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Hatje Cantz Verlag
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Which institutions are on the cutting edge? Which gallery scene is the most vital? Which site-specific artworks should not be missed? Which biennials are scheduled for the coming years? Contemporary Europe is a concise, up-to-date and insightful presentation of European museums, art institutions, galleries, art fairs, biennials and public artworks. |
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In her digitally manipulated photographs and installations, German artist Claudia Rogge (born 1968) deconstructs social roles by dramatizing them. Taking such cliches as the innocent child, the grim executioner and the masked temptress, Rogge replicates their images ad nauseam until all meaning is drained from them. |
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«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.» |
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«During his lifetime, painter Sebastiano del Piombo (ca. 1485-1547) was considered, along with Giorgione, the great hope of the Venetian School. Sebastiano later became Raphael's biggest competitor in Rome--he was, in fact, the only Renaissance artist capable of painting in the style of both the Venetian and the Central Italian Schools, taking cues from Giorgione, Da Vinci and Michelangelo to create a uniquely discerning and colorful style. Sebastiano was an innovator as well--he was the first to discover a technique that made it possible to paint with oil on stone, which Michelangelo deemed only for «women and lazybones like Sebastiano.» Michelangelo's poor opinion of the painter's abilities has perhaps shrouded Sebastiano's reputation for centuries. In his Lives of the Artists (1550), Giorgio Vasari reiterated Michelangelo's chastisement. A rediscovery of this Venetian portraitist is long overdue.» |
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n David Goldblatt received the world-renowned Hasselblad Award in 2006, he had been making photographs of the South African landscape and culture for more than 50 years. Born in 1930 in a gold-mining town near Johannesburg, his parents were Jewish refugees from Lithuania, and they raised him with an emphasis on tolerance and antiracism. In 1975, at the height of apartheid, Goldblatt explored white nationalist culture in Some Afrikaners Photographed, and in the 80s he observed workers on the Kwandebele-Pretoria bus, many of whom traveled eight hours every day to work and back. His late-90s solo show at New York's Museum of Modern Art focused on architectural work, and showed off Goldblatt's uncanny ability to discover a society through its buildings and landscapes. His photographs of architectural structures revealed the ways that ideology had defined his home country's landscape. |
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«Genius of the large-format camera, the long exposure and the silverprint, New York-based photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto has made pictures that seem to contain whole aeons of time within themselves, and suggest an infinite palette of tonal wealth in blacks, grays and whites. Many of these images have now become a part of art culture's popular image bank (as U2's use of Sugimoto's «Boden Sea» for the cover of their 2009 album, No Line on the Horizon, demonstrated), while simultaneously evoking photography's earliest days: «I probably call myself a postmodern-experienced pre-postmodern modernist» he once joked to an interviewer. This absolutely exquisite retrospective is an expanded edition of Hatje Cantz's 2005 volume. It is the first to feature works from all of Sugimoto's series to date: his celebrated portraits of wax figures, his incredible seascapes that seem to suggest a person's first conscious view of the ocean, the extremely long exposures of theaters which elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen and transform it into a magical image of an altar and the fascinating dioramas of scientific display cases, which invite us to travel far into the past. Additions to the original edition are two new groups of works, «Lightning Fields» (2006) and «Photogenic Drawings» (2007). Hiroshi Sugimoto was born and raised in Tokyo, Japan, where he studied politics and sociology at St. Paul's University, later retraining as an artist at the Art Center College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, CA. He currently lives in New York City.» |
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Trained sociologist and photographer Marrigje de Maar (born 1944) seeks out those magical households in which families have come together for generations — where life has worn itself into a house. Over the course of five trips to China, she photographed housing in Chinese communes that had been scheduled for demolition, finding within them a surprising diversity of types and uses of classical living spaces. |
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The first African-American artist to attain art superstardom, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988) created a huge oeuvre of drawings and paintings (Julian Schnabel recalls him once accidentally leaving a portfolio of about 2,000 drawings on a subway car) in the space of just eight years. Through his street roots in graffiti, Basquiat helped to establish new possibilities for figurative and expressioni... |
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Paul Klee (1879 1940) produced a unique, extraordinarily popular group of works; higher beings not only stand for spirituality, but also for skepticism and doubt toward religion and questions of faith. This is the reason for their popularity: Klee s angels are trapped in human form; they have weaknesses and blemishes, are forgetful and ugly, worried or playful occasionally even satanic. To the artist, good and evil do not negate but creatively complement one another. About eighty depictions of angels, most of them created during the final years of Klee s life, reflect both the fear of death and the physical fragility of the incurably ill as well as the artist s sage wit, sense of humor, cheerfulness, and quiet manner. Besides the biographical references and iconographic phrases, the publication sheds light on individual works, such as Angelus Novus, which inspired Walter Benjamin to develop his legendary concept of the Angel of History. |
