Heart of GlassDavid Reed’s innovative oeuvre and self-definition as a painter took place in the ground-breaking context of the Abstract Expressionism, Pop Art and Minimalism. Reed’s significance, which to this day has not been sufficiently appreciated, resides in the fact that his work evinces a simultaneous sensory opulence and analytical clarity, which in turn has to perform a self-transformation in painting in order to arrive at adequate results under the auspices and conditions of a new digital reality. In so doing, Reed’s painting draws upon a basic experience of a reality which is only tangible through the medium of painting. Surrogate images have always lurked behind the supposedly authentic experience, the apparently real body, for within Reed’s cosmos, the surrogate takes the place of the authentic because, in a world governed by images, the unique experience of the real takes place in the modality of the repetition of preformed images. The fitting experience here dates back to the late 1960s when Reed was engaged in classical plein air painting in the deserts of Arizona and New Mexico. After having spent the morning painting, he went in search of shade in a cave in the vicinity of Monument Valley and drank from a well there that seemed strangely familiar to him. He then found his way into a small canyon that was likewise familiar. Only years later did he realise the reason for this peculiar familiarity which this completely unknown locality held for him: he had once seen the cave in the John Ford movie »The Searchers« (1956). The first illustrated catalogue of his paintings eagerly awaited by devotees of abstract art, depicts them for the first time in a so-called flatbook in an appropriate size without the aid of unappealing hinged flap.Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Bonn, 28/6–7/10/2012

David Reed: Heart of Glass: Gemälde und Zeichnungen 1967–2012

Arts & Photography

Reed, David

History & Criticism

Snoeck Publishing Company

OrbitSigmar Polke’s work contains around 200 editions dating from 1963 to 2009, and the collection Ciesielski has collected them worldwide in their entirety. The book accompanying the exhibition showcasing this collection and its juxtaposition with works in the Lambrecht-Schadeberg collection in the Museum of Contemporary Art Siegen, is intended to facilitate an intense discussion of work of individual, outstanding editions by the late winner of the City of Siegens Ruben’s Prize (2007) lead by a younger generation of critics, but also by specialists with intimate knowledge as well as close associates. The authors embark upon an exciting adventure to formulate new approaches to the work of the ambivalent and ironic Grand Master. With his sheets, maps, books, photographs and objects, Sigmar Polke opened up completely new pathways for art in the twentieth century by means of surprising themes and experimental techniques. The editions drew upon his paintings, on the one hand in order to feed back into them, but on the other, to develop completely individual media-based aspects—almost as if to say: a life of its own. The special feature of Sigmar Polke's editions is of course the fact that a camouflage-like blurring principle is granted full thematic exploration within them. He produced photos here reminiscent of reportage and social criticism and juxtaposed them as equals with his colourful, serial prints containing everyday motifs, his so-called »German-pop« style-mix of simple fabrics. His critical attitude towards both the media and culture shines through in his multiples, especially when he worked with historical engravings or optical equipment, or even when simulating magical procedures.
Exhibitions: Museum für Gegenwartskunst Siegen, 16/3–23/6/2013 les Abatoirs, Toulouse, 31/1–4/5/2013

Sigmar Polke: Die Vervielfältigung des Humors: Kat. Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Siegen, und les Abatoirs, Toulouse

Devourer of ImagesKay Heymer calls the artist TAL R the »devourer of images« whose new group of ceramic sculptures invokes a number predecessors, such as André Derain, Alberto Giacometti, Willem de Kooning, Jean Fautrier, Hans Josephson, Georg Baselitz and Günther Förg. Each of them have, in their own respective ways in their sculptures, and often in apparent naivety, studied the boundaries of form and the beginnings of figuration based on body or body parts directly moulded from their chosen materials: Derain, de Kooning, Fautrier and Förg, for example, on the basis of heads or masks; Josephson and Baselitz using amorphous torsos; Giacometti and Baselitz in relation to individual hands, legs and feet. TAL R has devoured this tradition as quickly as he has regurgitated it, and, like his colleagues, he is fascinated and inspired by much older traditions of sculpture firmly rooted in religious and social behaviour. Including and primarily votive offerings—body parts for healing purposes proffered in supplication, which can be found in their hundreds, often stacked in piles, across the world from the Seine in France to the Northeast of Brazil, as a sign of magical folk beliefs. TAL R’s sculptures, his reformulations, are simultaneously naïve and refined, virtuosic and amateurish, reflective and genuine, artificial and authentic, vulgar and absolute, pure childlike innocence. »Who could ask for more?« Kay Heymer rightly asks!

