Georg Baselitz, born Hans Georg Kern in Deutschebaselitz, Saxony, in 1939, continuously contravenes set categories and regularities in his work. In sculpture, in which Baselitz first began to work in 1979, he fights against harmony and symmetry just as he does in his paintings. Baselitz works the wood with a chain saw, hachet, and chisel. The raw feats of strength create abrupt lines, notches, and incisions in the sculpture. Sculpture, the artist has said, is more primitive, more brutal, and more unconditional than painting, and much less encoded. This volume is a catalogue raisonne documenting all fiftyeight scupltures created over the past thirty years, from his first sculpture "Model for a Sculpture"(19791980) to his most recent, "Folk Thing Zero"(2009).

Georg Baselitz: Sculptures (German and English Edition)

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

DISTANZ

Maria Lassnig is one of the most radical female artists of our time: her selfportraits depict her with sagging breasts, wearing a pot on her head or even as a dumpling. Maria Lassnig calls her works bodyconsciousness paintings, and what they show is rarely flattering. Often she is naked or, as in the painting Du oder ich ( You or I ), stands before us with all the defenselessness of old age; her breasts sagging, her stomach wrinkled. At the same time, she is holding two pistols. One is aimed at the viewer, the other at her head. This selfportrait tells of an old dilemma; art is a weapon that can hit its target, but the artist also risks her own life when doing so. Maria Lassnig, who was born in 1919, has one great theme: femininity. For example, there is a strong woman stomping through a city like Godzilla, with the skyscrapers reaching only up to her hip. Or the woman sleeping with a tiger, and it is not clear who is subduing whom. The artist grew up under modest circumstances in Carinthia, Austria. Her mother did not want to raise her illegitimate child initially, so Maria grew up in her grandmother's home. She completed her training as a primary school teacher, and then one day she rode her bicycle to Vienna and applied to the Academy of the Fine Arts. In 1941 she was accepted, but she had to leave after two years, because her approach to color was considered degenerate. Pastel, sometimes slightly loud colors would later become her trademark: the cold bright green, garish yellow, the red she used when she painted her body and felt her skin burning. After the war, Maria Lassnig went to Paris, then in 1968 to New York; later she moved on to Berlin where she has lived for a long time. Maria Lassnig's great breakthrough came much later, in 1997, when her drawings were the high point of Documenta X in Kassel, Germany. The book shows works from Maria Lassnig's more recent period, since 1998, and previously unpublished paintings from 2009.

Maria Lassnig (German and English Edition)

The sexually charged works of Louise Bourgeois and Hans Bellmer reveal remarkable parallels, even though the artists never actually met. Louise Bourgeois (19112010) skeptically examined the traditional image of women, Hans Bellmer (19021975) created in the puppet an idea woman in which all his desires and fantasies are reflected. This publication establishes for the first time a dialogue between two artists, which are marked by the views of a male and female artist, respectively, as well as by personal obsessions and desires.

Hans Bellmer/ Louise Bourgeois (German and English Edition)

JELINEK, ELFRIEDE

History & Criticism

The Art of Tomorrow presents an international selection of seventyseven young artists, with four pages dedicated to each, who show great potential for the future. They were selected by three insiders from the art world: Laura Hoptman is a curator in the department of Painting and Sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York; Yilmaz Dziewior is the director of the Kunsthaus Bregenz and a member of the acquisitions committee of the collection of contemporary art of the Federal Republic of Germany; Uta Grosenick has edited numerous anthologies on contemporary art. The book is intended for an audience that wants to know today what will be happening in tomorrow’s art scene. It is thus an indispensable compendium for collectors and curators, for art students and others interested in art. Designers, graphic designers, fashion designers, and advertising agencies all derive ideas and inspiration from the visual arts. With its selection of artists, the book posits clear worldwide trends; its distinguished and futuristic design make the book a musthave.

