Books by Dietmar Elger
Andy Warhol: Self-Portraits
by Robert Rosenblum, Dietmar Elger
Perhaps no other artist from the second half of the 20th century is as familiar to the public as Andy Warhol--and his self-portraits can hardly be said to have played a lackluster role with regards to the artist's celebrity. U.S. postage stamp anyone? Occupying a position of central importance in his oeuvre, Warhol's self-portraits also occupy a consistent, long-running one. From the first self-images in gouache painted by 16-year-old Andrew Warhol in the mid-40s to the fright-wig series completed shortly before his death in February 1987, Andy Warhol continually used self-portraiture to reflect on his position and social status as an artist, performing a variety of roles in the process. Yet he never made use of the traditional topos of the artist's self-portrait; his fascination with transience and death is constantly present, as in his other works. Although a seemingly endless number of books have been published on Warhol's various work groups, this is the first monograph devoted exclusively to his self-portraits. The accompanying essays discuss different aspects of the theme and examine Warhol's self-portraits in the light of an expanded concept of the artist's self-portrait in the 20th century.
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Modern Art. A History from Impressionism to Today
by Hans Werner Holzwarth, Dietmar Elger, Anne Gantefuhrer, Karin H. Grimme, Barbara Hess
Most art historians agree that the modern art adventure first developed in the 1860s in Paris. A circle of painters, whom we now know as Impressionists, began painting pictures with rapid, loose brushwork. They turned to everyday street life for subjects, instead of overblown heroic scenes, and they escaped the power of the Salon by organizing their own independent exhibitions.
After this first assault on the artistic establishment, there was no holding back. In a constant desire to challenge, innovate, and inspire, one modernist style supplanted the next: Symbolism, Expressionism, Futurism, Dada, abstract art, renewed Realism, Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism, Pop, Minimal and conceptual practice.
This indispensable overview traces the restless energy of modern art with a year-by-year succession of the groundbreaking artworks that shook standards and broke down barriers. Introductory essays outline the most significant and influential movements alongside explanatory texts for each major work and its artist.
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Gerhard Richter: A Life in Painting
Gerhard Richter is one of the most important and influential artists of the post-war era. For decades he has sought innovative ways to make painting more relevant, often through a multifaceted dialogue with photography. Today Richter is most widely recognized for the photo-paintings he made during the 1960s that rely on images culled from mass media and pop culture. Always fascinated with the limits and uncertainties of representation, he has since then produced landscapes, abstractions, glass and mirror constructions, prints, sculptures, and installations.
Though Richter has been known in the United States for quite some time, the highly successful retrospective of his work at the MoMA in 2002 catapulted him to unprecedented fame. Enter noted curator Dietmar Elger, who here presents the first biography of this contemporary artist. Written with full access to Richter and his archives, this fascinating book offers unprecedented insight into his life and work. Elger explores Richter’s childhood in Nazi Germany; his years as a student and mural painter in communist East Germany; his time in the West during the turbulent 1960s and ’70s, when student protests, political strife, and violence tore the Federal Republic of Germany apart; and his rise to international acclaim during the 1980s and beyond.
Richter has always been a difficult personality to parse and the seemingly contradictory strands of his artistic practice have frustrated and sometimes confounded critics. But the extensive interviews on which this book is based disclose a Richter who is far more candid, personal, and vivid than ever before. The result is a book that will be the foundational portrait of this artist for years to come.
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Gerhard Richter: Writings 1961 - 2007
by Hans Ulrich Obrist, Dietmar Elger
For a painter who has so successfully neutralized the declarative potential of his medium, Gerhard Richter has committed to print a surprisingly large amount of discussion on his work. Perhaps it is only natural that an artist whose painting incarnates the Cagean premise that there is nothing to communicate should be moved to address that fact over and over. For this reason, the first edition of Richter's writings, The Daily Practice of Painting (published in 1993 by MIT Press) was an especially compelling collection, gathering the speculations of an artist profoundly involved in states of doubt, uncertainty and negation. Edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist, it quickly became a basic text in all of the creative fields. For this new, complete edition of the writings, Richter has placed his private archive at the editor's disposal; most of the photographic material comes from this archive and has not been previously published. The volume begins with the artist's farewell letters to his teacher Heinz Lohmar in 1961, is augmented with 15 unpublished texts from 1962 to 1993, as well as texts from the past 14 (highly productive) years of his career, and closes with an interview on his contribution to the 52nd Venice Biennale in 2007. In between are public statements on specific exhibitions, private reflections drawn from personal correspondence, answers to questions posed by critics and journal excerpts discussing the intentions, methods and subjects of his works from various periods. At more than 600 pages (the first edition was only 288), it is without doubt the essential companion to Richter's colossal oeuvre.
Gerhard Richter was born in Dresden in 1932. His first solo show was in 1964 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf. Today he is ranked among the world's greatest painters.
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