The highly distinctive publications on contemporary art are shaped by the personal preferences and friendships of the publisher. Painting and drawing, photography, video, installation, and new media are of interest as independent positions or in combination with architecture and the environment.

In 1936 the first and only issue of the magazine telehor (Greek for tele-vision) was released in four languages, as a special edition on and by László Moholy-Nagy. To celebrate its 75-year anniversary a facsimile reprint of the magazine will be produced, accompanied by a commentary volume.

The reprint makes the magazine accessible again in terms of its artistic and theoretical-historical dimensions. Particular attention has been paid to the production process. Thus the volume appears spiral-bound, an ultramodern technique in the
mid-1930s. The commentary contains an editorial statement that places the magazine, telehor, in the context of the art and media of the 1920s and 1930s and unlocks the position of the artistic avant-garde at the intersection of two epochs.

With a text by Giedion Siegried

Blumen sind seit Jahrtausenden ein universelles Kulturobjekt. Sie sind nicht nur weltweit ein wichtiger ästhetischer Bestandteil des Alltags, sondern waren stets ein symbolträchtiger Topos der Kunstgeschichte. Mit seinen «botanischen Installationen», in denen er aus Pflanzen, Blumen oder deren Bestandteilen ungewöhnliche neue Formen zusammenstellt, hat Makoto Azuma im Laufe der letzten Jahre in der Kunstwelt für Furore gesorgt. Ausgehend von der japanischen Tradition des Ikebanas – der japanischen Kunst, Blumen zu arrangieren – erschafft Azuma neuartige, nie gesehene Ästhetiken, indem er ungewöhnliche, auch exotische Pflanzen, die in der Natur niemals aufeinandertreffen würden, zu erstaunlichen Arrangements zusammenfügt.
In einzigartigen Fotografien hielt Shunsuke Shiinoki, der mit dem Künstler zusammen 2002 in Tokio den «Haute-Couture»-Blumenladen «Jardin des Fleurs» eröffnete, die aussergewöhnlichen floralen Installationen in einer eigenständigen Bildsprache fest.

Authoring: Re-placing Art and Architecture challenges traditional assumptions about the relationship between art and architecture. From 2008 through 2010, David Adjaye, along with Marc McQuade, taught three studios at the Princeton School of Architecture. Each studio focused on a collaboration with three distinguished artists—Matthew Ritchie, Teresita Fernández, and Jorge Pardo—on interventions in three vastly different sites: the state of New Jersey, the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn, and the city of Mérida in Mexico’s Yucatán Peninsula. Through an exploratory process of questioning, developing, and testing, each architect and artist reexamines the expectations traditionally associated with the conventions of architectural design and representation. Authoring: Re-placing Art and Architecture presents recent projects from David Adjaye, Matthew Ritchie, Teresita Fernández, and Jorge Pardo, along with interviews, essays, and archival material that unpack the shared space of art and architecture.

With contributions by David Adjaye, Stan Allen, Alex Coles, Teresita Fernández, Dave Hickey, Sanford Kwinter, Jorge Pardo, and Matthew Ritchie.

Following Written in Water (2002), this is the second publication devoted to Steven Holl’s legendary watercolors. Four hundred watercolors represent the creative process of this renowned and influential American architect and reveal his highly personal method developed over many years, containing preliminary ideas and sketches of all major projects.

Holl is known for his sculptural architecture and his virtuosic use of light, and watercolors are the ideal means to visualize these characteristic aspects of his work. At a time of rapidly changing technology in the service of architectural design, these watercolors become spectacular examples of a low-tech method. The results are invariably original works of art. The water colors are juxtaposed with photographs of the built architecture and emphasize the crucial aspect of scale.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Dan Graham, one of North America’s most important contemporary artists, is best known today for his sculptural works and installations. His photographic works are generally not so well known, despite the fact that he first became famous for his photographic series Homes for America, pictures of typical American suburbia. To this day the theme of architecture and its surfaces in the context of postmodern everyday culture represents an extremely important facet of his work.

