Jeff Koons' spectacular October 2008 exhibition at Berlin's Neue Nationalgalerie presented the infamous series of sculptures and paintings known collectively as Celebration, a project whose fabrication has involved so much labor (both manual and computer-aided) that Koons seemed to almost vanish from the art world radar in the 1990s, when he first undertook the series. At present, Celebration's best-known work may be the 10-foot-tall, stainless-steel "Balloon Dog," typical of the outsize scale and remarkably clean sheen of Koons' sculptures, in which the sensory joys of childhood object relations are revisited and espoused. Such works wear their playroom origins on their sleeves, but their gargantuan proportions, with their attendant sense of menace, establish them firmly in the adult world as infant objects retrieved and rebuilt with adult strength. "The work tries to gain support from the confidence of the gesture," Koons says, "to be kind of in the moment, and to have confidence within the self." Inasmuch as such observations could be true of much art, Koons is unusually open about what drives his work, all the while preserving its self-sufficiency as art. This monograph documents these mammoth installations in the Neue Nationalgalerie's Upper Hall, an exhibition that without doubt constitutes a milestone in the artist's career.

Jeff Koons: Celebration

Hüsch, Anette

Schuster, Peter-Klaus

Reference

Hatje Cantz

Parallel to the film career for which he is justly admired, David Lynch (born 1946) has always worked as an artist, having trained in painting at the Corcoran School of Art and the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in the mid-1960s. Lynch's photographs, paintings, prints, drawings, and more recently, musical compositions, are an indispensable part of his oeuvre and frequently a source of inspiration for his films. Fans of such classics as Blue Velvet, Wild at Heart, Twin Peaks and Mulholland Drive will readily conjure the director's keen eye for lush but menacing neo-Surrealist tableaux, for instance, which are directly nourished by his artworks. Other hallmarks of the Lynchian style, such as cryptic messages and inscriptions, foreboding atmospherics and a famously left-field sense of humor likewise appear in the paintings, drawings and photographs collected in David Lynch: Dark Splendor--a landmark publication that reveals the breadth and accomplishment of his work in this realm. It contains such marvels as his matchbook drawings--pen-and-ink images of shrouded dreamscapes and interiors, inscribed on the inside of matchbooks--his wonderfully foreboding lithographs, in which scrawled captions jostle among murky figures, his photographs of industrial wastelands and his sinister paintings that incorporate materials and objects to further advance their gothic appeal. Dark Splendor presents these works in excellent reproductions, and will seduce fans of contemporary film and art alike.

David Lynch: Dark Splendor

Spies, Werner

Dath, Dietmar

Wim Wenders: Pictures from the Surface of the Earth

Arts & Photography

WENDERS, Wim

Individual Artists

Schirmer/Mosel Verlag Gmbh

In his youth, J rg Immendorff was an assistant at Joseph Beuys's legendary performance How to Explain Pictures to a Dead Hare. As he describes here in an interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist, when Beuys complied with his dealer's request to rearrange the stage for commercial reasons ('I need the stuff we can sell at the front.'), Immendorff stuck a red dot on Beuys's vest, the international sign that a work has sold, and in this case the scarlet letter of the sellout. Immendorff remains as politically and personally engaged today. Male Lago, a gigantic scrapbook and portfolio almost three-and-a-half inches thick and weighing in at 880 pages, tracks his work from its earliest and most political days through to his recent paintings and quietly wry brass monkeys.

Jorg Immendorff: Male Lago (English and German Edition)

Kort, Pamela

STORR, Robert

Walther König, Köln

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Schuster, Peter-Klaus. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Schuster, Peter-Klaus