Thorsten Sadowsky - Böcker

The Dead Sea tells its own stories. Its salt crystals are like prisms. Through them you can see the world anew. Israeli artist Sigalit Landau creates this vision by using the world’s saltiest sea as her laboratory. Everyday objects are “baptized” by immersing them in the Dead Sea for months. Completely covered in salt, they have a hypnotizing effect. The transience of objects is transposed into the poetic aura of crystalline permanence. In this form, issues of female identity and bodily experience, the shadows of the Holocaust, the tense political situation in Israel, as well as questions of justice, structural violence, and economic exploitation of nature are negotiated. Salt Years is both a catalogue of these works created at the Dead Sea and a visually stunning documentation of the artist’s process.Exhibition: Museum der Moderne Salzburg, July 6 – November 17, 2019

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880 – 1938) is one of the most important artist personalities of the twentieth century; many of his works have become icons of Expressionism. Vacillating between self - doubt and egocentricity, the artist created an incomparably mult i - faceted oeuvre with a remarkable instinct for the trends and imbalances of his time. Kirchner was the driving force behind and the most radical member of the artists’ association “Die Brücke”. He embarked on a promising career which reached a first zeni th in the expressive works of his Berlin years. His ecstatic creative impulse was the result of one of the “loneliest times of my life, in which an agonising restlessness constantly drove me out by night and day.” Even after Kirchner had found a new home i n Davos in 1917, his life continued to be full of tension and marked by phases of mental instability and unbroken creative energy. Anxious to ensure the correct reception of his works, during these years Kirchner invented the art critic Louis de Marsalle a nd published reviews of his own works under this pseudonym. This colourful and fascinating artist personality is presented by Thorsten Sadowsky, the author of this volume, in a knowledgeable and lucid manner through examples of his works and the stations of his life

Since the 1990s, the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare CBE (*1962, London) has developed opulently executed sculptures and installations, colourful collages and theatrically staged photographs and films. To do so he transforms episodes from art and history whose effects influence our present-day lives. The volume takes up the traces of colonialism and its consequences for role models, worldviews and body images in the works of Shonibare.