The Museum Langmatt in Baden is a gem in every respect. The house and garden take visitors back to the turn of the previous century, when Jenny and Sidney W. Brown set up house here. As collectors, the couple was well-informed and well-connected, and they assembled noteworthy, mainly Impressionist works of art, mainly on their trips to Paris. The Browns acquired paintings by Renoir, Monet, Gauguin, Cézanne, and Degas—numerous small works that were displayed in the rooms. The Museum Langmatt, which opened in 1990, is founded upon this unique core collection. The Browns living area became an influential exhibition space for contemporary art. This carefully designed, illustrated volume has been compiled to celebrate the museum’s thirtieth anniversary. It provides a look at the magical art collection, its special history, and a glimpse behind the scenes, as well. Accompanied by essays by the museum’s director, Markus Stegmann, as well as by eye witnesses, experts, and artists, the publication affords an atmospheric view of this unusual institution.

The MUSEUM LANGMATT collection was significantly founded by Sidney and Jenny Brown between 1900 and 1933. The heart of the collection consists of around 50 outstanding French impressionist. This unique ensemble also includes valuable French furniture from the 18th and 19th century, sculptures, drawings, textiles, silver, and porcelain, and also Chinese ceramics.

EXHIBITION
Museum Langmatt, Baden
March 1—August 2, 2020

Women artists in Mexico present their lifeworld from a decidedly female point of view and respond to international artistic movements with very different approaches: works by Teresa Serrano (*1936), Ximena Cuevas (*1963), Betsabeé Romero (*1963), Teresa Margolles (*1963), Claudia Fernández (*1965), Melanie Smith (*1965), and Maruch Sántiz Gómez (*1975) constitute the core of this publication. The photographs, videos, objects, and installations from the holdings of the Daros Latinamerica Collection in Zurich take a subversive look at Mexico’s national identity. The works call prevailing hierarchies of power into question, including their associated traditional functions as well as the social spaces of women within Mexican society. The apparent banality of everyday things and actions—both in the domestic-private as well as the urban-public sphere—experiences new, deeper meaning and is in part ironically broken.

Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Bern 3.6.–23.10.2016

Paintings of a Sensual Immediacy

As artists, they were self-taught and created a cosmos of images that still captivates us today with its sensual immediacy and has made a lasting mark in art history on the work of non-academically trained artists: Henri Rousseau (1844–1910), Camille Bombois (1883–1970), André Bauchant (1873–1958), Louis Vivin (1861–1939) and Séraphine Louis (1864–1942). They are counted among the so-called circle of the "painters of the sacred heart"; their scenarios, often borrowed from nature, especially flowers and fruits, but also people in parks and landscapes, indicate a closeness to nature, a sensitive approach to the things of the immediate environment, with which they apparently sought to escape the coldness of uprising modernism.

These French pioneers of authentic art were discovered by the German art historian Wilhelm Uhde (1874–1947), who organized their first joint exhibition in Paris in 1928.

Frederic Matys Thursz (1930–1992) continually questioned painting. Following this critical attitude he developed over a period of forty years an impressive oeuvre that experimented with the most diverse techniques, processes, and approaches of painting. His late work in particular responded to the question of what painting can be through the persistent reduction of color and light, pure qualities that draw the viewer’s fascinated eye. This publication gathers together more than 120 works of art from both America and Europe, the majority of which are being published for the first time. His endeavors in painting are contrasted to a collection of Thursz’s own texts, such as lectures, interviews, and journal entries. Here, special weight is placed on the transcriptions of the series of lectures he gave in 1983 as an instructor at the New York Studio School.

The Munich architect Thomas Herzog is known for his unconventional environmentally-conscious, energy saving apartment houses and private residences. This monographic volume showcases both plans for projects never built as well as completed buildings such as the well-known Burghardt house in Regensburg built between 1977-1979 together with Verena Loibl-Herzog. The architect: Thomas Herzog born 1941 in Munich. 1960 to 1965 studied architecture at the Technische Hochschule in Munich. 1971 opened an office of his own. 1972 received a doctorate at the University of Rome. 1973 professor at the Gesamthochschule Kassel, 1986 at the Technische Hochschule Darmstadt. 1993 full professor in the department of architecture at the Technische Hochschule Munich.

