Search results for ""Scheidegger und Spiess AG, Verlag""

Raphael Ritz (1829–1894) is one of the most important artists to have emerged from the Swiss canton of Valais. In the 1850s, Ritz, who later became famous as the “Raphael of the Alps,” studied at the renowned Academy of Art in Düsseldorf, Germany, and perfected his technique in the genre of mountain painting, which focuses on the relationship between landscape and man. Ritz, who felt a strong connection to his roots, created landscape idylls in faraway Düsseldorf for an audience that appreciated regional peculiarities. At times with a touch of irony, he put his works at the service of a modern effort to illustrate the timeless character of everyday life. This new monograph looks at the work of the Valais-born artist beyond national borders and frames it in both the Swiss and international artistic contexts of the time. Ritz’s correspondence with his father, Lorenz Justin Ritz, who was a painter as well, is also comprehensively examined for the first time: it constitutes an important testimony to his artistic self-discovery. Selected photographs by Swiss contemporary artists from the museum’s collection show the Valais of today and establish a connection between Ritz’s ethnographic view of his own origins and the present. Text in French and German.

Read more less

David Chipperfield’s new building for the Kunsthaus Zürich now stands in all its splendour on Zurich’s Heimplatz, opposite the old museum building of 1910 designed by Karl Moser. Its opening to the public in October 2021 will make the Kunsthaus Zürich Switzerland’s largest art museum. Following the two previous volumes on Kunsthaus Zürich’s architectural history and the design for turning it into an art museum for the 21st century, this book documents the genesis of David Chipperfield’s extension from proposal through political debates about the entire project to completed structure. It features a foreword by David Chipperfield and an essay by Christoph Felger, executive architect for the project at David Chipperfield Architects Berlin, that discusses the design concept, the promise made with it, and its fulfilment. A conversation between Christoph Felger, the director of the City of Zurich’s Building Surveyor's Office Wiebke Rösler, and Kunsthaus Zürich’s director Christoph Becker, and architecture critic Sabine von Fischer, as well as numerous illustrations and plans sound out this new volume.

Read more less

Jacob Lawrence (1917-2000) is among the most distinguished 20th-century African-American painters. He is widely known for his modernist illustrations of everyday life as well as epic narratives of African American history and historical figures. The new book Jacob Lawrence: Lines of Influence explores his life, work, and legacy not only as an acclaimed artist but also as a storyteller, educator, and chronicler of the mid-20th-century African American experience. The book's first part, 'Relations', traces some of the engagements that shaped Lawrence's personal and professional life. It presents his work in dialogue with that of his contemporaries, mentors, and historically significant artists, such as Josef Albers, Richmond Barthe, Romare Bearden, Jose Clemente Orozco, George Grosz, Marsden Hartley, Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence, Horace Pippin and Augusta Savage. Its second part, 'Legacy', explores Lawrence's influence on contemporary artists living and working today and those who share similar formal and conceptual concerns.

Read more less

In 1913, psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and theorist Carl Gustav Jung (1875-1961) experienced powerful visions, often terrifying. However, seeing their great potential value he found ways to encourage further visions and fantasies. Over many years, he recorded his experiences in a series of small journals, added commentaries and transcribed them, using calligraphy and illuminations, into a large, red, leather-bound volume, commonly known as The Red Book. Jung never published the Liber Novus, as he called this pivotal part of his oeuvre, and left no instructions for its final disposition, and it therefore remained unpublished until recently. The Red Book Hours complements the facsimile edition and English-language translation of The Red Book, published in 2009, and draws out insights into Jung's affinity with art as a means of personal insight. Psychologist and multimedia artist Jill Mellick documents copious research into Jung's choices regarding media and technique and his careful design of environments in which he could experience creative processes and allow unconscious content to flow forth. Her unlikely journey includes explorations of memory, serendipity, and science. A stunning interplay of texts and images includes magnifications of the wildly colorful and intricately detailed sketches from The Red Book and a selection of Jung's own pigments, never seen until now, The Red Book Hours presents a more comprehensive picture than ever before of the foundational psychoanalyst's experience and expression of his rich inner world.

Read more less

In summer 2015, performance artist Marina Abramovic and psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer spent four days together at Abramovic's house in the Hudson Valley. Associating freely, they explored - from a psychoanalytical perspective - Abramovic's biography and art and what connects them. A better understanding of herself, her personality and her work, was Abramovic's objective. She claims that conversations with artists abound, with one curator saying this and another saying that. Yet there is no book in which psychoanalysis puts her life and artistic work in context. This new book aims to fill this gap. Yet it is not a therapist's report, nor a record of Fischer's analysis of Abramovic. It records the dialogue between artist and analyst attempting an interpretation of Abramovic's extraordinary violent performances that sometimes reach the brink of faint, even death. The two search for an understanding of the underlying structures and dynamics. Abramovic performs relationships, and she performs violence, yet she remains on her own in facing the pain and fear about it. The book is arranged in a sequence of dialogues, separated by Fischer's comments on and images of four of Abramovic's performances to which the psychoanalyst refers.

Read more less

Marcel Gautherot (1910-96) is regarded by many as one of the most significant French photographers, yet his work is relatively little known and even less published. Marcel Gautherot: The Monograph features some 200 of his striking pictures from all stages of his career, superbly reproduced in tritone printing. The images are complemented by essays on his affinity for modern architecture, his contribution to the history of photography, and on his attachment to Brazil. The most famous part of his work is the body of some 3,000 images documenting the construction of Brasilia 1958-1960. This, and other images he took of this extraordinary place until the 1970s, is widely appreciated as a high point of 20th-century architectural photography. Gautherot began an education in architecture but very soon took up photography as well. He travelled extensively in France and abroad and visited Brazil and Peru for the first time in 1939, before being drafted into the French army on the outbreak of World War II. Upon demobilisation in summer 1940 he returned to Brazil and made Rio de Janeiro his home for the rest of his life.

