Gisbert Stach’s (b. 1963) monograph Jewellery and Experiment presents a multifaceted opus from twenty-five years of gold- and silversmithing. In his oeuvre the primarily conceptual artist combines jewellery with video, photography and performance. One focus of his work deals with processes of transformation and experiment – pieces disappear through chemical dissolution, and form is determined by agencies of growth in nature. Stach works with means of alienation and irritation. Ground amber serves as pigment, which he works into jewellery pieces in the form of fish fingers, sliced bread or schnitzel. A further characteristic of his work is the performative act, for example when brooches are pelted with knives.
Gisbert Stach is represented in numerous museums and collections, including Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum, Munich (DE); Fondazione Cominelli, Brescia (IT); Museo de Arte Moderno, Tarragona (ES); Museum of Arts & Crafts, Itami (JP); Gallery of Art, Legnica (PL); Museum of Bohemian Paradise, Turnov (CZ); Amber Museum, Gdansk (PL).
Published to accompany exhibitions at Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart (DE), 9-11 November 2018, and Bayerischer Kunstgewerbeverein (BKV), Munich (DE) 28 February-24 March 2019.
Text in English and German.
The tale of the shepherd girl Radha and the Hindu god Krishna is probably the most famous love story in India. Written by Jayadeva at the end of the twelfth century, the Gitagovinda narrates the highs and lows of Radha and Krishna’s relationship. As a vivid metaphor for the human yearning for god, the work is today closely associated in India with the religiosity of Krishna. In the eighteenth century, in the former princely residence of Guler, the artist family of Nainsuhk and Manaku created the outstanding picture series of the second Guler Gitagovinda of 1775/80, which recounts the love story with an unparalleled elegance. This book retells the story using selected pieces from this series (printed in original size) and whisks the reader off into the atmospheric world of Indian miniature painting and poetry. This book accompanies an exhibition at Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 24 October 2019 – 16 February 2020.
Text in English and German.
Palazzo Vecchio portrays the architecture of the historic Florentine palace immortalised by the internationally-renowned photographer Massimo Listri. The first complete and organic photographic documentation of the building, updated in the wake of recent restoration and re-functionalization, the sequence of images runs page after page through the exterior and the interior of the palace. The alternation of rooms, courtyards and museum spaces, enriched by countless pictorial and sculptural elements, gives life, in Listri’s view, to a faithfully objective overview of the building that, since the end of the 13th century, has been the heart of Florence’s civic and political life, still today a place for meetings, debate and dialogue. The volume, edited by Sergio Risaliti, offers brief essays by experts on the subject such as Serena Pini and Carlo Francini, with a contribution by Mayor Dario Nardella.
Burst! Abstract Painting After 1945 looks at the close, but previously unexplored relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel. Through texts and close to 100 illustrations, the book describes a vital creative exchange across the Atlantic that would entirely redefine painting. Big, expansive, paint-splattered surfaces; spontaneous actions captured on canvas; new ideas of freedom. A story of post-war recovery and Transatlantic dialogue. On both sides of the ocean, society was reacting to the horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the coming of the atom bomb. The book shows how artists searched for new ways to deal with these shattering events. With works by Jean Dubuffet, Natalia Dumitresco, Helen Frankenthaler, Asger Jorn, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, Hedda Sterne and Clyfford Still, and more.
Autochromes were the first commercial colour photographs. Invented in 1904 by the Lumière brothers Auguste and Louis in Paris, colour photographs caused a great sensation at the time. They were an innovation and the first way to depict the world in true-to-life colour and thus capture it for eternity.
This impressive book was compiled by the two authors Dr. Maria Reitter-Kollmann and Dr. Alfred Weidinger. The scholars are leading experts on the history of colour photography at the Oberösterreichische Landes-Kultur GmbH in Linz. The museum holds one of the most important European collections of historical autochromes.
