Sherrie Levine rose to prominence as a member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists based in New York in the late 1970s and 1980s whose work examined the structures of signification underlying mass-circulated images, and, in many cases, directly appropriated these images in order to imbue them with new, critically inflected meaning. Since then, Levine has created a singular and complex body of work in a variety of media that often explicitly reproduces artworks and motifs from the Western art-historical canon as well as non-Western cultures.

Wolfgang Tillmans’ truth study centre became a fixed part of his exhibitions since he first showed a version of the multi-part tabletop installation in 2005. Often arising from local circumstances and current issues at the time of their creation, the “truth study centre” works mark an endeavour to create a clear view in ever more confusing times.

Far exceeding his original and main medium of photography, he juxtaposes a variety of contrary opinions, statements and comparisons on recurring table formats. The dimensions of the wooden tables, which he designed himself, are not arbitrary: they are built using standard British door panels, 198 cm long, and with one of four different standard widths. This book gives an overview, through lavish reproductions, of this new form of collage, in which picture, text and object “are only kept in place by their own weight.” An essay by Thomas McDonough, Professor for Art History at Birmingham University, New York, places Tillmans’ project within the context of twentieth-century collage, from Hannah Höch to Robert Rauschenberg.

Texts by Tina Barouti, Anne-Grit Becker, Natalie Dupêcher. Photographs by Robert Rauschenberg and Cy Twombly.

In the fall of 1952, Cy Twombly receives a traveling scholarship from the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and leaves New York for his first trip to Europe and North Africa. He meets up with Robert Rauschenberg in Casablanca, and the two of them travel to Marrakech and the Atlas Mountains, and then to Tangier. They pay a visit to Paul Bowles in Tétouan and go on day trips with him to nearby villages and Roman ruins. Twombly conducts his first and last archaeological excavation there. Upon their return to Rome in February 1953, Twombly studies and sketches the ethnographic objects and tribal artifacts he sees on display in the Museo Nazionale Preistorico Etnografico Luigi Pigorini. These sketches survive in the form of the North African Sketchbooks. Much of the surviving work from this trip consists of photographs taken with a Rolleiflex shared by the artists and sketches made by them, preserved in the archives of the Cy Twombly Foundation and Fondazione Nicola Del Roscio; they provide a unique perspective on Twombly’s lesser-known affinity for Africa’s Mediterranean shores.

A pictorial record of the exhibition Japanese Photography 1930s, at Kanagawa Prefectural Museum of Modern Art, 1988, which collects photographs from the emerging photography of the era. Approximately 340 illustrations of the work of photographers such as Kiyoshi Koishi, Shoji Ueda, Ei-Q, Koshiro Onchi, Nakaji Yasui, Iwata Nakayama, Shinzō Fukuhara, Kineo Kuwabara, Terushichi Hirai amongst others.

*Please note this publication is secondhand and has some traces of previous ownership.

“The husband and wife team of Bernd and Hilla Becher began photographing together in 1959. For close to fifty years, they documented architectural forms they collectively referred to as “anonymous sculpture.” Their extensive series of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, framework houses of mine workers, and other vernacular industrial architecture—often technologies on the verge of obsolescence—comprise an in-depth study of the intricate relationship between form and function.”—Fraenkel Gallery.

At the heart of Thomas Ruff’s complex oeuvre is a pioneering conceptual expansion of what constitutes photography. Ruff’s prodigious output varies widely, from analogue portraits to manipulated images appropriated from the internet, digitally-altered archival images and digital photograms. Works by the Dusseldorf-based artist consistently explore how historical and media-driven changes in photography affect our understanding of the relationship between image and reality.