Zeitgenössische Kunst – serie

"As a politically thinking person, I am not a morally thinking person.” While German painting of the postwar period essentially concerned itself with coming to terms with the past and presenting it in gestures ranging from the heroic to the ironic, Daniel Richter focuses on positioning himself in the present. Time and again he devises new ways of being “modern” in a medium that has long been labeled old-fashioned and anachronistic. His pictures constantly challenge the spectator by their painterly and contextually excessive demands, but they do not lecture on moral issues. In five chapters featuring more than 200 examples of his works, the author Eva Meyer-Hermann traces the chronological development of Richter’s artistic output for the first time. The turns from abstraction to figuration and back again that until now have been described as abrupt, prove on closer examination to be a logical consequence and a sign of conscious artistic action.

Few materials have experienced a similar revaluation in contemporary art as clay has in the past few years. This timely publication accompanies a large-scale exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, London, exploring how contemporary artists are using clay and ceramics in inventive and surprising ways, and pushing the boundaries of the medium. Featuring the work of over 20 international artists—from Grayson Perry to Woody De Othello—an introductory essay by curator Cliff Lauson, a text on the history of fine art and ceramics by writer and critic Amy Sherlock, and a round table discussion with artists from the exhibition, this catalogue is a meaningful contribution to the ongoing conversation about the relationship between art and craft.

It’s All About Freedom presents a comprehensive cross-section through nine decades of Tomi Ungerer’s artistic work for the first time—from drawings from the nineteen-thirties to objects from the two thousand–tens. The exhibits selected shed new light on Ungerer’s oeuvre by making it possible to comprehend the artistic dimension of the political and stylistic lines and breaks in his oeuvre as a ‘freewheeling artist’. His passion for experimenting across genres and the interplay between drawing, collage, and assemblage through which he searched for identity and humanity is thus shown in his work again and again. Developed by the Deichtorhallen Hamburg / Sammlung Falckenberg in cooperation with the Tomi Ungerer Estate and the Musée Tomi Ungerer in Strasbourg, the volume brings together contributions on Tomi Ungerer’s life’s work by Thomas David, Belinda Grace Gardner, Aria Ungerer, and Thérèse Willer, with a foreword by Dirk Luckow and Harald Falckenberg.

Wayne Thiebaud's famous, literally candy-colored still lifes of pies, cakes, gumball machines, and lipsticks reflect the promise and abundance of the American way of life - a society of plenty, where supply exceeds demand.The tactile impression created by his pasty layers of paint brings the objects to life and creates an atmosphere in which irony and melancholy are carefully balanced. Testing the possibilities of painterly expression, Thiebaud’s brilliant painting technique explores the boundaries of the real and imagined world.This catalog presents all aspects of the legendary American artist’s oeuvre, including still lifes and portraits, as well as his deserted, multi-perspective cityscapes and river landscapes, in luminous pastels that exude a peculiar summertime sadness.

Georg Baselitz enters a dialogue with the Old Masters - invited by Kunsthistorisches Museum Vienna, the acclaimed German painter and sculptor engages in a visual conversation. Baselitz himself curated this selection of works, focusing exclusively on nude painting. Both the exhibition and the catalogue revolve around this elemental human state, and its fundamental role in European art.From the beginning of his career, Baselitz’s work has been informed by a pronounced awareness of art history, above all he was inspired by Mannerism’s break with classical rules. Insights into the history of nude painting, as well into the topicality of painting itself, emerge from this encounter of Baselitz’s works with historical paintings of an idealized beauty from Kunsthistorisches Museum. The carefully chosen juxtapositions open up a space in which one can reflect and experience the essence of painting anew.

At the age of just 18, Zhao Gang, the son of Manchurian intellectuals, was the youngest member of the legendary Star Group, alongside Ai Weiwei as well as Huang Rui. In 1979, the way the up-and-coming avant-garde group in China protested against the party’s control of art was as influential as it was unsuccessful. Later, he studied in Europe and in the United States, acquired American citizenship, and is regarded as one of the outstanding “representatives of his generation, who truly understands East as well as West and speaks Chinese and English as a native language” (Phil Tinara) and who, as a passionate painter, consequently, also blends the visual language of East and West into a hybrid in a subtle, rebellious, sensitive, frenetic, mischievous, and absurd manner.In 2018 he took part in the survey exhibition “Art and China after 1989: Theater of the World” at the Guggenheim Museum, which showed the crème de la crème of contemporary art. The publication provides an overview of six central exhibitions from recent years, and takes a retrospective look at his work and life.

Employed as an office manager in the former GDR, and working as a self-taught artist, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt used her typewriter to create patterns and abstract compositions with characters and letters at the junction of Concrete Poetry, Dada, and Minimal Art. Her linguistic explorations that she developed further into collages later on, are often based on ambiguity.Published on the occasion of the large retrospective at MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam, NICHTS NEUES explores her typewritings, prints, collages, and paintings in thematic episodes. Although Wolf-Rehfeldt discontinued her artistic practice after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her art has lost none of its relevance. In a poetic, idiosyncratic, and often humorous way, the nonconformist artist explored themes such as environmental issues, intellectual freedom, community, and communication. Her sometimes subtle, sometimes more literal play with words, meanings, and forms continue to reveal the unexpected.

Sculptures of an Organic Artificiality Atem, Lehm - the German words for “breath” and “clay”, a title inspired by a poem by Paul Celan - is the first monograph dedicated to Latvian artist Daiga Grantina. Grantina’s solo show at GAMeC in Bergamo represented a major evolution in her poetics, a decisive and coherent change of palette and pace compared to her amorphous in-situ installations that have characterized her work to date. A mural forms an open-ended structure with its potentially infinite combinations: It seems to breathe, constraining and distending the grounding of space.The book’s structure mirrors this evolution, exploring a before, characterized by large-scale environmental installations in New York’s New Museum, the Biennale di Venezia and in Palais de Tokyo, Paris, to name a few, and an after, when the artist’s sculptural environments seem to shift their locus of perception.