“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

For almost thirty years, Wolfgang Tillmans has been creating new pictorial worlds of abstract photography with his Silver works, which sound out and compellingly expand the boundaries and representability of photographic processes. Brought together for the first time in one opulent artist’s book, Tillmans describes the pictures as ‘stained, impure, bright, unstable, exhausted, fugitive, smear, shimmer, as solid colours’. In addition to the pictures, Tillmans also shows images of the Silver works in exhibition settings: as elements of installations, for example at K21 in Düsseldorf in 2013 or as pure Silver installations like those at Tate Britain in 2003, the Venice Biennial in 2009 or, most recently in 2020, at WIELS in Brussels.

Bottled humanism, colored neon contaminations, tattered flaps of skin, and limp penises bring humanist self-assurance crashing to the ground. What appears as poison or chemical devastation is in fact an appeal to understand metamorphosis as a state of being. Over a period of three decades, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo created a consistent body of work that serves as a model for contemporary conceptual approaches of Posthumanism and the New Materialism. The catalogue brings together contributions by artists and theorists and documents Kudo’s comprehensive oeuvre in work and archive images as well as exhibition views from the retrospective at the Fridericianum (2016). Texts from Mike Kelley, Antje Krause-Wahl, Susanne Pfeffer & Reiko Tomii. Designed by Dan Solbach.

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.