Stephan Berg

How can the silence in contemporary art be made visible and even audible? And what is the intention of art in its attempt? This volume aims to answer these questions. The topic of silence is treated as a medial reflection in a broad panorama of installations, performances, video, films, photos, and drawings in different artistic ways and thus made tangible. The interdisciplinary project includes works by around 50 international artists such as Marina Abramovic, Jane Benson, Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Hanne Darboven, Jonathan Monk, Nam June Paik, Timm Ulrichs, Jorinde Voigt, and others.

Since the start of the Romantic era, painting has been regarded as the leading artistic discipline in Germany. To this day, the nation of “Painter Princes” continues to promote the development of the art of painting and enjoys a worldwide reputation with artists like Gerhard Richter, Katharina Grosse, Neo Rauch and Albert Oehlen. Here we encounter a survey of 53 young artists, in particular from the surrounding of the academies in Berlin, Dresden, Düsseldorf, Frankfurt, Hamburg, Karlsruhe, Leipzig, Munich and Stuttgart. The next generation of important painters is presented with several works, opulent illustrations and statements by artists and experts from the contemporary painting scene in Germany. This publication, and simultaneous exhibitions in Bonn, Wiesbaden and Chemnitz, and subsequently in Hamburg, demonstrate the diversity and qualityof their work.

Gerhard Richter (*1932) is an exceptional personality – not because his pictures are world famous, but because he has demonstrated a new approach to painting. His art masterfully moves between abstraction and representation, sensuousness and denial – ambiv alent attitudes which he demonstrated even in his early work. Gerhard Richter’s oeuvre overcomes the division between abstract and representational art. His pictures neither cultivate a modest interplay of colours and forms nor do they deliver an intact p icture of reality. Richter is a sceptical artist who questions the reality of his art even when the prime subject of his paintings is the tangible. This applies in particular to his door, curtain and window pictures of the 1960s, which form the central foc us of this volume. They stage a playful examination of the illusory nature of art, which always questions what painting shows or conceals. This lavishly appointed volume is published to mark the artist’s 85th birthday.

What is the mutual relationship between TV and art? The publication introduces artistic strategies used to explore TV and its specific contents and narrative forms in video, film, painting, sculpture and performance, ranging from the sculptural object of the TV box to the manipulation of the TV image and the use of its structure of lines and pixels in works of art. Television, which is among the most important inventions of the twentieth century, has developed a unique aesthetic and new communication structures worldwide. The early 1960s, the beginning of the development of TV as the first visual mass medium, were also the beginning of an artistic exploration of TV. From artists known for their work in this field such as Nam June Paik and Vostell to current works by younger generations of artists such as Thomas Demand, Tobias Rehberger, Ulrich Polster and Melanie Gilligan, this publication focuses on the analysis, paraphrasing and parody of TV formats and their pictorial nature, amongst other things.