik Spohler, Katja Stuke & Oliver Sieber, Clement Valla, Mels Van Zutphen. Text in English and German.

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The human soul is said to weigh 21 grams. But what is the soul, and what makes us human? What do friendship, relationship, partnership entail? How and, most importantly, who defines us and our (gender) identity, our way of loving and living? Is it society? Or rather we ourselves? In her book, the photographer Celine Yasemin addresses these fundamental questions. She has turned her lens on friends and fleeting acquaintances, people from various cultural and social backgrounds who do not identify with the norm, who live a self-determined life with different experiences, preferences, and approaches to life, who comply neither with traditional roles nor relationship models. With deeply empathetic images, Yasemin portrays her fellow human beings. She has succeeded in showing people in their most vulnerable state: in their private surroundings, in bed, naked, without makeup – and without sugarcoating anything. Her careful use of lighting together with her great sense for detail have resulted in pictures full of intimacy, dignity, and power. This book serves as a testimony to acceptance of each other’s differences and to mutual respect.

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David Czupryn is a master of the trompe-l'oeil effect, the centuries-old art of eye illusion that celebrates an unexpected comeback with him. With brush and paint he mimetically reproduces surfaces, thus provocatively negating handwriting and gesture. The pictures seem to be cast in one piece; they are not photorealistic, but illusionistic three-dimensional. David Czupryn was born in 1983 and studied sculpture and painting at the Düsseldorf Art Academy. This catalogue was published to accompany the Holy Ghosts exhibition in the Städtisches Museum Engen+Galerie. Text in English and German.

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Born in Sacramento in 1939, the artist Richard Jackson was one of the leading figures in the Californian art scene in the 1970s and 1980s. Influenced by abstract expressionism and action painting, Jackson developed a combination of painting and action that, much like documentation, exposes the physical effort and time spent in creating a work of art. During his early years, Jackson focused a spotlight on his artistic practice, which he regarded less as a mythical, inspired creative process than a hands-on production of a work of art: assembling the stretcher, attaching the canvas to the frame, applying the paint. Later in his career, Jackson delegated the painting process to complex machines that he used as protagonists or props in his works. This book introduces a selection of his installations entitled Rooms, which feature cartoonlike figures - often dogs or ducks with human traits or plastic figures resembling Playmobil toys - spouting paint from their mouths or genitals. Significantly, Jackson does not involve spectators in the installation, but presents them with the final 'painting' like a sort of oversized tableau. Text in English and German.

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In the early 20th century, the canon of works consecrated by the history of art was increasingly challenged by critics such as Hans Prinzhorn and artists such as Jean Dubuffet, who focused on the works of so-called dilettantes, self-taught artists, and lunatics as primordial artistic expressions seemingly related to the art of primitive tribes and children. The art of these 'outsiders,' for which Dubuffet coined the term 'Art Brut', was special in its instinctive directness. It is free from academic influences, resulting instead from a kind of maniac production without any model or strategy. Today, Kurt Wanski (1922-2012) remains one of the least known major exponents of Art Brut, despite having been a renowned and respected figure in East Berlin's art scene. From the outset, Wanski spent his life in asylums and hospitals before finally moving to the safe haven of a Catholic mental health institution. He always remained independent as an artist. A captive of his own world, Wanski primarily used magazines and journals as models for his drawings. Although he redrew the motifs in a rather clumsy way, his works are more magical than the original designs. For Wanski, who never left Berlin during his lifetime, printed pictures were an unlimited source of inspiration linking the real world with his imagination. Text in English and German.

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What began as a small bonfire on a beach in San Francisco in 1986 has evolved into a cultural phenomenon of epic dimensions - the Burning Man event in the Black Rock Desert of Nevada. At the end of August every year, around 70,000 people come together at Black Rock City, a temporary city in the desert that exists only for eight days. The event, which features hundreds of interactive art installations, art cars, and performances, culminates in the burning of the "Man", a 40-feet tall effigy that is the centrepiece of the celebration. In 2017, the Berlin artist couple Römer + Römer travelled to Nevada to take part in the event. Using a complex technique, they subsequently converted their photos of the festival into a series of striking large-format panel paintings that capture the utopian spirit and carnivalesque essence of Burning Man. Text in English and German.

