All products of the tree-part exhibition series "Playing the City" as special offer:

Interview Reader, 393 pp., 2012, 22,00 €

Playing the City 3, dvd, 160 min, 2012, 14,90 €

Playing the City 2, dvd, 160 min, 2010, 14,90 €

Playing the City 1, dvd, 130 min, 2009, 14,90 €

regular price 66,70 €

The bold and extraordinary oeuvre of the American painter Philip Guston (1913–1980) was one of the most widely discussed of his time. He was the first to return figuration to postwar American painting, was innovative in his combination of “high art” with images from popular culture, and is today celebrated as the pioneer of postmodern, figurative painting. On the occasion of the artist’s 100th birthday, this publication focuses on late works by Philip Guston as a milestone of American painting.

The catalog provides an overview of the artist’s oeuvre as well as numerous essays whose authors examine various thematic complexes within her overall concept, including film, music, and “intermedia”. Ono’s works are characterized by dualisms and her concern with basic elements and fundamental issues of human existence. Many works revolve around the phenomena of light and shadow, water and fire, air and sky. Destruction and healing as well as balance play important roles in Ono’s concept. The catalog features a comprehensive survey of the multifaceted universe of this extraordinary artist, who is regarded as a pioneer of early conceptual, film and performance art as well as a key figure in the world of music, the peace movement and feminism, who continues to play an influential role in current developments in art. Some 200 objects, films, spatial installations, photographs, drawings and textual pieces as well as a special music room will shed light on the diverse media landscape of Ono’s art and the central themes of her oeuvre. The catalog devotes particular attention to Yoko Ono’s works from the 1960s and 1970s.

With her installation “Die bewegte Leere des Moments” (The Void of the Moment in Motion), Alicja Kwade opens up a space of its own for the viewer, a space that offers possibilities for new perspectives and considerations, increases the viewer’s powers of concentration, and sharpens all his senses. What do time, motion, and space mean for the individual? To what extent do scientific findings provide orientation and support in this specific constellation?

Basquiat was not only an artist, but also someone who understood the art of living. With his classmate Al Diaz he tagged New York buildings with the pseudonym SAMO©, he painted everything he could lay his hands on, embellished clothes with his signature, worked as a DJ at the Mudd Club, founded the band Gray and produced a hip hop record. As he became more successful the artist attracted the attention of the New York creative scene in the 1980s, and in 1982 he became the hitherto youngest artist to participate in the documenta. Basquiat’s complex and explosive work, which resulted from his interdisciplinary artistic approach in cooperation with numerous artists, reveals its full potential in this catalog.

TIP. The catalog not only features Basquiat’s drawings, paintings and graffiti, but also provides an insight into rare archive material from public and private collections. It expands on and analyzes the historical and cultural context of Basquiat’s work – from the New York Bebop scene to Basquiat’s comprehensive book and video collection.

He is the "first Austrian Expressionist" and for many still an insider tip: Richard Gerstl (1883-1908). The painter is mentioned in the same breath as the three masters of Viennese modernism - Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka. Until his suicide at the age of only 25, he created an exciting, unusual, if manageable oeuvre with impressive highlights and groundbreaking innovations. For the first time in Germany, the SCHIRN is showing a comprehensive retrospective, bringing together almost all of the works by him that are known today.

The painter René Magritte (1898–1967) was a conjurer of enigmatic paintings. In a concentrated solo exhibition devoted to the great Belgian Surrealist, the SCHIRN explores his relationship to the philosophical currents of his time. Magritte did not see himself as an artist, but rather as a thinking human being who conveyed his thoughts through his painting. Throughout his life he sought to imbue painting with meaning equal to that of language. The SCHIRN is presenting Magritte’s masterpieces of enigmatic painting from the 1920s to the 1960s, among them his emblematic selfportrait entitled La Lampe philosophique (The Philosopher’s Lamp) (1936), Les Mémoires d’un Saint (The Memoires of a Saint) (1960) and Le Beau Monde (The Beautiful World) (1962). The exhibition features some 70 artworks, including numerous masterpieces from major international museums as well as public and private collections.

Two artists, two gener­a­tions of rather differing prove­nance: The SCHRIN is dedi­cating a compre­hen­sive exhi­bi­tion to the surprising and previ­ously largely over­looked affini­ties in the work by Alberto Giacometti (1901–1966) and Bruce Nauman (* 1941). Draw­ings, photographs, videos, sculp­tures and large-scale instal­la­tions by the US multi­media artist will enter into an exciting dialogue with selected sculp­tures and paint­ings by the Swiss sculptor. Both artists’ oeuvre revolves primarily around the image of man and the human condi­tion. With reduced formal language, it looks to explore funda­mental exis­ten­tial ques­tions.

Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is Finland’s most prominent female artist. Her work is of epoch-making significance. Recognition for Schjerfbeck’s portraiture is ubiquitous throughout Scandinavia – with her likeness even reproduced on the obverse side of the Finnish two-euro coin. The artist is honoured as a national icon. This monograph presents an overview of Schjerfbeck’s oeuvre from its beginnings in realism in the 1880s to the late, strongly abstract self-portraits of the 1940s.

