HolzwartH publications

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HOLZWARTH PUBLICATIONS
Spring 2016
Eric Hattan Works.
Werke Œuvres 1979–2015
Edited by Anthony Spira and Lutz Eitel
With texts by Anthony Spira, Stefanie Bräuer, Patrick Javault,
Eva Kuhn, Maja Naef and Ralph Ubl, Philip Ursprung and
biographical notes by Lutz Eitel
Hardcover with dust jacket and inserted brochure
21 x 28 cm
464 and 40 pages
1523 illustrations
Text in English, German and French
ISBN 978-3-935567-87-9
80.00 Euro
Swiss artist Eric Hattan (born 1955) creates his work from the everyday. He needs only the most simple
things: packaging that he turns inside out; furniture that he pins against the ceiling with wooden poles;
shoes that walk up a wall; or his own clothes as an image for the artist’s presence. Everything is lifesize, also in his video works that take a close look at common details and incidents. It is not an innocent gaze, though, and spectators have to be fully aware of what they perceive, if it is an actual room
or just a small model behind the spy hole, if it is a structural column or just a plaster stand-in. There
even seem to be traces of violent intervention: breeched walls, giant street lamps bent or torn out of
the floor ... if aesthetics are an ordering of the world, then here that order is stood on its head.
Eric Hattan became an artist the practical way, by engaging with the world and organizing
the local art scene, especially though the off-space Filiale, which he first opened in 1981. This book
presents the artist’s complete journey, an overview of works always reinvented in situ, in hundreds of
installation images and video stills and a collection of essays that for the first time present the artist’s
oeuvre from all angles. There emerges an artistic approach that is not about the conquest of ever new
spheres, but about the open exploration of sidelines. Hattan’s work develops seemingly familiar terrain
and inspires us for our own encounter of the everyday.
TERRAIN VAGUE (excerpt from the essay by Philip Ursprung)
If I had to select an emblem for Hattan’s work, I would take the motif of the mattress stemmed against
the ceiling. I consider it emblematic because it combines several artistic questions raised by Hattan.
What usually lies on the floor or on a bed, to support our body, is now held in place by some poles,
tucked against the ceiling. Does it mimic architecture? Or does it play with our perception, because
after looking at the ceiling for a while we start to ask ourselves if we are looking upwards from down
below, or actually downwards from high up? Is the mattress no longer useful? Or does it help support
the ceiling – like a capital on a Doric column, like Atlas bearing the weight of the world on his shoulders? Do we sympathise with the effort of holding the mattress high above our heads, because of
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Sales Ursula Stricker, Tel +49-7531-944250, vertrieb@holzwarth.de
Spring 2016
the anthropomorphic aspect, because it could be us, squeezed between the necessity to hold things
together, to perform, yet also tired and waiting for relaxation? ... Hattan is aware of the ambivalence of
art to both complicate and simplify life. His scepticism towards abstractions, generalisations and definitions runs through his entire oeuvre and his writings. It is not only evident in the friction between the
human body and its environment, but also between the individual imagination and the generalising
system of language.
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Déplacement, 2010. Public space, Basel
–> 296/297: All the While, 2008. MAC/VAL, Vitry-sur-Seine 2009
Distribution GVA Göttingen, bestellung@gva-verlage.de
Spring 2016
John Hilliard:
Accident and Design
With texts by David Campany and John Hilliard
Hardcover
24 x 28,2 cm
104 pages
59 color illustrations
Text in English and German
ISBN 978-3-935567-84-8
45.00 Euro
The photographs of British conceptual artist John Hilliard (born 1945) pose intricate questions to their
medium. Since the end of the 1960s, the artist has taken that medium’s representational capacities to
the proof, has made photos that are theses on perception, that critically expose photography’s inherent possibilities and flaws, while in turn creating his own striking images. In ever new experimental
set-ups, he utilizes every means offered by the medium: double exposure, multiple points of view,
changing perspectives, blow-ups, cut-outs, sequencing, superpositions, and much more. By these
means, Hilliard explores what an image can tell you about the world and to what extent the apparatus
itself will determine the meaning.
Accident and Design surveys the artist’s work of recent years, with additions of selected earlier
pieces to arrive at a focused stocktaking of artistic themes and issues. The essay by David Campany
elucidates how through photography Hilliard was able to forge new paths after the endgame of conceptual art. Three programmatic texts by the artist reveal the theoretical foundations and practical
approaches of his different work series.
