HERBERT MAIER

Who We Are – A Visual Library

Herbert Maier (b. 1959) has been working on this “encyclopedia,” which contains over 500 watercolors, since 2009. Originally from Germany, Meier—who studied with Emilio Vedova in Salzburg—has traveled to such places as Pakistan, India, Nepal, Mexico, Guatemala, Israel, Iran, and the tribal areas of West Africa. The images with which he brings back from across the globe are those that people have created of themselves and of others: faces, portraits, heads, and masks showing human culture in all its facets—from its beauty to its abysmal dimensions. Maier’s visual library is closely linked with these encounters with other people (and their artistic and cultural testimonies). This fascinating project, with texts by Isabell Herda and Volker Bauermeister, represents a successful attempt at global thinking: it bears witness to the availability of images as well as Maier’s passion for travel and collections.

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ANTJE MAJEWSKI & PAWEL FREISLER

Apple, An Introduction (Over and Over and Once Again)

Developed by German artist Antje Majewski (b. 1968) and Polish conceptual artist Pawel Freisler (b. 1942) over the course of their five-year correspondence, Apple is an artistic, scientific, cultural and historical project. The well-illustrated catalog, published in conjunction with exhibitions at Museum Abteiberg and Muzeum Sztuki (2015), ties together collaborative, associative projects, films, sculptures, installations, conversations and a community tree planting by Majewski, Freisler and other international artists including Jimmie Durham, Agnieszka Polska and Piotr Zycienski. The remarkable range of Freisler’s collection of carved, dried apples and Majewski’s paintings of different apple varieties highlight the idea of diversity and the complex relationship between global food economy and technological progress in science and a capitalist world economy. Contributions by Jimmie Durham, Anders Ettinger, Paweł Freisler, Fundacja Transformacja, Katherine Gibson, Antje Majewski, Ethan Miller, Agnieszka Polska, Joanna Sokołowska, Susanne Titz and Piotr Życieński.

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MAKING & UNMAKING

Duro Olowu

From Bauhaus jewelry and West African textiles to contemporary portraiture and sculpture, this unique exhibition and accompanying full color catalog curated by celebrated fashion designer/curator Duro Olowu (b. 1965) explores the rituals of making that underpin an artist’s work. Olowu selected material by over 70 artists, including rarely seen works by Anni Albers, Alighiero Boetti, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili and Irving Penn as well as newer paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye from the 1920s to the present. By setting up unexpected dialogues between historic and contemporary artists working in a myriad of media—textile, painting, sculpture, photography and collage—Olowu reveals a shared preoccupation with themes of gender, race, beauty, sexuality and the body. The volume includes an in-depth conversation between Olowu and Glenn Ligon, and texts by Jennifer Higgie and Shanay Jhaveri, which together highlight the intricate layers of history and place that influence the making of art.

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VICTOR MAN

Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough

Victor Man & Mihai Pop (Eds.)

Romanian-born artist Victor Man’s (b. 1974) layered, moody and atmospheric installations and paintings bring to mind the work of 18th-century landscape painters who used black mirrors known as “Claude mirrors” to turn colors into dark key tones. Figures in Man’s paintings emerge from semi-darkness, fractured and quasi-invisible, reminiscent of archetypes in works by Shakespeare, Joyce or Pound, and suggest a dialogue between the pictorial and literary arts. As literary critic Laura Pavel writes, “In Victor Man’s self-contained paintings, which appear as metonymies of embodied meaning, there is no ostentatious first-order visuality over second-order textuality.” Luminary Petals on a Wet, Black Bough is a handsomely illustrated artist’s book presenting Man’s series of paintings exhibited at the 56th Venice Biennale (2015), and developed for the solo exhibition at Galeria Plan B, Berlin (2016). The softcover publication includes essays by poet and translator Bogdan Ghiu and curator Mihnea Mircan. Man’s work is shown in the U.S. at the Gladstone Gallery, NY and Blum & Poe, L.A., and was included in the SF MOMA exhibition Open Ended (2016).

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NICHOLAS MANGAN

Limits to Growth

Aileen Burns, Charlotte Day, Krist Gruijthuijsen & Johan Lundh (Eds.)

Limits to Growth is the first survey catalog of the engaging and poignant work of Australian multidisciplinary artist Nicholas Mangan (b. 1979). Drawing from his background in history and science, Mangan’s work addresses a range of themes, including the ongoing impact of colonialism, humanity’s effect on nature, contemporary consumption cultures and the complex dynamics of the global political economy. The well-edited and richly illustrated book accompanies a three-venue international museum exhibition bringing together four significant works from the past seven years, plus one new commission. The videos and installations tackle narratives from Mangan’s own geographical region—Asia Pacific, with Australia playing a colonial role—and weave them into a bigger picture to explore global economy, resource extraction, and the ultimate power of the sun. In-depth conversations between the artist and the Barcelona-based curatorial collective Latitudes and essays by Ana Teixeira Pinto and Helen Hughes are interspersed with Mangan’s work. Mangan has part of the 2015 Triennial, New Museum, NY.