The exciting collection consists of more than 1,000 photographs by photographic pioneers such as the Archduchess, Margarethe of Austria-Tuscany or from the collection of Hans Frank, the founder of the first Austrian photo museum in Bad Ischl. Photographs by important photographers such as Auguste Lumière are also part of this unique collection.
In the coffee table book Autochrome, the authors present the most beautiful and important pieces from this collection in their full glory. In addition to the wonderful pictures, the book also provides a lot of background knowledge about the technique of this first commercially usable colour photography.
Text in English and German.
This book grants unexpected, beautiful and provoking insights into the diversity of the collection of treasures held in Leipzig’s GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts. Focusing on the joy of contemplating the works, its hope is to awaken the desire for a personal encounter with them. The sequence of illustrations highlights exciting connections, diversions and views between the objects. Chronological records or even the stringent arrangement of the collections and materials play no role here, allowing surprisingly novel, latent qualities that are frequently otherwise hidden, to be revealed.
In this publication the works meet face to face and present a wonderful survey of the diverse forms of applied art and design.
At first glance, we see an artist’s studio—photographs of the studio of the German-Swiss artist duo Cortis & Sonderegger—that contains all sorts of what seem to be everyday objects. Yet suddenly, large things appear small and little ones quite big, and sometimes the perspective is just not right. Jojakim Cortis and Adrian Sonderegger play a sophisticated game with and about the authenticity of photography. Boundaries between the genuine and the fake get blurred.
During the covid pandemic in 2020–21, Cortis & Sonderegger built a detailed model of their own studio near Zurich with much of its furnishings, of which they took countless photographs. These images are confusing, turn our viewing habits upside down, and invite to take a closer look. The artists’ play with model and reality becomes visible on various levels: the view from the model’s window shows the real studio space; proportions look weirdly distorted; and occasionally, Cortis & Sonderegger themselves appear as protagonists.
In today’s world, with myriads of images produced every day, Cortis & Sonderegger’s Studio series constitutes a counterpoint to latest developments in of photography and AI-based image generation.
Text in English and German.
Supported by a wealth of photographs of archaeological objects, this book delves into a fascinating world of ancestral spirits, revealed by the surprising richness and variety of these pre-Columbian pieces fashioned out of various materials. These works, on exhibition in the Museo Casa del Alabado, in Quito (Ecuador), outline the pre-Columbian view of the world centred on a flow of energy aimed at preserving life. These pieces evoke this primordial energy emerging from mother earth, the source of the good deeds performed by spirits and the ancestral guardian of the permanent renewal of the world of daily life, where spirits constantly draw on the balance of the forces ensuring their survival. Pre-Columbian art has the extraordinary capacity to express the power of reciprocal opposites which together provide a meaning to the existence of animate and inanimate beings.
Hard materials, such as stones and shells, served to embody powerful spirits, such as carts, macaws, or primordial ancestors. Ceramics were suitable for the depiction of ordinary plants and animals. The extraordinary growth of metalworking skills led to the creation of ornamental pieces designed for the elite (chest decorations, nose jewellery, earrings, and crowns) whose purpose was to reflect the power of the sun.
Each picture in the book is accompanied by notes explaining the function the article would have served, while acknowledging that these pieces have lost none of their expressiveness in the modern world.
Text in English and Spanish.
The consummate Susan Grant Lewin Collection – recently donated to Cooper Hewitt – captures the diversity and achievements of contemporary art jewellery with nearly 150 significant works from the last 15 years by designers from the United States, Europe, Asia and Australia. The brooches, necklaces and rings reveal how these contemporary jewellers have revolutionised the medium in transforming jewellery conventions as expressions of our time. Descriptions of specific works demonstrate that while the mastery of materials and techniques is critical to the creative process, it is not an end in itself, but only the means to accomplish an aesthetic vision. Process statements from each designer and a full gallery of the jewellery accompany the narrative sequence of extraordinary, stirring, unique pieces.
Published to accompany the Exhibition at Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum, New York (US), 17 November 2017-28 May 2018.