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Analogue photography is enjoying a revival. Whereas digital photography is predominantly used for documentary and everyday purposes, its analogue counterpart is becoming increasingly popular as an artistic and experimental medium. This catalogue showcases the wide variety of contemporary trends in analogue photography as exemplified by individual and serial works, as well as photographic installations. Produced by 24 artists from German-speaking countries, the works are grouped into four thematic sections that illustrate different facets of this art form, all with a distinct focus on the material and experimental uses of light, chemical ingredients, and technique. The publication highlights contemporary takes on photograms, chemigrams, and lumen printing, which all hark back to the early days of photography. Silver daguerreotypes and ambrotypes of modern-day sceneries create a disturbing anachronistic effect. Yet other artists employ very different forms of photography that go beyond simple cameras. The catalogue also includes artistic positions that blur the boundaries between analogue and digital photography, e.g., by interacting with artificial intelligence, collaborating with digital machines, and transposing digital images into analogue pictures. The show includes work by: Sylvia Ballhause, Eun Sun Cho, Günter Derleth, Jana Dillo, Tine Edel, Alexander Gehring, Spiros Hadjidjanos, Alexander Kadow, Georgia Krawiec, Martin Kreitl, Antje Kröger, Ute Lindner, Lilly Lulay, Harald Mairböck, Florian Merkel, Falk Messerschmidt, Elisabeth Moritz, Taiyo Onorato and Nico Krebs, Helena Petersen, René Schäffer, Karoline Schneider, Regina Stiegeler, Claus Stolz, Ria Wank. Text in English and German.

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A life on the high seas has always promised freedom and adventure. Like no other profession, seafaring provided the chance to explore remote regions of the world and offered an incomparable experience removed from everyday routines. Especially in the 1950s, young men followed the lure of distant shores - far away from Germany where many towns still lay in ruins after the Second World War''s nights of bombing.As evidence of their international travels, the sailors brought home all sorts of unusual souvenirs in addition to countless photos. Owing to affordable compact cameras, they could capture the places they had visited in both snapshots and carefully composed pictures. People were mesmerised by ''exotic'' countries such as Japan, Egypt, or Brazil and by the modern metropolises of Western industrial nations with their breathtaking skyscrapers, fast cars, and easy girls.The photographers not only focused on stunning natural spectacles and picturesque sights, but als

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This book is the story of an extraordinary survivor from the Alhambra palace in Granada, Spain: the Alhambra cupola, now in the Museum of Islamic Art in Berlin. The cupola, a ceiling crafted from carved and painted wood, was made to crown an exquisite mirador in one of the earliest palace buildings of the Alhambra. The book is the cupola’s biography from its medieval construction to its imminent redisplay in Berlin. It traces the long history of the Alhambra through the prism of the cupola, from the Muslim craftsmen who built it, to its adaptation by the Christian conquerors after the fall of Granada in 1492, to its creation as a heritage site. The cupola was sketched by artists from across Europe, before it was dismantled by a German financier and taken to Berlin in the 19th century. It witnessed the dramatic events of the 20th century in Germany and was eventually bought by the Museum in 1978. In recent decades, the new visibility of the cupola to the wider public has prompted questions about the object and its movement from Granada to Berlin. Its removal from the Alhambra and the complex reasons behind this loss are central to this biography. Setting the cupola within the wider context of Islamic heritage, it considers the role of collecting practices in the transformation of living monuments into heritage sites in the 20th century. This book presents a focused study of this unique object that cuts across academic disciplines and geographic boundaries to reveal a new perspective on the legacy of Islamic art in Europe and its continuing relevance today.

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Since the dawn of time, people have been fascinated by the idea of travelling to the stars, which is vividly illustrated by utopian and dystopian works of architecture, the visual arts, and cinematography. In many ways, the designs and symbols associated with space travel also found their way into popular culture in the former Soviet Union and its satellite states. Often spurned as propaganda by the West, they informed the design of mass-produced consumer goods and public art works in the USSR. While in our part of the world space travel largely turned into a political race as a result of the Cold War, its appeal found an aesthetic expression in everyday life in the East. This book presents the results of in-depth research and extensive travels through a total of seven countries. Its prime focus is the impact of space exploration on everyday life in its pioneering age between the late 1950s and the 1980s and the persistence of related concepts and utopian ideas in today's society. Told as a visual story, it combines artistic and documentary photography, portraits of contemporary witnesses, landscape snapshots, and historical documents. It is in part an historical investigation since many of the pioneers of the space age are no longer alive and many of the formerly ubiquitous items have disappeared. Text in English and German.

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What kind of world do we want to bequeath to our children? What planet, what future do we want to pass on to them? In his latest book, Cyril Christo poses the most fundamental of all questions. Together with his wife Marie Wilkinson and their son Lysander, Christo has been seeking out the wonders of this world for more than 40 years and across all continents. During their travels to the Inuit or the first peoples of Africa, they come into contact with communities who seem to have everything that modern, technological society has lost: time, family and an almost inexhaustible kindness towards strangers.The photographers present the wonder of unspoiled nature in their book, captured in powerful duo-tone images that provide a fascinating glimpse into the beauty of life. With a fighting yet sensitive spirit, they share how their experiences and encounters have guided their son's development and how nature can serve as a teacher to all children with their irrepressible yearning fo