This publication presents new photographs by Dan Graham together with original photographs from the Homes for America series. The new images exhibit stark similarities to the old pictures, as they were taken in the same locations, the same deserts of suburban streets and housing that Graham photographed in the sixties. Creating a fascinating, multilayered reference system of repetitions and differences, both spatially as well as temporally, it raises questions about architecture and public space and their function in society.

Design: Integral Lars Müller

The islands of Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima in Japan’s Seto Inland Sea are places of pilgrimage for friends of contemporary art and architecture. Alongside works in public spaces and site-specific installations, the islands also feature numerous museums and collections of contemporary art. They are home to buildings by architects such as Kazuyo Sejima and Ruye Nishizawa (SANAA), Tadao Ando, and Hiroshi Sambuichi, as well as works of art by Richard Long, Christian Boltanski, and Mariko Mori, among many others.

This publication offers a comprehensive documentation of this unique cultural landscape surrounded by Japan’s inland sea. The photographs by the Dutch photographer Iwan Baan that move between tiny details and grand panoramas create a comprehensive portrait of the islands and their fluid transitions between nature, art, and architecture. Numerous texts introduce readers to the individual areas and projects either on permanent display or that have taken place temporarily on the islands. Essays explore the history and historical predecessors of the islands, the role of architecture and art in the context of this unique landscape, and the island as a cultural concept and phenomenon.

With photographs by Iwan Baan

Design: Integral Lars Müller

Silvia Bächli and Eric Hattan spent four months, from March to June, in Seydisfjördur in eastern Iceland. The landscape they explored on their daily walks is dominated by snow, which shapes the atmosphere in and around the fjord with its changeable forms: turquoise meltwater, frost patterns, a few glass-clear bright colours in the whiteness, walls of snow by the edge of the road, drifts, icicles and at last the first brown snow-free places — things are slowly turning green. The artists create a unique portrait of Iceland’s magnificent landscapes with their photographs, in all its detail, thus chronicling the passage of time and the approach of the warmer season. 

Hamish Fulton’s photographic work focuses on nature and the way people experience nature. He has been hiking all over the world for 30 years, and translates what he experiences and sees into art. In 2009, Hamish Fulton and an expedition team climbed Mount Everest, the highest peak in the world. This publication presents this artist treatment of the ascent to the summit for the first time in a compendious pictorial volume in the form of collages of photographs and text, sculptures and works on paper.

The second issue in the exciting and experimental cross-disciplinary series “Findings on…” by Astrid van Baalen and Hester Aardse from the pars Foundation is centred on Elasticity in the broadest sense of the word. What happens when one gives a simple rubber band to an architect, historian, choreographer, chemist, artist, mathematician, physicist, economist, anthropologist, and geologist and asks each of them for a statement on elasticity? The economist studies the elasticity of supply and demand of market forces. The architect calculates the elasticity of the steel structure of a building during an earthquake. The anthropologist studies the flow of people returning to their homes in the wake of a natural disaster. “The Pars Foundation” draws researchers out of their specialized niches in order to publish their brilliant, crazy, important, or bewildering results and assembles them in this interdisciplinary volume. “Findings on Elasticity” is the second part of a publication series that together will constitute an atlas of creative thinking. There are no guidelines for the form their contributions must take. It may be images, poems, essays, sketches on coasters, formulas or a piece of sculpture; the editors only ask that a contribution reflect the respondent’s own field as well as his or her passion for the topic.

The book contains a collection of essays by scholars and artists from a range of different fields including art, art history, architectural theory and philosophy. The essays are based on papers given at a symposium in Copenhagen in June 2008 and refer to the following considerations: When spectators confront and designers invent works of art and architecture, vital questions regarding their appearance arise. These are not simply questions about what appears, also what does not, i.e. what withdraws when works are experienced and created. How do we cope with this withdrawal, with latencies that escape concretization? What are the productive paradoxes associated hereto and how do they influence the processes of making? Based on multiple discourses on these subjects, contemporary positions in art, architecture and philosophy draw up new challenges, especially with regard to the creative practices. Within and between these positions emerge potentials for modes of thinking and doing with a new sensitivity.

