Visitors to the 2001 Venice Biennale were highly impressed with the sculpture Boy--a child who stood five meters high--by the London-based artist Ron Mueck. Harald Szeemann called the sculpture the sphinx of the exhibition, and it soon became its landmark. The monumental, crouching figure of a youth makes a vulnerable, defensive impression and yet, its watchful eye seems to miss nothing. Mueck's human figures are always technically perfect, absolutely realistic, deliberately undersized or oversized. He first models them in clay and then takes a hollow cast which he fills with silicone or fiberglass. The finished sculptures show delicate networks of veins, fine hairs; they even seem to breathe. Their perfection is always in the service of content, however: Viewers are touched and set thinking by the emotional quality of figures like Pregnant Woman or Dead Dad--created by the artist after the death of his father. With great autonomous presence, exhibiting human features yet completely artificial, Mueck's artworks refer to fundamental questions and allow a wealth of associations.

Ron Mueck

Arts & Photography

Greeves, Susanna

Blume, Eugen

Mueck, Ron

Individual Artists

Hatje Cantz Publishers

Stefanie Schneider uses expired Polaroid film to photograph her friends in wigs, in silver underwear in trailer parks, and on rooftops, in a retro B-movie aesthetic helped along by the instant-antiquing of the discolored film and by the fact that some of her models are genuine movie stars. Among motel signs from the 50s, palm trees against the blue sky, candy-colored limousines, a gas station in the middle of nowhere, we find young people who seem oddly lost, vacant-eyed--among them Naomi Watts and Ewan McGregor. Director Marc Forster has picked up on Schneider's movie-friendly aesthetic and integrated her work into Stay, his new thriller starring Watts and McGregor. Stranger than Paradise, Schneider's latest reminiscence of a Hollywood that may never have been, that may be more David Lynch and Last Picture Show than anything real, has been created and brought out in cooperation with Hollywood as we know it today, and is to be released in conjunction with the film.

Stefanie Schneider: Stranger than Paradise

Joseph Beuys created his "Block Beuys" installation in the 1960s out of greatly varied materials and salvaged items that were selected, manipulated, altered and brought together in unusual ways. The objects correspond to one another and, in their unmistakable forms, refer to the artist's work in its entirety. Block Beuys is installed in a series of seven interconnected rooms in the Hessisches Landesmuseum in Darmstadt. In Leve sieht Beuys, the photographer Manfred Leve has documented "Block Beuys," not only in the variety of its individual pieces, but also with a view of the entire work of art. His black-and-white photos, devoid of any kind of staging, allow a thorough and genuine look at this radiant work.

Joseph Beuys: Leve Sieht Beuys: Block Beuys: Photographs

Reference

Steidl

It is above all the intrinsically bizarre form of the orchid that occasions Thomas Florschuetz's Flower Pieces. By means of cool stage settings and the blown-up extravagance of their natural size, the anthropomorphic forms of these flora are transformed into something that cannot be clearly named, but which stands as a metaphor of proliferative being even today.

Thomas Florschuetz: Ricochet

Lamorce, Jhim

von Ameluxen, Hubertus

Richter Verlag

The installation artist Arnold Dreyblatt is renowned for his media- and archive-supported works concerned with cultural memory. The collection Innocent Questions addresses Dreyblatt’s most recent work, which focuses on the question of the violation of personal rights in the present day. Using an oversized punch card, he shapes the façade of the Holocaust museum and Research Center in Oslo, Norway.

Innocent Questions (German Edition)

Seltzer, William

Fure, Odd Bjorn

Kehrer Verlag

Daniel and Geo Fuchs were, until recently, best known for their stark photographs of animals, fish and humans conserved in science museums, which address the mortality of their subjects. More recently, they've shifted from dark documentary to these glowing Technicolor images of action figures, retaining many of the same concerns and taking up questions about the power of mass media and the cult of personality. Their first crop of new subjects were Batman, Superman and the Incredible Hulk. They soon moved on to Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and Uma Thurman. And when they got to Saddam Hussein, Osama bin Laden and George Bush, the borders between reality and fiction really started to wobble. Commonalities between the networked world of entertainment and "war games" became unavoidable. The iconographic strategies of a president climbing out of a fighter plane equipped with military gear are scrutinized in a George W. Bush doll in its original packaging, with military accessories. How different the somber, plastic faces of Bruce Willis and Sylvester Stallone, Cold War-era soldiers without much left to do at the box office. These miniature sculptures--the title toys--turn out to be the ideal subjects for the Fuchs' intensely observed portrait photography, which asks but does not answer: outside the toy box, outside the frame, what is real and what is staged? Toygiants leaves the interpretation of its pale, vacant, plastic faces to the viewer.

Toygiants

Verlag Fur Moderne Kunst Nurnberg

Maslen and Mehra: Mirrored

verlag fur moderne kuntse nurnberg

Black Mountain (allemand) /allemand

Spector Books

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Books by Blume, Eugen