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Nasan Tur (*1974) explores the political and social conditions of our time. His works are experiments that bring to light ideologies, social norms, and behavioural codes and open up new possibilities for individual action. To this end, the artist examines statements, gestures, and images that he finds in the media and in the public sphere. Tur transforms them into miniatures of current social crises and discourses. The question of how predetermined role models influence us is at the heart of his art: he investigates what drives us to cross boundaries when faced with oppression, powerlessness, and manipulation and to actively change the social order.The catalogue is published to accompany the exhibition at Berlinische Galerie and presents new works addressing questions of power and its legitimacy. Why do human beings kill each other? What is the nature of the violence that we witness in ourselves and how and under what circumstances is it triggered? By arranging his works in a

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In the popular imagination, artificial intelligence (AI) is usually portrayed as a divine entity that makes “just” and “objective” decisions. Yet AI is anything but intelligent. Rather, it recognises in large amounts of data what it has been trained to recognise. Like a sniffer dog, it finds exactly what it has been taught to look for. In performing this task, it is much more efficient than any human being – but this precisely is also its problem. AI only mirrors or repeats what it has been instructed to reflect. Seen in this light, it may be viewed as a kind of digital “house of mirrors”. Humans train machines, and these machines are only as good or as bad as the humans who train them. Based on this insight, the publication addresses not only algorithmic bias or discrimination in AI, but also AI-related issues such as hidden human labour, the problem of categorisation and classification – and our ideas and fantasies about AI. It also raises the question whether (and how) it is possible to reclaim agency in this context. Text in English and German.

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. An intriguing evocation of London's past through its present . Examines the rarely-travelled areas of marshland on London's outskirts, documenting their gradual urbanisation The photographer Michael Collins, armed with a large-format camera, has spent years discovering traces of the past contained in the marshland landscapes just outside of London. The Hoo Peninsula is situated between the estuaries of the rivers Thames and Medway, one hour by car from central London. This narrow stretch of land is mainly made up of sand and clay hills. Nature there seems strangely inanimate, and the landscape is full of contrasts.But technology and industry are encroaching on the grazing sheep, the saltmarsh and the mud flats. Pylons dot the wilderness, in which shipwrecks have become an integral part of the scenery. Michael Collins visited the Hoo peninsula over several years, producing pictures inspired by the landscapes of 'plein air' painting. With their rich details, they deliberately follow the tradition of nineteenth century record pictures - archival images that were commissioned by the government to document the progress of industrialisation. Text English and German

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In recent years, having received a considerable boost by social media, a young and dynamic scene has emerged that is dedicated to what has become known as queer tattooing. This special community, which is growing steadily, has been born out of a desire to break with the hierarchies and patriarchal structures of traditional tattoo art. It aims to create safe, tolerant, and inclusive spaces where queer, nonbinary, and trans people can experiment away from the mainstream and develop their own individual styles and techniques. In their work, many tattoo artists break free from the destructive, heteronormative, and capitalist ideals of beauty, creating a visual language that subverts the long tradition of cultural appropriation which characterises the traditional tattoo scene. Their designs reveal a unique creative flair for queer iconography. This book is the first comprehensive introduction to this vibrant and diverse queer tattoo community. It presents 50 international tattoo artists with the help of extensive portraits, texts, and series of images.

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The title of the catalogue of works by the artist duo Stefan Panhans (Germany) and Andrea Winkler (Switzerland) is a nod to the rhetoric used by evangelical megachurches in the United States that preach a market-oriented, neoliberal ideology of individual self-optimisation under the guise of Christian pastoral care. The artists’ works touch on electric SUVs, communication with forms of artificial intelligence, racism in everyday life, celebrity cults, stereotypes, computer games, the “uncanny valley,” and other post-digital feedback loops between humans and virtual worlds, but also on the precarious condition of cultural sector workers. Panhans and Winkler are masters at using a broad spectrum of artistic genres and media, such as novels, texts, performances, installations, miniseries, musicals, sculptures, objects, films, videos, and dance. Their video installations can be subsumed under what is known as “expanded cinema”: the displayed objects, which also appear in the videos, are presented in a way that allows the films to expand into the surrounding space, drawing viewers into the artwork. Text in English and German.

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Based on the art project of the Mallinckrodtstraße workshop on Romani building culture of the same name and the redesign of a building façade in the Nordstadt district of Dortmund in September 2019, this publication focuses on a special form of architecture that has arisen in Romania, among other places, in the last 30 years which is characterised by expressive façade designs. Text in English, German and Romanian.