TAL R: Egyptian Boy: Kat. CFA Berlin

Gu nther Förg's beautifully produced, limited-edition book features twelvelarge-format lead paintings from 1989. The oversized trim size and highquality photographic reproductions convey an immediate and visceralimpression of the paintings at scale. Like his contemporary and onetimecollaborator Blinky Palermo, Förg dedicated himself to combiningtraditions of American Minimalism with a rigorous conceptual and evenmystical underpinning. Förg s thinly painted wooden surfaces andcloudy, layered palette have an enigmatic appeal, seemingly organic yetcountered by the painterly application of his strict geometric figurations.In the words of fellow artist Max Weschler, The special color of the lead[...] oscillating between iridescent gray and blue, seems like a darklythreatening storm with its infinite gradations of gloom that coalesces ina fine play upon natural and artificial patinas. Contributing essays byBritta Schröder and Max Wechsler.

Günther Förg: Zwölf Bleibilder: 1989

The First World War ranks as the seminal political catastrophe of the 20th century, but the sociocultural worlds that collapsed in 1914 into global conflict had long been fragile at best. German painter Franz Marc summed up this bellicose spirit as follows: In our era of great struggle for new art, we do not fight as the organized, but as wild ones against an old, established power. This richly illustrated catalog sharing the personal stories of enlisted protagonists from Klee to Picasso examines the processes of transmission between the international art movements of the time. How were the artists of the historical avant-garde molded or even deformed by the experience of war? More than 40 pitoval artists are featured to support this well-researched project, including Beckmann, Kandinsky, Leger and many more. Essays by curator Uwe M. Schneede and others.Published by Snoeck, Germany; Bundeskunsthalle, Bonn

1914 The Avant-Gardes at War: Cat. Bundeskunsthalle Bonn

Scrupulous and precise: the drawings of Walter Pichler
»If you make a drawing and it is entirely without purpose, then you take a step back, and at the same time you become ever more precise. If you are too bold, you isolate the object you want to report on; if you are too timid, you do not capture the object it was your intention to report on.« Scrupulous, precise, yet at the same time retaining great artistic freedom for himself—this was how Walter Pichler (1936-2012) came across to people and likewise pointed the way to understanding his work. On the one hand there is the drawing, the basis of Pichler’s work, yet above all there is the space and the nature of sculpture, the most important parameters of Pichler’s work. These are given form in works on a variety of themes: the person in the space, sculpture, the depiction of sculpture, Pichler himself, woman, man, the head, the torso, the friend, the mother, the couple, the family, the child, the bed, an occurrence, death, the wounded, the wanderer, the drinker, the sketcher, the watchwoman, the insulted, the person standing around, a construction, a floor plan, the house, the room, the cross, an important detail, a conversational situation. So it’s also about the human body and its sensibilities brought about by specific circumstances, and these become materially and spiritually tangible as states of consciousness, writes Christian Reder, companion of Pichler and one of the two authors of this publication. Early on, in his early thirties, Walter Pichler was recognised internationally as an independent and explicitly experimental artist, who would not allow himself to be limited to any one area, and in the years that followed he had a number of much-noticed exhibitions and participations: at the Museum of Modern Art (1967 and 1975), at Documenta 4 (1968), at the Venice Biennale (1982, most recently in 2013 in the Palazzo Enciclopedico), at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt/Main (1987), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (1998) and MAK in Vienna (1990 and 2011). Through these, Walter Pichler showed himself to be »one of those artists whose work becomes ever more puzzling over time«, states Stephanie Weber, the second author of this book, which may also have to do with the fact that he was, as he himself said, »anti-ideas«, and therefore vehemently opposed to a joining of the artistic process with a purpose or an ideology.
Exhibition: CFA Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin, 14/9–2/11/2013

Walter Pichler: Zeichnungen: Kat. CFA Berlin

Markus Lüpertz: Architecture Dithyrambic. Drawings and Paintings (1964–1977)»The capriciousness, as well as the freedom, with which Markus Lüpertz approached this theme, but also painting and life in general, was something I found unique, and which expanded my state of consciousness, oriented as it was towards the Bauhaus and nurtured by Protestantism, to reach its greatest possible extent. This was the happy and logical progression of what had already changed for me in the studio of Hans Scharoun (...). Discovering these spaces, which for me were so new and spiritual, awakened me from a long, deep sleep. The right angle was replaced and the aesthetics changed,« writes Johannes Gachnang of his late 1960s meeting with Markus Lüpertz in Berlin, where the later curator and publisher had worked as an assistant to Scharoun. What today’s critics sometimes state vitriolically to be »anti-modern« behavior by Lüpertz was, in reality, a revelation for art in post-War Germany, as the material contained in this publication clearly shows. This applied especially since this attitude arose from a deep confrontation with the historic and utopian architecture that artists were already discussing and working on even following the First World War, such as Wenzel Hablik, but most notably Bruno Taut with his »Alpine Architecture«. From Lüpertz’ works we can see that since 1964 he has focused on the theme of the house, which he interprets as a house to live in, a studio, a family house, a settlement—all the way through to the idea of »Lüpiland«. The volume shows the formation of a pictorial language by Markus Lüpertz, which was subsequently to become a principle in his work, »namely the deliberate confrontation of opposites in the individual work,« as Siegfried Gohr writes in his excellent article.Exhibition: Kunstverein Heilbronn, 1/10–17/11/2013

