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The incessant trend to throw away rather than to repair, demolish rather than refurbish has been a topic of discussion and criticism for years-at the same time, resource consumption and the waste continue to increase. To counteract this trend, students at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich and ETH Zurich have been developing sustainable and imaginative concepts for repairing a wide variety of objects, applying them both manually and by using digital techniques such as 3D printing. Beyond restoration, many projects aim to further develop and improve the repaired objects constructively, materially, or even in terms of design, lending them new value. This publication presents a wide variety of approaches and projects, complemented by essays by notable personalities from the fields of architecture, preservation, design, manufacturing, and craftsmanship.SILKE LANGENBERG (*1974) is professor of Construction Heritage and Preservation at ETH Zurich. Previously, she was professor for Design and Construction in Existing Contexts, Conservation and Building Research at the University of Applied Sciences in Munich, where she initiated a Repair Class.
Art and Objecthood illuminates the role of found objects and unconventional materials in the oeuvre of world-renowned artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. His creative fervor saw no bounds, he painted and drew on everything around him-from chairs to refrigerators, but also on items he encountered on the street: discarded windows and doors, mirrors, wood boards, and subway tiles. Interweaving art and life, these three-dimensional works are not only integral to New York's cultural landscape in the 1980s but are also symbols of Basquiat's engagement with, and transformation of, the reality around him. This publication presents new scholarship by leading Basquiat scholars and art historians and is the first comprehensive survey to explore Basquiat's use of found objects and unorthodox supports and their role in addressing issues of social inequality, political thresholds, and racial boundaries in the United States.JEAN-MICHEL BASQUIAT (1960-1988, New York City) is known for his raw gestural style of painting. His distinct approach was characterized by a rich fusion of text, symbols, and imagery. He was one of the first African American artists to achieve major international acclaim, and is celebrated for his prolific, albeit short artistic career.
This is the fourth monograph of the American artist Ann Mandelbaum. It offers both analog black and white work from 1990-2000 and also digital color images from 2007-present. None of the 100 examples have been exhibited or published before. The richness of the volume lies in the 35 year process delineated. It reveals a continual obsession with the organic world-woven within abstraction and sensation-and processed originally through the depths of the darkroom and subsequently on the digital screen. The varied imagery spans the history of the medium, including the photogram and multiple printing. Throughout, surreal techniques employ sculpture, collage, and the language of drawing. Regardless of medium, Mandelbaum consistently reinvents and rediscovers a language of surprise.
The revised and extended BMW Art Guide by Independent Collectors presents 304 private collections of contemporary art accessible to the public-featuring large and small, famous and the relatively unknown. Succinct portraits of the collections with countless color illustrations take the reader to 51 countries, often to regions or urban districts that are off-the-beaten-path. This practical guide is a collaborative publication stemming from the partnership between BMW and Independent Collectors, the international online platform for collectors of contemporary art. To date, neither the Internet nor any book has ever contained a comparable assembly of international private collections, including several that have opened their doors to art lovers and connoisseurs for the first time.
DAS MINSK is the latest project of the Hasso Plattner Foundation. Located in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin, the new exhibition space presents modern and contemporary art, as well as art from the former GDR, in new contexts. This catalogue for the two inaugural exhibitions links two artists from the Hasso Plattner Collection: GDR painter Wolfgang Mattheuer and Canadian photographer and filmmaker Stan Douglas. As the exhibitions direct their gaze to nature and the urban landscape of Potsdam, the volume presents familiar and novel perspectives on their work, complemented by a wide range of viewpoints on the motifs of landscape and (allotment) gardening in art. Beyond art theoretical voices, the book also features numerous experts addressing the socio-political dimensions of the subject-matter.WOLFGANG MATTHEUER (1927-2004) is one of the co-founders of the Leipzig School. As a critical observer of his time, his works bear witness to an ever-changing environment and society. STAN DOUGLAS (*1960) is considered one of the most important representatives of contemporary media art. His films and photographs have been shown in major international exhibitions since the early 1980s. In 2022 he will represent Canada at the 59th Venice Biennale. He lives and works in Vancouver and Los Angeles.
