Texte zur Kunst - #100
TzK's 100th issue is dedicated to the question of the “canon.” They take up this theme with an interest in reflecting on the journal’s own role in the field of contemporary art — one that, when first initiated in 1990, was markedly counter-canonical, vigorously contesting certain methods of critique while supporting others. And yet, they pause here to acknowledge that after 25 years, they have also doubtlessly played a crucial part in shaping a particular discourse, even normativizing it to some degree. Could it even be said that TzK has established a canon in its own right? With this issue, they now take stock of what TzK’s relationship to the canon might be, and moreover, what the notion of canonicity in 2015 might now represent.
To celebrate this #100 issue, 10 masters of contemporary art have created exclusive editions, which will be released in December 2015 and January 2016. Well done Texte zur Kunst !!!
Gerhard Richter, Ulrike Meinhof, 2015 SOLD OUT
Gerhard Richter’s edition for our anniversary issue is a retrospection in its own right: the photograph is a counterpart to the “Youth Portrait” with which the chronology of his RAF cycle (1988) opens. It is a print, mounted on Alu-Dibond, from the original negative of the portrait of Ulrike Meinhof that Richter had copied from an issue of “Stern” (in the Hamburg press archives) and which served as the referent for his painting. The photographer Inge-Maria Peters (who cosigns this edition) took the portrait of the 32-year-old mother of two on October 10, 1966, to accompany Meinhof’s regular column for “Konkret”; four years later, Meinhof would join the terrorist underground. The pin-sharp photograph assumes the style of an actor’s headshot: the journalist with an expression of unwavering determination, poised against the black background, ready to confront the viewer. Richter’s choice to revisit this photograph in an artist’s edition may be read as a comment on his earlier work, which has become almost inseparable from his “Youth Portrait” painting in the collective memory: the photograph prompts a comparative gaze that looks behind the painting’s blurring and emulation of Old Master iconography, qualities the artist discerned in the original picture but heightened by the means of his art. Almost 30 years after Richter’s painting (and nearly four decades after Meinhof’s death), does the photograph vouchsafe a less warped vision of history, a way out of the impossibility of its representation? Far from being a secondary visual, the photograph is revealed, here, to be a tableau in its own right: once the painting’s model, now returning in its wake, it emerges as its equal.
Medium: Pigment print on 308 g/m² Photo Rag on Alu-Dibond
Overall size: 51 × 50 cm,
Motif size: 33 × 36 cm
Edition of 120 + 15 A.P.
Numbered and signed on the back
Price: €5.800 SOLD OUT
Albert Oehlen, Gemäldereproduktion, beschnitten und personalisiert, 2015 SOLD OUT
One constant in the history of Texte zur Kunst has been our close engagement with painting, a practice whose very locus might be called into question: we have scrutinized the boundary between a painting’s interior and exterior and the specific materiality and semiotics of the painted canvas. As many writers and painters who have contributed essays to this journal have argued, painting comes into being off the canvas no less than on it. Albert Oehlen’s practice has been seminal to this debate: not only does he take painting seriously as a distinctive language and probe the limits of its code, his art also finds symbolic ways to explode painting’s framework. His edition for our 100th issue was conceived specifically for our special subscribers and to honor (and symbolically remunerate) the contributors to the issue and the participants of our anniversary event. Each piece of this edition, “Painting reproduction, cropped, and personalized,” is made from a different picture taken from Oehlen’s comprehensive “collector’s edition” Taschen catalogue. The artist has selected reproductions of individual works and trimmed them, thereby transforming them into what could be taken as new works entirely. The addition of the name of the recipient, which Oehlen collages with the clipped painting, makes each edition piece into a work that is “custom-made.“ The composited piece is set behind glass and shipped in a readymade décor frame.
