KIDS

Any era’s representation of children in art says more about the adults than the kids. This handsome, full-color exhibition catalog from Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin brings together portraits of children from the last century or so, in all their frightening, stifling, monstrous, sinister, ambiguous and explicitly sexual glory. Pieces range from Paula Modersohn-Becker’s turn-of-the-20th-century portraits, which trailblaze in abandoning the myth of the carefree childhood, to paintings, sculpture, film and photography from artists including Larry Clark, Chaim Soutine, TAL R, Cuny Janssen, Raymond Pettibon, Gert & Uwe Tobias and Andy Warhol. This bold show takes children out of the category of cuddly status symbols and gives them their full birthright of complexity. The oversized volume includes text in English and German, and installation photos. Text by Estelle Blaschke and Kito Nedo.

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Hubert Kiecol

Golden

German sculptor Hubert Kiecol is a new-style minimalist. The works of minimalist pioneers like Carl Andre or Donald Judd were simply “there” – certainly not symbols for something else. Yet Kiecol’s work, by contrast, is rich in association, and yet it is also evident that the emotional labor of association, the investigation of the archetypal, is left to the viewer. The interplay of form and openness connects Kiecol’s sculpture to his two-dimensional work. The artist’s balancing act, creating meaning and moods from minimalism, makes his work unique. A rich and comprehensively illustrated exhibition catalog.

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KIKI KOGELNIK

I Have Seen The Future

I Have Seen The Future

In a riot of electric color, collage, stencils and spray paints, this joyful book celebrates the manic universe created by Austrian-born artist Kiki Kogelnik, whose work explodes with the energy of the 1960s. Kogelnik settled in New York in 1962, just in time to tap the euphoria of Pop Art, women’s lib and comic books, among other influences, with these remarkable works. Just about every work includes a childlike handprint—the kind of thing a kid might press onto a plate or a finger-painting—a Kogelnik signature creating a bridge between the viewer and the art. Utopia is the magic word that sums up Kogelnik’s formal and thematic wanderings; she is interested in transformation, in overcoming the perplexities of space and time. She always considered the present to be the start of a better future. Kogelnik died in Vienna in 1997. This wonderful little jewel of a book is the document of her 2012 retrospective at the Kunstverein Hamburg.

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PER KIRKEBY

Ute Riese (Ed.)

Danish painter, poet, filmmaker, architect, and sculptor Per Kirkeby is one of Scandinavia’s most celebrated living artists. His engagement with natural and geologic processes is highlighted in this beautiful new exhibition catalog from Kunsthalle Giessen featuring photographs of his brick sculpture Gießen (1996) and large-scale charcoal drawings relating to in a series titled Masonites (1977–97). Earlier works are also featured including tempera paintings, bronze models, drawings, and several intensely colored monotypes. The sculpture, created to connect two building complexes at Justus Leibig University, stands as built metaphor of Kirkeby’s career-long focus on nature’s processes from sediment to culture. This excellent look into Kirkeby’s work, which has appeared at Documenta and in the collections of the Tate Modern, Phillips Collection, MOMA, NY and the Metropolitan Museum of Art, includes beautiful color plates and essays by Ute Riese and Marcel Baumgartner on the artist’s processes and ideas.

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MAGDALENA KITA

Californication

Polish-born, Dusseldorf-based artist, Magdalena Kita (b.1983), chose to create her latest multimedia project on the common bath towel. Influenced by the erotic works of 1960s NY-based visual artist, Dorothy Iannone, Kita’s, colorful and sensual motifs go much further. In a well illustrated monograph, Kita assembles a large number of the new bath towel series, covered with her naively lustful female nudes alongside documentation of her public performances where sensual young men are either sunbathing on or parading her erotic towels around the beach. Kita’s intention is to create tension around issues of identity and sexuality that reference her long involvement with Feminist agendas. Kita was the co-founder of the international semi-fictional Feminist collective, CONGRESS. Featured texts by Gia Edzgveradze, Tytus Klepacz, Thomas W. Kuhn, Matthew Licht, Elena Malzew, JL Murtaugh, Marina Pinsky & Alex Wisse, Noemi Smolink and Catherine G. Wagley. Kita’s performances have been shown throughout North America and Europe.

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KITSCH UNEDITED

Jan Andriesse

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EMIL MICHAEL KLEIN

Paintings
Outlines. From Color to Color

Oskar Weiss (Ed.)

Swiss-born artist Emil Michael Klein’s (b. 1982) new publication takes large-scale oil paintings he made between 2013 and 2016 and explores each canvas anew through the process of fine art printing. The slender artist’s book represents a collaboration between designer Teo Schifferli and the artist investigating the contrasting processes of printing and painting. The journey is presented in the featured 30 elegant reproductions. The arterial web of colored lines and monochromatic color fields in Klein’s paintings evokes the formal and chromatic effects of printed artwork. Klein, who trained as a wood carver before studying art at HGK, Basel, delves into the similarities and differences between the two artistic media. Grappling with the perennial problems involved in turning originals into reproductions, Paintings asks how images are viewed and disseminated.

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ALISON KNOWLES

The Big Book

Meghan DellaCrosse, Daniel Garber & Corinn Gerber (Eds.)

This important publication provides a first time document and re-visitation of artist Alison Knowles’ classic Fluxus project, The  Big  Book (1967). An eight-foot tall walk-in construction, it was comprised of a title page and eight moveable pages anchored to a metal spine, each equipped with casters. The book contained a stove, a telephone, a bed, a toilet, a library, a guestbook, a gallery with works by artist friends, a lush meadow, a ventilator and other assorted utensils. It was given its first public airing at the Something Else Gallery in Chelsea, New York. Following this first exhibition, the book travelled to various venues in Europe, Canada and the United States, including the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Frankfurt am Main and The Jewish Museum, New York. In the course of these travels, the book’s condition gradually deteriorated so that by the time it reached the final venue, only a few pages remained.

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AUKJE KOKS

Ways of Being

Freek Lomme & Boy Vereecken (Eds.)

The young Dutch artist Aukje Koks seeks to unite art and spectator in this playful artist’s book that treats art as a “thing among things” open to multiple interpretations. Interested in the intersections between visible reality and the world of ideas, Koks dislocates the viewer’s perspective in her paintings and sculptures so that reality and illusion become intermingled and it is no longer clear what is real and what is not. In Ways of Being images of her work are presented in tandem with informal, prosaic reports by friends, critics and curators, which make us aware of the semantics of images and blurring of categories via individual perspectives, ultimately in Koks’s view a political statement. Koks made Ways of Being collaboratively with writer/ curator Freek Lomme (texts) and designer/publisher Boy Vereecken (images). Contributions by Constance Barrere Dangleterre, Bianca Stigter, Chris Sharp and Bart Groenendaal.

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FLORIN KOMPATSCHER

This elegant, large-format catalog of the fascinating paintings of Italian-born artist Florin Kompatscher focuses on his work from 2005-2010. In stunning color reproductions and black-and-white installation photos, the reader can see the remarkable balance between surreal metaphor and special depth of field in his oil paintings; Kompatscher’s paintings are dream-like, referring to antecedents like Dali, Magritte, Tanguy and even Caspar David Friedrich, yet totally individual to the artist. “It is possible to glimpse mountainous landscapes and underwater worlds, exploding volcanoes, and cosmic configurations in these paintings,” writes art historian Noemi Smolik. “At the same time, they elude the real.” Hard to describe, indeed, but nonetheless beautiful.

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