For 14 Rooms curators Klaus Biesenbach and Hans Ulrich Obrist invited international artists to each activate a room and explore the relationship between space, time, and physicality with an artwork whose “material” is the human being. Giving visitors an insight into a more performative and interactive practice, the exhibition allows visitors to encounter a new situation within each of the fourteen rooms and engage in a diverse series of immersive and intimate experiences. 14 Rooms will feature works by celebrated international artists within a spectacular architectural environment conceived by Herzog & de Meuron. Two additional works serve as an epilogue (Wolfson) and an archival documentation (Baldessari), challenging the very notions of live art and the human experience as set out in 14 Rooms. With an overarching exhibition design, the project is a collaboration between Fondation Beyeler, Art Basel, and Theater Basel.

Artists featured: Marina Abramovic, Allora & Calzadilla, Ed Atkins, John Baldessari, Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster, Damien Hirst, Joan Jonas, Laura Lima, Bruce Nauman, Otobong Nkanga, Roman Ondák, Yoko Ono, Tino Sehgal, Santiago Sierra, Jordan Wolfson, Xu Zhen

Exhibition: Art Basel 14.–22.6.2014

This edifice, built in Munich in 1992 to house a representative private collection of contemporary art, has received much acclaim among the experts for its elegant integration of frequently opposing demands for architecturally artistic contour and criteria for adequate architectural exhibition. In this architectural monograph, depiction of plans and a photo essay by Christian Kerez provide a comprehensive visual documentation; the text part traces the ideal constellation of the dialogue to which the building owes its derivation: Architects, clients and the artist Helmut Federle worked on the design together.

This book explores the history of the Kramlich Residence, a home for American art collectors Richard and Pamela Kramlich and dedicated space for their pioneering collection of media art, located in the beautiful landscape of the Napa Valley, California. Designed by Swiss architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron, the unique character of the Kramlich Residence evolved from a laboratory of ideas by the architects, and since completion offers artists and artworks a rare creative opportunity to respond to this dedicated home for media art. Featuring essays and conversations with historians, curators, architects and collectors, and new artist commissions, each contribution in the book draws on distinct experiences of the project, exploring how new ways of viewing and reflection emerge from the intersections between architecture, nature, moving images, sound, and spaces to live and gather.  

The book includes new photographic artworks by Lothar Baumgarten, Luisa Lambri, and Catherine Wagner

The collaboration of the architect Thomas Herzog, the sculptor Nikolaus Lang and the painter Rainer Wittenborn began about 25 years ago; since then a number of conceptions and realisations have materialised in which the concern is constantly a matter of avoiding the conventional genre hierarchy of the usual "art on the building" and of realising an integration of architecture and fine arts. The most well-known project of this kind is the Design Center Linz, where Lang and Wittenborn were considerably involved in the interior design. In this book, the third volume of the survey of Thomas Herzog's work, all the joint efforts are documented in texts and pictures. The architect: Thomas Herzog, born 1941 in Munich. 1960 to 1965 studied architecture at the TH Munich. 1971 opened an office of his own. 1972 received a doctorate at the University of Rome. 1973 professor at the Gesamthochschule Kassel, 1986 at the TH Darmstadt. 1993 full professor in the department of architecture at the TH Munich.

Ein Gespräch zwischen Jacques Herzog, Pierre de Meuronì und Rémy Zaugg This book presents excerpts from several interviews with the architect team of Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron in which artist Rémy Zaugg poses a number of provocative questions on the architects' thoughts about architecture and art. These thoughtful and informative discussions offer valuable insights into the architectural concepts that underly the work of Herzog & de Meuron, who consciously design their buildings in dialogue with such artists as Joseph Beuys, Thomas Ruff, Helmut Federle and Rémy Zaugg and have developed a method based on the principle of co-authorship. (Englische Ausgabe erhältlich ISBN 3-89322-889-6)

Between 1930 and 1938, Berlin-born John Heartfield, whose given name was Helmut Herzfeld, created political photomontages; today, they can be regarded as symbols of the fall of the Weimar Republic and Hitler’s dictatorship. A bitter opponent of the National Socialists, the virtuoso photo editor of the front pages of the Arbeiter Illustrierten Zeitung lighted on images that were often astonishingly clear-sighted and powerful.