Read more less

Swiss artist Martin Disler (1949–1996) was a self-taught painter, draughtsman, and sculptor, as well as a poet. Over the course of his career, his work evolves from clearly recognisable motifs towards the utter disintegration of figures. Especially his later paintings owe their power, as well as their size, to his particular way of working: In a highly physical process, the artist would alternate between applying and removing paint, moulding matter with brushes and knives as well as with his hands and nails until his body merged with the work. The materialisation of Disler’s physical thinking, a ‘theatre of survival’, places him in a fascinating dialogue with Ernst Ludwig Kirchner and the great expressionist’s work. This new monograph, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Kirchner Museum Davos, focuses on the last decade of Disler’s career and relates his output from the period to Kirchner’s art, thus revealing similarities between the two artists. The essays explore the importance of the human body and its role in the artist’s creative process as well as aspects such as movement and dance, gesture, expression, abstraction and figuration.

Read more less

Swiss artist, architect, designer, typographer, and theorist Max Bill (1908-94) was one of the most important exponents of concrete and constructive art and a key figure in the history of 20th-century European applied arts and design. Educated by such eminent teachers as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Bill immediately displayed a genius for work in fields as diverse as painting, sculpture, architecture, typography and design from the outset of his career in the 1930s. In the 1950s, he teamed up with Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher to found the legendary Ulm College of Design in Ulm, of which he became the first director. In his work, Max Bill carried on the Bauhaus legacy, both as an artist and a teacher, and made a decisive and lasting contribution to 20th-century cultural life. The new edition of this authoritative and much sought-after monograph displays Bill's wide-ranging work and sets him in the context of his cultural milieu by featuring works by his contemporaries, such as Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, and Donald Judd. Accompanying essays investigate Bill's influence on other artists and the lasting importance of his oeuvre in the present. Text in English and German.

Read more less

During the heyday of the Japanese coloured woodblock print around 1800, an ordinary print filled the same purpose as modern commercial graphic art. Mainly because of European art lovers' growing enthusiasm for these subtle, refined compositions, some artists and their work soon gained worldwide recognition and fame. Capturing the fugitive moment is a key element of Japanese woodblock prints, for which Japanese language has the term 'ukiyoe', 'images of the fluid, transient world'. 'Bijin-ga', 'images of beautiful women' is a specific kind of such prints, paying tribute to women by capturing a moment of irretrievable magic. The graceful look of a self-assured beauty of a very private situation's intimacy have stimulated many artists to create their greatest works. 'The Beauty of the Moment' presents around 100 'Bijin-ga' by the best known masters of Japanese woodblock printing. Included are particularly exquisite pieces using 'kirazuri', a technique using powdered brass or mica dust highly polished on a light film of glue to imitate gold dust on the surface of the print. This book accompanies an exhibition Die Schonheit des Augenblicks (The Beauty of the Moment) at the Museum Rietberg in Zurich. Text in English and German.

Read more less

The Museum of Drawers is the world's smallest museum of twentieth-century art. This unique piece has been conceived and put together by the Swiss-born artist Herbert Distel in 1970-77. It consists of an old cabinet made to hold reels of sewing silk whose twenty drawers each contain twenty-five compartments. Each of the 500 compartments houses an original miniature work of art, many of which were made especially for the Museum of Drawers. The list of artists represented includes such influential pioneers as Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duchamp, Hannah Hoch, Meret Oppenheim, Pablo Picasso, and Andy Warhol. Following a first presentation as a work-in-progress at the documenta 5 in Kassel (Germany) in 1972, the Museum of Drawers caused sensation internationally. It has been shown several times in New York, including a presentation at the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in 1999, and at many museums around the world. After its restoration it is now part of the permanent collection of the Kunsthaus, Zurich. This new book is a comprehensive documentation of this extraordinary object. It shows all twenty drawers with their content as well as each of the 500 miniature art works individually and in true size. Essays on the history and importance of the entire work and concept complement the images.

Read more less

In summer 2017, celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor curated the exhibition Dear to Me at the Kunsthaus Bregenz, marking the 20th anniversary of one of his most famous designs. Part of the program were conversations with philosophers, curators, historians, composers, writers, photographers, collectors, and craftsmen that Zumthor had invited to contribute to the exhibition. His dialogues with them offer insights into the thoughts and practice of fascinating personalities. Together with his counterparts, he explores artistic preferences and practices, reasonings, as well as practical knowledge from artisanal experience. Always charming and affectionate, he follows-up persistently, and takes his guests with gentle determination on mutual intellectual strolls. The equally serious and serene conversations with Anita Albus, Aleida Assmann, Marcel Beyer, Hélène Binet, Hannes Böhringer, Renate Breuss, Claudia Comte, Bice Curiger, Esther Kinsky, Ralf Konersmann, Walter Lietha, Olga Neuwirth, Rebecca Saunders, Karl Schlögel, Martin Seel, Ruedi Walli, and Wim Wenders are collected in 17 booklets held together in an exquisitely manufactured box. An 18th complementary booklet documents the Dear to Me exhibition in Bregenz through concise texts, images, drawings and plans.

