Kai Althoff stages ceramic works by modernist potter Bernard Leach in poetical mise-en-scènes at the Whitechapel Gallery 
German artist Kai Althoff (born 1966) is renowned as a figurative painter and creator of all-encompassing poetic environments that incorporate textiles, photographs, drawings and artifacts. Althoff draws from a wide range of literary, cultural and artistic influences in his work, and for his unique display at Whitechapel Gallery in London he pays tribute to British potter Bernard Leach (1887–1979), selecting around 20 of Leach’s ceramic vessels and tiles from the 1920s onward to be displayed in specially designed vitrines.\nAs a counterpoint to Leach’s own work, Althoff presents his own new paintings and sculptural installations, as well as recent pieces that bring together fabrics, found material and paintings inspired by Japonisme.

Kai Althoff Goes with Bernard Leach

Arts & Photography

Halbreich, Kathy

Eichler, Dominic

Tyas, Matthew

Podlatchikov, Iouri

Collections, Catalogs & Exhibitions

Whitechapel Gallery

Published to accompany the 2008 Deutsche Guggenheim survey curated by American artist Collier Schorr, Freeway Balconies unfolds more as an artist's book than a straightforward exhibition catalogue. Borrowing from Allen Ginsberg, the title refers to the meeting place of spectacle and voyeurism in American culture--expressed here through Schorr's idiosyncratic mix of 19 emerging and established artists, including Sharon Hayes, Bruce Nauman, Francesca Woodman, Rashawn Griffin and Richard Prince, among others. Her choices, arranged around selections of her own work, reveal her probing interest in slippages of identity and identification, cultural memory and forgetting and the ways in which artistic action and production engage these issues.

Freeway Balconies

SPECTOR, Nancy

Lewis, Sarah

Guggenheim Museum Publications

The works of inventive young Swiss artist Shahryar Nashat pose questions about part of the museum experience that's rarely considered -- the display itself. Whether he's using photography to focus on the plinth supporting an Renaissance sculpture (and chopping off the sculpture itself at ankle or knee), or incongruously pairing a stuntman-gymnast with Baroque frescoes in the Louvre, Nashat has plenty to say about painterly virtuosity, artistic patronage and the artificiality of art exhibitions. ''The pedestal base plates ... in which elegant and erotic rods of brass have been embedded themselves represent the object of desire,'' writes curator Kathleen Rahn. This artist's book based on Nashat's first German solo exhibition includes video installations, sculpture, etchings and photographs.

Shahryar Nashat: Downscaled and Overthrown

Individual Artists

Sternber Pr

From the start, Wolfgang Tillmans' abstract photographs played a decisive role in his gentle subversion of photographic hierarchies and his seductive emphasis on the materiality of photographic objects in his presentation of them. In the past decade he has pursued this tack, making wholly non-representational photographs that explore processes of exposure. From the delicate veils of color in the Blushes and Freischwimmer series, and the sculptural paper drops made of folded or rolled-up photographic paper, to the colorfully compelling works of the Lighter series, the printed object itself, divorced from its reproductive function, is always the point. "For me, the abstract picture is already objective because it's a concrete object and represents itself," Tillmans says; "the paper on which the picture is printed is for me an object, there is no separating the picture from that which carries it. That's why I like to show photographs sometimes framed and sometimes not, just taped to the wall." Designed by the photographer, and with 275 color reproductions of these works, Abstract Pictures impressively demonstrates how fruitfully Tillmans has mined this terrain. Wolfgang Tillmans (born 1968) began his career in photography documenting Hamburg's rave scene in the late 1980s. His earliest images were printed on digital copiers, and in the mid-1990s, living in London and then New York, Tillmans began to foreground the lo-fi properties of his printed images by exhibiting them pinned or taped to gallery walls. In 2005, at an exhibition at Maureen Paley gallery titled Truth Study Center, he further extended this approach by exhibiting photographs alongside newspaper cuttings, pamphlets and other kinds of printed matter, on custom-made wooden vitrines. This installation also brought to the fore more political themes in Tillmans' photography. In 2011 he traveled to Haiti to document reconstruction efforts following the previous year's earthquakes.

Wolfgang Tillmans: Abstract Pictures

Hatje Cantz

Ugo Rondinone (*1964) adds a poetic dimension to everyday objects and phenomena. In typically Minimalistic arrangements, he puts a tree, a clock, the sun, or a rainbow in new contexts by means of repetition, isolation, or reduction, creating atmospheric ambiences. The SCHIRN is dedicating a large survey exhibition to Rondinone that will showcase key paintings, sculptures, and video works by the renowned Swiss artist. Devised specifically for the SCHIRN, his new installation extends along the entire length of the gallery and into the Rotunda. The exhibition and the book Life Time combine fundamental themes that have shaped the work of the conceptual and installation artist for the past thirty years: time and transience, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Rondinone has repeatedly referred to the iconography of Romanticism in his works and used quotes from literature and pop culture. The starting point of his multimedia oeuvre is the transformation of the outside world into a subjective, emotional inner world. He develops experiential spaces in which the viewer actually becomes part of the installations and their immersive structures.

Ugo Rondinone: Life Time: Cat. Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

Ulrich, Matthias

Snoeck Publishing Company

The rising Glasgow artist Claire Barclay creates beautifully composed sculptural installations that balance chaos and control in equal but precarious measure. This volume documents her recent exhibition at the Kunstverein Braunschweig, featuring works in wood, leather, brass, mirror and fabric.

Claire Barclay: Fault on the Right Side (Art)

History & Criticism

Walther König, Köln

Sam Falls - After Life

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Books by Eichler, Dominic