PRODUCTION.

Made in Germany Drei (Three)

Kestner Gesellschaft, Kunstverein Hanover & Sprengel Museum Hanover (Eds.)

Blending young emerging artists and collectives with past and noted artists, the three-institution exhibition and its accompanying catalog, Production, engages different perspectives on the topic of production. Occurring every five years and now in its third reincarnation, the exhibitions in Kestner Gesellschaft, Kunstverein Hanover and Sprengel Museum Hanover (June 2017) focuses on the diversity of artist’s production within Germany and the question of how geographic, political and institutional structures and new technologies influence artists and their process. In addition to 22 artists, groups and collectives, 20 contributors from a diverse group of professionals tackle this expansive project. Artists range from video installation artist and theorist Hito Steyrl to the “female only” performance collective IMPURE FICTION to Thoma Ruff, and contributors cross generations from established Switzerland-based curator and writer Tenzing Barshee to young independent curator Jana Franze. With 380 pages and 180 color images, this voluminous catalog is a smart and informative snapshot into 21st-century art-making ideas.

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LAURE PROUVOST

The Artist Book

Fraser Muggeridge (Ed.)

Born in France, Laure Prouvost received the Max Mara Prize for Women, 2012, and will be exhibiting new work at Whitechapel Gallery and Tate Britain in Spring, 2013. Provoust’s first artist book extends her preoccupations with the occurrence of “mis-translations,” in which objects, stories, or scene are transformed through film, video and in this case, onto the printed page. Exploring ideas of translation, mirroring and narrative, each “mistranslation” allows a new narrative to develop that often is unrelated to its origin. Using a technique she describes as “backword stories,” Prouvost uses the idea of the artists’ book as a biography, juxtaposing formal devices with mini-narratives, images and handwritten notes. The book is made up of text and images, including a newly commissioned biography that is punctuated by graphic statements about language, translation, and cultural misunderstandings, in which the subject, or narrator, merges with the book itself.

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PS:

Jahresring 61: Jahrbuch für moderne Kunst

Dominic Eichler & Brigitte Oetker (Eds.)

The Jahrespring series, the longest continually published annual journal for contemporary art in Germany, embraces diverse voices and forms of writing and thinking about contemporary art and culture. The 61st edition is a reader and visual sampler with contributions by visual artists, writers, poets, musicians, choreographers, and designers. Lectures, scripts, interviews and conversations, performative texts, poetry, short stories and biographical fiction are interspersed with image-based work. Its discursive, intertextual and interdisciplinary approach explores the contemporary cultural resonances in gender and sexuality. The title, PS (or postscript), suggests the place where these implicit relations are revealed. Over 30 contributors including Manuela Ammer, Julie Ault, Monika Baer, Nairy Baghramian, Gerry Bibby, Jennifer Bornstein, Pauline Boudry & Renate Lorenz, Dragana Bulut, Françoise Cactus, Leidy Churchman, Ann Cotten, Juan Davila, Dominic Eichler, Elmgreen & Dragset, Yusuf Etiman, Isa Genzken, Margaret Harrison, Janette Laverrière, Adam Linder, Lee Lozano, Charlie Le Mindu, Shahryar Nashat, Stephen Prina, Ming Wong and more.

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PSYCHO

Ena Swansea and Robert Lucander at the Falckenberg Collection

Dirk Luckow (Ed.)

American painter Ena Swansea and Berlin-based Finnish painter Robert Lucander have never met but were paired in this exhibition catalog due to their shared interest in plumbing the depths of human emotions. Though different in expression, the two artists’ content lies between dream and waking, life and death. As the paintings of human psychosis bring the unexpected to consciousness, the catalog’s title Psycho recalls the Hitchcock film, in which it is impossible to penetrate the tension or to distinguish between victim and culprit. Essays by Harald Falckenberg, Belinda Grace Gardner and Miriam Schoofs.

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RETO PULFER

Zustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions

Reto Pulfer & Nikola Dietrich (Eds.)

