PLANE/STRUCTURES

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KATRIN PLAVCAK

Humming Thumbling

Silvia Eiblmayr & Jörg Heiser

Berlin-based artist Katrin Plavcak (b. 1970) purposefully examines the history of images originating from comics, cartoons, illustration and (quite broadly) from technical visual media. Clichés, distortions, trivializations and spectacles—as produced by the media industry, whose logic is also quite seductive to art and its institutions—form an aesthetic fundus from which, in her own painterly language and in a highly qualified transformation process, she formulates her point of view. Plavcak—who grew up in Zeltweg, Austria—is also a great portraitist: she knows how to pinpoint the psycho logical characteristics of her found or invented figures with great skill. Her non-impasto oil and acrylic paintings draw figurative references to Otto Dix and George Grosz, Magritte and Picasso, and Hannah Höch and Maria Lassnig, as well as to the practice of naive painting—where perspective and spatial conditions are suspended while several narrative strands coexist.

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Olivia Plender

A Stellar Key to the Summerland

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OLIVIA PLENDER

Rise Early, Be Industrious

Remco de Blaaij, Gerrie van Noord & Olivia Plender (Eds.)

The first significant survey of work by British artist Olivia Plender (b. 1977), this substantial monograph navigates the artist’s evolving attitudes to historical and contemporary forms of communication and education in her research-based practice. From a reappraisal of her project Google Office (2010), in which artistic agency meets Liberation Management, to her rethinking of the Open University as a model for the educational role of television, her work is a critical envisioning of labor’s extensive influence. To this end, she also addresses the work ethic embedded into mainstream educational systems during the industrial era, and the alternative movements that placed creativity and the arts as central to an attempt at emancipation. In specially commissioned essays and interviews, archival material, and new texts by the artist, this publication addresses the in-depth investigation of Plender’s research and artwork into educational models and their relation to social organization. Essays by Angus Cameron, Maeve Connolly, Lars Bang Larsen and Tirdad Zolghadr.

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ANDREAS PLUM

Paperworks

With bold colors and expressive brushstrokes, emerging Cologne- based artist Andreas Plum collages colored strips of paper onto canvas and then applies paint or groups the strips to bring forth an explosive cathartic vision. In his first exhibition catalog, Plum adopts the motifs of Pop Art as well as the abstract thrust of hard-edge painting and blends the two approaches with the lingering resonance of arte povera in mixed media on canvas. Plum’s multi-colored paper streamers appear as an eruption of a psychedelia, breathing new life into the sterility of conceptual art with paradoxical visual and material choices.

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POETRY OF THE METROPOLIS: THE AFFICHISTES

Esther Schlicht, Roland Wetzel & Max Hollein (Eds.)

During the 1940s and 1950s, the Affichistes appeared in Paris with a new and revolutionary artistic format: the tearing down of posters. In the resulting looted random images, they created a radical contradiction to the dominant abstract painting of the postwar period. This catalog, accompanying the exhibition by Museum Tinguely and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, provides a comprehensive look at activities spanning two decades (1948–68) by an important postwar avant-garde in France including artists Raymond Hains, Jacques Villeglé, François Dufrêne, Mimmo Rotella, and Wolf Vostell. Highlighting their backgrounds in decollage, action and happening, this handsome oversized book allows for beautiful reproductions of their complex collaged works, which appear still fresh and radiant today. A full chronology and timeline of the movement is included in the back along with interviews or writings about the artists by curators Esther Schlicht and Roland Wetzel plus Bernard Blistene, Fritz Emslander, Didier Semin and Dominique Stella.

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POLITISCHE LANDSCHAFT

Political Landscape

Dirck Möllmann & Elisabeth Fiedler (Eds.)

Timed to coincide with the 70th anniversary of Europe’s liberation from Nazi totali- tarianism, the six contemporary projects featured in Political Landscape focus on the geography, sociology and history of the Ausseerland region and the western Totes Gebirge, areas active in both supporting and opposing Hitler’s fascism during the mid-1940s. Few witnesses of these past events are still alive and many interpretations are contested. Aiming to awaken collective and individual memory, an international group of artists—Clegg & Guttmann, Eva Grubinger, Florian Hüttner, Angelika Loderer, Susan Philipsz and Bojan Šarcevic—present varying interpretations of the historic landscape. This handsome book with rounded corners and an embossed cover was published on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition and functions as a walking project and history guide. Text and images of each project, the artists and sites are included along with details and local anecdotes.

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SIGMAR POLKE

The Multiplication of Humour

Eva Schmidt (Ed.)

With his sheets, maps, books, photographs and objects, Sigmar Polke opened up completely new pathways for art in the 20th century by means of experimental media. While related to his painting practice, Polke’s 200 editioned works link the artist’s larger oeuvre to a diverse circle of collaborators. Colored serial prints with everyday motifs appear as German Pop in the vicinity of reportage-like, socially critical photos or mixed-media images produced on decorative furnishing materials. This exhibition catalog showcases Alex Ciesielski’s complete collection of Polke’s editioned works. Full-color reproductions pair with a remarkable amount of original texts—from Hubertus Butin, Thomas Kapielski, Stefan Koldehoff, Stefanie Kreutzer and Inse Rüttinger, among others—each reflecting on a single edition from perspectives alternatively academic and anecdotal.

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SIGMAR POLKE | POSTER

Sammlung Ciesielski

Axel Ciesielski is an avid collector of Sigmar Polke’s work, probably the only person in the world who can say that he owns each one of the artist’s editions. This catalog presents all the posters produced for Polke’s museum and gallery exhibitions—posters almost exclusively designed and determined by the artists’ ironic eye. A particularly fascinating aspect of Ciesielski’s collection is that it includes perfect copies of all these posters as ephemeral counterparts to Polke’s work; the artist himself included the posters in his catalog raisonné, pointing to their hybrid state between artwork and advertisement. The book is also a journey through the art world of the 1960s, revealing Polke’s early benefactors as well as the institutional retrospectives that subsequently promoted and reflected his worldwide fame.

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ANDREJ POLUKORD

The Sarcophagus

Preis der Kunsthalle Wien 2016

In cooperation with the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Applied Arts, the Kunsthalle Wien Prize is awarded for outstanding final projects at the two universities of art in Vienna. Andrej Polukord, graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts and co-recipient of the 2016 prize, works in painting, installation, performance and video art to create unpredictable and ambiguous environments and absurd situations that produce double meanings. In Polukord’s installation, The Sarcophagus at Kunsthalle Wien, the environment takes the form of a cave. Mushrooms grow from the ceiling and transform the gallery into an inverted forest floor. The petite softbound catalog includes a handful of drawings, black & white photos of the work, and a surprise poster by Polukord of the forest and floating mushrooms. Texts by Eva Blimlinger, curator Lucas Gehrmann, and a conversation with the artist and Lucas Gehrmann, and Kunsthalle Wien director Nicolaus Schafhausen.

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