Read more less

Charlotte Perriand is one of the foremost figures in twentieth-century interior design. Together with her collaborators Pierre Jeanneret and Le Corbusier, she created many pieces of furniture we now consider classics, including the instantly recognisable LC4 chaise. Her pioneering work with metal was particularly instrumental in paving the way for the machine-age aesthetic popular throughout the 1920s and '30s. The third volume in a four-part series, this lavish book covers the years between 1956 and 1968. During this period, Perriand established a relationship with the Galerie Steph Simon, which exhibited and published some of her most iconic work, as well as that of renowned contemporaries Serge Mouille, Georges Jouve, and Jean Prouve. Perriand also completed several high-profile projects throughout the 1960s, most of which have been published here for the first time. These include comprehensive designs for Air France's offices around the world and the renovation of the Palais des Nations, where many of her designs for furniture and the assembly halls she decorated remain in use and relatively unchanged to this day. This new volume also documents her intimate, yet little known, links to Brazil. Covering key moments in Perriand's personal life, as well as the iconic styles she developed, this third volume in the series comes complete with annotations and a bibliography for further research.

Read more less

Whether Old Masters or young Swiss art, whether printed or drawn: with holdings of more than 160,000 works on paper, the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich, the famous university’s collection of prints and drawings, is one of the largest and finest of its kind in Switzerland and internationally. Albrecht Dürer, Maria Sibylla Merian, Rembrandt van Rijn, and Pablo Picasso are represented alongside contemporary greats such as Louise Bourgeois, Miriam Cahn, Fischli/Weiss, Urs Lüthi, and Shirana Shahbazi. Founded in 1867 as a classical academic study collection, the archive serves today as a focal point for scholars and art-lovers alike, and as the means for exchange between the university and the public. This lavishly illustrated book takes readers on a fascinating journey across six centuries of art history, featuring some 300 of the collection’s highlights. An introductory essay on the history and evolution of the Graphische Sammlung ETH Zürich and brief texts on 40 selected works accompany the illustrations. The volume is rounded off by personal statements by contemporary artists and researchers from various disciplines, who testify to and comment on the significance and topicality of the collection’s holdings.

Read more less

The work of artist and stage designer rosalie is marked by aspects of an innovative transgression of limits. It has been shown in numerous exhibitions in galleries and museums, mainly in Germany, and has been featured also at international art fairs, such as Art Basel, Art Cologne and Art Frankfurt. rosalie has also created a number of large-scale projects for public space in several German cities. rosalie has gained particular recognition also for her work for the stage and projects she has realised with musicians. Light as a medium, light-art is a key aspect of rosalie's work in recent years, and has become an independent complex with her oeuvre. With her large-scale, striking kinetic light-sculptures, using new and innovative technologies and materials and recognised by a growing international audience, she has created a wide range of "new universes of light". 'rosalie Light-Art' presents her spectacular light-art projects and interdisciplinary works including music and scenery for the first time in a large-size illustrated book that also includes a DVD with short film presentations.

Read more less

Open House discusses the topic of temporary housing in architecture, art, design and humanitarian aid. The phenomenon of tiny houses fascinates and is currently trending in various media. In times of large migratory movements from poor to rich countries there is also an urgent demand for temporary housing in many places. Eighteen international authors explore the intentions behind such constructions, their underlying principles and the lifestyle they convey. Their contributions reveal how these concepts relate to the very notion of habitat, to space, to pragmatic criteria, as well as to the time in which they are elaborated. Moreover, addresses various issues of individual housing through the featured original installations, and spatial experiments. Open House is published in conjunction with a two-year research project and an open-air exhibition of the same title in Geneva in summer 2022. Book and exhibition comprise around 40 designs by artists, architects, designers, architecture schools and research institutions, as well as humanitarian organisations, such as Andrea Zittel, EPFL Laboratoire ALICE, Global Shelter Cluster, Gramazio Kohler Research at ETH Zurich, Jean Prouvé, John Armleder, Kengo Kuma, Kerim Seiler, Matti Suuronen, Maurizio Cattelan and Philippe Parreno, the UNHCR, and others. Text in English and French.

Read more less

Isabelle Cornaro, based in Paris and Geneva, holds degrees in art history and visual arts. She has a strong interest in experimental cinema and devotes herself to the narrative, symbolic, and economic origins of things. In her work she assumes an anthropologist-type manner to investigate people's seemingly fixated attachment to emotionally charged, even fetishised objects, creating large stage installations and short movies. This book is part of the new On Words series that presents conversations with contemporary women artists. Through them, readers come to understand the sources from which they draw inspiration, the themes in their work, and their view of the world. Edited by Julie Enckell, Federica Martini, and Sarah Burkhalter and bringing together a wide range of viewpoints, the On Words series adds a new narrative to polyphonic art history as told by those who actively shape it. Text in English and French.

Read more less

Jun Kaneko, born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942 and based in Omaha, Nebraska, since 1986, is revered for his role in establishing modern ceramic art, yet he has been equally prolific in a range of other media. This book offers an entirely new and detailed survey and analysis of nearly six decades of Kaneko's work in ceramics, drawing, painting, installation art, and opera design. Tracing the career of this dynamic artist from his early training and subsequent association with the pivotal California Clay Movement to his important public commissions and philanthropic concerns of the present, it focuses in particular on the past 20 years, which have previously not been the subject of a comprehensive volume. Drawing extensively on interviews he has conducted with Jun Kaneko since 2002, Glen R. Brown reflects on the principal concepts that have shaped Kaneko's art, situating them in the space between a Japanese Shinto ethos and the aesthetic tenets of Western Art Informel and Post-Painterly Abstraction. He discusses in-depth Kaneko's art, from the colossal glazed-ceramic Dangos to the sensitive colouristic stage and costume designs for operas. The book provides fascinating insights into Kaneko's unique, relentlessly self-sustaining creative process and the multiple conceptions of space that inform it. Featuring more than 200 colour illustrations and substantial information not previously available in published form, this book offers an up-to-date definitive critical survey of this important artist's life and work.