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It has been long awaited, but Florian Hüttner, collaborator for 25 years and co-operator of the gallery for landscape art in Hamburg, finally has a first survey exhibition. Curated by Till Krause, the show resembles a well-tended garden. Boskette, bushes, waysides, fences and a viewing platform arranged in the huge space of the former Wandelhalle in Bad Tölz. Visitors can stroll through the multi-layered work: Paintings are packed, crates are painted, painted crates float on rivers. Paintings, map cityscapes, drawings cut into landscapes, sound transmissions from underground. Drawings, sound transmissions from underground streams.... a partisan frescoed partisan ambush in the Alps.... The book, conceived and designed by the artist himself, documents the exhibition and goes further into the original context of the works shown. Thus, this artist book is supplemented with images of very different places and exhibition contexts. Text in English and German.

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Every month, the art association HMKV presents the latest videos by international artists in its series “HMKV Video of the Month” which has been ongoing since March 2014. The idea for the series came from the desire to show the newest artistic productions in rapid succession, changing works at a faster pace than in the exhibitions of the HMKV. For the first time, this publication unites all 78 works that have been exhibited since 2014. The videos address a variety of different topics and stories, ranging from labour conditions, structural changes, speculative technologies, or posthuman machines to technology (and its history) as well as artificial intelligence. A wide array of works is devoted to the old ‘new’ right-wingers and the alt-right. The book not only shows stills of all videos, but each work is also accompanied by an introductory text to provide a comprehensive overview. Text in English and German.

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Norbert Tadeusz (1940-2011) ranks among Germany's leading figurative painters of the late 20th century. A native of Dortmund, he studied at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys and distinguished himself early on as a unique painter whose figurative style greatly contrasted with the conceptual, minimalist, or more abstract works of his fellow students such as Imi Knoebel, Blinky Palermo, Reiner Ruthenbeck, or Katharina Sieverding. Ignoring all contemporary trends, for instance Pop Art, Fluxus, Zero, Minimal, and Concept Art, Tadeusz consistently explored traditional subjects and genres, including still lifes, landscapes, and interiors. In his sometimes radical images, Tadeusz aimed to develop unconventional modes for the depiction of traditional motifs, experimenting with colour, form, and space. Certain topics he has continually re-examined over the years. Above all, the investigation of bodies - the living, human nude and the dead, animal carcass - presents a central theme that runs through his oeuvre. Much of his work revolves around the female body, as the epitome of both life and its source. Allowing for a great variety of poses and disparate settings, it is one of the artist's most important motifs. This catalogue has been published to accompany an exhibition tour, which itself was designed in close collaboration with the estate of the artist. Text in English and German.

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Over the last few years, the oeuvre of Mary Bauermeister (*1934) has been extensively rediscovered and celebrated. Today, she is considered to be one of Germany's leading female post-war artists. In the early 1960s, her studio in Cologne, located at Lintgasse 28, was the meeting place for artists, poets and composers such as Nam June Paik, Christo, Joseph Beuys, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, her future husband. They all used experimental music, readings, exhibitions, performances and happenings to explore the limits of social norms. Soon afterwards, Bauermeister moved to New York for a time, where she gained international acclaim. This book is the first to take a close look at those works in which Bauermeister privileges language as a means of artistic expression. She uses cyphers, symbols and textual fragments from nature, science, academia, philosophy, mathematics, music and art to create sensual, poetic drawings, collages and objects. Bauermeister first won fame with her celebrated 'lens boxes' in which convex glass, magnifiers and prisms merge with optically distorted images and words, forming magical cabinets of wonder. Text in English and German.

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This volume is published to mark the 40th anniversary of the artists' collective Rrose Irwin Sélavy and to accompany the exhibition at HMKV Dortmund. Since 1983, IRWIN has been investigating the art history of Eastern Europe, especially the ambivalent legacy of the historical avant-garde and its totalitarian successors, i.e. the dialectic of avant-garde and totalitarianism. Since the 1990s, the focus of the group has been on challenging the art history of Western Modernism in a critical and iconoclastic way. The artists playfully and darkly contrast it with the retro avant-garde and an Eastern Modernism.The book, which can be read from both sides, is made up of two parts: the first chapter explores the black humour that is a consistent element in IRWIN's work. The second chapter examines issues relating to the state and how IRWIN uses them to comment on current topics such as migration.Text in English and German.

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In an age of fast-changing technologies, offering numerous ways of generating images, Elias Wessel challenges the conventional definition of a painting: he creates his “paintings” without resorting to traditional painting techniques and eschews classical genres. The artist’s abstract paintings – which in many ways show connections to painterly practices – are in fact made up of photographs and digital material. Wessel, for example, takes photos of smartphone displays to produce monumental abstract compositions from the fingerprints left behind on them. He also documents his scrolling behaviour on social media platforms by using long-time exposure to superimpose accessed profiles and their contents: the result is visual and decontextualised structures. His other works present painterly-looking details of damaged displays: where else in the digital world can we experience such a close relationship with the canvas? Above all, the quality of Elias Wessel’s working method lies in the way he links the fundamental discourses in the history of photography with the latest technology and current social debates. In so doing, he skilfully observes and questions the social consequences and instruments of digitalisation. Text in English and German.

