MIRJAM THOMANN

2015

Eva Maria Stadler & Mirjam Thomann (Eds.)

Berlin-based artist Mirjam Thomann’s work deals with spaces, gaps, architecture, buildings and their relationship to viewers. Designed by the artist, this monograph/ artist book presents a broad selection of her work from 2006 to 2015, including a ceramic project at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Taipei, spatial interventions at Galerie Christian Nagel in Cologne and Berlin, and a series of display sculptures based on a reconstruction of a 1960s exhibition design, among others. A preface by art historian and curator Eva Maria Stadler on the artist’s “setups” as a critique of exhibition design, and an essay on the artist’s process by art historian, critic and artist Tom Holert accompany over 100 illustrations. Thomann’s visuals—photographs of installations, booklets, invitations, performances and archival material collected by the artist such as postcards, video stills, floor plans and snapshots—are presented at similar scale and organized in a reversed timeline.

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JENNET THOMAS

The Unspeakable Freedom Device

Margaret Thatcher is the spectral protagonist in this dystopian folkloric work by London-based experimental narrative video artist Jennet Thomas. Using color and design to great effect, Thomas follows the movement of her characters as they navigate a new environment at once sinister and psychedelic, savage and ritualistic. In a world in which all signs have collapsed and meaning has imploded, two impoverished pilgrims stumble through a broken landscape in which profound disorientation leaves them unsure of which route to choose: red, blue or green? As the colors rotate, the fiction loops and the pilgrims must start their search again. Thomas’s video and performance work emerged through 1990s London’s experimental underground film and live art club scene, where she was co-founder of the Exploding Cinema Collective. Her film works are screened extensively at international film festivals, with retrospectives at Toronto’s Pleasure Dome and New York’s Anthology Film Archives, among others.

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David Thorpe

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THOSE EARLY YEARS

British and German Art after 1945

Carina Plath (Ed.)

Postwar Great Britain and Germany were both marked by literal hunger as well as hunger for artistic freedom of expression. As the artistic spirit reemerged in the 1950s, what did it look like in these two cultures? In this well-researched and attractive publication, Carina Plath and Dorthe Wilke, curators of the exhibition at the Sprengel Museum, Hanover, look at this time for signs of artistic autonomy rising from the ashes of a brutal period. Divided between sculptural work and painting, the show explores work that set the stage for the art world of today. Substantial essays by John-Paul Stonard, Gerhard Marks Haus, Arie Hartog and Carina Plath are intertwined with well-captioned reproductions of the featured works making this publication more of an historical document than exhibition catalog. Twenty-eight artists are featured including Francis Bacon, Willi Baumeister, Lynn Chadwick, Hans Hartung, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Bernard Schultze, Hans Uhlmann and more.

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THROWN

British Columbia’s Apprentices of Bernard Leach and Their Contemporaries

This book forms a foundation for research into this significant and under-recognized aspect of West Coast culture – the legacy of Bernard Leach’s approach to pottery in St. Ives, England, and its influence on important West Coast potters such as Michael Henry, Glenn Lewis, John Reeve and Ian Steele. These potters, along with Wayne Ngan, Tam Irving and Charmian Johnson, formed an integral part of the West Coast studio pottery movement that flourished during the 1960s and 1970s and produced a legacy of ceramics equal to any other in the world. Lavishly illustrated with archival and exhibition photographs from the Morris and Helen Belkin Art Gallery’s 2004 “Thrown” exhibition, the book contains essays and writings by Glenn Allison, Michael Henry, Tam Irving, Charmian Johnson, Glenn Lewis, Lee Plested, Herbert Read, John Reeve, Naomi Sawada, Doris Shadbolt, Ian Steele, Nora Vaillant, Scott Watson and Soetsu Yanagi.

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ESTHER TIELEMANS

New Scenes

Saskia van der Wiel & Freek Lomme (Eds.)

Drawing attention to the visual quality of concentration, sensation, relations, attraction and repulsion—as if played out on the world stage in front of her— Dutch artist Esther Tielemans presents painted panels as décor hanging on the wall, lying on the floor or hanging free in space. Taken together, these forms act almost like props, creating a large-scale abstract landscape for the viewer to wander.

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JENNI TISCHER

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Manuela Ammer (Ed.)

Emerging Berlin artist Jenni Tischer’s work weaves an unlikely bond between minimalist sculpture and the frayed, human history of textile work. Vividly conveyed in this compact beautifully illustrated exhibition catalog accompanying her survey show at Mumok, Vienna (2014)—the result of winning the Art Basel 2013 Baloise art prize—Tischer’s installations blur the boundary between display and artwork: walls and floor interlock, open cubes intertwine with “Viennese netting” recalling Thonet chairs, architectural objects allude to looms and pin cushions. Tischer ponders the impact of the anachronistic practice of weaving: How is human labor inscribed into its materials and surfaces? Why are textiles gaining momentum in the digital age? Between “pins” (needles) and PINs (personal identification numbers), Tischer considers the memory of materials and the digital encoding of identities, staking out a space for the human in a polished design world. Essays by curator Manuela Ammer, critic Ines Kleesattel, art historian Karola Kraus and artist Barbara Kapusta.

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Gert & Uwe Tobias

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GERT & UWE TOBIAS

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TOKAIDO LANDSCAPES

The Path from Hiroshige to Contemporary Artists

Hiroshige’s early 19th-century series, Fifty-three Stations of the Tokaido, is a masterpiece of ukiyo-e (woodblock printing) landscape tableaux. The artist takes the viewer along one of the main roads of Japan, linking Edo (now Tokyo) with Kyoto and a famous scenic route that includes celebrated sights like Mt. Fuji. This unprecedented – and stunningly beautiful – exhibition catalog delicately and faithfully reproduces Hiroshige’s prints, and goes on to works by other important artists following in the footsteps of this classic series: 62 woodblocks from the 1960s by Shiko Munakata; Yoshitomo Nara’s In the floating world, No Nukes!; a mix of samurai and modern scenes by Akira Yamaguchi; and photos of a magnificent painting-installation by up-and-coming artist Kazuyuki Takezaki. Two centuries of Japanese art and artists on one timeless theme.

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