"Astonishing Things Since the early 1980s, Thomas Schütte—three times a participant in the documenta in Kassel, winner of the 2010 Düsseldorf Art Prize, and the Golden Lion as best individual artist at the 2005 Venice Biennale—has worked on architectural model, scenes, and figurative scenarios. Replete with notes on relative dimensions or accompanied by small figures, they correspond to the realisation on a larger scale, with many origin ..."
"The immersive soundscape installations and intimate environments of the Canadian artist duo Janet Cardiff (born 1957) and Georges Bures Miller (born 1960) present an ongoing series of chapters in the life of the ghost in the machine. Their works describe tales of tag-sale menace and shared loneliness through aural means, wholly reconceiving the gallery experience. A pioneering collector of new media art, Ingvild Goetz has assembled a si ..."
"One of Poland’s foremost contemporary artists, Pawel Althamer (born 1967) makes humankind itself the topic of his work--as physical sculpture, as political entity, and as participant in the work’s production. This volume is the first to both explore the spiritual dimension of his work and to position it within the contexts of Poland’s turbulent history."
"The title "Fragile Sense of Hope" expresses the basic mood of an entire re- gion. The fall of the Iron Curtain a little over twenty-five years ago has led to dramatic changes in the structures of everyday life in the societies of Eastern Europe, accompanied by a tenuous sense that a better future is within reach. Ideological systems of value dictated by the state fell apart overnight. Entire generations had to reinvent their lives and a ..."
"Mona Hatoum (born 1952) has established herself as a truly transnational artist: born in Beirut, and working in Berlin and London, her multimedia work explores the dangers inherent to the borderlines between nation and body. This multi-authored and richly illustrated publication reveals all of the different facets of the artist’s career, from her overtly political performances of the 1980s to her later installations, photographs, sculpt ..."
"Description: Just Love Me--with its title taken directly from a late 90s neon sign by Tracey Emin--reveals how complex and differentiated female identity constructions have become today. Classically assigned roles have broken down. Radical feminist positions of the 70s and 80s no longer make sense. But if much has changed since the late 60s, when feminist artists began to make their most prominent moves, many social and structural probl ..."
"As a young artist living in New York, Andrea Zittel started to design furniture that satisfied her needs and desires and saved space. In search for organization systems in all areas of life, she acts as a researcher, test person, inventor and fabricator efficiently rolled up into one, producing objects, dwelling units and clothing. Zittel founded A-Z Administrative Services in 1992 as a laboratory, shop, conceptual organization, apartme ..."
"This volume considers the work of Mike Kelley alongside the collaborations of Peter Fischli and David Weiss. Kelley's works are firmly anchored in an ironic, detached attitude towards his Irish Catholic upbringing; he makes use of the pictorial language of specific subcultures and the aesthetics of 'low culture,' to probe such concerns as the representation of childhood and the social construction of sexual behavior and cultural identif ..."
"The multi-dimensionality of our daily experiences is reduced by the television and internet media to the surface of a flat screen. Thus reality loses more and more of its spatial qualities, even as theoretical physicists develop increasingly sophisticated models to better understand the structures of time and space. As they employ an ever-growing number of dimensions in this endeavor, the mode of our sensual reception continues to becom ..."
"Housed in a modern building designed by Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron, the private Goetz collection contains one of the largest repositories of American art from the 1980s and 90s, with work by Matthew Barney, Carroll Dunham, Robert Gober, Peter Halley, Jenny Holzer, Mike Kelley, Jonathan Lasker, Louise Lawler, Cady Noland, Raymond Pettibon, Paul Pfeiffer, Richard Prince, Jessica Stockholder, and Andrea Zittel. Essays by Ursula ..."
"Talking Pictures is the third, central component of a five-part cycle titled Imagination Becomes Reality, produced by the renowned Goetz Collection. Here the focus shifts to contemporary narrative images, less actual "talking pictures", films or videos, than other visual media--paintings, for instance--engaged in an exchange with the viewer. When painting used comprehensible set symbols, compositions, atmospheres or motifs, the work was ..."
"The Goetz Collection is one of the best assemblages of contemporary art in Europe, each piece having been chosen by Ingvild Goetz herself. In this fourth installment of the Goetz's Imagination Becomes Reality series, featured artists include Olaf Breuning, Barnaby Furnas, Wade Guyton, Kelley Walker, Thomas Helbig, Mark Leckey, Ivan Morley, Markus Selg and Thaddeus Strode."
"Thomas Schutte is a catalogue of works by this contemporary German artist. Schutte studied under Gerhard Richter, Benjamim Buchloh, and Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Dusseldorf Academy in the 1970s. He comes from this strong conceptual background but as his career matured the emotional content of his work evolved and became much more potent. Schutte's work is incredibly eclectic: Ceramic figures, architectural models, drawings, outd ..."
"Swiss duo Fischli & Weiss have been collaborating since 1979 on clever, charming works that turn everyday detritus--from stuffed animals and beer bottles to sausages and magazine advertisements--into witty scenarios of balance, collapse and blissful silliness. Their best-known work remains their film "The Way Things Go," in which such items are arranged in a domino sequence to fall, catch fire and roll along, with dizzying hilarity. All ..."
"Seminal Los Angeles-based artist and writer Mike Kelley has said, looking back on his career, "I didn't want to be a rock musician; I wanted to be an artist. And I think the reason I chose it was that at that time it was the most despicable thing you could be in American culture... I came from a milieu in which artists were despised, whereas rock musicians and drug dealers were, you know, hipster culture heroes." Along with a selection ..."
"At various points in this past century, painting has been pronounced dead, painters have been plagued by self-doubt, the act of painting has been equated with the flogging of a dead horse, and the art of painting has been reduced to the separate ingredients of color, ground, and brushstroke. Yet each of the painters included in "The Mystery of Painting" treats their art form as an emancipated, proud medium that neither calls for a conce ..."
"This new catalogue of works from the Goetz Collection documents the Arte Povera movement which began in Italy in the 1960s, and features many of its major artists, including Giovanni Anselmo, Alighiero Boetti, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, Pino Pascali, Guiseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Prini, and Gilberto Zorio."
"Geta Bratescu was born in 1926 in Ploiesti, Romania.Despite state repression during the period of the Communist-Stalinist dictatorship under Nicolae Ceausescu (1965-1989), she developed an oeuvre characterized by an impressive understanding ..."
"Based on the holdings of the Goetz Collection in Munich, and accompanying a 2013 exhibition there, this volume offers a concise Roni Horn overview. It includes Horn's best-known series, such as You Are the Weather, To Place, a.k.a., Some Thames and Cloud and Clown. Throughout these sequences, Horn's abiding motifs recur: water, weather, her adoptive home of Iceland, and more formal qualities such as repetition and permutation. The book ..."