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Five continents, three decades: with Walking Distance, Olaf Unverzart presents his interpretation of a travel diary. Beyond tourist attractions, well-known places with supposedly typical folklore, his volume of photography opens our eyes to the things and creatures 'in between' – this 'in between' mainly takes place on the street. The power of the images lies in the stillness and intimacy of the scenes. Unverzart’s photographs do not have a voyeuristic feel; they do not pretend to uncover essential insights and truths about places or their people, but appear as fleeting impressions. The individual photographs with their black-and-white composition and grainy texture have a strange quality that seems removed from time and place, lending them an almost universal character. Unverzart explores the most diverse types of transition: we see cars, rails and streets as well as passers-by and pedestrians. Scenes of the old-fashioned and the obsolete point to the photographer’s search for a lost era and repeatedly allude to the extreme cultural, social and technological changes of the last three decades. Text in English and German.

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Ardelle Schneider’s photographic project Butterflies and Caterpillars offers authentic impressions of the current drag scene in the United States. Her photos address issues such as the meaning of identity and the construction of a self that goes beyond gender-specific roles and their constraints. Schneider accompanied her subjects in their everyday lives over a long period, capturing private moments and public performances alike. She observed their transformation and dual nature as their self-presentation and self-image repeatedly collide with society’s expectations. Do our clothes change the way we act? Does our outward appearance reveal our character and affect the way others perceive us? What lies underneath these layers of tulle and makeup? In her intimate, sensitive photographs, Schneider brings out the nuances and complexities of the personalities hidden behind the garish masquerade. Her keen intuition and carefully tuned lighting allowed her to create images that ooze warmth, dignity, and power. This book is a monument to acceptance and mutual respect. Text in English and German.

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A central pillar of Daniel Lie’s artistic practice is time – ranging from age-old memories to the beginning of the world, from the life span of a human being to the geological time of the elements. Lie’s art explores concepts such as life, death, and decay, as well as biographical relationships and heritage, with an approach that centres around personal memories, family stories, cultural objects, and natural products that survive for a long time and are linked to memories of the past. Taking a lifetime as a comparative measure, the works are inspired by developmental processes and the transition from one state to another. Installations, sculptures, and a combination of different media reveal the performative qualities of the referential objects – time, transience, and presence. Lie turns a spotlight on these three aspects by creating complex installations and giving pride of place to organic elements that grow and age and have life cycles of their own, such as plants and fungi. Engaging in an interdisciplinary exchange with mycologists, archaeologists, and environmental specialists, Lie addresses the fault lines in binary thought patterns such as science and religion, past origins and present existence, life and death, while attempting to subvert them.

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Düsseldorf-based sculptor Carol Pilars de Pilar (b. 1961) addresses fundamental questions of how we live in our world, and how we see ourselves and others. Her work exudes a humanistic sympathy for her subjects and their relationship to the world. This book, which documents her series entitled Alltag/Everyday Life and Passages, combines sculptures, texts, and images to create a multifaceted large-scale art installation. Mounted on concrete plinths and slender steel supports, the artist has created clay figurines that are representative of society in all its breadth and diversity. In interviews that address the key issues our society faces today, she spoke to six people, recording and transcribing their answers. In conjunction with the collages and sculptures, they contribute to the associative web of meanings her work evokes. Text in English and German.

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Ever since her student years at Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Louisa Clement (b. 1987) has investigated the transformation of human communication, especially in digital space and social media. One of her primary interests is the increasingly widespread display of idealised self-portraits. For her most recent work, entitled Repräsentantinnen/ Representative, Clement has created copies of herself that are as fascinating as they are unsettling. In collaboration with a Chinese company specialising in the manufacture of sex dolls, she commissioned life-sized manikins to be made based on parameters of her body that were calculated with the help of body scans, microphotographs, and video recordings of movements. With movable parts and sexually functional, these dolls not only have the same face as their creator, but are programmed to imitate the artist’s facial expressions and to communicate and interact with spectators and the surrounding world This publication documents Clement’s work and explores various technical, psychological, economic, and ethical questions raised by it. The book also features a sound box that allows it to interact with its readers. Text in English and German.

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Jörg Rubbert’s series of photos about Paris, taken over a period of 30 years between 1988 and 2019, views the city and its people from different perspectives. His images feature bourgeois neighbourhoods and majestic public squares as well as run-down areas and famous red-light districts. Rubbert focuses both on the city’s unique atmosphere and on its residents. He consistently makes use of analogue photography without digital add-ons, exclusively relying on natural light. With their dense atmosphere, blurred focus, high contrasts, and in some cases grainy appearance, Rubbert’s photos are “imperfect” in the best sense of the word, taking on an almost painterly quality. His images approach their subject from two different angles. They show Paris, with its striking architecture and picturesque atmosphere, through the lens of accentuated nostalgia, yet they also shine a light on people’s lives and the city’s current social condition. In a demonstration that the streets still form the real stage of the “theatre of life,” they put a spotlight on the seemingly trivial stories of everyday life. Text in English, German and French.