Markus Lüpertz: Architektur dithyrambisch: Kat. Kunstverein Heilbronn

Gohr, Siegfried

Lüpertz, Markus

Löbke, Matthia

The collection of Reinhard Onnasch demonstrates an astounding art and culture transfer between America and Europe. Published in conjunction with the exhibitions at Hauser &amp; Wirth in London in the fall of 2013 and in New York in early 2014, Re-View: Onnasch Collection is the first in-depth study of Reinhard Onnasch’s activities as a gallerist, art dealer, catalog publisher, and art collector. Its chronology presents a wealth of previously unpublished documents and photographs, and includes, for the first time in English translations, several interviews with Onnasch. From these conversations one gains a sense of the passion with which he built his remarkable collection. Works that could be considered exemplary of Pop art or Minimalism are featured alongside important works of color-field painting, Fluxus, assemblage, and Abstract Expressionism, which the publication illustrates with new photographs in honor of the occasion. The works reproduced in the catalog represent a veritable vanguard of the twentieth century’s most important art movements.

RE-VIEW ONNASCH

SCHIMMEL, PAUL

Onasch, Reinhard

Individual Artists

<div>Deep drilling by Manfred Pernice This complex book by Manfred Pernice goes back to an exhibition at Museum Ludwig Cologne in 2007. At that time, he had combined the early work ­»Bibette Headland« (1999) with »Haldensleben« (2005), a work further developed specifically for the exhibition, and the »Hotel Hangelar« (2007), exhibited for the first time back then. These three large and, to some extent, accessible sculptures refer to the architecture of bunkers, airport towers and small town neighborhoods. Today, after a decade, it is clear that these three sculptures occupy a central ­position in the work of the artist. They illustrate Pernice's long-standing examination of the historical and socio-political contexts of ­architecture and the aesthetics of everyday life. At the same time, his sculptures, despite their references to reality and history, exist as independent objects, as ­objectification, that present themselves in a productive reciprocal relationship of the familiar and the foreign, turning aesthetic experience into insight. The book displays, for the first time, the varied text and image material of Manfred ­Pernice's research and ­presents it together with a survey of the realized works of art at Museum Ludwig Cologne. </div>

Manfred Pernice: Haldesleben · Bibette headland · Hotel Hangelar: Kat. Museum Ludwig Köln

Pernice, Manfred

Museum Ludwig Köln, Barbara

Butter in the sun
In 1966, when Kuehn first exhibited the work group »Melt Pieces« at the legendary Bianchini Gallery in New York, he noted in his sketchbook: »Butter in the sun. What could be more fatal?« This brief consideration signifies one of his basic principles: the procedural aspect. Kuehn rebelled with his early work against the authority of the rigid stable form, as was represented by the then predominant Minimal Art: The ideal cuboids seem to have started to melt like ice or butter. Physical processes, often associated with external forces, transform intact geometric shapes. Kuehn experimented with different materials (tar, fiberglass, latex, metal, wood) and an incredible breadth of creative possibilities. Deformations and transformations, the basic form remaining intact, become visible and produce a narrative as well as a metaphorical moment. The main factor here is the tension of opposites – strength and weakness, rigidity and flexibility, hardness and softness, solid and fluid state collide and raise one of the basic themes of human existence: the question of boundaries and freedom. In 2000, Gary Kuehn noted that his work »lies somewhere between sex and geometry«. The book, which was created in close collaboration with the artist, gives an insight into the diverse sculptural, painterly and graphic works from five decades, with an emphasis on the 1960s. A central theme of the book and exhibition is the close link between painting and sculpture in Kuehn’s work. In addition to knowledgeable accompanying texts, it is especially the richly illustrated exhibition chronology containing interviews and artist texts that make this book indispensable.
Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, 19/9/2014–25/1/2015

Gary Kuehn: Cat. Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein

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