Her sensual Nanas-buxom, colorful female figures- laid the foundation for her international success beyond the art world: Niki de Saint Phalle. But the self-taught artist's creative spectrum is much broader, and her unconventional oeuvre, ranging from painting and drawing to assemblages, performances, theater, film, and architecture, is more subversive and critical of society than is widely assumed. Based on her efforts to process her own feelings, she addressed social and political issues, critically questioning institutions and role models in ways that are as relevant today as they have ever been. The exhibition and the publication shed new light on the artist's exceptional personality and uncover the wide-ranging oeuvre of the popular outsider-that is always surprising and eccentric, emotional, dark and brutal, humorous and cheerful. NIKI DE SAINT PHALLE (1930-2002) is one of the most important artists and sculptors of her generation. Growing up in Paris and New York, she returned to Paris in the 1950s, where she began her artistic career with her legendary Tirs, her "shooting" series, created during provocative performances.
One of Pakistan's most notable contemporary artists, Bani Abidi creates videos and multimedia works that interweave autobiographical fiction with sociopolitical commentary and satire. Her practice explores the sobering realities of the political conditions, bureaucracy, and urban infrastructure in Asia, exposing the absurdities emerging from the dysfunctionalities of everyday life. The Artist Who is the first monograph to look at the work of this Berlin-based Pakistani artist. Envisioned as an artist project, the publication explores notions of humor, playfulness and experimentation by engaging with forms of writing, design, printing, and assembly. Containing a documentation of artworks created over two decades as well as archival material and a rich selection of texts, it represents the wide range of relationships Abidi has fostered during this period.BANI ABIDI (*1971, Karachi) studied visual art in Lahore and Chicago. Encompassing video, photography and performance, Abidi's practice draws on everyday as well as historical events to explore issues of nationalism and state power. Solo shows have taken place at Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Gropius Bau, Berlin, amongst others; group shows include the 8th Berlin Biennial, Guggenheim Museum, New York, documenta 13, Kassel. Abidi lives and works between Berlin and Karachi.
Creating works with a fascinating range of tone and expression, Sean Scully's oeuvre is a continuous exploration of his core motif of lines and swaths of color. Captivating the observer through an uncertainty of edges and brushstrokes that appear to exalt the materiality of paint, pigment, and abstraction, Scully experiments with a variety of media and materials. Material World provides insight into the artist's practice and stylistic approach, which have evolved through a sustained engagement with the art historical tradition of Formalism. In an in-depth essay, Raphy Sarkissian situates Sean Scully's art in dialogue with selected works of abstract and figurative, modern and pre-modern painting and sculpture, as well as with aesthetic theories. This dialogue translates further into the interplay of the museum's architecture and the Neoclassical sculptures presented alongside Scully's work. SEAN SCULLY (*1945, Dublin) is one of the world's most acclaimed contemporary artists. The oeuvre of the Irish-born artist, who grew up in London and moved to New York in 1975, is characterized by an intense confrontation with Abstract Expressionism, Action Painting, and Minimalism. Beyond a purely formal exploration of color, form, plane and light in his abstract paintings and sculptures, his visual expressiveness is matched by intellectually engaging writings and lectures. Scully lives and works in New York, Barcelona and near Munich.
Martin Eder's new body of work is inhabited by ghostly hybrid creatures. Blurring the transition between humans, animals, and supernatural beings, Eder explores the motif of the boundary and its transgression in his oil paintings. His subjects allude to an encounter with the underworld and recall Dante's Inferno. A symbolism that both reflects a (post-)pandemic unease and hints at the encounter of reality and illusion. Eerie and fascinating at the same time, the paintings outline a space marked by the collapse of a shared perception. In addition to studio insights and paintings, the volume includes an elucidating text by curator Jane Neal as well as a conversation between Eder, Damien Hirst and Tim Marlow, director of London's Design Museum. MARTIN EDER (*1968, Augsburg) lives and works in Berlin. He studied under Eberhard Bosslet at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. His work has been exhibited internationally at Kunsthal Rotterdam, ARKEN Museum of Modern Art in Copenhagen, Hirst's Newport Street Gallery in London und MUDAM Luxembourg, among others.
Since the beginning of China's economic boom in the late 1980s and its ever-increasing influence on globalized society, the country's burgeoning contemporary art scene has attracted great attention around the world. However, despite the Chinese art market's emergence as a highly prolific industry and a growing international recognition of contemporary art from China, there is a remarkable lack of Chinese women artists represented in (inter-)national exhibitions and publications. Stepping Out! is the first comprehensive publication in 25 years to present a broadly representative selection of the work of contemporary Chinese female artists, including pioneering as well as emerging artists thus far little-known abroad. Through an enormous wealth of perspectives, the artists reveal their personal and social fears, contradictions, and hopes in the tense field occupied by powerful tradition, and shed light upon the search for identity both as women and as artists within a rapidly changing Chinese society.Stepping Out! features more than 100 artworks by 26 artists born between 1960 and 1994 living in mainland China, including Cao Fei, Lin Tianmiao, Luo Yang, Ma Qiusha, Tong Wenmin, Wen Hui, Xiao Lu, Xing Danwen, and Yin Yiuzhen.