ACCIDENT AND DESIGN (excerpt from the essay by John Hilliard)
Assuming photography’s most common purpose in representing the appearance of its objects to be
mimetic, and given its origins in a period of naturalism in nineteenth-century European art, then as
a strategy it can be compared to parallel endeavours within descriptive painting and drawing. The
exactitude implicit in such practices seems to militate against a tolerance of the accidental – that is,
occurrences beyond the intent or awareness of the creator. Nevertheless, unforeseen incidents may
be seen to occur in the end-products of either discipline, although their locus may differ.
As with a fisherman’s net, in addition to the main catch, the camera has the capacity to scoop
up the unexpected. Indeed, such inclusions may even evade detection, unnoticed at the moment in
which the picture is taken, overlooked during the printing process, only to be discovered (if at all) in
the finished image – eliciting a frisson of pleasure or a pang of dismay, depending upon their perceived
Spring 2016
suitability. Such accidental inclusions may escape the initial awareness of the photographer as a result
of the very nature of the process of recording. Within a practice ranging from spontaneous snapshots to painstakingly prepared pictures, most images will be ‘captured’ by the camera in a fraction
of a second. Looking through the viewfinder immediately prior to that moment, elements may be
moving unpredictably in front of the lens, a priority may be to target only a specific subject from within
a complex field of view, and in any case the capability of eye and brain to have an equal and particular awareness of everything in the frame may be severely limited by time and restricted by the size
and/or luminosity of the viewing screen. In such circumstances, a great deal of responsibility will be
delegated to the disinterested mechanism of the camera itself.
In the above description, it is the lack of conscious attention to, or lack of engagement with,
every detail of the image during its production that leads to after-the-fact discoveries which can be
seen, in retrospect, as accidents waiting to happen... The unheralded details found lurking in peripheral
areas of the photograph are most likely to be acknowledged as a bonus at the very least, and at best
elevated to pivotal status within the finished work. Recognising the significance of such accidental
inclusions in a retrospective assessment is a legitimate part of creative responsibility. There is what is
intended to be there and there is what has actually arrived, and the artist/photographer needs to be
alert to both ends of the process. They must also be allowed the pleasure of discovering their own
work – of knowing what they set out to achieve and seeing what has transpired: aware of both the
similarities and the differences within that endeavour, prepared to be critical of any shortfall yet also
willing to celebrate the presence of the unexpected and to welcome some accidental guests at an
otherwise designed event.
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A Studio Palette For John Everett Millais And Charles Landseer, 2015. Pigment print on Hahnemühle paper / Pigmentdruck auf Hahnemühle-Papier, 102 x 123 cm
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Spring 2016
Bridget Riley
With a text by Éric de Chassey
Hardcover
24 x 30 cm
38 pages
Text in French and English
ISBN 978-3-935567-81-7
35.00 Euro
Two years after being awarded the 2012 Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen, Bridget Riley created
a ten-metre wide wall painting for the local Museum of Contemporary Art. It was in stark black and
white, composed from black angles and arcs on a white ground. After decades of exploring the subtle
effects of colours, with this painting the artist revisited and developed the work she had started in
the early 1960s as a pioneer of op art. Then, in 2015, at Galerie Max Hetzler in Paris, she showed a
focussed selection of five related works: a nearly nine-metre-wide wall painting, as well as two monumental and two smaller panel paintings. They were all in black and white and built on variations of a
modified triangular shape with one side rounded convexly or concavely. The two smaller paintings
themselves were shaped in triangular form. The different dimensions of the works and the repeating forms they were based on offered a complex interplay within the exhibition spaces. This book
now renders the connections between the works as clear as a walk through the gallery. An essay by
French art historian Éric de Chassey puts the development of this new series in a context with examples of famous paintings from the artist’s earlier work phases.
UNBOUND CERTAINTIES
(excerpt from the essay by Éric de Chassey)
In thus revisiting her own past, Riley does not forsake her allegiance to the principles of modernism,
which entails that each work of art is an adventure with an unforeseeable result reached through a
process of trial and error, and not the illustration of a pre-existing idea or the mere formalisation of a
floating image. Riley simply leaves aside – as she has long since done – the teleology that went with
modernism up until the 1970s, in order to direct the viewers’ attention to the particular effects created
by each painting.
