TOM HUMPHREYS

Flaca

Nikolaus Hirsch and Sophie von Olfers

From 2003-2007, one of the most exciting exhibit spaces in London was Flaca, in the home of artist Tom Humphreys. This copiously illustrated exhibition catalog looks back on those days through Humphreys’ eyes. It’s a perfect match with the Frankfurt-based museum, Portikus, and its tradition of interpreting the exhibition space in forever new ways. Humphreys made no pretense to offer an illustrative or historically accurate representation of his activities in those days; he created a group show with more than 40 artists, some of whom never showed at Flaca. The catalog expresses the energetic, engaged style that characterized Humphreys and his creation, Flaca. Contributing writers are Thomas Bayrle, Christian Egger, Nikolaus Hirsch, Sophie von Olfers with essays recalling the excitement of discovering artists in this cutting edge space, its historical chronology and much more.

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Tom Knechtel

On Wanting to Grow Horns: The Little Theater of Tom Knechtel

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TOM WESSELMANN

Pictures on the Wall of Your Heart

American artist Tom Wesselmann (1931-2004) emerged as an artist in the 1960s Pop Art scene – alongside Warhol, Lichtenstein, and Rosenquist – with his Great American Nudes series. Throughout his career he also made still lifes, which are the focus of this exhibition catalog. Using some of the artist’s most accomplished works, the curators examine individual, incremental changes and developments in his work via the still lifes, from the found-object collages in his early career to shaped canvases to laser cut-outs from the late 1990s. The catalog investigates the deeply “American” quality of Wesselmann’s works, as well as his sly allusions to European tradition.

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TONEL

Lessons of Solitude

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TOO MUCH WORLD

The Films of Hito Steyerl

Nick Aikens (Ed.)

Hito Steyerl is one of today’s most respected—and presciently relevant— practitioners and theorizers of modern visual culture. She speculates on the impact of the Internet and digitization on the fabric of our everyday lives. As prolific in her writing as in her film and image-making, this book gathers a decade’s worth of the artist’s own writing alongside critical essays and readings of Steyerl’s practice. Published to accompany a major mid-career retrospective at the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven and the Institute of Modern Art, Brisbane, this publication is a charged slideshow of the artist’s extraordinary investigations into the status, circulation, and materiality of images. Texts and writings by Sven Lütticken, Karen Archey, Ana Teixeira Pinto, Nick Aikens, Thomas Elsaesser, Pablo Lafuente and David Riff are spliced with over one hundred pages of color stills and documentation of three never-seen-before works: Liquidity Inc. (2014), Shunga (2014) and Surveillance: Disappearance (2013)…

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Topographies

Karen Moss

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MARIO GARCÍA TORRES

An Arrival Tale

Daniela Zyman & Cory Scozzari (Eds.)

Appropriation, storytelling, reenactment and reportage are some of the strategies Mexican conceptual artist Mario García Torres (b. 1975) deploys to highlight the limitations of factual evidence and the agency of historical records and objects. An Arrival Tale detaches his works from their original context and offers them as a collection of narratives and artistic experiments in order to address the urgencies of our time. The amply illustrated monograph exploring the artist’s multidisciplined work—film and video, photography, sound and performance—pairs diverse contributions by sound artist Carl Michael von Hausswolff, writer Armen Avanessian, curator Chus Martinez plus theorist Anke Hennig examining the space of arrival as a complicated and disjointed nexus between departure, displacement and return. While conceived in relation to the solo exhibition at TBA21, Vienna, the publication expands on thematic threads of spatial disjunction, recollection, asynchronicity, fictionality and the politics of visibility. Torres has exhibited and performed at the Hammer Museum (2015), the Stedekijk Museum, UC Berkeley Museum of Art and Pacific Film Archive, Tate Modern, dOCUMENTA (13), the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and more.

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TRANSPARENZEN/TRANSPARENCIES

The Ambivalence of a New Visibility

Simone Neuenschwander & Thomas Thiel (Eds.)

The globalized world seems at once transparent and opaque. While modern life is characterized by a desire for more transparency in communication, politics and business, limitless access to information has eroded our personal privacy. In the two-part, joint exhibition project curated by Simone Neuenschwander and Thomas Thiel, contemporary artists examine the many cultural facets and atmospheres of a (non) transparent society: the consequences of an algorithm- and data-collection driven life and world, our changed relationship to privacy and strategies of refusal or deliberate disclosure of data, among other issues. Conceptually designed by the activist Dutch design group Metahaven, this overscaled dense catalog is packed with images, artistic statements and scientific essays from both exhibitions, including outlines of all the contributions to this substantial project. Using mapping and fragmentation to convey the ubiquity of silent surveillance, the book is a complex and provocative contribution to this ever-present social dilemma. Contributions by Emmanuel Alloa, Neïl Beloufa, Clare Birchall , Juliette Blightman, Ryan Gander, Calla Henkel, Max Pitegoff, David Horvitz, Metahaven, Katja Novitskova, Yuri Pattison and Manfred Schneider.

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ELMAR TRENKWALDER

Ornament and Obsession

Evelyn-Dorothée Allemand, Arie Hartog, Markus Landert & Hans-Peter Wipplinger (Eds.)

In a contemporary art scene in which one artist’s work can be mistaken for another’s, no one ever fails to recognize Austrian Elmar Trenkwalder’s utterly unique vision. Avidly collected throughout Europe, his clay sculptures combine vegetable-like forms, grotesquely distorted fragments of the human body, sexual obsessions reminiscent of the Kama Sutra and elements of Rococo architecture; he also creates drawings, paintings and mixed-media installations. The absolute opposite of trendy minimalism, Trenkwalder’s oddly human theater of architecture shows exuberant ornaments functioning not so much “holy shrines” as they are sly exhibitions of dreams and the unconscious.

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LUCA TREVISANI

Renate Wiehager (Ed.)

Curator Renate Wiehager provides us with the essential pointer regarding the working method of Luca Trevisani by bringing Le Corbusier into play, whose amorphous architectures had been inspired by artifacts found at the boundary between nature and culture. An extensive overview of young Italian artist Luca Trevisani’s work is documented for the first time, featuring over four hundred reproductions. Trevisani, born in Verona (1979), working in Berlin and Bologna, creates an associatively-gathered world from multiple sources including graphic and product design, cultivation processes, scientific maps, literature, arts and crafts techniques, art history, elements of nature, photos and more. His sculptures and paintings are made with natural as well as manufactured materials (branches, feathers and string, metal bars among much else) and suggest the fragility of tactile experiences while insisting on the idea that the external world is understood only through direct experience. Essays by Renate Wiehager, Andrea Cortellessa and Luca Lo Pinto.

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