Medium: Offset and inkjet print inclusive white washed wood frame
Size: ca. 40 x 30 cm
Edition of 150 + 20 A.P. (each unique)
Signed, numbered and personalized on the front
Price: €480 SOLD
Seth Price, WROK, FMAILY & FRIEDNS, 2015
Medium: Ultraviolet transfer on hand-cut polyester foam, acrylic polymer
Size: 31 x 28
Edition of 25 + 10 A.P. (each unique)
Signed and numbered
Will be released: Dec. 10, 2015
Price: € 1.500 plus shipping
John Baldessari, Engraving with Sound: Belch, 2015 SOLD OUT
Medium: Archival inkjet print
Size: 31 x 28 cm
Edition of 25 + 15 A.P
Signed and numbered on labels
Will be released: Dec. 10, 2015
Price: € 1.500 plus shipping SOLD OUT
Rosemarie Trockel, Ich parshippe jetzt, 2015 SOLD OUT
Medium: Digital print on 310 g/m² PhotoRag Hahnemühle
Size: 31 x 28 cm
Edition of 25 + 10 A.P.
Signed and numbered
Will be released: Dec. 17, 2015
Price: €1.500 SOLD OUT
Peter Fischli, Blumen, 1998/2015 SOLD OUT
Medium: Offset Print
Size: 31 x 28 cm
Edition of 25 + 10 A.P.
Signed and numbered "1998/2015 F/W Fischli"
Will be released: Dec. 17, 2015
Price: €1.500 SOLD OUT
Rachel Harrison, Living It Up, 2015
Rachel Harrison (b. 1966, New York) lives and works in New York. Known for her work in assemblage and sculpture, Rachel Harrison has created a print for Texte zur Kunst that composites various media from her recent activities and associations into the two dimensions of an inkjet print, each further marked by the artist with spraypaint. The work is based on a digital collage that appears in her publication “G-L-O-R-I-A,” produced on the occasion of her 2015 show at Cleveland Museum of Art, which presented a selection of her works alongside those by Robert Rauschenberg.Size: 28 x 31 cm
Edition of 25 + 10 A.P. (each unique)
Signed and numbered
Price: 1500
Sarah Morris, September 1990, 2015
Sarah Morris (b. 1967, London) lives and works in New York. This print, “September 1990” is based on the lunar calendar for the month of Texte zur Kunst’s first issue. Morris began working with the lunar calendar as an organizing device while creating her 2012 “Rio” series. Carrying forward her color memory of this time, she brings to this print the palette of Brazil: from umbrellas to flora to pharmaceutical packaging. This work communicates, references, and utilizes the psychology of locality and the passage of time.Size: 39 x 55 cm
Edition of 25 + 10 A.P.
Signed and numbered
Will be released: Jan. 14, 2016
Price: € 1.500 plus shipping
More information will follow soon.
Richard Phillips, Canyons II, 2015
Richard Phillips (b. 1962, Marblehead, MA) lives and works in New York. Adapting his smooth, pop-inflected painterly engagement with celebrities and other commodities that might be considered iconic of present-day desire, Phillips, here, responds to the controversial reception of his “Playboy Marfa” sculpture (a 12-meter neon bunny commissioned by its namesake publisher) that was installed alongside Texas’s Highway 90 in 2013 until deemed illegal and taken down. With “Canyons II,” Phillips revisits the playboy logo super-imposing it onto an impressionist interpretation of the Mexican serape rug. Once seen as a pure art form and a symbol of Mexican cultural wealth, these rugs now more often seen as tourist items or connote the “drug rugs” made popular by surf culture. In this print, Phillips plays with “heritage” décor imagery as it relates to the accelerated hoarding of property and wealth associated with art and gentrification in west Texas.Size: 101.6 x 76.2 cm
Edition of 25 + 10 A.P.
Signed and numbered
Will be released: Jan. 21, 2016
Price: 1500,- € plus shipping and insurance
Wade Guyton, Untitled (for TzK), 2015 SOLD OUT
Wade Guyton (b. 1972 in Hammond, Indiana) lives and works in New York. Over the past ten years, Guyton has developed his characteristic pictorialism by way of digital technologies employing printers, scanners, and computers. For Texte zur Kunst, Guyton has created an inkjet print on primed linen – the same as is used in his paintings. Continuing his “unfinished works” series, in which he stops the printer before the given image is fully formed, Guyton, through this process, renders the surface of each piece unique. He uses a US standard format of 11 x 17 inches and an Epson 3880.Size: 43.2 x 28 cm
Edition of 25 + 10 A.P.
Signed and numbered
Will be released: Jan. 28, 2016
Price: SOLD OUTThese editions are available at Texte Zur Kunst