The scale of the new paintings makes them not only a visual experience, but a bodily experience, too. Far from inducing the ‘radical disembodiment’ associated with Riley’s 1960s works, these
paintings have their roots in the here and now of a bodily perception that can only function in the
Spring 2016
presence of a stable object. We identify an image on the surface of the painting at the same time as
the image’s complex perceptual effects make themselves felt, whether or not we are conscious of
them, concentrating on them or simply looking while paying no particular attention. But unlike the
large curve paintings, where ‘one is unavoidably reminded of human gestures and movements’, the
new black-and-white paintings are thoroughly non-figurative, without any suggestion of bodies: they
are to be experienced by an incarnated eyesight, which is not replicated nor even hinted at in them.
They are more like landscapes, or rather, because they are reduced to a contrast of black and white,
they are like the movements of light and shadows that you can experience on a stable surface or
moving across a field. Although this field is that of a picture or wall, it relates to experiences made
in nature: ‘It did begin in Cornwall with walks on the cliffs’, Riley has acknowledged. ‘You walk one
way and you walk back and the light is different.’ This is where the address of these paintings rests –
not on the basis of a teleological notion of progress to which viewers would be led indiscriminately
through excitation – but on that of a one-on-one relationship. What we experience first in these paintings are some harmonious certainties (and our uncertain world demands some certainties because
we are lost enough in our everyday lives), which never lock themselves onto closed identities, but,
within a prolonged viewing, are at our disposal to be freely and pleasurably analysed, broken apart,
recomposed, started anew – each time in a personal way.
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Chorus, 2015, acrylique sur support en polyester APF / acrylic on APF polyester support, 200 x 450 cm
Spring 2016
Rolf-Gunter Dienst:
Frühe Bilder und Gouachen
With a text by Martin Engler Hardcover
28 x 27 cm 64 pages
Text in German ISBN 978-3-935567-86-2
45.00 Euro
Rolf-Gunter Dienst (born 1942) has been a key figure in German art since the 1960s, both as an
abstract painter and as editor of the magazine Das Kunstwerk. The oil paintings and gouaches from
1962 and 1963 presented here mark the beginning of his artistic work. Influenced by abstract expressionism and minimalism, he developed his essential issues as a painter from a scriptural token, a
small reference to painterly gesture, covering the canvas in rows from one end to the other. The motif
allowed for endless formal variations and color gradations, from which Dienst created his own mode
of allover painting. This book is a documentation of his breakthrough, an important chapter in the
history of the German avant-garde.
VERSPRECHEN UND VERWEIGERUNG (excerpt from the essay by Martin Engler)
Die Spannung zwischen zeichnerischem Kürzel und Bildraum, zwischen Struktur und Form, ist das
zentrale Movens der Malerei Diensts. Auch wenn zu Beginn die Dienst’sche Paraphe noch recht
barock ausgreift, das Spielerische sich noch sehr offen am Repetitiven reibt, wenn sie im Maßstab
changiert, noch sehr nahe dem Schriftzeichen, im Kalligrafischen verhaftet ist. Gerade diese spielerische Offenheit macht jedes einzelne Blatt und Bild immer wieder zum Zeugnis eines skrupulösen
Wahrnehmungsprozesses. Und mit jedem Bild wird von neuem die Idee einer unverstellten, unmittelbaren Sichtbarkeit Lügen gestraft. Den Bildern eignet ein Moment der Transparenz und des Fließens,
der Offenheit und des Sich-Verschließens. Farbe und Struktur zersetzen sich im Sehen. Und selten
formuliert Dienst dieses Grundtheorem so frei und großzügig wie in diesen frühen Werken.