Read more less

Hong Seung-Hye has garnered a unique position in the Seoul art scene with her bravado in defying conventional borders. She sees no restraints in crisscrossing the border between the abstract and the figurative, the plane and the three-dimensional. Nor does she shy away from employing public spaces just as freely as she experiments inside a white cube. This first monograph on Hong traces the trajectory of her prolific oeuvre. It features four essays written by distinguished Korean critics, curators and educators who have closely witnessed and worked alongside Hong throughout the past two decades. Originally written in context with solo exhibitions, each of which marking a milestone in her career, they offer individual starting points to delve into and read Hong's art. Ranging from her earliest paper collages to the most recent videos reinterpreting Snoopy from iconic comic strip The Peanuts, this book illustrated with some 200 colour plates provides a comprehensive survey of Hong's versatility.

Read more less

Swiss graphic designer Lea Michel has chosen for her book the single most often impersonated figure in Western movie history: The President of the United States. Taking 164 fictitious presidents, male and female (for the first time in Curtis Bernhard's comedy Kisses for my President of 1964), it charts the range of actions of the world's formerly most powerful person - making statements or giving speeches, standing in front of or sitting behind the desk at the Oval Office, climbing out of or into limousines, wearing dressing gowns. Six presidential typologies - Father and Husband, Villain, Alien, Clown, Hero, Lover - sorted by 241 sub-categories, such as Shaking Hands, Looking Shocked at a Screen, or In a Video Conference with a Terrorist. Taken from films and TV and online series, such as Dr. Strangelove, Independence Day, or House of Cards, as well as from many lesser known productions, they also highlight the intense relationship between fiction and reality in a time where the incumbent president exploits all media to an unprecedented extent to market himself and to increase his popularity.

Read more less

Situated on the shore of the Lake Zurich, Le Corbusier's exhibition pavilion is his last realised design. Based on his Modulor proportional system and at the scale of a single-family home, it demonstrates the potential of prefabricated elements to form a perfect space for art and design. Commissioned in 1960 by Heidi Weber, Zurich-based gallery owner and patron of Le Corbusier the visual artist, this structure in steel and glass represents pivotal aspects of his architectural philosophy and also points to the future. Architects Silvio Schmed and Arthur Rüegg have carefully restored the Pavillon Le Corbusier to its original state, including the reconstruction of missing pieces of furniture and luminaires. This book documents their research and the restored building, featuring previously unpublished historic photographs and documents alongside newly commissioned images by Georg Aerni.

Read more less

Founded in 1841 and located since October 2019 in a striking new building by celebrated Spanish-Italian architects Barozzi Veiga, the Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne (MCBA) is one of Switzerland's major public art galleries. It is home to an impressive permanent collection spanning eight centuries of art history that comprises manifold works by Swiss and international artists. This compact guide introduces 212 works from all periods represented in the collection with image and a concise text about its history and reception. An essay on the museum's development over 170 years as well as an index of artists round out the book.

Read more less

Danish artist Michael Kvium, born 1955, works in painting, prints, drawing and watercolour, and sculpture, as well as performance and stage design. His paintings and graphic works often resemble comic strip art or extensions of 17th-century Baroque paintings, depicting the more negative aspects of Western culture. Motifs include grotesque monsters, half man half woman, sometimes approaching self-portraits. He is expressing himself in a personal world of images. His works seem familiar, making the viewer smile at one time and causing disgust at another, yet in their strange way all sharing this familiarity. Kvium defines and expresses his wholly personal and unflinching understanding of powerful human presence in an area unexplored by others. This first comprehensive monograph takes the reader through Kvium's entire career since his beginnings in the 1980s. It reveals the various lines in his work from early experiments as a young artist in the world of bikers to an outspoken critic of our current Western society.

Read more less

Since the late 2000s, German-Iranian artist Bettina Pousttchi has been creating works at the intersection of sculpture, architecture and photography. Her large-scale installations question the history and memory of places, exploring the connections between time and space in a transnational perspective and have gained her wide international recognition and praise. This book features Pousttchi's new photographic installation at Nivola Museum in Orani on the Italian island Sardinia. For this, she chose as her subject the Metropolitan Life Building on 1 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. Criticised for its blatant Italian references at the time of its completion in 1909 and the world's tallest high-rise until 1913, the building displays a hybrid identity, recalling cultural and temporal-spatial dislocations between the Old and the New World, Renaissance and Modernism. Published alongside the images of Metropolitan Life and other works by Pousttchi are an essay by art historian Greg Foster-Rice and a conversation between the artist, critic and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, and architect and writer Markus Miessen.

