Cathrin Langanke Livres

Capacity for enthusiasm, fascination and abandon - these are factors of pivotal importance in both art and love. This catalogue documents a wide variety of attitudes to the subject since the 1970s.

More is more? The Swiss artists Lang/Baumann are renowned for their extraordinary interventions, which radically alter public space or occupy the interiors of art institutions. Beautifully presented in this monograph, their colorful, experimental, and rigorous projects are a call for more audacity in creating temporary installations that often seem to promise access to a hidden world. While some of their works--such as their street painting in the Swiss mountain village of Vercorin or their Beautiful Steps series of absurd staircase constructions--have garnered Lang/Baumann worldwide attention, they have also done a variety of other work that gives new impulses to our perception and can breathe new life into museum exhibitions or site-specific interventions. They have, for example, created installations using huge inflatable pipes woven into the windows of facades, realized large wall paintings with complex geometries, and transformed a whole house into a sculpture by connecting all the doors and windows with tunnel-like passages

Die Serie "Medals for Dishonor" von David Smith, die zwischen 1936 und 1940 entstand, nutzt surrealistische Motive, um die Schrecken des Krieges darzustellen. Im Kontext der zeitgenössischen surrealistischen Kunst wird deutlich, dass Smiths Gewaltdarstellungen eine soziale Kritik formulieren, die sich von den Arbeiten anderer führender Surrealisten abhebt. Die Frage, ob diese Serie eine Neuakzentuierung des Surrealismus in den 1930er-Jahren repräsentiert, wird aufgeworfen und regt zur Auseinandersetzung mit den gesellschaftlichen Themen dieser Epoche an.