How do we envision life on earth? Over half of the world’s population lives in cities. The future of these urban centers depends on questions of mobility. In a search for answers, the authors and artists invited to contribute to this book have explored what the Auto­stadt in Wolfsburg has to offer, while walking through the various cultural themes presented within this twenty-eight-hectar landscape park. The result is a collection of thoughtful and fresh perspectives on one of the largest distribution and pickup centers for new cars, which attracts two million visitors a year. Christian Boros, Douglas Coupland, Li Wie, and Sascha Lobo reflect on their personal experiences of navigat­ing the park. Readers can see the Autostadt through an inner monologue on the park and its art, the story of its amazing, brief history, a fantastical short story, a car ride into the future, or a trip into a surreal realm?and find inspiration for innovative answers to the questions of our time. (German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-3834-7)

Kemang Wa Lehulere was born in 1984 and lives in Cape Town and Johannesburg. He is perceived as one of the most important representatives of a new generation of South African artists who work in all different kinds of genres and media in order to develop new artistic perspectives and narrative modes, as well as new forms of political action. Wa Lehulere’s drawings combine allusions to the apartheid era in his home country and found pictorial material, personal memories, and texts. His work echoes how traces of racism and injustice are often blurred and ignored, revealing the gap between individual biography and official historiography.
In the spring of 2017, the Deutsche Bank KunstHalle presents Kemang Wa Lehulere as Deutsche Bank’s “Artist of the Year” in his first comprehensive institutional exhibition in Europe which is impressively documented in this volume.

Belgian artist David Claerbout is known for investigating the conceptual impact of the passage of time through his use of video and digital photography. His work skillfully interrogates both moving and still imagery to suggest an otherworldly level of existence, something that might refer to a specific place or event, but the timeline of which is not clear, oscillating between both past and present. His oeuvre is characterized by a meticulous attention to production details, painstakingly created, often over a period of years. With each of his projects Claerbout creates a small number of drawings, which help him to reflect upon and comprehend his concepts more thoroughly. Up to now, these works have not been afforded the attention they deserve. This publication addresses that oversight in a striking way, presenting, to a larger public for the first time, a comprehensive overview of Claerbout’s drawings created over a period of two decades.

Unlike animals, whose consciousness of their own existence differs from humans, humans experience life as a conscious function of death, painfully aware of the limitations of life and the emptiness lurking ahead. Becoming Animal explores the existential nature of human existence in a rich survey through Symbolism, Surrealism, Minimalism and contemporary art.

This investigation builds from a literary and philosophical framework that addresses consciousness and the self. Through a series of apparently irreconcilable artistically and politically divergent movements, empty transcendence is confronted by the enduring concepts of eternity and utopia. Becoming Animal features artists such as Francisco de Goya, Alfred Kubin, Odilon Redon, Gardar Eide Einarsson and Werner Büttner and includes essays on emptiness and transcendence in modern and contemporary art.

Exhibition:

Museum of Religious Art, Lemvig, 12.5.–12.8.2018

Rendezvous der Träume is the official catalog for the major exhibition at the Hamburger Kunsthalle – an art-historically significant encounter between international Surrealism and German Romanticism. The opulently illustrated publication opens new perspectives on two artistic movements deeply connected by dreams, cosmos, poetry, and revolt.

Surrealism, which emerged in Paris 100 years ago, saw itself as a radical break with rational orders – but at the same time as a continuation of Romantic ideas of inner vision, nature, and transcendence. The exhibition and this catalog impressively demonstrate how closely intertwined dreams and history, poetry and politics, past and future are.

Highlights



•Over 300 illustrations on 344 pages – high-quality design and comprehensive documentation
•Featuring works by Salvador Dalí, René Magritte, Max Ernst, Meret Oppenheim, Toyen, Paul Klee, and many others.
•Confrontation with German Romanticism – including Caspar David Friedrich and Philipp Otto Runge
•Well-founded essays by renowned authors on the artistic elective affinity between Romanticism and Surrealism
•Cooperation with the Centre Pompidou, Paris – a European exhibition project for the centenary celebration of Surrealism



The exhibition is a cooperation with the Centre Pompidou, Paris. It offers a particular thematic focus within the European centenary celebration of Surrealism.