Read more less

In 2018, Israel marks the seventieth anniversary of statehood. Yet the events of 1948 are remembered very differently by the Palestinian people, who to this day carry the memory of the Naqba, the displacement of an estimated 750,000 Palestinians from their territories during the 1948 Palestine war. In the seven decades since, there has been no lasting agreement to sort out the volatile political and social situation in the region, which looks likely to remain for many years to come. Unresolved is the most recent photo-essay by renowned Swiss documentary photographer Meinrad Schade. A continuation of his War Without War project, in which Schade documented the lingering, damaging marks of war on the former Soviet Union, Unresolved explores the obvious traces of conflict and the scars it leaves on both the people and landscapes in Israel, the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and the Gaza Strip. Yet even more importantly, Schade brings home to the reader the sometimes more hidden symbols that can be found in daily life and that are simultaneously result and catalyst of the struggle. The captions - in English, German, Hebrew, and Arabic - highlight historic and current aspects of the conflict and invite readers to view it from different perspectives. Text in English, German, Arabic and Hebrew.

Read more less

Minoru Onoda was born in Japanese-occupied Manchuria to a Japanese family in 1937. Before the outbreak of World War II, they moved to Himeji in Japan, which remained the artist's residence until his passing in 2008. Following his artistic education at the Osaka Institute of Fine Arts and at Osaka School of Art in the 1960s, Onoda joined the Gutai, Japan's first post-war radical artistic movement. Gutai challenged what the movement considered a reactionary understanding to initiate new notions of art, and redefined the relationships among body, matter, time, and space. Enchanted by concepts of repetition, Onoda produced panels with amalgamations of gradually increasing dots with relief, creating organically growing shapes, progressing to infinite circles and ultimately moving to a monochrome style in painting. When Gutai disbanded in 1972, he opted for a conceptual style in which the proliferating dots disappeared. The Western world has received Minoru Onoda's art almost exclusively in the Gutai context, for example in the 2013 exhibition Gutai: Splendid Playground at New York's Guggenheim Museum. This overdue first-ever monograph on Minoru Onoda introduces him as an artist in his own right. Apart from investigating his relations with Gutai, it explores his creative process with a particular focus on his sketchbooks. Text in Japanese.

Read more less

Sigfried Giedion (1888-1968) and Carola Giedion-Welcker (1893-1979) were among the most distinguished and influential scholars of art and architectural history during the 20th century's earlier dacades. Of particular impact was their role in connecting leading protagonists of modernism in architecture, art, and literature, such as Alvar Aalto, Hans Arp, Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Breuer, Max Ernst, Walter Gropius, Barbara Hepworth, Le Corbusier, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, or Sophie Taeuber-Arp. The discourses they initiated, for example on the New Vision in photography or a 'Synthesis of Arts', have lost nothing of their relevance and provide new starting points through to the present day. The estate of Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker is today kept in Zurich at ETH Zurich's Institute for the History and Theory of Architecture, the Swiss Institute for Art Research, the University of Zurich's Institute of Romance Studies, and the James Joyce Foundation. It comprises some 16,000 letters, 10,000 photographic prints and negatives, a wealth of other papers, and a vast library. This new book offers a re-evaluation of Sigfried and Carola Giedion-Welcker's work, impact, and lasting significance. The editor and contributors were the first to draw fully on the estate, which has been opened entirely to researchers only recently. Featuring a vast number of previously unpublished documents and other images alongside excerpts from the extensive correspondence the two maintained with their artist friends and colleagues in academia, it provides a unique and manifold insight into the 'Giedion universe'.

Read more less

In 1911, Le Corbusier (1887-1965) and his friend August Klipstein (1885-1951), a scholar of art history and later renowned art dealer, undertook a grand tour of Eastern Europe, the Balkans, Turkey, and Italy. While Klipstein's interests were more focused on research for his doctoral thesis, Le Corbusier's impressions were more immediate, his mindset more romantic. They both kept a diary of their journey and produced many sketches, drawings, watercolours, and photographs en route, sometimes capturing the same motif and even copying each other's work. While Le Corbusier's record was published in 1966 as Journey to the East and has become a classic, Klipstein's testimony of the expedition remained largely unknown until today. In this new book, Ivan Zaknic explores the creative symbiosis of this friendship and what the two ambitious young men brought back from their trip. Richly illustrated, including reproductions from both of their diaries, and featuring the complete text of Klipstein's diary as well as that of the little known correspondence between Le Corbusier and Klipstein, the book offers an entirely new perspective of this seemingly well-known undertaking. It introduces the personality of Klipstein as well as lesser-known facets of the very young Le Corbusier.

Read more less

Colombia is a land of natural beauty and rich cultural heritage, of rainforests and rivers, of peaceful rural farms and ranches where farmers and gauchos gather for work and leisure. But behind these images of bucolic serenity, the people of Colombia live through considerable hardships. Poverty is prevalent in many isolated parts of the country where state authority is largely absent, and seventy years of armed conflict between the Colombian army, right-wing paramilitary forces, and left-wing guerrilla groups, such as the FARC and the ELN, continue to leave lasting scars. The country's central role in the cocaine trade both provides for and threatens the livelihood of many Colombians. The culmination of almost twenty years spent traveling throughout and photographing Colombia, Colombia: Al borde del paradiso features more than one hundred incredible photographs by Luca Zanetti. What the images collectively portray is a place that teeters between paradise and the abyss, a wildly colourful and chaotic backdrop to the stories of everyday people's lives. Arranged thematically in several sections, the book also includes an essay on the historic, political, and social context of the conflict by Colombian sociologist Alfredo Molano, who followed closely the peace negotiations of 2012–16 between the Colombian government and the FARC and who is a member of the truth commission established as part of the peace agreement signed between the rebels and the government; brief introductory texts by Medellín journalist Anamaria Bedoya Builes; and a postscript by Luca Zanetti. Text in Spanish.