Piet Mondrian had a decisive influence on the development of painting from figuration to abstraction. On the occasion of his 150th birthday, Mondrian Evolution is dedicated to his multifaceted work and artistic development. Initially working in the tradition of late-nineteenth century Dutch landscape painting, Symbolism and Cubism subsequently took on great significance for him. It was not until the early 1920s that the artist focused on a wholly non-representational pictorial vocabulary, concentrated on the rectangular arrangement of black lines with surfaces in white and the primary colors blue, red, and yellow. In separate chapters, this path is traced through motifs such as windmills, dunes, the sea, farms reflected in the water, and plants in various forms of abstraction.PIET MONDRIAN (1872-1944) was one of the pioneers of abstract art. Hailing from a strict Calvinist family, the artist became famous for his compositions of black lines and rectangular fields in primary colors, but his early work was influenced by 19th century Dutch landscape painting.
Earthbound-In Dialogue with Nature gathers forward-thinking works that propose alternative ways of shaping the complex relationship between human activities and the ecosystem-visionary approaches that emphasize the need for dialogue through new forms of interaction and consciously intervene in the current debate to initiate change. Created in collaboration with HEK, Haus der elektronischen Künste¿a young institution from Basel dedicated to digital culture¿and curated by HEK director Sabine Himmelsbach and Boris Magrini, this exhibition demonstrates that precisely where other strategies fail, art can open up new perspectives.
A characteristic of 20th- and 21st-century artistic production is that casual acquaintances and close intimates, friends, lovers, or sometimes even rivals come together to work collaboratively on the realization of a single work of art. Amitié et créativités collectives is focused on the genesis of these works and explores the conditions that contributed to the concentration and liberation of these creative energies. Beginning with the groundbreaking socio-cultural upheaval of the 19th century, the publication examines for the first time a variety of works of diverse genres and techniques from different time periods. Featuring works by Salvador Dalí and Luis Buñuel, Francis Picabia and René Clair, Jean Tinguely and Yves Klein, William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Jenny Holzer and Lady Pink; and many more, this publication. brings together more than one hundred works.
The legacy of the art and cultural scientist Aby Warburg offers many subjects for reassessment. Almost unknown until now are the artifacts he collected on a journey through the southwest of the US in 1895/96 and donated to the Museum für Völkerkunde in Hamburg (today Museum am Rothenbaum). The results first unfolded in Warburg's famous lecture on the "snake ritual" of the Hopi (1923). Following Warburg's transdisciplinary approach, this publication examines his guiding principles in assembling his collection as well as his reading of Pueblo art and culture. It pays tribute to the works and their artistic significance and sheds light on the circumstances of acquisition in the sociopolitical environment of the Pueblo communities of the time. The contemporary fascination with the snake ritual is also a topic. Set against this are the previously neglected perspectives and strategies of Pueblo leaders to regain interpretive sovereignty over culturally sensitive content and imagery.ABY WARBURG (1866-1929) is considered as the founder of a modern art history oriented towards cultural studies. His research was mainly concerned with the investigation of the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance, which he recorded in his iconic Bilderatlas Mnemosyne.
Nina Malterud is one of Norway's most prominent ceramics artists. Over the course of her five-decade-long career, she has developed a unique artistic oeuvre with references to traditional ceramic objects like plates, bowls, and tiles, but the emphasis is more on expression than on function. She explores the possibilities of clay and glazes in a free and undogmatic way, and is open to the visual results that can arise through controlled coincidences. The traces of the process are an essential part of her visual language. Sometimes the motifs are recognizable, but for the most part, she works with abstraction. The pieces radiate both tenderness and fragility, strength, and power. Combined with the materiality and weight of ceramics, the results are artworks with a strong sensory appeal.NINA MALTERUD (*1951) is a Norwegian artist. She studied at the National College of Art and Design in Oslo and works in Bergen, where she holds a professorship at the Institute of Ceramics of the National Academy of the Arts. Her sculptures are in collections of numerous Norwegian art museums.
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