This publication offers a current, undisguised view of this group of works by Heartfield (1891–1968), whose oeuvre not only makes him an outstanding artist but an extraordinary contemporary witness. The book draws upon the artist’s own works, some of which were not generally available until 1989, and also sheds some light on what was—at least from today’s vantage point—his somewhat too unreserved support of the Communist Party. The early Dadaist years, his friendship with George Grosz, and the legendary book covers Heartfield designed in the twenties for the Malik Verlag, which he founded with his brother Wieland, round off the volume.

Exhibition schedule: Berlinische Galerie, Landesmuseum für Moderne Kunst, Fotografie und Architektur, Berlin, May 29–August 31, 2009

Frederick the Great as a gardener? That is something new. In fact, however, under Frederick’s idiosyncratic guidance, the garden at Sanssouci became a mirror of his personal and political roles. Paths, plantings, architecture, and sculptures express his notions of death, happiness, and fame. Frederick used famous forms of mythological representation, as well as mysterious allegorical allusions and emblematic references. The “axis of knowledge” defined his Prussian Arcadia as the best of all possible worlds, where the “philosopher of Sanssouci” and his friends devoted themselves to the arts and sciences. The “axis of power,” on the other hand, represents his fame and ambition as a European monarch who legitimized his rule not only via the Hohenzoller and Orange dynasties, but also through the tradition of the pharaohs, the Roman emperors, and Louis XIV, the Sun King.

Wolfgang Winter and Berthold Hörbelt have been building box houses since 1996. They have now done this in a large number of different places. In public space, in each case for several days, weeks or months, they piled several hundred water boxes on top of each other, often arranging them into concave or convex structures. The brown, green and orange boxes, usually part of a system of exchange and monetary deposit, are removed from normal commercial circulation and, along with an unexpected aesthetic quality, take on a new function - beyond the aesthetics of commercial goods and the logistics of stockrooms. The box houses, located at key places in the urban landscape, function as cinemas, bus stops or - like at the Sculpture Project in Münster in 1997, which marked the first international success for the two artists - as an information pavilion and kiosk. With introductory essays and a fax dialogue between the artists and Florian Matzner, this book examines their work over the past four years - mixed forms from sculpture and architecture which find their place at the "intersection between autonomy and applicability" (Wolfgang Winter). The artists: Wolfgang Winter, born 1960 in Offenbach. Lives in Frankfurt on Main.ì Berthold Hörbelt, born 1958 in Coesfeld. Lives in Havixbeck and Frankfurt on Main.

Georg Baselitz was born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony, and is one of the most important contemporary artists in Germany. He discovered the print medium early on, producing his first etchings in 1964. From then on he experimented with very different techniques, such as dry-point, aquatint, and then later with wood- and linocuts. In the process he explored the specific requirements of these artistic forms of expression, developing his own unique works on paper.
With the inclusion of prints that have never before been exhibited, this volume presents a choice selection of works from a very important branch of Baselitz’s oeuvre. The original prints, print series, and rare artist’s proofs dating from 1964 to 1983 stem from the excellent collection belonging to Franz, Duke of Bavaria, head of the House of Wittelsbach. This book contains Baselitz’s first etchings, the figural Heroes from the mid-sixties, and excerpts from the portfolio series Cows (1969), Eagles, and Trees (both 1974). It also includes examples of his famous inverted pictures, which he has been making since 1969.

Exhibition schedule: Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden, Kupferstich-Kabinett, June 20–August 25, 2008 · Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich, September 18–November 16, 2008