Read more less

La Gara is an 18th-century country estate in Jussy, a village near Geneva, Switzerland. The buildings have been carefully restored by Swiss architect Verena Best, who also added inspired touches to the interior design. The renowned Belgian landscape designer Erik Dhont reinterpreted and subtly redesigned the gardens and surrounding grounds, completed by a palindrome-like labyrinth designed by Swiss artist Markus Raetz. This new book tells the full story of the La Gara estate and illustrates its beauty. The essays investigate various aspects of its preservation and restoration of buildings and gardens and the contemporary interventions. They highlight features such as the historic watering system for the gardens and the fishponds and look at the specific Genevan garden tradition and characteristics of the rural landscape around Jussy with its biodiversity. Moreover, they contextualise La Gara with the 'ferme ornée', a villa with agricultural and ornamental features following ancient Roman models. The beautiful volume is rounded out with newly commissioned photographs by renowned Swiss photographer Georg Aerni. Text in French.

Read more less

This new book, published to coincide with an exhibition at Kunsthaus Zurich in summer 2017 offers an overview of the development of Mexican graphic art between the late 19th-century and the 1970s, ranging from figurativism to early abstract works. It features around 50 key works on paper, printed using a range of techniques, that deal with issues such as poverty and wealth, love and cruelty, and the poetry and hardships of everyday life. In addition to prints by Jose Guadalupe Posada, there are characteristic Realist works by Leopoldo Mendez, Diego Rivera and David Alfaro Siqueiros as well as abstracts by Rufino Tamayo and Francisco Toledo. Revolutionary ideas and engagement with socio-cultural and socio-political concerns play a key role in the history of Mexican art. The members of Taller de Grafica Popular, a people's graphic art workshop established in 1937 by a collective of international artists in Mexico, produced flyers and posters for the masses supporting trade unions, popular education and socialist issues in the country. Their editions exemplify the typical Mexican tradition of black-and-white woodcuts and linoleum prints. The images depict Mexican life and the customs and characteristics of its indigenous populations, but also include the country's first forays into abstract art. The images are complemented by an introductory essay and brief texts on the artists and featured works. The Mexican Graphic Art exhibition runs from 19 May to 27 August 2017, Kunsthaus Zurich.

Read more less

Fritz Block (1889-1955) was one of the most dedicated proponents of Germany's postwar New Building movement. From 1929, he also used the medium of photography to express the impulse of modernism along the ideals of New Objectivity and New Vision, travelling as a photojournalist to Paris, Marseille, and North Africa, as well as in 1931 to the United States. Being of Jewish origin, Block was banned from working as an architect and publishing his photographs in Germany by the Nazis in 1933. He subsequently turned entirely to photography on extensive trips abroad, and eventually emigrated to America in 1938. After his arrival in Los Angeles, he focused on colour slides for educational purposes that characterised his work from 1940 to 1955. He produced a particularly innovative series depicting California's architectural modernism, which was widely distributed throughout the United States. The first book on Block's work in photography features a vast range of images from his entire career. Vividly illustrated with some 450 photographs, including many in full colour and published here for the first time, Photo-Eye Fritz Block demonstrates Block's significance in modern photography.

Read more less

'M Selection' features a selection of works from the Migros Museum of Contemporary Art's collection by 27 Swiss and international artists. It examines the artists and their works and puts them in context with various artistic movements from the second half of the 20th century: Pop Art, Minimalism, Post-Minimalism, Land Art, Performance, Photography and conceptual Art, Feminist and Appropriation Art. The fully illustrated book gives brief texts on the featured works. Two introductory essays on the entire collection and the exhibition concept complete the book. 'M Selection' is published to coincide with an exhibition at the Musee Rath in Geneva. Artists featured include: Marc Camille Chaimowicz (French), Cosey Fanni Tutti (British), Thea Djordjadze (Georgian, working in Germany), Hamish Fulton (British), Douglas Gordon (British [Scottish]), Mathilde ter Heijne (Dutch, working in Germany), Daniel Knorr (Romanian, working in Germany), Sol LeWitt (American), Babette Mangolte (French, working in the USA), Bruce Nauman (American), Gerhard Richter (German), Markus Schinwald (Austrian), Katharina Sieverding (German), Alina Szapocznikow (Polish, worked in France), Oscar Tuazon (American), Andy Warhol (American), Stephen Willats (British), Christopher Wool (American), and others.

Read more less

Hans Josephsohn, born in 1920 in Königsberg (now Kaliningrad, Russia), came to Zurich via Florence as a Jewish immigrant in 1938. In more than six decades he has created a sculptural oeuvre that transcends the fashions and fads of the art world and yet testifies to his incomparably sensitive understanding of our age. This comprehensive monograph introduces the reader to Josephsohn's approach, outlines his development and places him within the development of twentieth-century art. The book shows the fascinating uniqueness and the tense calm of an oeuvre that offers many young artists an attitude to art that mirrors their own concerns. AUTHOR: Gerhard Mack is the arts editor of the Sunday edition of the "Neue Zurcher Zeitung" and the author of numerous essays and publications on art and architecture, literature, and theatre." 136 colour, 92 b/w illustrations

Read more less

In August 1968, the Pakistani foreign minister visited Beijing and presented Chairman Mao with a crate of mangoes. Apparently, Mao immediately sent the mangoes, a fruit unkown so far in China, as a gift to the 'Worker-Peasant Mao Zedong Thought Propaganda Teams' deployed into Quinghua University to put down warring factions of Red Guards and occupy the campus, with the implicit political message that workers were now made managers of education. The exotic fruit were then distributed over the following weeks to various factories. Thus the mangoes, perceived as coming from Chairman Mao, transformed from mere fruit into near-divine symbol. They were celebrated by the workers as tokens of Mao's love and compassion and worshipped as a kind of religious relic. The Golden Mango powerfully symbolised the slogan "The working class must be the leaders in everything", and soon appeared on all kinds of household products. The new book Mao's Golden Mangoes and the Cultural Revolution illustrates how factory workers tried to preserve Chairman Mao's precious gift, how the mango transformed into a religious symbol, and how the political spectacle of the 1968 National Day Parade featured the mango.