With contributions by Michael Asgaard Andersen and Henrik Oxvig, Renaud Barbaras, Andrew Benjamin, Olafur Eliasson, Sanford Kwinter, David Leatherbarrow, Martin Seel, David Summers and Sven-Olov Wallenstein

Silvia Bächli was invited to design the official contribution for the Swiss Pavilion at this year’s Biennale in Venice. This book offers a look inside her studio and documents the preparation of her works for the Biennale, illustrating her working process with spatial situations and snapshots that show her trying out various constellations as well as focusing on individual works and groups. The works and pictures from the artist’s studio are combined with photographs of her working stay in Iceland. Bächli has developed her body of drawings over the course of three decades, using varying formats and techniques. Drawing, for her, is a movement of seeing, of gentle deviations and displacements within the gravitational field of an aimless attentiveness to things and dreamlike phenomena that doesn’t really come to rest even in the finished drawing. The result is not just painterly moments; the drawings often seem to capture, as if in film stills, a cinematic look way of looking at bodies and things or their details, at landscapes, gestures, structures, and processes.

The German artist Katharina Grosse has fulfilled her dream of a tailor-made studio, a place large enough to accommodate her large-scale works and where an industrial atmosphere is combined with soft light and neutral walls. In close cooperation with the artist, the firm Augustin und Frank Architekten planned the studio in Berlin’s Mitte neighborhood and completed it in 2007. The result is a compact reinforced concrete cube containing workrooms, storerooms, an archive, offices and living space. The contributors to this publication use Grosse’s studio as a springboard to explore the relationship between painting and architecture, and the role that studios play in the production of art. Numerous photographs show the raw architecture of the new building and the artist’s appropriation of the space.
With contributions by Georg Augustin, Laura Bieger, Andreas Denk, Ulrich Loock and Philip Ursprung.

With contributions by Georg Augustin, Laura Bieger, Andreas Denk, Ulrich Loock und Philip Ursprung

Silvia Bächli (1956) has become one of the most successful Swiss artists of her generation. This publication was developed with the artist, and is the first comprehensive survey of her output. Silvia Bächli’s art makes us feel unsure of ourselves. It sends viewers on a tightrope walk between banality and deliberate continuity. Her art always concentrates on the minimum. We see isolated arms or faces or eyes. No context is provided at all. She illustrates the impressions that remain after a walk. Despite the general trend in art towards being ever more provocative, louder and more strident, Silvia Bächli has stuck to Indian ink, gouache, oil paint and thin, smooth white paper for over twenty years.

Pipilotti Rist, eine der gefeiertsten Schweizer Künstlerinnen der Gegenwart, und Richard Julin, Chefkurator der Magasin 3 Stockholm Konsthall, haben sich in Zürich einen Tag lang den Vorbereitungen von Rists Einzelausstellung Gravity, Be My Friend in Stockholm gewidmet. Das aus dieser Begegnung resultierende Buch eröffnet neue Dimensionen von Pipilotti Rists Welt und fördert Anekdoten aus dem kreativen Prozess zu Tage. Das reich illustrierte Buch zeigt u. a. Bilder des neuen Werks Tyngdkraft, var min vän sowie von jüngeren Arbeiten wie Homo sapiens sapiens (2005) und A Liberty Statue For Löndön (2006). 

