Raoul Hausmann’s photographic work has long been underrated. This key artist of the twentieth century is remembered primarily for the central role he played in Berlin Dada with his assemblages, photomontages, and optophonetic poems, yet the vicissitudes of history caused his photography, an essential facet of his oeuvre, to be cast almost entirely into the shade. From 1927 on, Hausmann became an avid and restless photographer in Germany, in particular during his stays at the North Sea and Baltic coasts. While in exile in Ibiza after the Nazis came to power, he took an interest in the local populace and vernacular architecture, before emigrating again in 1936. During this intense decade, he reflected extensively on photography, developing a highly individual practice in the medium, simultaneously documentary and lyrical, inextricably linked to his way of thinking and living.

Edited by Suzanne Cotter. Text by Catherine Wood, Jan Verwoert.

Rendered in pallid, ghostly tones, Silke Otto-Knapp’s watercolors and gouaches recall turn-of-the-century painters such as Bakst, or children’s illustrators like Arthur Rackham. Her delicately delineated vignettes of encounters, dances and isolate doings seem to take place beyond a veil, in a submarine realm of amphitheaters and botanical gardens. Present Time Exercise surveys her work from the past five years.

Adapted from writings by artists and critics appearing in magazines, catalogs, and other recent publications, The Auratic Narrative was conceived by Jay Chung and Q Takeki Maeda as a framing device for their exhibition at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in 2019. The text-as-artwork offers a dramatic account of an unnamed artist’s ambivalence toward their professional milieu. Here the narrative is presented in its entirety along with bibliographical notes and an introduction by artist and writer Ariane Müller. Photographic documentation of the exhibition—the first survey of the artists’ collaborative practice—accompanies the work. Taken together, word and image chart a course through the show and the artists’ oeuvre.

For the first time, the 35 legendary box catalogues of Städtische Museum Mönchengladbach have been published as a book. Museum director Johannes Cladders developed the idea of catalogues in the form of a box with Joseph Beuys in 1967. Until 1978, Cladders worked closely with exhibiting artists to create such catalogues, which radically re-envisaged the traditional exhibition and museum publication. They embody the participatory approach of their time and instance a vision of a porous democratic work. Viewers are invited to actively participate in this artistic and institutional endeavour and engage both intellectually and physically. Researched by Susanne Rennert, designed by Petra Hollenbach, with photographs documenting all catalogues by Tobias Hohn & Stanton Taylor, and introductory essays by Susanne Rennert and Susanne Titz.

Blinky Palermo, is known for his large fabric and metal pictures as well as his objects and installations. Less well known, yet no less interesting, are the works he created in editions: screen prints and offset prints, lithographs, objects, and a template for painting. In their entirety, these works not only reflect Palermo’s development from the 1960s to his early death in 1977, but also show how the artist deliberately expanded his work with the possibilities of technical reproduction. Thanks to a donation from the Cologne collector Ulrich Reininghaus, in 2018 a complete set of Palermo’s editions became part of the Museum Ludwig’s collection. After having been subject to an in-depth scholarly research, they will now be presented in an exhibition for the first time. This exhibition catalogue also includes an updated version of Fred Jahn’s out-of-print catalogue raisonné from 1983.

Isa Genzken’s Der Spiegel 1989–1991 consists of 121 reproductions of black-and-white photographs cut out of the influential German newsweekly Der Spiegel over a period of three years. The images are presented starkly, bereft of photo credits or captions: having been freed from their usual meaning-giving context, the images assume a mystery and free-floating universality as the viewer unconsciously struggles to recall the specificity of the sensational news story and headline to which they were once attached. The book is produced in a limited edition of 700 numbered copies.