Was es hier zu „sehen“ geben könnte, entzieht sich dem Sehen als schlichtem Schauen
oder im Sinne einer finalen, abschließenden Beschreibung mit großem Erfolg und ebensolchem
Mehrwert. Diese Bilder wollen im Gegenteil immer wieder neu gesehen werden. Das Sehen ist bei
Dienst zugleich Prozess und Verheißung – beides wird nie oder zumindest nie gänzlich eingelöst. Ein
im besten Sinne dialektischer Prozess, dessen komplementäre Lesarten in keinem Fall im Bild, sondern immer nur außerhalb zur Deckung kommen, als Leistung des Betrachters. Und diese ästhetische
Spring 2016
Kippfigur, dieses Sowohl-als-auch aus Versprechen und Verweigerung, begründet wesentlich das Sinnliche und die Seh-Lust der Bilder Rolf-Gunter Diensts. Eine Re-Lektüre der frühen Arbeiten Diensts
gibt deshalb nicht zuletzt auch dem Umgang mit unserer unmittelbaren Gegenwart einen anderen,
profunderen Hallraum, wenn es das Werk vermag, seine Verwurzelung in der Kunstgeschichte sichtbar werden zu lassen. Das Werk von Rolf-Gunter Dienst spannt mit seinen skripturalen Einschreibungen den Bogen zurück von den frühen Jahrzehnten des 21. Jahrhunderts bis zur Kunst der 60er Jahre
des 20. Jahrhunderts. Die Kleinteiligkeit unserer Narration der Gegenwartskunst macht mit einem
Male einer neuen Großzügigkeit Platz, wenn wir künstlerische Werdegänge nicht mehr im kurzatmigen
Dekadenrhythmus beschreiben, sondern anhand großräumiger Sinneinheiten, wie etwa der lebenslangen Erkundung eines skripturalen Kürzels.
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Ohne Titel, 1963, Gouache auf Papier, 31,9 x 42,4 cm; Ich liebe Anna, 1963, Gouache auf Papier, 86 x 61 cm
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Ohne Titel, 1963, Gouache auf Papier, 49,8 x 65,2 cm; Ohne Titel, 1963, Gouache auf Papier, 50 x 65 cm
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Spring 2016
Inge Mahn
With texts by Robert Fleck, Noemi Smolik,
Stephan von Wiese
Hardcover with dust jacket
21 x 28 cm
78 pages
23 color and 19 b/w illustrations
Text in German and English
ISBN 978-3-935567-83-1
45.00 Euro
The sculptures of Inge Mahn take their cue from everyday objects. Dog houses and bird boxes, a
traffic tower, a set of classroom furniture, steeples and chimneys have been recreated, refashioned
and bizarrely alienated in white plaster and other common materials. Their silken surfaces absorb the
light and render their forms more abstract, like phantoms in the room. In the artist’s exhibitions, the
sculptures are installed in different constellations to include the spectator in a tension field between
public space and personal experience.
Inge Mahn (born 1943) studied at the Academy of Arts in Düsseldorf where until 1972 she was
a master student of Joseph Beuys. In the year of her graduation, she was invited to documenta 5 by
curator Harald Szeemann. Since then she has widely exhibited in national and international solo and
group shows. In 1983 she became professor first at the Academy of Arts in Stuttgart and later at the
Weißensee Academy in Berlin. Today she lives and works in the village of Groß Fredenwalde in northeastern Germany.
SCULPTURAL ASSERTIONS IN SPACE (excerpt from the essay by Robert Fleck)
Several sculptures by Inge Mahn are positioned in a space, receiving their form from it. Others
assert themselves like architecture, self-confidently and discreetly, in a surrounding space that is not
made precise. The irregular white surfaces reveal the traces of numerous fabrication processes and
absorb the light that should be intensified by their large surface area and pale colour. This circumstance explains the sculptures’ peculiar presence. Despite their formal relation to Minimal art, they do
not demand attention, unfolding instead a particular poetry from this modest, though very decisive,
stance. Their uniform whiteness and their irregular surfaces, which break the ambient light, evoke an
impression in the viewer of standing before clear bodies, which, like phantoms, do not occupy the
space they define, but keep it open.
Another aspect of Mahn’s sculptures likewise reveals her oeuvre to represent a position in the
recent discourse on three-dimensional art that has been given far too little attention. Each work by
Spring 2016
Mahn evokes seen things, mostly architectural in nature, but displaces them into a subjective imagemode through coarse execution and the obvious unusability of the resulting form... Works not immediately related to an architectural context, such as Polizeikanzel (Police pulpit, 1973), one of the first
large works Mahn completed after leaving art school, take up structures from the public sphere –
in this case, an elevated platform used by traffic police. Mahn created the form, however, in such
an obviously handmade and functionally useless way that an endless chain of quasi-metaphorical
meanings arises: the posturing of state power, the evocation of East German watchtowers along the
intra-German border at the time, and the ironic link between the police platform and the Christian
preacher’s pulpit...
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Roter Teppich, 1980/2015, Polizeikanzel, 1973, Balancierende Kugel, 2015, Staffelei mit acht Bildern, 1978, Hundehütten, 1977, Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2015
Hundehütten, 1977 (oben / above); Roter Teppich, 1980/2015 (rechts / right), Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, 2015

HolzwartH publications

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