Occasionally, when something seems very familiar you lose sight of what makes it so special: Flemish Masters. From van Eyck to Bruegel sets out to counteract this effect and opens our eyes once again to the revolution that took place in the Low Countries in the 15th and 16th centuries that shaped the course of European art. In 48 lavishly illustrated analyses, Matthias Depoorter explores how painters such as Van Eyck, Van der Weiden, Massys, Bosch, and Bruegel reached unprecedented heights, and are rightfully considered innovators to this day.
The defining factor was their perfecting and mastery of the oil painting technique as well as their ground-breaking attention to optical lighting effects. The new technical possibilities offered a different way of looking at the world and ultimately a new way of painting. No less innovative was the level of detail. These painters were thoroughly acquainted with each other's work-this volume shows the fundamental artistic cross-fertilization. A must-read for anyone who wants to fall in love with the old masterpieces anew.
An Encounter Between Art and the Technosphere
Proprietary algorithms, secret data troves, and inscrutable systems rule the day. How is this registered in art? In Poetics of Encryption Nadim Samman explores works that highlight the hidden dimensions of our technological landscape. Running counter to erroneous claims regarding a new culture of transparency and openness, such artworks address black sites, black boxes, and black holes-all the while, toggling between enlightened concern and occult dreaming.
Since 1955, the annual World Press Photo Contest has set the standard in visual journalism. The 2023 Yearbook showcases the most striking press photographs and compelling reports from 2022, carefully selected from thousands of entries by six regional and one global jury of acclaimed independent professionals.
Providing a diversity of perspectives from all over the world, the awarded works bear witness to the events that shaped this past year, and document in long-term projects the ongoing issues we face. Recognizing the importance of photojournalism and documentary photography at a time, when the truth is contsted, the awarded images share courageous stories and present invaluable insights - from war, and the struggle for civil rights and political empowerment, to the visible impact of the climate crisis that could be felt in 2022 more acutely than ever.
Chinese Calligraphy Meets Western Performance
In his paintings the Taiwanese artist Yahon Chang brings together traditional Chinese ink-wash painting and Western forms of artistic expression to produce a synthesis of East and West. Typically standing on large sheets of linen or Xuan paper and wielding a brush almost as long as he is tall, Chang creates works imbued with performative energy and characterized by large, sweeping brushstrokes. Drawing on Chinese literati and Zen (Chan) Buddhist traditions, the artist understands painting as an activity that connects body and mind. His entire body functions as an axis for these expressive paintings and is influenced by his training in calligraphy. This publication offers the first insight into the artist's extensive oeuvre and includes exhibition views as well as accompanying texts.
WHAT DOES MIGRATION MEAN FOR THOSE, WHO STAY BEHIND?
Louise Amelie's documentary photo series is an artistic exploration of the global phenomenon of migration and its many facets, which are often ignored in European migration politics. Migration has always been an integral part of human experience and will continue to be. Yet in public discourse it is presented as an aberration, while the existence of nation-state borders is hardly ever questioned. On the globe, Kyrgyzstan nestles inconspicuously next to Kazakhstan and China, but on the ground the vastness and heights of the mountains seem endless. In contrast to the natural beauty, prefabricated housing estates spring up in the capital, Bishkek. Here lives a young population that, despite all the adversities of post-Soviet reality, faces the world with great confidence. In a collection of portraying texts and photographs that foreground the individual stories, the book is an expression of solidarity and empathy, and shows that migration can mean both an opportunity as well as the painful loss of a beloved Missing Member.
Coding Care: Towards a Technology for Nature brings together contributions from renowned authors and artists who are particularly concerned with nature and our environment. In doing so, they raise the question of how we can use technology to better understand nature and shape coexistence in a sustainable way - especially in regions that are not yet fully technologized. In this sense, coding should be understood as a form of caring, a substitute for what technology can contribute to the future in each specific cultural and regional context.
"IN MANY LANGUAGES, 'UNDERSTANDING' ALSO COMES FROM THE IDEA OF PUTTING SOMETHING INSIDE YOUR BODY" - CAMILLE HENROT
Over the past twenty years, Camille Henrot has developed a critically acclaimed practice that moves seamlessly between drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and film. Mother Tongue is Henrot's first publication focused solely on painting and drawing, bringing together over 200 works from the series System of Attachment, Wet Job, and Soon, created between 2018 and 2022. This recent body of work addresses the ambivalent nature of care and the tension between the simultaneous developmental need for attachment and independence, beginning at infancy and continuing throughout life. Her deeply personal and intimate interrogations ultimately relate to broader questions such as the expectations placed on mothers and the representation of the female body.
This richly illustrated catalogue is accompanied by texts from Emily LaBarge, Legacy Russell, Marcus Steinweg, Helene Cixous, Seamus Kealy, and a conversation with Camille Henrot and curator Julika Bosch.
