Thomas Zander Reihenfolge der Bücher

The catalogue features works from six decades including photographs, paintings, works on paper and artist's books. With their unconventional approaches to these media, both artists are seminal figures in the development of the Californian art scene. Goode and Ruscha attended the same high school in Oklahoma City and went on to study at Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles. Along with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, their work was shown in the 1962 groundbreaking exhibit "New Painting of Common Objects". It was considered the first museum Pop Art exhibition in the USA. In reaction to abstract expressionism, the young artists turned to the visual experience of their environment: light and haze, reflecting surfaces, synthetic materials, mundane objects and commercial culture. Joe Goode is associated with the Light and Space movement and innovatively explores the experience of seeing in his works. Breaking the convention of the two-dimensional image space, they question the authenticity of experience between representation and abstraction. Exhibition: Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne, Germany (23.11.2019 - 03.03.2020)

Austere an inspired pairing of two influential American conceptualists Working from the 1960s on, Lewis Baltz (1945–2014) and Sol LeWitt (1928–2007) developed pared-down visual languages to explore the structures of spatial processes and permutation. Baltz, in photographic series such as The Prototype Works , Tract Houses and Park City , united traditions of documentary photography and avant-garde art to depict the iconography of postindustrial society―signs, walls, parking lots, suburban homes.LeWitt’s works in sculpture, such as his Serial Project and his massive Black Cubes , highlight an absence of function and an austere seriality. Much like Baltz, LeWitt deploys consistent measurement as the basis for many of his works. Both artists’ groundbreaking works are included in this suggestive pairing. Works by both artists are documented in numerous exhibition views and individual illustrations with further illumination from texts by Baltz and LeWitt.

The publication juxtaposes works by painters Günter Umberg and James White, inviting a dialogue between their ostensibly disparate practices. Umberg defines painting as “painted colour”. He has radically reduced the means of painting to its essentials. The sheer presence of colour in his works produces an uncanny effect of depth and the physical presence of the paintings comes to the fore. James White’s black and white paintings depict everyday scenes such as a half empty glass, a door left ajar. The London based artist, executes them intricately like still life paintings, yet using contemporary materials, cinematic narrative devices and images of consumer objects that anchor his practise in today’s visual culture. The works of both artists investigate questions of surface and depth of images, closeness and distance, presence and absence.