The essays in this lavishly illustrated volume offer a multi-faceted portrait of American financier J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) as a collector of art. A riveting exploration of Morgan’s acquisitions from antiquities to medieval manuscripts to Old Master paintings and European decorative arts, Morgan—The Collector introduces the reader to how and why he amassed his vast collection. The lively essays also serve as a tribute to Linda Roth, curator at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, who dedicated much of her forty-year career to researching Morgan and the over 1,500 works from his collection now in the museum. This much-needed publication focuses on Morgan as a collector and is directed at both a scholarly and more general audience that is interested in the history of collecting, America in the Gilded Age, Pierpont Morgan, and European art.
Lotte Reimers’ joining forces with Jakob Wilhelm Hinder and the extensive ceramics exhibition with which he was touring West German cities in 1951 marks the onset of her passion for this craft. Committed to making the public aware of ceramics as art, Hinder and Reimers ended their tour at Deidesheim in 1961. Lotte Reimers’ creative approach to managing the Deidesheim ceramics museum and gallery has received critical and popular acclaim both at home and abroad. Acquired by the state in 1993, the Deidesheim museum collection is now known as the Hinder/Reimers Collection of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate. Lotte Reimers embarked on a career of her own as an art ceramist in 1965. While running the museum and gallery, she has been adding to her impressive uvre for nearly forty years.
Nicole Callebaut (1935) is an internationally renowned Belgian visual artist who has tirelessly explored for 50 years the relationship between line and surface, between light and colour in a desire for both pictorial and intellectual research. After studying decorative arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, she became a journalist for Belgian radio and television, co‐wrote the book on Rites and Mysteries in the Near East published by Robert Laffont, co‐directed films for ethnographic character before settling for several years in New York where she reconnected with painting, then founded an art school in Loulé in Portugal and continued tirelessly to make her paper in the tank, to paint and to exhibit on both sides of the Atlantic, testifying to an apparently inexhaustible vitality. Her works are among others in the collections of the Center Pompidou (Paris), the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington DC), the Museum of Sharjah (USA), the French Community of Belgium, the Museum of Mons, the Museum of Ixelles (Brussels), the Centro Cultural Loulè and the Centro Cultural Faro (Portugal).
Text in English and French.
This catalogue assembles sumptuous photographs of the world’s leading collection of Cham sculpture, along with the most recent insights of Vietnamese and international scholars. The Champa culture thrived in magnificent temples, sculpture, dance and music along the central and southern coast of today’s Vietnam from the 5th to the 18th century. A focused exploration here uncovers this brilliant yet almost lost culture to newcomers and experts alike. The Danang Museum has been recently expanded and refurbished to house what is generally considered the world’s greatest collection of Cham Art.
Distillations: Nancy Goldring Drawings and Foto-Projections 1971–2021 surveys 50 years of visual and conceptual explorations by artist and writer Nancy Goldring. Material is arranged according to predominating themes throughout her career: Thresholds, Sites, Sets, Perspectives, Dreams and Visions, and Chiaroscuro. The book reveals her unique process, how she devised her technique of melding graphic and photographic material through projection, and tracks its evolution from the sandwiching of black-and-white graphic and photographic images through to the creation of her “foto-projections” and large installation work. Included are interviews with the artist and an introduction by Jarrett Earnest with essays by writers and curators Paolo Barbaro, David Levi Strauss, Michael Taussig, and Ellen Handy.
El-Gazzar, born in 1925 in Alexandria, is a leading figure in modern Egyptian art of the 20th century. He enrolled in the Faculty of Fine Arts in Cairo in 1944 and then joined the Contemporary Art Group founded by Hussein Youssef Amin, his master. With an innovative and unique expressionist style, it portrays the people of Cairo in a folkloric way. Later, he tried his hand at abstraction by representing industrial machines and their effects on humans.