Coupling defeat and despair with rebellious humor, Danish artist Peter Linde Busk explores the grotesque conditions of human existence. Populating his works with tragic and awkward figures like fallen heroes, jesters, or outlaws in abstract spaces of detailed ornamentation, his figurations are meticulously composed using a great variety of textures and techniques, and often incorporate random material relics from previous works. Similarly, his titles are wry quotes or poetic fragments: it is from Rilke that Peter Linde Busk has borrowed the title of the book, Who speaks of victory? To endure is all.
This richly illustrated monograph features a major essay by art historian Maria Fabricius Hansen juxtaposing Linde Busk's work with medieval mosaics and the grotesques of Renaissance art. A catalogue raisonne of works from 2015 to 2022 is supplemented by short prose texts and a playlist by writer Minna Grooss that suggests a sound track to the materially emphatic works by Linde Busk.
Inspiring Role Models for a Younger Generation of Women Architects.
Making women in architecture visible - that is the goal of Diversity in Architecture e.V. (DIVIA). Celebrating its debut in 2023, its international award for women architects and urban planners aims to help achieve this goal. Following the announcement of 27 nominees, selected by an international Advisory Board with experts from the six continents, a high-profile jury has chosen the five finalists: May al-Ibrashy (Africa), Katherine Clarke & Liza Fior (Europe), Marta Maccaglia (South America), Tosin Oshinowo (Africa) and Noella Nibakuze (Africa). Each of them a pioneer in her field and an embodiment of DIVIA's philosophy, inspired by trailblazing architect Lina Bo Bardi that "architecture is a social discipline", this catalogue retraces their paths and portrays their work. In conversation with them we learn about what drives them, the obstacles they face(d) along the way, and the opportunities that lie in female leadership.This publication is a tribute to their cultural engagement, ethics, and deep sense of community-it is a recognition of their efforts to create environments that positively affect others and celebrates them as role models for the next generation of female architects.
Rough, pristine, and poetic
Jan Jedlicka is a painter, draftsman, graphic artist, photographer and filmmaker, but also a wanderer and explorer. As an attentive observer, he engages with the subtle changes caused by light, the seasons, or human interventions in his environment. Precise, delicate, and quietly persistent, Jedlicka's works refer to the landscapes and places in which he moves and returns to again and again like the Italian Maremma. For his drawings, watercolors, and paintings, he extracts pigments from minerals found on site-and thus literally brings the landscape onto paper and canvas. This publication explores Jedlicka's oeuvre from the 1970s onwards-not chronologically, but as a map of the artist's movements through the landscape, and along the paths of his various artistic strategies.
At the Tipping Point
Taking a deliberately kaleidoscopic approach, the exhibition 1.5 Degrees and the accompanying catalogue encourage us to address the climate crisis in a curious, innovative, participatory, and active way. More than 30 international artists, including melanie bonajo, Laure Prouvost, Julian Charriere, Otobong Nkanga, Marianna Simnett, Ernesto Neto and the collective SUPERFLEX, explore the complex interdependencies between humans, nature and technology, and search for solutions, from plants as data repositories, algae as energy sources and microorganisms as empathic dialogue partners. Including all parts of the museum collections as well as new outdoor installations at the National Garden Show BUGA, the book presents various models of how to use the means of art to reshape the coexistence of species and emphasizes the hope-giving potential of creativity and innovation.
Ted Stamm's paintings, drawings and performative works show the New York artist's constant engagement with his time and his tireless experimental way of working. He developed a minimalist visual language that often appears strictly geometric and simple, yet conveys a great sense of freedom. His iconic works and cross-media conceptual approaches went on to influence a wide range of artists in the generation that followed. This new monograph on the work of this American artist is the most comprehensive published to date. Examining Ted Stamm's series and artistic language through essays by renowned scholars that place his work in the context of its time and discuss his contribution to the art historical canon, it provides an in-depth insight into Stamm's multifaceted oeuvre.
In her oil paintings as well as charcoal, chalk, graphite and color pencil drawings, photographs, films and installations Swiss artist MIRIAM CAHN (*1949, Basel) explores political and social themes. Cahn's works are characterized by an intense color palette combined with recurring motifs of violence, tenderness, war, devastation, and physical vulnerability. Commenting on her own work in writing is central to Cahn's artistic practice. She examines her own works, reflecting on art and current affairs, and often juxtaposes her texts with her artworks in exhibitions and publications.
ECRITS DE COLERE is the first text-only compilation of her writing, and includes essays, journal entries, and correspondence with friends, foes, family members, and gallerists. The book provides deeply personal insights into Miriam Cahn's life, her family, and the art industry, introducing the reader to a pugnacious, independent spirit.
