New Texte zur Kunst editions by Martha Rosler and Amy Sillman

Martha Rosler - Berlin Park - 1990/2016

For Martha Rosler’s edition for Texte zur Kunst #103, “Berlin Park,” the American artist presents a photograph she took in 1990 Berlin. Captured in a leafy area at twilight, it features a billboard, partially defaced, engaging the methods of mediation for which the artist is well known – collage and appropriation – but enacted here via a found gesture of destruction. Rosler, who often employs the language of consumer goods and mass media to highlight historic axes of conflict, offers this image to highlight the fragility of territorial representation. With “Berlin Park,” she has captured an instance of this operation in the chance superimposition of two forms of interpretational authority: a quotation – a solemn show of patriotism (and GDR-era rhetoric) by German newspaper magnate Axel Springer – republished posthumously by his influential tabloid Bild, appearing as a literal veneer beneath which far-reaching commercial interests loom: the Marlboro Man – the ur-icon of cancer-inducing “West products.” Lasso in hand, he bursts through the imperious remark of Springer, the right-wing publisher whose empire’s headquarters were sited at the division of the Bundesrepublik and the “Wild East” (then a popular term pointing to the shifting territorial claims, in particular the gentrification of the reunified Berlin whose beginning this picture marks). The simplistic calculation of scale = value that both ads manifest, albeit to very different ends, underlines the medium’s intrinsic characteristics: where a billboard is meant to be representational, it has here, in Rosler’s hands, turned revealing.

Medium: C-print,
Size: 40.6 x 50.8 cm
Edition of 100 + 20 A.P.
Numbered and signed on the back
Price: € 450,– plus shipping

Amy Sillman - pink pink pink black - 2016  SOLD OUT

“What makes Ad Reinhardt great,” wrote Amy Sillman in an essay for her 2009 zine “Das Diagram,” “is the split that makes up his greater whole […]: not just his solemn geometric abstractions, nor his uproarious collages […] but the circulation between them, a circulating economy in which solemnity is equivalent in value to satire.” Such an understanding of the plasticity of a work’s limits is evident in Sillman’s “pink pink pink black 1 & 2,” for which the New York-based artist has selected not one but two works on paper: “Pink Drawing #4” (2016; at left) and “Pink Drawing #19” (2015; at right) – two nodes within a larger network of drawing-based procedures between which the collector is invited to choose one. These pieces (exhibited this past year at New York’s Sikkema Jenkins gallery and Kunsthaus Bregenz [KUB], respectively) are here put into new circulation as archival pigment prints. Their genesis, meanwhile, comes from her intense interest in a fifteenth-century Roman Catholic Bregenz chapel, which, contra the more austere mood of the surrounding architecture (for example, Zumthor’s Kunsthaus), offsets its sober stucco walls with stripes and odd shapes rendered in shocking pink. Metabolizing the peculiar corporeal details of this space over the course of her site visits to Bregenz, Sillman limited her palette for her KUB project as a response to the chapel’s dominant tones – “pink pink pink and black.” Just as Sillman’s painting often bleeds into drawing, diagramming, digital animation, and other forms, her painted gesture, therein, is itself never restrained to the realm of either figuration or abstraction. Taken together with the notion of responsive “relational” color, these elements form a circulating economy of language – here, pools of gradient reds and tectonic greys that waver in form between calligraphic line, bodily gesture, and poetic mark.

Medium: Dione print,
Size: 70 x 50 cm
Edition of 100 + 20 A.P. + 2 P.P.
Signed and numbered on the back
Each motif: € 350,– plus shipping  SOLD OUT
Both motifs: € 650,– plus shipping   SOLD OUT

These limited editions are available at Texte zur Kunst