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The oeuvre of El Greco (1541-1614) was first introduced to a broad German audience in 1910, through Julius Meier-Graefe's The Spanish Journey. Numerous artists subsequently caught Greco fever when they first saw larger groups of his works in the exhibitions that followed in Munich in 1911 and Dusseldorf in 1912. In his disregard for the Renaissance rulebook of painting, his love of dramatic mood and emphasis on emotive color and form, El Greco provided acrucial precedent for painters such as Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, Max Oppenheimer, Ludwig Meidner and especially members of the Blaue Reiter (August Macke, Franz Marc, Albert Bloch and others). El Greco and Modernism presents more than 40 paintings by El Greco, gathered from the most famous museums around the world, and sets them alongside the work of the modernists he influenced. Describing his critical role in such currents as Symbolism, Cubism, Expressionism and abstract art, this catalogue offers a richly illustrated account of how an artist who, in his time, had no imitators and virtually no pupils, would become a flexible lens for artistic self-discovery and one of the fathers of modernism in the early years of the twentieth century. |
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Trained as a horticulturalist, Swiss photographer Yann Mingard (born 1973) offers a wonderfully intimate view of nature with his close-up views of undisturbed forest underbrush. Mingard takes all his photographs at dusk with a long exposure, revealing fragments of withered grass and dark earth. |
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Czech photographer Frantisek Drtikol (1883-1961) reinvented the genre of nude photography for the early twentieth century. Drtikol opened his Prague studio in 1907, and his nudes from this early period convey the dreamy eroticism of Art Nouveau and the foreboding accents of Prague Symbolism that he was to return to throughout his somewhat brief career (Drtikol abandoned photography for painting in 1935, and it was not until curator Anna Farova's now legendary 1972 Prague exhibition that this work was rediscovered by a broader public). But Drtikol quickly absorbed into his photography the myriad new idioms of the interbellum years, and freighted his nudes with the dramatic lighting of silent film and the more austere geometric effects and dynamic poses of Futurism, Cubism and Bauhaus. Surveying his daring and expressive nudes of the 1920s and 1930s, this important publication charts Drtikol's adventurous treatments of the nude as they evolved in their quirky conversation with modernist innovations — from the early nymphs and femme fatales to more abstracted studies that dramatize light and kinetic qualities. This smartly conceived volume confirms Drtikol's place as one of the greatest photographers of the early twentieth century. |
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«Alongside Monet, Bazille and Sisley, Pierre-Auguste Renoir laid the foundations of Impressionism in 1860s Paris. But acclaim for his painting was slow in coming, primarily because of the tribulations of the Franco-Prussian War and the Paris Commune, which put a hiatus on so much artistic activity during the 1860s-70s. As a result, the first two decades of Renoir's career are sometimes ignored, an oversight this superb volume decisively remedies. The artist's most important model during these years was his mistress, Lise Trehot, with whom he was involved from 1865 to 1872. His depictions of Trehot, in classic paintings such as «Woman in a Garden» and «En ete» (both 1868), underscore the importance of Manet for the Impressionists in general, but also show Renoir infusing the older artist's somber palette with the warm, burnished glow for which he is beloved today, and exploring the looser handling of the brush so closely associated with the Impressionist movement. This volume also looks at Renoir's «plein air» landscape paintings and other portraits, such as those of his fellow Impressionists Frederic Bazille and Claude Monet, altogether reproducing 250 works in full color. Revelatory and comprehensive, «Between Bohemia and Bourgeoisie» is the first extensive examination of the painter's early oeuvre and the importance of his close friendships with Bazille, Manet, Monet and Sisley.» |
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The Guidebook is entirely devoted to the artists participating in Documenta 13. Each one is introduced in an illustrated essay written by one of the Documenta's agents, in close collaboration with the artists-who also contribute illustrations, which are as diverse as the projects themselves. These essays are individual visual statements, ranging from drawings to notes. Narrative introductions to the various venues combine factual details with Carolyn Christov-Barkargiev's key ideas and concepts, which are connected to each of the venues. Containing a map of the exhibition and brief descriptions of all of the sites and projects, this short guide is an indispensable tool both for those attending Documenta 13 and anyone unable to visit the show in person. |
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One of India's most influential contemporary artists, Nalini Malani (born 1946) creates paintings, wall drawings, theatrical works, video and shadow plays. Inherited iconographies and cherished cultural stereotypes are challenged from a contemporary urban, internationalist point of view. This catalogue accompanies her show at Documenta 13. |
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In the early 1960s, what was then the Kunstmuseum Dusseldorf received a large gift of Japanese woodcuts (Ukiyo-e), a gift to which the donor would generously add until 1988. This catalogue presents 220 pieces from this collection, by the enormously prolific illustrators Kunisada (1786-1865) and Kuniyoshi (1798-1861), masters of the Utagawa School. The prints of these artists transport the observer into a colorful, imaginative dream world of Kabuki actors, mythical creatures, hauntingly beautiful women and fierce warriors. This publication offers a rare opportunity to compare the two artists' illustrations of the same themes, and includes essays that provide an introduction to nineteenth-century Japanese popular culture and bridge the gap between the centuries by exploring aspects of the grotesque in Japanese art, explaining legends and plays, and presenting some of Kuniyoshi's preliminary studies. |
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Like his fellow Pop painters Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Mel Ramos (born 1935) derives the motifs for his work from mass media and advertising. In bold and immediately recognizable canvases, he unites consumer goods with idealized pin-up girls modeled after magazine images dating from the 1950s and 1960s. Ramos immortalizes these models' lascivious poses by entwining them with the featured products in what he calls commercial pin-ups. This monograph illustrates and discusses many of these works, but also provides insight into the artist's multifaceted oeuvre by presenting more than 100 works, from his first portraits of people, comic heroes and heroines, and his prominent pin-up girls, to his latest works from the Galatea series. Celebrating the artist's 75th birthday, this catalogue accompanies a major European retrospective, the first to unite Ramos' drawings, paintings and sculptures. |
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