Over the years, collector Ingvild Goetz has put together a collection of media art that has become one of the most important in the world. As a sequel to the already available fast forward, the volume fast forward 2 features a superb selection of works, including videos, video installations, and films by all of the most significant artists of the genre. The publication focuses on recent productions dating from the 1990s to the present, as the collector is personally interested in also presenting very recent works.

Artists featured (selection):

Doug Aitken, Pawel Althamer, Francis Alÿs, Matthew Barney, Sue de Beer, Janet Cardiff/George Bures Miller, Keren Cytter, A K Dolven, Nathalie Djurberg, Willie Doherty, Omer Fast, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Johan Grimonprez, Mona Hatoum, Teresa Hubbard/Alexander Birchler, Mike Kelley, William Kentridge, Zilla Leutenegger, Bjørn Melhus, Hans Op de Beeck, Raymond Pettibon, Paul Pfeiffer, Pipilotti Rist, Julian Rosefeldt, Markus Selg, Fiona Tan, Sam Taylor-Wood, Mathilde ter Heijne, Ryan Trecartin

Exhibition schedule: ZKM | Museum für Neue Kunst, Karlsruhe June 18–October 3, 2010

 

Gardens are refuges, ideal and protected places, sometimes enclosed, limited, and artificial, occasionally natural and wild. An artist’s private view of a garden, his garden, will show it to be a special place, a locus amoenus, or else he selects a single plant from the garden, and depicts it, with botanical precision, in all of its beauty. The spectrum ranges from the medieval Garden of Eden and detailed studies by Albrecht Dürer and his contemporaries, to Peter Paul Rubens’s courtly, gallant games in a royal park, Van Gogh’s gnarled trees in the courtyard of a sanatorium, and a video installation by Fischli/Weiss. More than mere images of gardens, these works are always landscapes of the soul. This opulently illustrated, impressively comprehensive volume features close to four hundred pages of blooming dreams.(German edition ISBN 978-3-7757-1870-7)

 

Artists featured (selection):

 

Max Beckmann, Joseph Beuys, Arnold Böcklin, Pierre Bonnard, Lovis Corinth, Camille Corot, Jacques-Louis David, Eugène Delacroix, Max Ernst, Fischli/Weiss, Jean-Honoré Fragonard, Lucian Freud, Caspar David Friedrich, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Vincent van Gogh, Paul Klee, Max Liebermann, August Macke, Édouard Manet, Henri Matisse, Claude Monet, Berthe Morisot, Edvard Munch, Emil Nolde, Camille Pissarro, Peter Paul Rubens , Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Thomas Struth, Antoine Watteau

 

Exhibition schedule: Städel, Frankfurt/Main November 24, 2006 – March 11, 2007 · Lenbachhaus, Munich, April 5–July 8,2007

Whether cirrus, cumulus, or stratus: endlessly changing and barely tangible, clouds in the sky have always fascinated humans. Since the early 19th century many artists have focused their interest on images of clouds, as can be seen in this richly illustrated volume of masterpieces by such diverse artists as Caspar David Friedrich, John Constable, William Turner, Claude Monet, Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Ferdinand Hodler, Gustav Klimt, Emil Nolde, René Magritte, Edward Steichen, and Gerhard Richter. This publication attests to the sheer, endless number of associations that artists from the Romantic era to the present day have connected with the phenomenon of clouds; it spans the arc from the cloud as ornament to “Cloud Seven,” from the “Discovery of Clouds” to artificially manufactured cloud formations, telling of metamorphoses and of “uncanny beauty,” and even discovering the “cloud of sound.”

 

Exhibition schedule: Leopold Museum, Vienna, March 22, 2013–July 1, 2013

 

They danced on the roofs of Manhattan: in the 1960s a group of artists in New York began developing a new form of art that went beyond the object. The new, time-based practices of artists such as Robert Morris, Trisha Brown, Simone Forti, Richard Serra, Sol LeWitt, Lucinda Childs and Yvonne Rainer embraced media such as dance, music, and film. Now, they will be shown in their historical dialogue with Minimalism in an exhibition celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Paris’s Centre Pompidou at the Carré d’Art in Nîmes. A Different Way to Move will also include works by Carl Andre, Vito Acconci, Dan Flavin, and Bruce Nauman; the richly illustrated catalogue contains a collection of essays which open up and question the vision of Minimalism, as well as original texts by the artists about this new awakening in art fifty years ago, now published together for the first time.

