Roberto Ohrt Books

Jonathan Meese, Daniel Richter and Tal R rank among contemporary art's international heavyweights. Now they have collaborated on a large-scale joint project for Holstebro Kunstmuseum. Jonathan Meese (Germany, b.1970), Daniel Richter (Germany, b.1962), and Tal R (Denmark, b.1967) are contemporaries, having in common a neo-figurative and neo-expressive approach to art-making. Individually, each artist has worked within traditional genres, but has also ventured into and experimented with ever new, more sculptural, theatrical- performative and installation-like forms. Together, they share an interest in the marginalized, rebellious, exploratory, imaginative, uninhibited and energetic aspects of human existence. Collectively, there is much humor and existential pathos and protest at stake. Meese, Richter and Tal R are not just colleagues but also personal friends. In the past, they have co-produced artistic projects by pairs, but never have all three come together to create a common project. The exhibition will not only attest to their artistic affinities; undoubtedly, their joint creative energies will redeem something unprecedented. Part of the exhibition will consist of newly produced individual works. In addition, Meese, Richter and Tal R will build a museum within the museum consisting of wondrous objects in display cases and on podiums. Finally, a short film will be produced featuring the three artists in disguise, hanging upside down reciting lines from Nicolas Roeg's cult movie 'The Man Who Fell to Earth' from 1976, which the exhibition title paraphrases. Nicolas Roeg's strangely disturbing and highly topical film is a symbol of climate crisis, business greed and fighting the strange and alien (within). Its main thematic is the corruption of human nature with its penchant for lusts and vices in a society that has almost everything to offer. In conclusion, the exhibition The Men Who Fell from Earth is a total staging of extremely rare character, created in the strong spirit of artistic collegiality and friendship.

From 1925 until his death in 1929 the Hamburg-based art and cultural scholar Aby Warburg worked on his Mnemosyne Atlas, a volume of plates that has, in the meanwhile, taken on mythical status in the study of modern art and visual studies. With this project, Warburg created a visual reference system that was far ahead of its time. In cooperation with the Warburg Institute, Roberto Ohrt and Axel Heil have now undertaken the task of finding all of the individual pictures from the atlas and displaying these reproductions of artworks from the Middle East, European antiquity, and the Renaissance in the same way that Warburg himself showed them, on panels hung with black fabric. This commentary volume and the exhibition in Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin succeed in restoring Warburg’s vanished legacy—something that researchers have long considered impossible. ABY WARBURG (1866–1929), scion of a Hamburg banking family, completed his doctorate in 1892 on the Italian Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli. As a result, he comprehensively studied the interplay of myths, images and rites from different cultural contexts. This lead him to his main subject matter: the afterlife of antiquity in the Renaissance. With his attempt to break down the rigid boundaries of art history, Warburg is regarded as one of the fathers of modern pictorial science. The art historian ROBERTO OHRT (*1954) and the artist AXEL HEIL (*1965) have searched through the 400,000 individual pictures in the Photographic Collection at the Warburg Institute in London, looking for the images for the atlas. Their work is a comprehensive tribute to Aby Warburg’s pictorial world.

The first monograph on the compelling young Brazilian painter Christian Rosafeatures a selection of his most recent work in graphite, oil and spray paint.Born in Rio in 1982 and now living and working in Los Angeles, Rosa studied atthe Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna with Daniel Richter. His current pieces onunprimed, rough, beige canvas are minimal with colorful loops, craquelures,erasures, and carelessly painted bubbles and squares. His extremely reducedrepertoire is reminiscent of Cy Twombly, one of the most enduring Americanabstract painters. Rosa also calls on the Empire of Signs, initially determinedby Roland Barthes for Twombly. In addition to Oscar Murillo and David Ostrowsky,Christian Rosa is considered a rising star in contemporary art today. An exhibitioncatalog out of the CFA Berlin with essay by German writer and curator Roberto Ohrt.

Publikation zur Ausstellung im Heiligenkreuzerhof, Wien , vom 9.3.–30.4.2012; mit einem Text von Roberto Ohrt, deutsch/englisch 104 Seiten, offen fadengebundene Klappenbroschur, herausgegeben von der Universität für angewandte Kunst Wien.

Es gibt Fotografien, die berühmt sind, ohne dass die Öffentlichkeit weiß, wer Sie gemacht hat. Viele Aufnahmen von Elfie Semotan (geb. 1941) zählen zu diesen. In der Begegnung mit anderen Künstlern hat sie in den letzten 30 Jahren ein Kaleidoskop unterschiedlichster Portraits erstellt, von denen sich die faszinierendsten nun in diesem Katalog-Buch ein Stelldichein geben.

This volume offers a selection of hitherto unpublished drawings by German performance and installation artist Jonathan Meese (born 1970). The collection includes all phases of his work, plus a discussion of his recent controversial performance piece featuring the Nazi salute.

'Niemals werde ich Erklärungen abgeben. Nun bist Du ganz allein mit unseren Geheimnissen.' Mit dieser Haltung hat Guy Debord, der Protagonist der Situationistischen Internationale, bisher eine genaue Untersuchung dieser Gruppierung verhindert. Sie blieb daher so unbekannt wie berüchtigt. Roberto Ohrt legt erstmals eine kritische Chronologie der Situationistischen Internationale und ihrer Zeit vor, eine pointierte Geschichte der modernen Kunst seit 1945 in den Bereichen Malerei, Literatur, Film, Architektur, Aktion. Der Autor spürt den Verbindungen zum späten Surrealismus, zum Lettrismus, zu Cobra, den Nouveaux Réalistes und der Pop Art nach.