Corinna Thierolf - Böcker

In 1970 in Munich Gerhard Richter met Brigid Berlin alias Brigid Polk, Andy Warhol’s legendary muse and enfant terrible of New York’s high society. This meeting gave rise to Richter’s important “Brigid Polk” series, based on Polaroid self-portraits by the eccentric artist: a dialogue between America and Europe, photography and painting, artist and muse. The series about Brigid Polk is an important record of Gerhard Richter’s photo paintings. It is exemplary of his struggle for a new self-concept of painting in dialogue with photography. This volume is the first to pay extensive tribute to this multifaceted series and traces the history of its creation, which revolved Heiner Friedrich, an important gallery owner in Munich. The personal reminiscences of those who were present at the time are particularly evocative of the avant-garde art scene of the 1970s.

In 1926 22 year - old Dutchman Willem de Kooning (1904 – 1997) travelled to the USA on a British freighter – without papers and hidden in the machine room. The young art student eked out a living by painting houses, signs and façades, before he was able aft er eight years to dedicate himself entirely to painting.In the United States he established contacts with the art scene and forged friendships with artists such as Arshile Gorky, Franz Kline, Clifford Still, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko. Today De Ko oning belongs to the outstanding painters of Abstract Expressionism and together with Jackson Pollock is regarded as a pioneer of Action Painting. This publication vividly examines De Kooning’s life, marked by self - doubts, successes, new beginnings, excess es, and scandalous paintings, as well as the evolution of his artistic work. In addition, author Corinna Thierolf opens up exciting perspectives on De Kooning’s work by revealing entirely new, surprising relationships with the works of fellow artists such as Franz Marc, Piet Mondrian, or Wassily Kandinsky.

In 2019, Wolfgang Laib entered into a dialogue with masterpieces by Fra Angelico, Leon Battista Alberti, Filippo Brunelleschi and Benozzo Gozzoli in his philosophical and poetic installations of pollen and beeswax. The publication documents impressively this unique and spectacular art event.Following an invitation from the Museo Novecento in Florence, Wolfgang Laib – one of the outstanding artists of the present day – created five works in four of the city’s main sights, including the convent of San Marco and the Pazzi Chapel. In their juxtaposition with the historic masterpieces, the delicate pollen sculptures and the imposing beeswax ziggurat cause the contrast between present and past, physical place and endless space, and real and spiritual life to become blurred and lead us towards the central questions of life.