The Art of Tomorrow (German and English Edition)

Yilmaz Dziewior

Tobias Rehberger (b. Essslingen, 1966; lives and works in Frankfurt am Main) has crucially advanced the role of art in our communication society. HIs strategies expand the traditional concepts of the artist, the production of art, the exhibition, and the public to include the dimension of interactive uses. As a rule, lamps, sofas, or vases are the material that Rehberger employs to raise questions about when objects become art. The present book illustrates that Rehburger's approach is not simply to use the publications that accompany his exhibitions functionally, as a medium for information, but rather to design them as elemental, autonomous components of the exhibition.

Tobias Rehberger (German and English Edition)

“My art is not my work; you are the creator of your image in your head. I do not exist at all.” Those are the words of Michael Schirner, Germany’s “pope of advertising.” In his oeuvre, Schirner treats the visual worlds of mass culture and high culture as well as the perception of images communicated via media. He does not create new images. His images are images about images. Magazines, newspapers, films, television, the internet, advertising, and art are his image archives. Schirner works and reworks that which is stored in our collective memory. The goal of his work is to make the invisible visible. He reduces the elements of the image to a minimum, leaving everything out that can be left out. The result: the audience imagines the reduced. What is not shown is created in the viewers’ heads. Schirner has faith in the imagination and thinking of the viewers, thus making them the real authors of the work. His art is communication. This book shows his latest series, BYE BYE: thirty-two coarse halftone reproductions of images that appear vexingly familiar to us, even though we have never seen them in this form. We are torn between the familiar and unfamiliar, the visible and the invisible, the real and the unreal, memory and forgetting, illusion and reality, original and fake. BYE BYE includes a foreword by Dirk Luckow and texts by Oliver Koerner von Gustorf, Hans Ulrich Reck, Ingo Taubhorn, and Brigitte Werneburg as well as an interview with Markus Peichl and Michael Schirner.

Michael Schirner: Bye bye (German Edition)

Schirner, Michael

A collection of remarkable paintings created mostly without paint. Since the mid1990s, Sergej Jensen (b. in Copenhagen in 1971) has been offering one of the most remarkable responses to the question of what painting can still be today. Painting in the classical sense plays only a minor role: in lieu of canvas, Jensen uses jute, coarse cotton, and jeans. He incorporates spots on fabrics, which turn the expressive gesture of his paintings into a sign of wear from real life. Jensen sews fabrics together, leaving the seams visible to evoke the fleeting impression of a drawing and he colors others with gouache, acrylics, and markers, but Jensen more often applies materials foreign to painting, such as patches, paper money, spices, beads, and glitter. Hanging his fabrics from windows, Jensen lets the sun and rain contribute a patina and treats them with chlorine and paints mixed with bleach to reduce their brilliance.

Sergej Jensen (German and English Edition)

Sergej Jensen

Peter Eleey

Heidi Zuckerman Jacobson

Helmut Draxler

Jacob Fabricius

Rainald Goetz

Dirk von Lowtzow

Melanie Ohnemus

Susanne Pfeffer

The artist Björn Dahlem (b. Munich, 1974; lives and works in Berlin) roots his sculptural creations not in stability but in what is fragile―for fragility, Dahlem believes, is the defining condition of human knowledge. Dahlem transposes complex issues, primarily of astrophysics and philosophy, into the field of art. His sculptures and installations― most of them are made of mundane materials from the home improvement store― begin where certain knowledge reaches its limits. The publication presents a selection from the oeuvre with a focus on largescale sculptures and space installations from the past five years.

Björn Dahlem (German and English Edition)

Thanks to almost complete absence of figurativee elements, Eberhard Havekost's recent works mark a visible caesura. He questions the authenticity of pictures, broaching the issue within the medium of the painting. This is where means that were developed earlier get connected: reflective or matte areas of projection, frontal views and changes in perspective, or the examinations of culturally standarized design. Eberhard Havekost was born in Dresden in 1967. Today he is one of the most important artists of his generation. In October 2010, he began his tenure as professor at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.

Eberhard Havekost (English and German Edition)

Loock, Ulrich

Twenty international artists investigate the role of destruction in contemporary art―from a creative act to a memento mori of the environment, from prosperity trash to a poetic transformation.

Under Destruction (German and English Edition)

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