Read more less

Felix Nussbaum (1904-44) was a German painter of Jewish descent, murdered in Auschwitz by the Nazis. After more than four decades in oblivion, his native city Osnabruck in northern Germany brought this distinguished artist to light again by opening a museum dedicated to his oeuvre, the Felix-Nussbaum-Haus. The artist's work, life, and fate resonates in this expressive structure that was designed by celebrated American architect Daniel Libeskind. German artist Brigitte Waldach, born 1966, has produced an impressive body work, mainly of large-format drawing and voluminous installations. Existenz (existence) she conceived especially for Felix-Nussbaum-Haus, where it has been on display since December 2018. It consists of three-dimensional drawings, excerpts from Nussbaum's letters, and a sound collage, involving the viewer in a dialogue with his paintings. This book documents the environment Waldach has created within Libeskind's architecture to reflect upon and experience Felix Nussbaum's art from our contemporary perspective. Text in English and German.

Read more less

Austrian artist Manfred Wakolbinger, born 1952, trained as a metal worker and tool maker before turning to art. Following first steps in jewellery design, he moved on to sculpture and photography, later also to video art. Many of his sometimes voluminous sculptures were created for public spaces. The submarine world has captured his particular interest in photography and video. Wakolbinger's art is organic and conveys an inner poetry, yet it remains enigmatic even when it becomes concrete and figurative. This book features a selection Wakolbinger's works in photography and sculpture since 2012, accompanied by a conversation between the artist and curator Jasper Sharp. An essay on the topic of language in his art by scholar and critic Cornelia Offergeld and a text by celebrated Austrian novelist Christoph Ransmayr describe and interpret the recent oeuvre by one of Austria's most distinguished contemporary artists. Text in English and German.

Read more less

Masks evoke scenes of carnival or African tribal rites, we may be thinking of death masks of famous people, theatre and fashion, cosplay, disguise, and of protection. They represent some of the most ancient and most controversial objects of our cultural history. Today's artists look beyond the mere object, they are interested also in the social, cultural, and political meanings of masks. This book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Aargauer Kunsthaus Aarau in fall 2019, explores their appearances in contemporary art. Artists at all times have been attracted by masks and their symbolism. Through works by distinguished Swiss and international artists and concise texts the book demonstrates manifold approaches to the topic of masks. With contributions by Yasmin Afschar, Daniel Berndt, Hendrik Bundtge, Emily Butler, Wendy Chang, Michelle Cotton, Peter Fischer, Claire Hoffmann, Olivier Kaeser, Melitta Kliege, Susanna Koeberle, Elsy Lahner, Leo Lencses, Bettina Muhlebach, Lena Nievers, Lucia Rey, Hermant Sareen, Joerg Scheller, Madeleine Schuppli, Angela Strecken, and Thomas D. Trummer. Text in English and German.

Read more less

All across Switzerland, in smaller towns like Schaffhausen or Biel as well as in larger villages such as Altdorf or Buchs, there are local public theatres, restaurants with a stage, or multi-purpose halls. This part of the country is second home to Beat Schlatter, actor-comedian, playwright, and the person behind one of Switzerland's most famous faces. For some thirty years, he has travelled Switzerland in every direction to perform his own programmes and to appear in shows, and he has rested, changed, and made-up his face in hundreds of these places that offer some form of a back-stage. When on tour, Schlatter takes photographs of these usually dull transitional spaces where A, B, and C celebrities and local stars and starlets await their appearance. This new book, featuring around 300 of Schlatter's images, is a testimonial to the moderate tristesse and the well-intended fruit bowl inherent to all these spaces, no matter how conventional or hilariously extravagant they may seem. Text in English and German.

Read more less

Walter Mittelholzer (1894-1937), pioneer of aviation and co-founder of Switzerland's legendary airline Swissair, is chiefly revered as an accomplished aerial photographer. His spectacular views of the Swiss Alps have been very popular ever since he began publishing them in the 1920s. Much lesser known today are his expeditions by plane to distant places. In his day, he proved to be a keen marketer, selling the images he took on travels to Spitsbergen (Svalbard today), Persia (Iran), and Abyssinia (Ethiopia) in his self-written books, in movies, and to the press. His 1926/27 trans-Africa journey on the seaplane Switzerland from Zurich via Alexandria to Capetown made his name known internationally, both as an aviator and a photographer. Well respected entrepreneurs and bankers funded Mittelholzer's undertakings, supporting his goal to promote air travel in Switzerland. The entire Mittelholzer archive is now held as part of ETH Bibliothek's special collections in Zurich. This latest volume in the Pictorial Worlds series revaluates Mittelholzer's media activity from today's perspective. It features some 200 of his outstanding photographs. The complementing essay looks at the patronising view of Africa and its people and cultures the aviator-photographer maintained and provides an account of the colonialist backdrop of Swissair's lift-off in 1931.