Pierre Mendell has been designing the posters for the Staatsoper in Munich from 1993 to 2006. With over a hundred motifs to his name, he has not only successfully created an unmistakable identity for the Munich opera, he has also linked this opera house with a form of visual expression that is unparalleled in its originality and immediacy. Mendell’s simple, almost archaic, visual language is admired over the world and his poster designs are represented in leading collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Hanna Saliba ranks among the most innovative restaurateurs in Germany. His restaurant Saliba in Hamburg, which serves Syrian cuisine, is renowned far beyond the city’s borders for its magical culinary experiences. Some of the restaurant’s guests —Hans Hansen from Hamburg, the Munich designer Pierre Mendell, and the publisher of this volume — developed the concept for this book together with Saliba as an expression of their enthusiasm for Arab cuisine, particularly for the diversity and sophistication of its incomparable hors d`oeuvres called Mazza. “Eating with the eyes” is to be taken literally. Arabic calligraphy complements the feast for the eyes and makes the book much more than a collection of recipes for amateur cooks and professional chefs.

With a preface by Udo Steinbach
With photographs by Hans Hansen

A Time and Place shows the extensive body of work by the German artist Christian Moeller, who lives in Los Angeles. It includes work dating from 1991 to 2003, and describes his fascinating tightrope walk between analogue and digital worlds. This is the first time there has been a monograph consisting of both internet and book pages. Playing to the particular strengths of each medium, A Time and Place gives it readers a book that, strange as it may sound, can be read at a computer that is logged on the internet. The artist’s texts, drawings and photographs in the book are complemented by digitized internet film documentation sequences in image and sound.

The artist-couple Gerda Steiner (b. 1967) and Jörg Lenzlinger (b. 1964) are two of the most imaginative figures on the young Swiss scene. This publication contains numerous colour photographs and appears to accompany their "Good and Silly Miracles" exhibitions in the church of San Stae at this year's Venice Biennale. The artists use artificial plants, nectar lakes, bears to take viewers into a truly amazing world, creating a distinctive, miraculous aesthetic. The artist's book accompanying the exhibition brings together photographs from numerous journeys on which the artist-couple cannot and do not want to abandon their hopeful search for an earthly paradise. Their dreams have now come true – wonderland is everywhere. This publication is complemented by a booklet with short reports on strange occurences by various authors.

Spirale was an international artists’ magazine for young art and is now one of the most important records of how art developed in the 50s. It marks the change of generations in post-war art and documents the development of abstract and constructive/concrete art in Europe. The Spirale was edited by Marcel Wyss, Dieter Roth, and Eugen Gromringer and appeared from 1953 to 1964.

British art and architecture of the 1950s are of extraordinary topicality today. This applies particularly to the Independent Group which included artists such as Richard Hamilton, Eduardo Paolozzi and Magda Cordell, the photographer Nigel Henderson, critics Reyner Banham and Lawrence Alloway as well as architects such as Alison and Peter Smithson, James Stirling and Colin St. John Wilson.

“Clothing as housing, the shell in which we live and breathe.” That is the credo of the cosmopolitan fashion designer, Christa de Carouge, who has roots in both Geneva and Zurich. Just as no-one changes their home without good reason, Carouge’s timeless creations are designed to last. The materials are of the finest quality, the color is almost always black, occasionally red or white. Silk is her preferred fabric, even for heavy-duty garments. Subtle folds and throws enclose the wearer’s form. No buttons, no hooks. The simplicity of the forms, the precious fabrics, and the life-style and life-sense that go with these are much desired today. And overwhelmingly successful. The architecture expert, Werner Blaser, goes into the background that applies here, and with a sideways glance at Mies van der Rohe’s leaning toward reduction and the sensitive material collages of Le Corbusier, he explores the way in which Christa de Carouge’s philosophy meets a particular need of people today, whose clothes must have identity, and combine comfort with aesthetics. The designer herself finds her own equilibrium and inspiration in travel.

This surprising collection of “isms” ranks among the most important publications on avant-garde art in the 1920s. Hans Arp and El Lissitzky took a refreshing, frankly opinionated inventory of artistic attitudes and movements from 1914 to 1924. Lissitzky’s exuberant design of the book epitomizes the style of the times.

With an essay by Alois M. Müller