Professional Documents
Culture Documents
DCV - May 2022
DCV - May 2022
For the longest time, physical matter was seen as no more than a passive and lifeless object.
Since the early years of the twenty-first century, however, visual artists and scientists alike have
initiated a change of thinking, conceiving matter as active, unruly, and autonomous. The
ethnologist Hans Peter Hahn has called it the "willfulness of things," while the Belgian philosopher
Isabelle Stengers has underscored the "power of wonder"-the bracing sense of marvel and
surprise instilled by a material world that sometimes defies the attempt to put it into words.
This pioneering publication features six selected artistic positions that highlight the New
Materialism's significance for contemporary art. The artists employ materials that are millions of
years old such as rocks from an open-pit mine as well as classic inorganic staples like ceramics
and cutting-edge materials like digital products transformed in high-tech procedures into hitherto
unseen hybrid objects. Their work lends art a powerful voice in contemporary debates around
man's position vis-a-vis his environment, around sustainability, participation, and justice.
With works by Ilana Halperin, Agata Ingarden, David Jablonowski, Markus Karstiess, Robert
Smithson, and SUPERFLEX.
www.artdata.co.uk
ART
www.artdata.co.uk
ART
Ugo Rondinone is one of the most accomplished artists of his generation. For three decades, the
conceptual and installation artist has built an oeuvre grappling with themes of time and
impermanence, day and night, reality and fiction, nature and culture. Spanning diverse media-
painting, sculpture, film, and installation art-his work is rooted in the transformation of outward
reality into a subjective and emotionally charged world within, harnessing a multifaceted system
of inspirations and references from German Romanticism to American Land Art and international
pop culture. Balancing the mundane with the spiritual, the artist conjures suggestive atmospheres
that capture the contemporary mood.
This book gathers four exhibitions of Ugo Rondinone's work in 2021: a wall . a door . a tree . a
lightbulb . winter at theSorlandets Kunstmuseum (SKMU), Kristiansand, Norway; a sky . a sea .
distant mountains . horses . spring at Sadie Coles hq, London; a rainbow . a nude . bright light .
summer at Kamel Mennour, Paris; and a low sun . golden mountains . fall at Galerie Krobath,
Vienna.
www.artdata.co.uk
ART
For seven years Cara Galowitz walked the streets of Corona, Queens every day during her lunch
break from her nearby museum job, where she worked as an art director. These photographs,
which she calls "an exercise in seeing", capture the vivid juxtapositions of one of the most
ethnically diverse neighborhoods in the world.
Through layers of irony, humor, and visual sophistication, these photographs evoke a place that
is a continual work-in-progress, where the past, be it faded lettering or crumbling architecture,
collides with the present in the form of spontaneous street decorations, signage, graffiti, and
religious iconography. The images evoke the struggle and resilience of the people of Corona, as
well as capturing the quirky beauty of the streets.
www.artdata.co.uk
ART
www.artdata.co.uk
ART
The German-Czech artist Michael Bielicky (b. Prague, 1954; lives and works in Karlsruhe) has
been an innovator in the fields of photography, video, and web-based installation art for over four
decades. In an ongoing dialogue with emerging technological developments, his works probe the
history of his media from the deepest strata to the magical mathematical practices of the
medieval Cabalists: idiosyncratic hybrids that straddle the boundary between the analog and
digital worlds. Operating on the interfaces between real and virtual spaces, his media art prompts
a critical reflection on the nature of technology, its material and immaterial significations, and the
ways in which it informs our perceptions and actions. The book Perpetuum mobile is the first to
offer a comprehensive survey of Bielicky's rich and diverse oeuvre. The layout, designed by the
artist himself, integrates the experimental images into a graphic "stream of consciousness."
www.artdata.co.uk
ART
While Wolfgang Gafgen's hand drawings and woodprints are widely acclaimed, only
connoisseurs are familiar with his photographic oeuvre. The extensive body of analog black-and-
white and color photographs spans the decades from the late 1960s to the present and is no less
accomplished than the artist's graphic works and prints. This book, with essays by Christian
Gogger, Olivier Kaeppelin, Clemens Ottnad and Michel Poivert, is the first to gather a large
selection of these pictures, illustrating the interdependencies between works in the different visual
media of expression. Artfully arranged still lifes breathe a spectral animation into ostensibly trivial
everyday objects. The human figures that appear now and then seem to be engaged in cultic
performances; many of the photographic works are accompanied by ironic quotes from the earlier
history of art or allusions to historic myths.
www.artdata.co.uk