Recognised during his lifetime, the production of El-Gazzar was exhibited in France from 1949, at the Venice Biennale in 1952 and at the São Paulo Museum in 1953. Today, his works are in private collections in Cairo, Alexandria, Rome, Paris and Brussels, but also in major institutions around the world, such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York or the Mathaf: Arab Museum of Modern Art.
This catalogue raisonné, published in English, comprises two volumes. The first is dedicated to the artist’s paintings and the second to graphic works, archives and photographs. It brings an understanding of the enigmatic work of the artist, but also of modern Egyptian art in general.
Switzerland has been globally connected and entangled with colonies established by the seafaring European nations in Africa, the Americas, and Asia since the 16th century. Colonial — Switzerland’s Global Entanglements offers a timely overview of this highly topical matter, placing a wide range of aspects in historical context and addressing as well questions of colonial continuities.
Contributions by distinguished scholars and experts from various disciplines investigate questions such as the involvement of Swiss companies in the trade with enslaved people, Swiss mercenaries in the service of colonial powers, the colonial legacy of the country’s missionary societies, and the research and collection of artefacts by Swiss scientists in former colonies. Light is shed also on the involvement of anthropological institutes at the universities of Zurich and Geneva in scientific racism.
Conceived as an illustrated reader, this volume is both an invitation and a stimulus to explore and to engage critically with Switzerland’s history of global interdependence.
This book accompanies a major exhibition in the Ashmolean Museum on the early work of internationally acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer. It focuses on his paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books created between 1969 and 1982, in the private collections of the Hall Art Foundation. Anselm Kiefer: Early Works is the first institutional show and publication in the UK dedicated to Kiefer’s early practice. The book introduces themes, subjects and styles that have become signature to Kiefer’s work, while providing a more intimate and complementary context for his large-scale installations that he is best known for today. The early works are accompanied by three recent paintings from the artist’s own collections and White Cube, chosen by the artist himself.
Art historians, artists, curators and experts of Kiefer’s art from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Britain and the US have contributed 46 original texts on individual works, organised in a chronological structure. An illustrated chronology at the end of the book compiled by Stephanie Biron from the Hall Art Foundation provides an overview of the artist’s early practice and life, to contextualise the works.
The book begins with Kiefer’s iconic Occupations and Heroische Sinnbilder series, created in 1969 and 1970, which Kiefer views as his first serious works. Kiefer was among the first generation of German post-war artists to directly confront the country’s troubled past and identity. Full of complex references to German socio-political history but also to culture, literature and his personal life, Kiefer’s early works carry a unique iconography, linking classic ideas of great art with a distinctive understanding of concrete artistic materiality. The landscapes in his watercolours are historically charged; hand-written words on paintings are closely linked with poetry well known to most German viewers; motifs and symbols point at Nazi ideologies and a collective feeling of guilt.
Inwelt by Maximilian Prüfer (b. 1986) is the continuation of the 2016 publication Brut and encompasses the various series of works by the artist in the intervening period. Prüfer’s work employs a number of procedures of his own invention that reveal the traces left by insects and other natural phenomena. He analyses animal behaviour in order to then compare it to human behaviour. For instance, in his series Forming Thoughts, which he began in 2020, the artist explores the pathways and tracks made by ants. In doing so, he attempts to establish a direct link to neurological structures and to draw conclusions regarding the behaviour of creatures that live as collectives, as well as humankind’s understanding of nature.
In 2013, five years after the world has been convulsed by a global banking and financial crisis, Isaac Julien (b. 1960) premiered his film PLAYTIME to address an important question: Can capital be rendered visible? By following the stories of six protagonists — interconnecting figures in the world of art and finance — Isaac Julien subsequently found narrative images for the process of capital interlocking at a global level, intertwining a macroscopic and a microscopic perspective dialectically, as it were.
The Palais Populaire and the Wemhöner Collection have joined forces to shed new light on PLAYTIME from today’s perspective and to testify to the work’s topicality, as capital as a medium plays into almost all political, social, and societal issues and influences the lives of nearly every human being on this planet.