The Architecture of Empathy is the title of a marble statue by John Isaacs and at the same time the basic attitude and raw material of all his works. The British artist made a name for himself as a Young British Artist around Damien Hirst in the 1990s with his hyper-realistic wax sculptures. Conscious about not locking himself into one style, he experiments with a wide variety of materials and techniques, from ceramics, neon, bronze, marble and sculpture to photography. This richly illustrated publication is the first comprehensive overview of his work from the 90s to the present, and reveals not just his broad reaching multifaceted technical scope, but also his psycho-anthropological poetic through numerous essays and conversations with companions.
This set includes the volumes The Day May Break and The Day May Break - Chapter Two at a Special Price
Some of Nick Brandt's subjects are humans, some are animals, but they all are creatures of equal and obvious personhood. The overwhelming sense in the photographer's ongoing global series The Day May Break is that they are all figuring out how to live in a new world. Each has arrived at the shoot at Senda Verde wildlife sanctuary in Bolivia through their own cascade of tragedy. Both extreme droughts and floods have destroyed people's homes and livelihoods. Victims of habitat destruction and wildlife trafficking, the animals are rescues that can never be released to the wild. People and animals were photographed in the same frame and indeed convey a sense of connectedness through a shared fate. Fog is the unifying visual, symbolic of the natural world rapidly fading from view; and an echo of the smoke from wildfires, intensified by climate change, devastating so much of the planet. But in spite of their loss, these people and animals are survivors, pioneers entering the new phase our world has reached. In The Day May Break they share their powerful stories.
Inverted Baroque, Mirrored Landscapes
Oberschwaben (Upper Swabia), between the Black Forest, Lake Constance and the Allgau, offers a richness of Baroque architecture and picturesque rolling landscapes. Axel Hutte's images are not intended as portrayals of a cultural landscape and its history. They are photographic images, but not necessarily photographically realistic images. They are, collectively, titled Reflexio. Hutte works with the inversion of the colour spectrum, the reflection of the pictorial space. The photographer's interventions in the realistic image are a radical transformation of what the eye initially registered, they contradict experience; negate customary perception. Instead, they are an autonomous aesthetic construct and reveal a different side of reality. The two themes in these works-"Baroque" and "landscape"-thus become equivalent tools for thoroughly investigating pictorial realities.
Quiet Spaces
In the absence of people, the interiors Candida Hofer photographs in her characteristically austere style unfold a palpable presence of their own. Concentrating on the aesthetic of abstract structures and relying solely on the light available, she captures the unique atmosphere of a place. The photographs of her latest series, taken in the autumn and winter of 2021, show the architecture of the Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, its libraries and storage rooms in interior and exterior shots. Places of silence and preservation. A diary composed from a collage of notes, text messages and emails between all participants illustrates the conceptual approach and the meticulously planned process of creating the photographs. Hofer's photographs are juxtaposed with works ranging from classical modernism to the present day by artists such as Josef Albers, Gunter Fruhtrunk, Donald Judd, Imi Knoebel, Bruce Nauman, Yves Tanguy and Rosemarie Trockel.
Optical illusions that reveal a hidden reality
"Like a visitor from outer space, I try to take a look at the human habitat from the outside - curious, but also with horror." Exploring the possibilities of the photographic medium to the limits, Andreas Gefeller explores the liminal space where reality takes on the quality of a phantasmic phenomenon. From early documentary series to unusual perspectives and digital multi-image collages, this publication brings together previously unpublished photographs, key images from Gefeller's well-known series as well as his recent work. The retrospective reveals how the artist uses techniques ranging from extreme long- and overexposures to high-speed flashes to challenge our visual perception. Examining the human influence on nature, he creates images of an almost sublime abstract-painterly quality and then breaks the enchantment to reveal the hidden reality of the seemingly familiar.
An Ode to Vanishing Beauty
It is estimated that, as a result of climate change, illegal trade, and habitat loss from the encroachments of technology and industrialization, as many as one in eight species of birds is heading towards extinction. Created in close collaboration between Sean Scully and Kelly Grovier, each pairing of poem and drawing is devoted to the beauty and mystery of an individual species of bird. Scully's visual language, at once measured and impassioned, geometric and free-flowing, captures the essence of creatures that are, themselves, on the brink of becoming mere abstractions. Though his first series of iPhone drawings are consistent with his signature style, they reveal a fresh intimacy, playfulness, and exhilaration of gesture, color, and form that is in accord with the wonder of feathered flight. Created on a digital device, the drawings are, as Scully remarked, the ironic embodiment of "technology which is ruining nature turned inside out to protest its demise." Yet taken together, these duets aim to offer something uplifting in the face of an accelerating tragedy. "Hope" is, after all as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, "the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul."