Astrid Nippoldt / Hansjörg Dobliar

It’s Always Night, Or We Wouldn’t Need Light

This beautiful, softcover catalog documents a joint presentation of Astrid Nippoldt’s films accompanied by painted installations by Hansjoerg Dobliar at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen. It showcases two artists who follow in the footsteps of Romantic traditions, creating art which inspires dreaming. Dobliar, for his part, harnesses his large over-paintings of magazine photographs in colorfully gloomy constructions to form the effect of cosmic space with these seemingly crystalline structures. Nippoldt, whose films are evocative fragmented narratives, uses witty detail to define, gently, the absurdity of existence. Don’t miss Hans-Jurgen Hafner’s marvelous essay, written from the imagined future. Includes several photographs of the installations along with essays by Andreas Baur, Doris Krystof and Johannes Meinhardt.

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NO IS NOT AN ANSWER

On the Work of Marie-Louise Ekman

No Is Not an Answer is the largest presentation of Marie-Louise Ekman’s art ever featured in the form of a book. As one of the most influential artists in Sweden in the postwar period, Ekman was both part of Swedish pop and the rebellious underground in the ’60s and ’70s.

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NO TO THE INVASION

Breakdowns and Side Effects

Fawz Kabra & Annie Godfrey Larmon (Eds.)

Alongside the Center for Curatorial Studies, Bard College, group exhibition No to the Invasion (2017), is a fascinating exhibition catalog and reader presenting the artworks from the Barjeel Art Foundation—an independent, UAE-based collection of modern and contemporary Arab art. The focus is on works by artists specifically addressing issues of body and politics in the Arab context post-1990 such as Akram Zaatari, Kader Attia, Walid Raad and Yto Barrada. Reflecting on the artworks are writings ranging from Ahmad Makia’s nuanced reading of the impact of Pan-Arabism on contemporary Arab identity to Tarek El-Ariss’s consideration of the archive as a tool for understanding affective histories of Arabs in the modern era to Marwa Arsanios’s study of the fraught process of rebuilding and gentrification in Beirut after the Lebanese civil war. Additional essays by Ala Younis, Fawz Kabra, Kader Attia, Khaled Malas, Mandy Merzaban, Rawi Hage and the Sigil Collective and an interview with Thomas Keenan and Sultan Sooud Al-Qassemi. Each featured artist and text is a critical and timely contribution to a range of conversations about the Arab world and its diasporas.

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NILS NOVA

Works So Far

American artist Nils Nova takes the idea of trompe l’oeil to an extreme, very conceptual place in his first comprehensive monograph to date. Imagine a photo of the gallery you’re in, blown up to life size and placed in exactly the same spot as the real-life space. You’re walking into a wall that looks like the space behind it. In his outstanding and insightful essay, Max Wechsler comments that it is not just the imposing dimensions of the work that disarm the imagination, but the succession of mirror images that throws off the viewer’s sense of what’s real and what’s not. Eventually, even a real photograph hanging on a real wall starts to look like an illusion floating in space. This extensively illustrated publication invites the viewer into Nova’s oddly parallel universe.

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PORCELAIN FACTORY NYMPHENBURG

Legendary for craftsmanship and quality, Nymphenburg is the Bavarian royal family’s porcelain factory, acclaimed since its founding in 1747 for precious, handmade pieces. This new, comprehensively illustrated book shows how Nymphenburg developed its world-renowned reputation over almost 300 years, becoming synonymous with refinement, sophistication and brilliance in porcelain. With concise attention to detail, photographer Frank Stolle guides the reader through the entire factory (located since 1761 in the northern wing of the Nymphenburg Palace in Munich), covering the intricacies of molding, turning, luting, painting, firing, glazing and gilding. The factory’s master workshops own 15,000 color formulas and 30,000 different molds, and are still producing stylistically influential and custom works for artists, architects and designers from around the world.

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Albert Oehlen

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ALBERT OEHLEN

In der Wohnung

Fred Fischli & Niels Olsen (Eds.)

The representation of domestic interiors has always been an important subject to Berlin-based German painter Albert Oehlen. In collaboration with Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen, Oehlen assembled an exhibition (2014) surveying approaches to the painting of interiors in contemporary art. His most recent artist book, In der Wohnung (In the Apartment), from STUDIOLO artist book series, is a record of his art historical journey. The book opens onto undulating black-and-white perspectival line drawings of landscapes sparsely populated with fragments of work by Richard Artschwager, Mike Kelley and Martin Kippenberger, among others, which the artist uses in his own paintings. Arriving at a building set into the landscape, we encounter a recent “Klebebild” by Oehlen—Pop art panels featuring Oehlen’s collages. Several close-ups of the final artworks are also shown on display. A survey of Oehlen’s work is being presented at the New Museum, NY, later this year.

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Ahmed Ögüt

Today in History

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Melik Ohanian

Cosmograms

Jean-Christophe Royoux

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More from the Black Pocketbook Series

KEN OKIISHI

The Very Quick of the Word

Annie Godfrey Larmon & Alise Upitis (Eds.)

Multiple temporalities of memory making and recording are overlaid in the video “paintings” of New York– and Berlin–based artist Ken Okiishi. Okiishi uses flat-screen televisions as canvas, painting in the style of the abstract expressionists. Brashly colored pigment rubbing against a glowing screen showing a delayed playback of significantly deteriorated home videos which have significantly deteriorated. The artist, featured in the 2014 Whitney Biennial, is interested in exploring the gap between digital and continuous space. This intentionally overwhelming book, which accompanies recent exhibitions at the MIT List Visual Arts Center and CCS Bard, imagines the exhibition catalog itself as a format in crisis. A mass of overlaid images and inlaid texts, it includes essays from curators Annie Godfrey Larmon and Alise Upitis along with images from Okiishi’s series gesture/data (2013–ongoing), and a screenplay book of Okiishi’s 2010 runaway hit, (Goodbye to) Manhattan.

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