Exhibition: Carré d’Art Nîmes, 7.4–17.9.2017

The white rabbit and his pocket watch, the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, and naturally, Alice herself—the characters and absurd, cryptic puns of Lewis Carroll long ago made Alice in Wonderland a favorite book for every age group. Artists have also been inspired by the fantastical, imaginative, yet savage tale, and since the book was first published in 1865, there have been many works of art based on it. This book presents some of the most nuanced, starting with the original illustrations by John Tenniel, and going on to works by Max Ernst, René Magritte, Salvador Dalí, and other Surrealists, as well as art from the 1960s, all the way to contemporary works by Anna Gaskell and Kiki Smith or large installations by Stephan Huber and Pipilotti Rist. This bibliophile’s volume confirms and illuminates the uninterrupted relevance of this literary creation.

 

Exhibition schedule: Hamburger Kunsthalle, June 22–September 30, 2012

 

“You’re sitting in your apartment, looking at the things around you, and the light keeps growing dimmer; you see less and less, until nothing is left: that’s depression.” An increasing number of people suffer from this mental illness, whose symptoms can vary greatly in strength and therefore remain mysterious, difficult to understand for those around the person suffering. The young photographer Nora Klein (*1984 in Rostock) has discovered a form of expression beyond words that conveys how depressive people experience their illness. She spent eighteen months engaged in trustful exchanges with the afflicted. From these conversations—excerpts of which can be found in the book—arose sensitive portraits, as well as abstract visual imageries, whose immediate, penetrant qualities provide insights into the world of depression.

 

Exhibition: Kunsthaus Erfurt 7.4.–13.4.2017

British architectural photographer Peter M. Cook (*1967) started travelling to Tokyo in 1992, settling there in 1998. Peter has devoted himself to photographing buildings across Japan. Edo, which is the old name for Tokyo, is the culmination of twenty years tirelessly documenting Tokyo and its buildings, recording an architectural evolution of the city. For his photo book, Peter M. Cook has selected 100 images of Tokyo, paying homage to the visual language of Hiroshige’s 100 Views of Edo: Mount Fuji makes an appearance, ghostlike in the background, its powerful iconic presence a reminder of a constant in nature, in contrast to the urban landscape at its base. At the same time, Cook’s abstract aesthetics are reminiscent of the pioneering silent film Metropolis from 1927, which has set the scene for the futuristic city. The book furthermore includes a haiku by the renowned Japanese architect Kengo Kuma whose buildings Cook started to document for a new project.

To be able to simply drift in the infinity pool on the roof terrace of the fifty-seven-floor Marina Bay Sands Hotel, while in the background you can enjoy the urban soundscape of Singapore’s imposing sea of high-rises. Or to be personally welcomed to a private champagne party after an extended hot-air balloon ride over the Kenyan wilderness. The extravagant pleasures of the wealthiest one percent of the earth’s population represent an extreme contrast to those of the remaining ninety-nine. Describing the gaping disparities in images is a challenge that has been taken up by Nina Berman, Peter Bialobrzeski, Guillaume Bonn, Mikhael Subotzky, and many others photographers. The volume assembles their works for the purpose of lending visual evidence to the blatant discrepancy between people’s living conditions, which can be as fascinating as it is shocking.

 

Exhibitions: International Photography Festival GuatePhoto, Guatemala City, Guatemala 12.–30.11.2015 | Balkan Photo Festival, Sarajevo, 29.–31.1.2016 | Gage Gallery at Roosevelt University, Chicago 4.2.–28.5.2016 | Head On Photo Festival, Sydney 29.4.–22.5.2016
Uri-Eichen Gallery, Chicago, July 2016 | The Eye – International Photography Festival, Aberystwyth, Wales 30.9. – 2.10.2016 | Addis Foto Fest, Addis Ababa 28.12.2016–1.1.2017