The credo of today’s society without boundaries reads “ever faster, ever higher, ever further.” In the early twenty-first century, man, oscillating between euphoria and depression, finds himself confronted with the promising opportunities of a global and virtual world as well as the challenge to constantly improve, optimize, and shape his life more efficiently. The presented works are not aimed at visualizing the contents of the eponymous epochal novel “Infinite Jest” by David Foster Wallace. The book rather explores the various demands confronting today’s individual, in which the modes of resistance and the contradictions of a reality often described as lacking any alternative make themselves felt. The catalog is a commentary on the exhibition. The essays it contains are reproductions in a twofold sense: they reproduce the idea of the presentation in textual form, and they are reprints. The artistic manifestos also published in the book refer to the included essay by Alex Danchev on the one hand and are a constant companion to early-twentieth-century art on the other. They demonstrate the ever-recurring desire for renewal in a way of their own.
Artists: Francis Alÿs, Maurizio Cattelan, Claire Fontaine, Peter Coffin, Lara Favaretto, Andrea Fraser, Karl Holmqvist, Judith Hopf, Ceal Floyer, Josh Kline, Alicja Kwade, Joep van Liefland, Helen Marten, Kris Martin, Navid Nuur, Daniel Richter, Michael Riedel, Anri Sala, Ryan Trecartin, and the Kopp Collection.

Tobias Rehberger (*1966) is internationally renowned for his trenchant and witty works. Numerous awards and exhibitions honor the artist whose complex oeuvre occupies an outstanding position within today’s art production. Rehbergerʼs work cannot be categorized as associated with a special medium or dedicated to a certain subject. Relying on a variety of media rather, the artist has created sculptures, installations, posters, and paintings and thus dealt with a wide range of themes spanning from optical delusions and identity games to issues of transience. It is often the genesis of a work his art focuses on: the artist frequently falls back on his own memories, draws inspiration from outdated techniques of production, or provokes his viewers by furnishing his works with alleged flaws or lending his works the appearance of copies when viewed for the first time. Many works are results of a joint authorship, works for which Tobias Rehberger relies on others’ information and ideas.

Caillebotte’s radical, precisely conceived compositions and highly modern, and photographic depictions reveal unconventional perspectives within the context of Impressionist art. The new medium of photography played an important role in the development of his pictorial inventions. Caillebotte’s pictorial worlds bear witness to a close relationship between photography and painting in the development of the New Vision. Many of his paintings and drawings refl ect formally similar images found in the medium of photography, the aesthetics of which are clearly echoed in Caillebotte’s compositions. 

The catalogue ‘George Condo. Mental States’ pictures the distinctive body of work of the American artist Condo has produced since the early 1980s. His artistic style combines mercilessly the beautiful and the grotesque, seriousness and absurdity. Thereby he is ironic, provocative and witty. Skillfully drawing on the pictorial language of past centuries, Condo incorporates a variety of painterly and pictorial styles into his work. One focus is on his imaginary portraits – archetypes, evoking different mental states, which unsparingly exposes the yawning abysses and ridiculousness of modern society.

Gabríela Friðriksdóttir approach is characterized by the use of a variety of media: drawings, paintings, photographs, and sculptures figure as prominently as installations, performances, and video films. In her works Friðriksdóttir assembles various cultural, religious, and psychological elements to unfold a unique aesthetic canon of signs, forms, and meanings. This becomes particularly evident in her films, whose surreal scenarios, abandoning all traditional patterns of narrative, confront the viewer with wondrous worlds in which dream images mingle with stories from Norse mythology and references to sexual psychology. For her films, Friðriksdóttir has repeatedly collaborated with the Icelandic pop star Björk. For the Schirn, Gabríela Friðriksdóttir has conceived a room entitled “Crepusculum” (dusk, twilight) in which medieval Icelandic manuscripts are combined with the artist’s mysterious system of signs and a new film production to create a mystical landscape.

This is the first comprehensive publication to focus exclusively on the Surrealists’ three-dimensional works—about 180 of them in all. From today’s perspective, many of them seem surprisingly fresh and contemporary, not at all like historical artifacts. The selection presents more than fifty artists of the Surrealist period, including familiar names such as Duchamp, Magritte, Dalí, Picasso, and Man Ray, but also many other artists whose striking works are yet to be discovered by a wider public.

Gustave Courbet (1819–1877) is the preeminent representative of Realism and the spearhead of a style of painting committed to socially relevant issues. His lifelike portraits defy the artistic convention of idealization. The painter had another side, however: in his portraits, landscapes, drawings, and still lifes, he depicted a contemplative, meditative, inward-looking world, which stood in stark contrast to the fast-paced industrialization of the period.

At the 2009 Venice Biennale, the artist showed Watershed, a single-family house, which he floated in a Venice canal in an attempt to promote the suburbanization of water. For the Schirn, Watershed was cut into pieces. The transformed house is a new sculpture titled Sir Walter Scott which physical components are used as material for an examination of the physical and psychological dimensions of contemporary suburban architecture.

Within the space of just nine years painter Uwe Lausen assimilated styles such as Pop Art and Hyperrealism in a highly individual way while reflecting unsparingly on the authoritarian social structures of postwar Germany. The fortieth anniversary of the death of Lausen, a self-taught artist who took his own life at just twenty-nine years of age, is commemorated by the appearance of two publications: a catalogue in which his passionate and—from today’s perspective—extremely topical oeuvre can be rediscovered, and the artist’s collection of aphorisms, HERE AND NOW (1967).

These days people love art—especially contemporary art, which has become a constantly growing cultural factor. Fascinated by the artists' creative milieu, the public strives to share in its atmosphere. In a time of upheaval this publication offers a look behind the scenes of the contemporary art world. Many artists keep an eye on what happens in the art world and reflect the more and more lavish trade: from the creative process and the mounting of an exhibition to the rituals of the scene.

This comprehensive publication is devoted to the Conceptual Art movement in Russia, still relatively unknown in the West, of the late and post-Soviet period. Like their contemporaries in the West toward the end of the sixties, Conceptual artists in Moscow reflected on the existential experience of being part of a political concept. In a radical departure from the romantic image of the autonomous artistic genius, the viewer is included in the art; processes of production and conditions of reception are exposed

This reader presents the most-known archictects from the exhibition, biographic data, famous buildings and information about their projects.