Berlin-based Swiss artist Reto Pulfer’s (b. 1981, Bern) comprehensive monograph, Zustandskatalog: Catalog of States and Conditions, follows the artist’s wide-ranging, sensuous and mysterious work over the past 15 years. Self-taught, Pulfer constructs singular universes combining installation, sculpture, painting, performance, music and architecture with recycled materials and found objects. Excerpts from Pulfer’s novels and insightful texts by curator/critic Anselm Franke and French artist Benoît Maire are interspersed among 475 photographs of Pulfer’s technical drawings, one-off exhibitions, large-scale installations and performances. Categories such as living ceramics, food advice, ghostology, synesthesia and transformation are woven throughout the book, giving unique insight into the ideas and imagination that are part of the work itself. The large, elegant soft-cover publication, accompanying the multi-venue exhibition, is sumptuously designed and illustrated with full-bleed color images, many with by explanatory captions.

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PX: THOUGHTS ON PAINTING

Jan Bryant and Leonhard Emmerling

A combination exhibition catalog and provocative theoretical text, this book features two opposed essays disagreeing about the supposed purpose or operation of contemporary painting. The two-part Auckland show features the work of 25 painters from New Zealand, Europe and the United States – Gerhard Richter and Paul McCarthy among them – offering a wide variety of practices. Essays by curators Jan Bryant and Leonhard Emmerling pay particular attention to the legacies of conceptualism. Emmerling’s text takes off from Kant and Adorno to consider painting’s complete uselessness as the basis of its inalienability; Bryant adapts Jean Paulhan’s ideas on cliché and terror to account for aspects of contemporary painting practice that can’t be folded neatly into dominant arthistorical discourses.

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IMRAN QURESHI

Where the Shadows are So Deep

Contemporary Pakistani painter Imran Qureshi is a master of mixing the sublime with the reality of contemporary life where suicide bombings are a common occurrence and Nike sneakers mix with ancient tribal garb. Playing with scale and the polarities of dark and light, the artist’s current series of exquisite miniature paintings demands an altogether different kind of looking. Accompanying the artist’s exhibition at the Curve, Barbican, London (2016), this small richly illustrated hardcover catalog, third in the series, focuses on Qureshi’s use of miniature painting as a site for social commentary. Drawing upon the curve as a formal motif in the miniature tradition, the installation sequence responds to the dramatic architecture of the gallery space. Hung at varying heights, the delicate paintings begin by depicting gentle scenes of nature and then gradually transform with the addition of darker elements, subtly implying the uncertainty of what lies around the bend. Qureshi’s largest installation was recently featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Roof Garden (2013). Essays by Mohsin Hamid and Eleanor Nairne.

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THOMAS RAAT

Archetypes and Residues

Thomas Raat and Edwin van Gelder (Eds.)

Following his first publication, An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth and More, which created an almost cult-like following, Dutch artist Thomas Raat (b. 1979) interleaves ordinary objects such as chairs, doors, mirrors and tables with excerpts from Henry James’s The Real Thing (1892) in his second design-driven artist book, Archetypes and Residues. Some of the works have found new form under Raat’s hand—in Standard, chairs have been resurfaced and arranged in ensembles; the copper kick-plates, handles and locks of doors have been recomposed to read as paintings in Hanging Doors; in Mirror Windows, mirrors have been mysteriously darkened. The large-format publication filled with full-bleed images adopts an auction catalog format, and concludes with an index of the artist’s works describing the palettes and dimensions of each object reproduced here. By alluding to the two-dimensionality of the printed page, Raat reflects upon his sculptural practice as well as the space within printed matter. Contributions by Thomas Raat, Edwin van Gelder, Maria Barnas, Edwin van Gelder and Mainstudio.

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ARNULF RAINER

Andrea Madesta

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ARNULF RAINER

Rainer and the Women

Klaus Thoman (Ed.)

When the Albertina in Vienna dedicates a retrospective to Arnulf Rainer to mark his 85th birthday this year, it will no doubt be a brilliant review of a multifaceted body of work. This book presents for the first time an anthology of Rainer’s overpainted photographs of women, created from the 1960s to the present— images with erotic, even pornographic subjects. “The process of his confrontation … varies between elegant lineament, a tactile drawing encompassing and surrounding the body, and overpainting, whereby the flowing and spraying of the paint has clear associations with sexual acts, and sometimes the photographic work is entirely drowned in paint,” writes critic Peter Weiermair in his introductory text. In contrast, writer Andrea Madesta takes a critical view of the images of women and the historically conditioned, radical confrontation with social values and conventions in Rainer’s work.

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