Throughout the Cold War, the creation and reception of art in Germany was inseparably linked to divided political realities. Artists in East and West Germany redeployed the traditions of abstraction and realism in new national and international contexts, creating a wide range of powerful artworks, often responding to popular culture and technologies of reproduction.
This substantial and profusely illustrated book, with sixteen important essays by major art historians and cultural critics, is the first comprehensive look at the full extent of postwar German art. It includes work by Georg Baselitz, Willi Baumeister, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Joseph Beuys, Hanne Darboven, Hermann Glöckner, Hannah Höch, Jörg Immendorf, Anselm Kiefer, Blinky Palermo, A. R. Penck, Gerhard Richter, Rosemarie Trockel, Werner Tübke, Wolf Vostell, and many others.
Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures is the catalogue for a groundbreaking international exhibition that reveals for the first time the contribution of both Germanys to the development of contemporary art.

Art of Two Germanys/Cold War Cultures

Arts & Photography

Barron, Stephanie

Eckmann, Sabine

Gillen, Eckhart

History & Criticism

Abrams

[Grid < > Matrix] is the first publication in the Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics series, a series of exhibitions and publications that explore the interpenetration of different screens of representation in contemporary culture—from the canvas to the computer terminal, the cinema to the television set, the video monitor to the museum wall, the book page to the cell phone display. This series probes the aesthetic uses and historical dimensions of contemporary screen culture and sheds light on how different artists make use of newer media and technologies, how the rise of the digital impacts dominant codes of art, culture, and experience, and how today’s screens open alternate windows on the past, present, and future. [Grid < > Matrix] traces two different but closely related modes oforganizing the visible world and its aesthetic representations. In analog cultures, the notion of the grid empowers the production of images that claim universal authority. Most often static in nature, grid-like structures, spaces, and images approach the viewer as immediately recognizable and hence devoid of unwanted surprises. Digitally-based matrices, by way of contrast, set the modernist grid into motion. They have the ability to catalyze visual expressions and experiences that, in spite of their algorithmic foundations, aim at open-ended and often unpredictable transformation. Grid and matrix, as presented in this exhibition, form a central dialectic of modernist and postmodernist culture. Featuring two essays, one by each of the exhibition curators, the publication's aim is not to tell a story of linear historical progress, but to explore continuities and ruptures between the analog and the digital, between the organizational principles of older and newer media. [Grid < > Matrix] includes artwork by Theo van Doesburg, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Piet Mondrian, Agnes Martin, Andy Warhol, John F. Simon, Jr., Andreas Gursky, Albert Oehlen, Jeffrey Shaw, and Julius Popp, among others. Essays by co-curators Sabine Eckmann, Ph.D., director and chief curator at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, and Lutz Koepnick, Ph.D., professor of German, Film, and Media Studies at Washington University in St. Louis.

[Grid< >Matrix] (Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics)

Koepnick, Lutz P.

Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum

Windows both connect and divide interior and exterior, public and private spaces.  Interfaces update the function of the window in today’s world of omnipresent screens and digital information. Window?¦Interface, based on a forthcoming exhibition at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, explores how artists such as Olafur Eliasson, Cerith Wyn Evans, Monika Fleischmann, Kirsten Geisler, Pierre Huyghe, Richard Long, and others have addressed the role of windows and interfaces as mediums of perception and transport. The book investigates art that explores the limits of the body in relation to the surrounding world and reveals the embodied character of human experience.Lavishly illustrated and accompanied by essays that situate the exhibition in the context of contemporary art, this volume is the second in the Kemper Art Museum’s Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics series, inaugurated in 2006.

Window - Interface (Volume 2) (Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics)

Thaddeus Strode’s vibrant large-scale paintings are universes unto themselves: wild mash-ups of California surf and skateboard culture, Zen philosophy, rock music, literature, film, and comic books. Absolutes and Nothings marks the artist’s first major museum show, presented as part of the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum’s Contemporary Projects series.  Strode’s images draw on a wealth of motifs inspired by a broad range of sources in popular culture, freely combined with the artist’s own creations. The strength and visual pleasure of Strode’s aesthetic come from his self-reflexive combination of painterly styles and incongruous elements, in which enigmatic texts, phantoms, monsters, and castaways play off one another to produce cryptic—and captivating—fantasies. Including over two dozen full-color images of works from 2001 to the present, as well as essays by Sabine Eckmann, Meredith Malone, and Benjamin Weissman, Absolutes and Nothings is a fascinating premier monograph from one of our most vital and exciting contemporary visual artists.

