The disturbing and challenging imagery in this Berlin-based artist's work is pulled from history, art history and popular culture. He makes it his own in a variety of mediums, including painting, sculpture, drawing, collage and installation. Subjects include the symbols of the Third Reich, comic book heroes and science fiction scenes, a complex and diverse system of signs, removed from the popular lexicon and distorted to present provocative and subversive parallels. He is particularly inspired by the 1930s, the decade that witnessed Germany's transition from the Weimar Republic to National Socialism, from democracy to totalitarianism, but was also marked by the development of film as a powerful new tool of mass communication. He confronts the visual language of Fascism with signs of Modernism, with comic strips and film, in order to interrogate its charismatic power and superficiality. This Island Earth includes color reproductions of numerous new works, including a 36-foot-long painting, as well as smaller paintings, drawings, collage works, sculptures and banners.

Andreas Hofer: This Island Earth

Arts & Photography

Individual Artists

Steidl/Hauser & Wirth

This long-overdue survey of the London-based, 2001 Turner Prize-winner's work--the first comprehensive look at his career--makes up for that delay by reproducing each and every one of his more than 500 works, a total that's easy to track because each piece has a number in lieu of a title. Creed's sculptures, installations and drawings come from the objects, works and sounds of everyday life. Constantly searching for the essential nature of things, he uses the simplest materials to create a world in which obsessions and fantasies radically alter reality and transform it into a catalogue of rigid rules and unexpected exceptions. His work is simultaneously spectacular and subtle, playful and severe, at times almost cruel in its stark dryness. Creed's pieces are characterized by their economy of means and site specificity. This awareness of context and the role of the viewer leads to a variety of unexpected artistic propositions: a protrusion from the wall, a sheet of paper crumpled into a ball, a door opening and closing, the lights going on and off, or a soundtrack inside a moving elevator.

Martin Creed: Complete Works

History & Criticism

Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere works in wax, wood, wool, horse skin and hair, among other materials, creating compelling forms that suggest distorted human and animal bodies. Her figures are often faceless and fragmentary, perched precariously on high stools or suspended from walls, ceilings or tall iron columns. Each of the eight works illustrated here is photographed from multiple views and approaches, offering the reader their intricate "skin" textures and presence at closer range than would be possible if one were standing in front of the works in a gallery. De Bruyckere was born in Ghent in 1964, and came to international attention at the 2003 Venice Biennale, and has since shown in Paris, Berlin and London.

Berlinde de Bruyckere: Schmerzensmann

Subotnick, Ali

Reference

On October 4, 1959, Allan Kaprow (1927-2006) premiered his seminal work 18 Happenings in 6 Parts at the Reuben Gallery in New York City. Kaprow combined new electronic music and music theory, the plastic arts, theater and dance within an innovative structure that demanded audience participation. This happening anticipated, and gave form to, the conceptual dialogue of contemporary art. In November 2006, 18 Happenings in 6 Parts was performed a second time at Munich's Haus der Kunst in conjunction with a major traveling retrospective of the artist's work and the tenth International Dance Biennial of Munich (DANCE). Andrè Lepecki's faithful rendering of 18 Happenings in 6 Parts is a living work as relevant and groundbreaking today as it was for Allan Kaprow's audience of 75 invited guests in 1959. This book is a rich visual introduction to both Lepecki's presentation of Kaprow's happening and the 2006 Kaprow retrospective.

Allan Kaprow: 18 Happenings in 6 Parts

Rosenthal, Stephanie

Meyer-Hermann, Eva

Lepeke, Andrè

Joan Mitchell (1926-1992) was a pre-eminent painter of the Abstract Expressionist generation, and, along with Lee Krasner and Helen Frankenthaler, one of the few female painters of her era to gain critical and public acclaim. She came to attention in the early 1950s but only recently has her work won the recognition it truly merits. Her large-scale gestural paintings register a great acuity of feeling and tremendous vitality. Leaving America documents Joan Mitchell's exhibition at Hauser and Wirth Gallery, London, which featured works made between 1960 and 1965, after she had relocated from New York to France. In the paintings of this period Mitchell moved away from the all-over style and bright palette of earlier compositions, instead deploying more sombre hues and dense central masses of color. The brushwork in these paintings is nonetheless full of zest, the paint flung and squeezed on to the canvases, spilling and spluttering across surfaces and smeared on by hand.

Joan Mitchell: Leaving America: New York to Paris 1958-1964

Molesworth, Helen

Nothing to Remember! is a facsimile of 22 delicately-colored prints on hand-drawn music paper created between 2004 and 2006 by Louise Bourgeois. This artist's book follows an earlier publication, Ode à l'Oubli (Ode to Forgetfulness), which Bourgeois made entirely out of fabric, using linens and clothing remnants from her past. Nothing to Remember! is an immediate collectible, with only limited quantities available.

Louise Bourgeois: Nothing to Remember!

Bird is the culmination of Roni Horn's long-running photographic series of taxidermied Icelandic wildfowl. Photographed at close range against white backgrounds which recall conventional studio portraiture, the birds are viewed from behind, abstracting their varied physiognomies and markings into inscrutable shapes and patterns. Despite the title's singularity, the birds in this series are presented as diptychs in order to compare and contrast different species. This gesture of doubling-as an aesthetic and conceptual strategy-has been a consistent motif for Horn since 1980, serving to invite careful scrutiny from the viewer. Horn's images are accompanied by a text from writer and curator Philip Larratt-Smith. In place of the usual catalogue essay, Larratt-Smith has compiled an extended series of quotes and anecdotes from film, literature, photographers' monographs and Horn's own writings. Roni Horn was born in 1955 in New York, where she continues to live and work. Since earning her MFA from Yale University in 1978, she has shown her sculptures, installations and photographs extensively throughout the world. She has had solo exhibitions at the Dia Center for the Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and her work will be the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 2009.

Roni Horn: Bird

Zhang Enli's paintings depict the familiar and overlooked--everyday objects that are connected through the artist's immediate surroundings in China. His brushstrokes come close to traditional Chinese ink painting, where every stroke articulates elements that are significant to the whole. This volume includes work from 2005 to 2008.

Zhang Enli: Container

Pirotte, Philippe

Andreas Hofer's Phantom Gallery, exhibited simultaneously in 2008 at Hauser & Wirth in Zurich and an abandoned Los Angeles storefront on Sunset Boulevard, was devoid of artwork. Instead, there were pale traces on the walls suggesting that paintings had recently been removed after hanging for a long time.

Andreas Hofer: Phantom Gallery

Available in English for the first time, Viennese painter Maria Lassnig's diaries--originally published in German in 2000 by Hans Ulrich Obrist--are a collection of journal entries, notes, poems, letters, photographs and drawings.

Maria Lassnig: The Pen Is the Sister of the Brush: Diaries 1943-1997

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Steidl/Hauser & Wirth publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Steidl/Hauser & Wirth