Angela Stief – författare

A wide-ranging exploration of comics, characters, and the visual language of KAWS and his contemporaries.KAWS. Art & Comics explores the interplay between comics, comic strips, cartoons, and fine art. It places the American artist KAWS in dialog with selected contemporary stances, focusing on the artistic autonomy of his characters—figures that unite characteristics of street, pop, commercial, and public art. Comics are characterized by a universal language and exist in many cultures as an accessible way of telling stories graphically, in words and images. Jean-Michel Basquiat and Ad Reinhardt were fine artists who created comics in a near-classic vein. Even before the advent of photography and (animated) films, caricature, satire, and frame-by-frame narration offered a powerful way to convey stories across national, generational, and social boundaries.From the 1960s onward, artists such as Keith Haring and H.C. Westermann questioned the division between high and low art. Prominent contemporary artists in this tradition include KAWS, Joyce Pensato, Cosima von Bonin, and Peter Saul. KAWS began as a graffiti artist in the 1990s, later overpainting posters and advertisements in public spaces by obscuring faces with a stylized skull and crossbones.He is known for monumental figurative sculptures in bronze, wood, and inflatables. His COMPANIONs and ACCOMPLICEs display a range of emotional states, often isolated and melancholy.

Hanakam & Schuller are tricksters. As artists and researchers, they remodel the rules of fine art, creating idiosyncratic orders and new world designs incorporated in videos and objects. The artefacts of the two artists from Vienna are "Gestalt-changers"; they change their outer shape and re-appear in a number of different contexts.

The trickster art book illustrates the oeuvre and provides an insight into its making using multi-page photo spreads from video stills, and production photographs. The Arkadikon essay captures readers and leads them to contemporary hypothetical landscapes, deconstructing them as modern surrogates of an increasingly virtual world.

The artists discuss ideal, pop, aura and abduction with Angela Stief, Anselm Franke, Uta Grosenick, Annette Hünnekens, Wolfgang Ullrich, Lois Weinberger, Stephanie Weber und Oliver Zybok.

New works by the acclaimed painter In her painterly and graphic oeuvre, the renowned British artist Jenny Saville explores the centuries-old tradition of representing the human body. Her figures occupy an ambiguous zone between idealization and deconstruction. Drawing inspiration from the annals of art history— from Old Masters such as Leonardo and Raphael through to Egon Schiele, Pablo Picasso, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud—Saville's painterly practice is characterized by physicality, carnality, and the interplay between new and old media. Whether she is depicting history, the bodies of others, or indeed her own, Jenny Saville's work explores what it means to be human.

Katharina Grosse (b. 1961) has created walkable artworks in three historical spaces within the Albertina in Vienna. The shimmering colour fields extends across the walls, ceiling and floor, crossing spatial and conceptual boundaries. Their power, intensity and sheer size is overwhelming. The catalogue documents the three-dimensional image world with detailed photos of the installations and pictures from the studio. Expansion and permanent boundary-crossing, freedom and autonomy form the basis of Grosse’s oeuvre. Her creative work is experimental and unpredictable, like untamed thoughts. Numerous photos from the artist’s personal archive provide an insight into her working methods and sources of inspiration, as well as the processes by which she develops her ideas.

George Segal’s ghostly figures are immediately recognizable, even by those who don’t know the artist’s name. Some are installed in public spaces, as if sitting on a park bench. This book explores his revolutionary technique of casting from live models, as well as his work across a variety of media, presenting him as a restless innovator. George Segal’s sculptures are unmistakable and inimitable. Among the most compelling artists in twentieth century art, Segal combined a reverence for tradition with a desire to speak in a contemporary idiom. His unique technique of casting live models using plaster and gauze and combining these ghostly white figures with objects of everyday use was revolutionary, catapulting him to fame in 1962. Including over 75 illustrations, the book and texts present Segal as a radical experimenter, a traditionalist, and a restless innovator who worked in paint, photography, printmaking, charcoal, and pastel.

This volume presents art with light in all its facets – using mirrors, black light, neon tubes, and bottles, Brigitte Kowanz creates objects and spatial artworks in which she showcases light. "What is light?" is the central question of her oeuvre. "Light is what you see," is the artist's answer.Light helps us see; it makes everything visible, yet remains invisible itself. Brigitte Kowanz explores this paradox in her art of light. This volume offers a retrospective of the work of the artist, who died in 2022. In addition to her central works, it presents iconic works in which she addressed current topics such as digitalization and new communication media in an information society as early as the 1980s.