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DOMENICO MANGANO & MARIEKE VAN ROOY

Homestead of Dilution

Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk (Ed.)

Homestead of Dilution is a collaboration between Italian artist Domenico Mangano (b. 1976) and Dutch architectural historian Marieke van Rooy (b. 1974) while they were attending the art and psychiatry residency at the Altrecht psychiatric institution in Holland in 2015. Focusing on the psychiatric institutions that lately have become subject to gradual dismantling, the duo drew from a 1970s utopian experiment for their project, which brought together healthy and mentally ill people to offset the increasing polarization in society at that time. In their exhibition of video, sculptures, drawings and photographs, they take a wider look into the difference between illness and sickness, normal and healthy, and ask how the concept of “dilution” could bridge and unify radical forms of otherness through an artistic process. The accompanying publication is an extensive reader on the concept of dilution featuring the duo’s artworks and installations along with writings by John Foot, Ilaria Gianni, Niekolaas Johannes Lekkerkerk, Aaron Schuster, Esther Vossen and Marieke van Rooy.

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MARCEL ODENBACH

Blenden/Blinds

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MARCOS LUTYENS

Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days

Kari Cwynar (Ed.)

In 2008, when gallerist Jessica Silverman asked Paris-based writer/curator Raimundas Malasauskas to curate a show at her San Francisco gallery, she did not expect him to propose an exhibition that takes place in the mind of the audience through hypnosis. When Malasauskas found Marcos Lutyens, an artist deeply immersed in neurosci- ence, eco-dreams and artificial intelligence, he found his accomplice. Together they produced The Hypnotic Show, which in 2012 with Lutyens as hypnotist, arrived in Kassel for dOCUMENTA (13) for a 100-day performance that included 340 hypnotic sessions with his audience. In this fascinating and playful book, Memoirs of a Hypnotist: 100 Days, Malasauskas introduces and Lutyens chronicles the event, assembling all kinds of improbable experiences: research of cognition and neurological activity, deep exploration of varying states of consciousness and, at the center, the possibility for contingency and embodied dematerialization within the current thinking of art.

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mark

Before the Curtain. Avant le Rideau

mark’s works are often an investigation of seemingly commonplace situations. “… tools, a form of communication concentrated upon the moment. The impulse for this is an idea, the idea of comprehending the ‘world’ and its rules in order to question them. The questioning of inherent rules, the shifting of the frame of reference, and the continuation of discussion are the methods of our artistic practice and expression of our attitude. We are undoubtedly involved in the economics of the art market, irrespective of whether we profit from them or not. We are subject to a kind of absorption out of which we develop a practice which can in turn absorb those conditions: as a specific framework, a system of rules and parameters with which we and the people we collaborate with can deal. […] Sometimes we forget that others are less familiar with critical conceptual art than we are. As a result, we operate from a general understanding and within a broad acceptance instead of from the periphery. It is important for us to proceed from a specific context. Concentrated upon the situation, we develop our work which does not gear itself to a professional future – this certainly represents one of the notable advantages of working within a collective.” In 2009 mark had a photo taken at the Regent Photo Studio on the Avenue du Parc in Montréal and recorded the photographer’s instructions. They subsequently developed the text from this as part of an installation at WE LEFT THE WARM STABLE AND ENTERED THE LATEX VOID (WLTWSAETLV). The text also constitutes the material of this book. mark is a collective of five artists who live in Berlin, Bremen, and Vienna respectively. mark’s artistic practice draws upon professions in the fields of architecture, fine art, design, and the social services. Individual members have run spaces in Bremen in which installations, performances, and talks by other artists have been staged.

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FILIP MARKIEWICZ

Paradiso Lussemburgo
The Luxembourg Pavillion Biennale 2015

Paul Ardenne (Ed.)

Dance, performance, film, karaoke and readings fuse politics and pop in Paradiso Lussemburgo, artist, author and musician Filip Markiewicz’s (b. 1980) installation at the Luxembourg Pavilion of the 56th Venice Biennale. Markiewicz’s subject is the projected and historical realities of Luxembourg itself. In both installation and reader, Markiewicz creates a journey through layers of the country’s projected labels (such as tax haven) and waves of immigration that speak to its blended sense of European nationality in search of its identity. The reader continues, in the words of the artist, a “new contemporary mythology of Luxembourg,” with the bilingual layering of drawings, text and analysis, exhibition views, an interview and a film script. Paradiso Lussemburgo, a project proposed by Markiewicz and curator Paul Ardenne, creates an active theater in Venice, which the reader continues, inviting further participation. Writings by Paul Ardenne, Josée Hansen and Ingo Niermann.

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