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Where jetliners used to take off every few minutes, nearly everything has ground to a halt. The bright blue sky above the tarmac is serene, the contrails have disappeared, the endless corridors are eerily deserted. In April 2020, at the height of the first lockdown of the coronavirus pandemic, the photographer Marc Krause explored Frankfurt Airport with his analogue camera to capture the strange calm of this “non-place.” Without the hectic hustle and bustle of pre-pandemic times, he noticed things that are usually drowned out by the rushing crowds: the geometric lines of the constructivist architecture, the changing patterns of light and shade, the junk left behind by travellers in vast halls that would be teeming with thousands of people on a normal day. Offering a fascinating glimpse of a seemingly surreal world, this publication is an unsettling testimony to a historic moment in time and a powerful photo book that leaves viewers torn between melancholy and hopeful longing. Text in English and German.

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Romantic landscape painting and the tradition of recounting fairy tales have their roots in the 19th century. The painter Philipp Fröhlich transposes them to the present. In his works Hansel and Gretel are dressed like people of the 21st century, and his scenes of nature, which are rendered in a style that approaches photorealism, provide a sharp contrast to the anti-modernism that is usually associated with fairy tales. While we were able to identify with the heroes from the picture books of our childhood, the figures in Fröhlich’s art seem eerily removed from us. The canvases are huge and give the impression to viewers that they have become part of the pictures themselves. Fröhlich studied stage design in Düsseldorf until 2002, and gradually switched from theatre work to painting. But his artistic approach is still influenced by his initial training. Beginning with notes and preparatory studies, Fröhlich develops models, some of which are elaborately designed, to try out the composition of the future picture. The resulting stage-like, almost cinematic quality of his paintings leads to an intriguing mixture of precise, cool realism and soft painterly effects – as if we were gazing into a distorting mirror between reality and fantasy. Text in English and German.

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Gladys Kalichini (born 1989 in Chingola, Zambia) is a contemporary visual artist and academic who investigates how women have been portrayed in relation to a dominant, colonial past. For example, the artist sheds light on instances in which women have been deleted from historical narratives and the collective memory of society. As a result of her extensive research, Kalichini has demonstrated that women were intentionally marginalised in the official representations of Zambia’s and Zimbabwe’s struggles for independence. In her elaborate multimedia installations and video art, which she often develops on the basis of research material and photos from archives, Kalichini highlights the omissions in the dominant representations of the two countries’ fight for freedom. She thus expands the history of their liberation struggle by drawing attention to the deletion and invisibility of female freedom fighters. By reminding the public of several of these women, Kalichini creates a diverse and complex alternative narrative of national independence.

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In the autumn of 2020, Christo will wrap the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in silvery fabric for 16 days, returning to his signature style - after realising The Floating Piers in Italy, the London Mastaba, and a quarter of a century after he and Jeanne-Claude wrapped the Reichstag building in Berlin. As a prelude, a major exhibition at PalaisPopulaire in the German capital will celebrate this 25-year anniversary in the spring of 2020. At the same time, the Pompidou Center will pay tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude by staging The Pont Neuf Wrapped Documentary exhibition as well as a comprehensive show highlighting their early years in Paris.To accompany these events, Matthias Koddenberg, art historian and long-time friend of both Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude, who was the other half of the artistic duo until her death in 2009, has edited an elaborate collection of interviews. The book is composed of many conversations held between Koddenberg and Christo in the artist's New York studio over the last few years. With rare frankness, Christo describes how he fled from Bulgaria and made his way into the Western world. He talks about his time in Vienna and Geneva, his vibrant life in Paris that was full of hardship, and the fateful moment when he met Jeanne-Claude. This publication provides an exceptional inside view, uniting texts and numerous archival images and photographs, many of which have never been published before, or depict early works by Christo that have only recently been rediscovered.

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AannenMayKantereit is one of the most popular bands in Germany. From the very beginning, Martin Lamberty has been their photographer. He has been travelling with his old friends from school around Europe ever since. His pictures tell the story of how the young musicians started their careers by performing on the streets of Cologne right up to the development of their current album "Schlagschatten". Lamberty has provided a chronicle of the concerts, of the band's life on tour, and their studio recording sessions. But his shots are far more than just classic band photos. As their friend, he is always a part of what is happening and gets to capture private moments behind the scenes, ranging from the miserably long journeys on the tour bus and the lonely hours in anonymous hotels, to the band's vacations together. In a unique way, Lamberty combines these silent moments with intriguing, sometimes melancholy images of rooms or landscapes and weaves them into a rich account. The result is a coming-of-age book about winning and losing, about life and friendship.