Thaddeus Strode: Absolutes and Nothings (Volume 1) (Contemporary Projects)

Malone, Meredith

MediaScapes: Art, Technology, Nature (Volume 3) (MLKAM-Screen Arts and New Media Aesthetics)

American artist Sharon Lockhart is well known for her formally strict and conceptually precise films and photographs. Lunch Break, her newest solo exhibition, is the product of more than a year spent at the Bath Iron Works shipyard in Bath, Maine, observing and engaging with shipbuilders during breaks from their daily routines. The resultant two film installations and three series of photographs present images that are devoid of sentiment yet deeply humane, intimate in their focus on everyday situations while reflective of broader global conditions through their historically grounded approach.To accompany the exhibition, this catalog from the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum includes over one hundred images in full color, essays by exhibition curator Sabine Eckmann and art historian Matthias Michalka, and an interview with Lockhart conducted by filmmaker James Benning.

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break

Taking as its impetus a group of important new acquisitions at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, Precarious Worlds explores thematic connections between some of the most influential artists working in Germany today. Works by Franz Ackermann, Cosima von Bonin, Charline von Heyl, Thomas Demand, Hans-Peter Feldmann, Isa Genzken, Sergej Jensen, Michel Majerus, Manfred Pernice, Wolfgang Tillmans, and Corinne Wasmuht are examined in light of how they mediate the radical political and societal transformations that followed the fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the Cold War as well as the worldwide effects of the digital age.            Characteristics such as the fragility of objects, the disorientation of visual perception and geographical location, and the instability of both historical memory and notions of the “real” recur throughout these otherwise diverse and unique paintings, photographs, installations, sculptures, and fabric works. This fully illustrated color catalog includes an essay by Sabine Eckmann and extended entries on each work by Svea Bräunert.

Precarious Worlds: Contemporary Art from Germany

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III is the third volume in a series examining the work of acclaimed video artist and photographer Sharon Lockhart. Known for collaborating with remote or marginal communities such as blue collar workers of the twenty-first century, as she did in Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break I, the artist also blurs the line between photography, video art, and documentary. The results are simultaneously staged and artificial, yet at the same time intimate and deeply human. Her newest museum installations also incorporate artworks and utilitarian objects made by others, expanding upon earlier forms of institutional critique. This book includes essays by curators and scholars who provide an international perspective on the artist’s evolving series. Stunningly illustrated, Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III serves as a reminder of the power and beauty of Lockhart’s art.  

Sharon Lockhart: Lunch Break III

Published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Mildred Lane Kemper Art Museum, "In the Aftermath of Trauma "presents the work of contemporary video artists from around the world who use their medium to probe traumatic experiences and their aftermath. Engaging with historical events such as the Holocaust, the terrorist attacks of 9/11, the Vietnam war, and the conflicts between India and Pakistan, these artists use the semi-documentary format to delve into the very nature of trauma, offering ways of comprehension that go beyond either head-on confrontation or denial and repression. In lieu of this dichotomy, each piece in the exhibition reveals a more nuanced and complex relationship between the past event and its present ramifications. The works in the exhibition have a thematic emphasis on the present after-effects of historical trauma and the future possibility of closure in either the real world or the imaginary realms of the artists. Replete with beautiful colo

In the Aftermath of Trauma: Contemporary Video Installations

Famed for her painted portraits, Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965) has also created a wide range of prints over the past two decades, including monotypes, lithographs, woodcuts and etchings. Experimenting with different techniques, she uses a variety of diverse paper stocks and handmade papers as well as various colored and monochromatic inks. In comparison to the diminutiveness of her paintings, the relatively large scale of these prints--in particular of the lithographs and monotypes--is remarkable. Her portrayed subjects here include historical figures such as William Shakespeare, Oscar Wilde and his lover Lord Alfred Douglas (Bosie) and Richard Wagner; visual artists such as Frida Kahlo, David Hockney, Andy Warhol and Robert Mapplethorpe; pop stars such as Eminem and Kurt Cobain; as well as her friends. More recently, Peyton has turned to the genre of the still life to explore and renew its contemporary relevance. This monograph of Peyton's prints is the first in-depth exploration of the artist as a critical printmaker. It includes essays by Sabine Eckmann and Hilton Als as well as an interview with the artist conducted by Beate Kemfert. Featuring more than 70 of her prints in color, the catalogue also includes the first comprehensive index of her prints to date.

Elizabeth Peyton: Ghost: Works on Paper

ALS, Hilton

Kemfert, Beate

Reference

Hatje Cantz

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