Texts by Zeigam Azizov, Philipp Bollmann, Anna Herrhausen, Isaac Julien. Design by Pit Stenckhoff, Anna Bühler, Flo Paizs, Neue Gestaltung, Berlin.
Text in English and German.
In 2008 and 2013 the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts in Leipzig presented two representative inventory publications under the title Vessel / Sculpture. German and International Ceramics since 1946, which attracted great interest from across the globe and were regarded as standard reference works. This third volume continues the series, against a backdrop of a renewed and extensive increase of modern studio ceramics in the museum’s collection. As in the previous publications, the objects in the book enter into aesthetic dialogues, thus facilitating interesting perspectives in the development of artistic ceramics up to the present day. In doing so it becomes clear how ceramic objects are developing from a servient-functional gesture into ever consistent autonomous artworks yet without necessarily losing the vessel theme. Its multitude of current artists’ biographies and illustrations of makers’ marks make this a highly recommendable reference work.
Contents: Contributions from selected artists: Felicity Aylieff, Thomas Bohle, Werner Bünck, Carmen Dionyse, Allesandro Gallo, Louise Hindsgavl, Beate Kuhn, Sonngard Marcks, Ken Mihara, Sarah Pschorn, Elke Sada, Carolein Smit, Julian Stair, Robert Sturm and Henk Wolvers.
Published to accompany an exhibition at GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts Leipzig (DE), 10 November 2018 – 13 October 2019.
Text in English and German
The Ashmolean is fortunate in having the finest collection of Indian art in Britain outside London, one which includes many works of great beauty and expressive power. For this we are indebted above all to the generosity, knowledge and taste of our benefactors and donors from the 17th century to the present. This book offers a short account of how the collection developed and a selection of some of its more outstanding or interesting works of art. While it is written mainly for the general reader and museum visitor, it includes many fine objects or pictures, some of them unpublished, that should interest specialist scholars and students.
Since 1987, the Ashmolean has made many significant new acquisitions of Indian art and these are highlighted in this collection. As the book’s title implies, it also ventures beyond the bounds of the Indian subcontinent by including works from Afghanistan and Central Asian Silk Road sites as well as many from Nepal, Tibet and Southeast Asia. From the early centuries AD, Indian trading links with these diverse regions of Asia led to a widespread cultural diffusion and regional adoptions of Buddhism and Hinduism along with their related arts. Local reinterpretations of such Indic subjects, themes and styles then grew into flourishing and enduring artistic traditions which are also part of the story of this book.
The selection of works ends around 1900. By the 16th century and the early modern period in India, growing European interventions and Western artistic influences under Mughal rule saw a significant shift in sensibility and the practice of more secular and naturalistic forms of court art such as portraiture. By the late 19th century, fundamental cultural changes under British rule and the advent of new technologies brought about a gradual decline in many of India’s traditional arts.
Tony Sarg (1880–1942), an American artist born in Guatemala to a diplomatic family, first achieved professional success as an illustrator in London and New York. But in the 1920s, he gained even greater renown for his touring puppet shows based on classic tales like Alice in Wonderland and Robinson Crusoe. Fusing the time-honoured craft of traditional marionette shows with a playful modern sensibility, Sarg’s productions were foundational to American puppetry: Jim Henson can be considered a direct artistic descendant. Yet this was only one facet of Sarg’s varied accomplishments: he was also a pioneer in animated films and children’s books, and, as a longtime designer for Macy’s, he invented the gigantic balloons used in the firm’s Thanksgiving Day Parade. (He also employed one of his parade balloons in the famous Nantucket Sea Serpent hoax of 1937.)
This abundantly illustrated volume, published to coincide with a major exhibition organised by the Norman Rockwell Museum, is the first to survey Tony Sarg’s protean career. It brings together imagery and artifacts from numerous public and private collections, and includes special sections on Sarg’s long association with the island of Nantucket and his influence on American puppetry. Tony Sarg: Genius at Play will be essential reading for anyone with an interest in the history of popular culture.