Made in Germany

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Bruce Altshuler

The avant-garde is a twentieth-century phenomenon. By the turn of the nineteenth century, artists were beginning to address a far larger audience than ever before, and it was one on whose understanding they could no longer depend. Aesthetic concerns, too, had shifted from representing visual phenomena to reconfiguring the visible world in new and complicated ways. The public was rarely amused. Indeed, as these newer forms of art were presented in now famous exhibitions, derision and anger were the customary responses of the public and the critics. Artists formed more or less cohesive groups of like-thinking individuals who styled themselves the "avant-garde," really a military term for those pathfinders who first venture into unknown or enemy territory. Through photographs of personalities, installations, and works of art, and in a lively text that recounts the artistic thinking and the gossip that surrounded each new movement, The Avant-Garde in Exhibition: New Art in the 20th Century traces this phenomenon from its beginnings in the Fauvist Salon d'Automne in Paris in 1905 through such notorious events as the exhibitions of the Section d'Or (Paris) and the Blue Rider (Munich), the Armory Show (New York), the Futurist 0-10 exhibition (Petrograd), the Dada Fair (Berlin), the Nazi's Degenerate Art Exhibition (Munich), the First Papers of Surrealism (New York), Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century (New York), the Ninth Street Show (New York), the Gutai Art Association (Japan), Le Vide (Paris), Full-Up (Paris), the New Realists (New York), Primary Structures (New York), and When Attitudes Become Form (Bern).

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Pati Herling

Modern modern, is a group exhibition curated by Pati Hertling featuring works by 34 contemporary artists. Modern modern points to an emotional and aesthetic sensibility among the artists in the show, who are living and working mostly between Berlin and New York. Despite strong modernist references, stylistic classifications are of no importance in this show. The works are refreshingly unconcerned with the distinctions between 'figuration', 'abstraction' and the 'conceptual' and find another way to communicate their ideas and feelings about their subjects and the world around them. With colors dirty and drab, the absence of evident political commentary or shocking visuals, and an accent on the melancholic, the show is also reflection of the times we are living in right now.

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Frank Whitford

"Vasily Kandinsky (1866-1944) is one of the most important and influential painters of the twentieth century, and was one of the first Western artists to create pictures without figurative motifs, consisting exclusively of colours and forms selected and arranged for their own sake. He was also the first 'abstract' painter (although he generally avoided the term) to explain and justify what he was doing. His theoretical writings, including Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1912) and Point and Line to Plane (1926), both classics of their kind, are among the most significant texts written by any artist this century." "In this catalogue of the first major showing of Kandinsky's work for some years, over 130 works on paper are reproduced in full colour and shown in the context of Kandinsky's oeuvre as a whole. In his introductory essay, Frank Whitford traces Kandinsky's entire artistic career, placing it in the context of his life in Russia, Germany and France and highlighting the importance of watercolours in particular."--Jacket.

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Ingrid Schaffner and Matthias Winzen

"This publication documents the importance of collecting and packaging, storing, and archiving as a contemporary artistic strategy. It lends surprising insight into the process of creating art, which itself is a result of collecting experiences and materials, by using the work of forty internationally celebrated artists as examples." "In Deep Storage, these archives of materials become works of art themselves. The documentation and exhibition of these extreme departures from conventional forms of collection and recollection is a stunning project in the avant-garde tradition." "In accordance with its subject matter, this book is organized like a storage file of information, in which the broad spectrum of artistic contributions and essays and texts by twenty-five authors is presented alphabetically."