Read more less

The mythic figure of Prometheus has inspired many poets, painters and musicians since the age of romanticism. For Goethe and Henry Fuseli, the titan who stole the fire from the gods of ancient Greek became the embodiment of mankind struggling for autonomy and self-determination. Yet the fire has come not only to our benefit. Along with it came also menace upon mankind. This is the subject of a major work by Venezuelan artist Javier Tellez. In his film installation 1/2 Rotations (Prometheus and Zwitter) of 2011, two sculptures slowly rotate before a camera: Arno Breker's (1900-91) Prometheus and Zwitter (hermaphrodite) by the German art-brut sculptor Karl Genzel (1871-1925). Both works were on display in the Nazi propaganda art shows of 1937 in Munich, Breker's in the Great German Art Exhibition and Genzel's in the coinciding defaming show Degenerate Art. This new book juxtaposes paintings and drawings reflecting the Prometheus myth by Henry Fuseli with Javier Tellez capital work of contemporary art. It is published to coincide with an exhibit at Kunsthaus Zurich in summer 2014.

Read more less

German-born artist Thomas Mullenbach plays with our everyday perception of the normal and well-known and undermines ourcollective ideas of sense, value, and purpose of the visible world. To this end, the now Zurich-based artist explores the discipline of art history and puts the possibilities and limits of painting up for discussion.This lavishly illustrated new monograph features a range of Thomas Mullenbach's paintings and drawings. Published inconjunction with a recent exhibition at Kunsthalle Zurich, it focuses on Mullenbach's more recent works, many of which hecreated especially for this show. Essays by Elke Bippus and Juri Steiner and a conversation between curator Beatrix Ruf and Thomas Mullenbach complement the illustrations.

Read more less

Leipzig-born photographer Margret Hoppe is a promising new voice in European photographic art. This new book features her series Apres une Architecture, a photographic perspective of Le Corbusier's architecture that refers to his concept of a modern architecture laid-out in the book Vers une architecture (Toward an Architecture) of 1923. Hoppe's images show Le Corbusier's use of exposed concrete, the clarity of his geometric shapes and the emblematic polychrome surfaces as symbols of his buildings. She investigates what remains today of these visions of architectural modernism, now that its legacy in many cases is adored as a monument rather than actually used and appreciated as a functional piece of architecture. The photographic image transforms the buildings into signs of a highly pictorial and sculptural aesthetic, enabling manifold views at Le Corbusier's work in the present day. The book also presents a selection of Hoppe's photographs of international modernist buildings, alongside two essays and a conversation with the artist. It is published to coincide with a solo exhibition at the Museum der bildenden Kunste in Leipzig.

Read more less

Markus Raetz is one of the most renowned contemporary artists in Switzerland. Initially educated and working as a primary school teacher, he became an artist in his early twenties. Since the 1970s, his work, including solo exhibitions, has been been on the international stage. Raetz works with a variety of materials and media. The phenomenon of perception is his main focus, rather than how something is represented. Prints form a major part of his work. Markus Raetz.The Prints 1951-2013 covers his complete body of work in this genre.; the Catalogue Raisonne is complemented by a separate volume, with essays on his work and artistic development. Exhibitions: Museum of Fine Arts Bern, early 2014 (date TBC). Markus Raetz is represented with works also in the permanent collections of museums such as: Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Kunstmuseum Basel, Basel; Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (Main); San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art, La Jolla CA; Tate Gallery, London; MoMA, New York; Musee national d art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Schaulager, Munchenstein near Basel; Moderna Museet, Stockholm.

Read more less

Hubert Looser, entrepreneur and patron of the arts, has put together an outstanding collection of modern and contemporary art. The focus of Looser's interest is Abstract Expressionism, Minimal Art, and Arte Povera. The collection also includes classical modernists, as well as Asian and African sculpture. The Hubert Looser collection will be given to Kunsthaus Zurich as a long-term loan in 2017. This book is published to coincide with the first exhibition of key works from this highly significant Swiss collection at Kunsthaus Zurich in summer 2013. It features paintings and sculptures by artists such as John Chamberlain, Jasper Johns, Donald Judd, Elsworth Kelly; Anselm Kiefer, Yves Klein, Willem de Kooning, Roy Lichtenstein, Brice Marden, Pablo Picasso, Jackson Pollock, Sean Scully, Louis Soutter, Cy Twombly, Andy Warhol, and others. It also offers an insight into Looser's private space, his home and garden, as a setting for masterpieces of 20th and 21st-century art.

Read more less

Jules Spinatsch ranks among the foremost contemporary Swiss photographic artists. Many of his projects, although controversial are thought-provoking and internationallly recognised. Since 2003, he has been working on his Surveillance Panorama Projects; shot with network cameras, these works create awareness for social habits and show the sometimes striking discrepancy between illusion and reality. In Vienna MMIX, he focused on the famous Vienna Opera Ball; from the opening of the doors at 20:32hrs, until the end of the dance at 05:17hrs, using 2 cameras to complete duel rotations, capturing an image every few seconds, an incredible 17,352 in total. Jules Spinatsch. Vienna MMIX-10008/7000 presents this fascinating social study in two volumes. Volume 1 shows 10,008 images, combined into a single chronological sequence; panoramic views that recreat the entire space, yet show only fragments of events. Volume 2 presents a selection of 70 images, documenting single moments of great intensity or intimacy, in fascinating close-up detail. It is a striking collection, documenting a range of human behaviour in a public space, over a relatively short period of time, in a very specific arena.

Read more less