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In recent years, the images shot by the Cologne-based architectural photographers Hugo (1879-1938) and Karl Hugo Schmölz (1917-1986) have been winning wide acclaim and are receiving more and more attention. After completing his photography training and working in various positions, Hugo Schmölz set himself up as an architectural photographer in Cologne in 1911. Later, his son Karl Hugo took over the company. While the work of the two photographers fell into oblivion over the years, it is being rediscovered today and reveals its breathtaking aesthetic originality and technical perfection. Due to the development of a special, additional exposure technique, Schmölz was able to capture dark interiors in astounding detail even at the beginning of the century and to create dazzlingly elegant pictures which have lost none of their expressive power. For the first time ever, the book presents a series of photos, taken mostly in the Rhineland and the Ruhr district between 1935 and 1957, together with pictures showing movie theatres which were brand new at the time. Most of these cinema auditoriums have since been destroyed, but the light in the photos gives them a three-dimensionality that evokes a striking sculptural effect. They are certainly not imbued with nostalgia, on the contrary, they appear to be strangely lost in time and, owing to their extremely delicate gray nuances, seem almost hyperreal. Text in English and German.

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Owing to their achievements as radical and unique innovators of the painting tradition, Jonathan Meese (* 1970 in Tokyo), Daniel Richter (* 1962 in Eutin, Germany), and Tal R (* 1967 in Tel Aviv) have won international recognition over the last decades. In their work, the three artists refer to established ways of seeing, while at the same time distorting, expanding, or challenging them. The humorous aspect of their art always opens the door for contemporary topics, ranging from politics, society, and self-presentation, to questions about the general significance of painting. For the exhibition Bavid Dowie, Jonathan Meese, Daniel Richter, and Tal R have teamed up for the first time, in order to work and exhibit their art together. This catalogue presents the works the artists developed jointly, as well as new pieces that were created individually. It thus not only provides a glimpse into this one-of-a-kind collaboration, but gives a good insight into where each one of the three outstanding artists stands at present. Text in English and German.

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With the artist Jana Schröder, the Kopfermann-Fuhrmann Foundation is opening an exhibition series curated by Benjamin-Novalis Hofmann, which will feature presentations with women painters of the younger generation. The individual artistic positions are each based on an outstanding idea of abstract painting in the 21st century. With regard to her works, Schröder herself speaks of an "aesthetics of doodling". Her works are characterised by lines that sometimes seem to dissolve, then again condense into tight and finely rhythmic webs. The series of works, always conceived as a series, have a palpable physical reference to space and time, are expressions of individual gestures and movements. The catalogue shows works from the past 10 years and includes an extensive interview with the artist. Text in English and German.

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Computer Grrrlz brings together 23 international artistic positions that negotiate the complex relationship between gender and technology in past and present. The book deals with the link between women and technology from the first human computers to the current revival of techno-feminist movements. An illustrated timeline with over 200 entries covers these developments from the 18th century to the present day. The publication presents artists, hackers, makers and researchers who are working on how to think differently about technology: by questioning the gender bias in big data and artificial intelligence, promoting an open and diversified Internet, and designing utopian technologies. The perspectives presented here address a broad range of topics: electronic colonialism, the place of minorities on the Internet, the sexist bias of algorithms, the dangerous dominance of white men in the development of artificial intelligence and digital surveillance, but also ideas on how we can change our traditional ways of thinking. Artists included: Morehshin Allahyari, Manetta Berends, Zach Blas & Jemima Wyman, Nadja Buttendorf, Elisabeth Caravella, Jennifer Chan, Aleksandra Domanović, Louise Drulhe, Elisa Giardina Papa, Darsha Hewitt, Lauren Huret, Hyphen-Labs, Dasha Ilina, Roberte la Rousse, Mary Maggic, Caroline Martel, Lauren Moffatt, Simone C. Niquille, Jenny Odell, Tabita Rezaire, Erica Scourti, Suzanne Treister, Lu Yang. Text in English and German.

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Evangelos Papadopoulos (b.1974 in Athens) creates sculptures and temporary installations that often occupy entire rooms and consistently engage with the specifics of the exhibition space. Papadopoulos uses materials such as plasterboard and steel to make dynamic shapes whose organic growth invades the surrounding space like rampant vegetation. By resorting to unusual materials, the artist’s complex, intuitive approach gives spectators a fresh perspective and opens up new meanings. This book spotlights Flow, an installation specially created by Papadopoulos for his show at Museum Ratingen. The work’s title is a reference to the constantly changing sculptural interventions during the exhibition, which allowed Papadopoulos’s increasingly sprawling shapes to enter into a dialogue with Dennis Rudolph, Diane Edwards, and Banz & Bowinkel. These digital artists responded to the sculptor’s three-dimensional structures by creating their own animated works using video clips, augmented reality apps, and 3-D scans, while the sound artist Lasse-Marc Riek composed a work-specific audiovisual intervention. Text in English and German.

