Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Wade Guyton, Zwei Dekaden MCMXCIX–MMXIX, 16 November, 2019–1 March, 2020.

Wade Guyton rose to prominence in the mid-2000s with a landmark series of abstract paintings composed of simple forms and letters printed on canvas. Running the canvas through a commercial inkjet printer, Guyton stretched the device beyond its capacity to the point of failure, embedding the limits of a digital future onto the surfaces of his paintings.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition Wade Guyton, Zwei Dekaden MCMXCIX–MMXIX, 16 November, 2019–1 March, 2020.

Wade Guyton rose to prominence in the mid-2000s with a landmark series of abstract paintings composed of simple forms and letters printed on canvas. Running the canvas through a commercial inkjet printer, Guyton stretched the device beyond its capacity to the point of failure, embedding the limits of a digital future onto the surfaces of his paintings.

Produced on the occasion of the exhibition at Museum Ludwig, Köln, March–June 2008. The Cologne Progressives were a group of artists who came together in Cologne, Germany in the 1920s. The artists in this exhibition, Franz Wilhelm Seiwert, Heinrich Hoerle and Gerd Arntz, were its core members. In the aftermath of the horrors of the First World War, like many Germans, these artists desired radical social and political change. Supporters of socialism and workers’ rights, the Progressives sought to unite art and politics. Their aim was to embody change with both the subject matter depicted and in the way they painted their artworks.

“Betye Saar’s work occupies a pivotal position in American art. Her assemblages from the 1960s and early 1970s interweave issues of race, politics, and supernatural belief systems with her personal history. Having grown up in a racially segregated society, Saar has long held that art can transcend our darkest moments and deepest fears. Today, the emergence of a new generation of artists mining her poignant legacy attests to how profoundly Saar has changed the course of American art. The 2020 Wolfgang Hahn Prize not only acknowledges her extraordinary achievements and influence, but also recognizes the need to revisit how the history of art in recent decades has been written.”—Christophe Cherix, Guest juror of the Wolfgang-Hahn-Preis 2020

Produced on the occasion of Jac Leirner being awarded the Wolfgang Hahn Preis 2019 at the Museum Ludwig, Köln.

Leirner cre­ates in­s­tal­la­tions, col­lages, and sculp­tures using found, of­ten in­dus­trial­ly man­u­fac­tured ev­ery­day ob­jects, ac­cord­ing to the prin­ci­ples of col­lect­ing, ac­cu­mu­lat­ing, and clas­si­fy­ing play an im­por­tant role in her work. This re­sults in dense, of­ten min­i­mal­ist works that play with the aes­thet­ic, rep­re­sen­ta­tio­n­al, and so­cio-cul­tu­r­al lev­els of mean­ing of the ob­jects.

More information on the exhibition and award can be found here.

Established in 1994 in honour of the Cologne art collector Wolfgang Hahn, the Wolfgang Hahn Prize has since been awarded annually to an exceptional, internationally known artist who is nonetheless not yet well known in Germany. In 2015 the prize was awarded for the first time to two artists, R.H. Quaytman and Michael Krebber. This publication honours the prizewinners, both of whom approach the medium of painting from a decidedly conceptual standpoint. With a foreword by Mayen Beckmann, an introduction by Yilmaz Dziewior, a laudation by Daniel Birnbaum, and an afterword by Hanspeter Sauter.