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This book documents the project Radio Carabuco of the Bolivian artist Andrés Pereira Paz, which he created during his residency at Künstlerhaus Bethanien in Berlin. A podcast (www.radiocarabuco.com) developed in collaboration with international artists, researchers, and activists forms the centerpiece of the project. Pereira Paz's critical reflections were inspired by José López de los Ríos's painting of a vision of hell, commissioned by the Catholic Church during the colonial era. Created in the Andes town of Carabuco in 1664, the work is still on display at the local church. Like many paintings from that period, the Christian motif was brought to Latin America by the Spanish colonial rulers to convert the indigenous population from paganism to Christianity and to peddle propaganda for Catholicism's message of salvation. The episodes of Pereira Paz's podcast investigate the methods and consequences of religious and cultural colonialism and scrutinise various political and societal perspectives, in particular with regard to his native country of Bolivia. The rejection and suppression of everything that is perceived as 'other' is a key theme of his work, which also addresses the question of whether the traditional Western idea of 'hell' has potentially become a symbolic place of active resistance against propaganda, censorship, and discrimination that should be defended as effectively as possible.

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Every year, the 100 Beste Plakate e. V. association awards prizes to the creators of the most innovative and groundbreaking poster designs from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland. The yearbook, which is developed by different graphic designers and design studios each year, presents all the winners and their designs in detail. It has become the key indicator of trends for creatives and advertisers alike.Studio lindhorst-emme+hinrichs has designed the current yearbook as an ever-changing, unique volume. Ten different coloured papers are used in different combinations: as a result, the cover as well as the front and back endpapers never have the same colour, and each copy is unique.The central focus of the book is on the poster designs for the art and culture centre Neubad in Lucerne, some of which have reached an iconic status. Over the years, the Swiss province has become a hotbed of avant-garde design. More than 80 graphic designers have created around 550 posters for t

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As we mark the 150th anniversary of Barlach's birth in 2020, the Ernst Barlach Haus in Hamburg pays tribute to the artist with a comprehensive overview of his wood sculptures. Starting with its own collection, the museum elaborately documented all available figures between Lübeck and Zurich with new photographs. This book is the result of this monumental project. It introduces 72 of the 84 extant wood sculptures and includes many fascinating large-format colour plates presenting the statues and their details. Wood held particular importance for Barlach as an artistic material: he regarded it as animate matter. Consequently, woodwork takes centre stage in Barlach's artistic practice - a fact that is often obscured by the large number of mostly posthumous bronze casts of his works. Around 1907, Barlach began to explore the centuries-old medieval art of woodcarving without any prior training. The poor, the homeless, the struggling, invalids, beggars and outlaws: Barlach turned his attention to those pushed to the margins of society and paid tribute to them by placing them at the centre of his art. This book does justice to the reductive character of his forms, which gestures at simplification and a transcendence of time, by highlighting Barlach's contemporary relevance. Text in English and German.

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In February 2018, an international jury of experts, having been appointed by the board of the association 100 Beste Plakate e.V. (The 100 Best Posters), met to once again evaluate all entries submitted to the annual competition. It has selected ground-breaking designs from the fields of advertising, corporate design, author graphics and poster design. Thus the outstanding creative achievements of well-established institutions, graphic design firms, ad agencies and of individual students enrolled at German-speaking universities or design schools throughout Germany, Austria and Switzerland will be awarded. The diversity of this medium, which has managed to resist an ever encroaching digitalisation into its field, will be portrayed in this book - showcasing both its value as a means of public announcement and as a visual message bordering on fine art. Following on from the competition 100 Best Posters 17 will present, in printed form, the prize-winning designs. Text in English and German.

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This publication is devoted to an academic description of the pneumopteria, a species which is considered extinct as a result of human action. Pneumopteria are also referred to as aerial creatures, cloud whales or cloud sponges, and occasionally, in scientific language, as pneumospongia. Often, in older treatises, they have been termed celestial leviathans. These gigantic, cloud-like creatures, which seem to float in the air without movement or stimulation, can reach several hundred metres in size. They were frequently observed and described, especially in historical times. With his fictional research on actual or imaginary persons, situations, and objects, Roland Boden provides the first thorough introduction to the nature, appearance, and behaviour of pneumopteria. He elaborates on aspects of the history of the exploration, specification, and classification of the species. In his treatise, Boden presents photographs, reproductions, prints, reconstructive drawings, and computer-generated images, combining numerous real scientific and historical facts with completely fictitious elements to create a parallel reality that cleverly questions contemporary perceptual processes. Text in English and German.

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