Andreas Baur

For over 40 years British artist Hamish Fulton has been transforming walks into works of art. From Soho to Saskatchewan, from his home in Kent to the peaks of Nepal, he has trekked, hiked and trudged the world in solitude covering between 30 and 50 miles a day, depending on the terrain, in all weathers. His walks all over the world, conveyed in wall drawings and images, photographs and objects, quietly protest the excesses of urbanization in a sympathetic but uncompromising way. Walking Transformation, the new exhibition catalog documenting the nucleus of the recent exhibition at Villa Merkel in Esslingen, chronicles his walks in Tibet and India. With essays by writers Andreas Baur, Freddy Langer, and Tina Plokarz and illustrated with 30 color plates of works and installations from the exhibition.

Kat. Galerien Der Stadt Esslingen Villa Merkel

Hamish Fulton: Walking Transformation

Marcus Weber

»STONED AGIN« »Better than de Kooning«, this title quoted for a group exhibition sounds like a terrible genre joke, because »nobody can paint better than de Kooning«, so it is an ideal title for a group show exhibition. Peter Saul paints during the mid-1970s a series of pictures of women that parodies the »Woman«-pictures (1950-53) of Willem de Kooning. He meticulously imitates the brush strokes and the impasto in a stylistic mix of Pointillism and Graffiti Art, turns up the colour regulator, and allows the abstract-expressionist painting and the women themselves to blend in a »Daliesque« manner, like soft ice cream (see the text »Un Autre Monde« by Marcus Weber and »Ice Creams, Atom Bomb, I-Screens, Data Bomb« by Esther Leslie in this book). In 2008, Saul paints another version of this cartoon-like, neon avatar and calls his painting »Better than de Kooning« ...a relief of US reality. Artists: Tim Berresheim, Jana Euler, Maria Lassnig, Lee Lozano, Michel Majerus, Dieter Krieg, Katrin Plavcak, Jon Rafman, Gunter Reski, Peter Saul, Matthias Schaufler, Jim Shaw, Amy Sillman, Sue Williams Exhibition: Villa Merkel Galerien der Stadt Esslingen: 12/9-15/11/2015

Better than de Kooning

Lionel Bovier

Jean-Charles Massera

Irene Hofmann

Fabrice Gygi

Melanie Smith

Melanie Smith was born in 1965 in Poole, South of England, and now lives in Mexico City Her installations, paintings and video works address a wide range of issues relating to perception, as well as philosophical questions with an emphasis upon socially relevant topics. Her contribution to the Venice Biennale in 20n, presented at the Mexican pavillon, made a lasting impression on the visitors. Smith readopted this show in an in foret and content markedly extended version in her first museum-based solo exhibition in Germany this summer at the Villa Merkel, Esslingen.

Short Circuit

Darren Almond

Johannes Meinhardt

An outstand artist with fabulous work, Darren Almond, born in 1971, is without doubt one of the outstanding English contemporary artists; it all started 1997 with his participation in the legendary show Sensation, the inception of the Young British Artists, and led to the Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2003 and a Turner Prize nomination two years later. And anyone who caught the empathetic and concentrated retrospective at the Villa Merkel in Esslingen in the summer of 2011 can count his or her blessings. The title of the book and exhibition is derived from the large-format Nocturnes (2004-2010) featuring photographs of moonlit landscapes using long exposure times which evoke Romantic landscapes in their European variants and classical Japanese and Chinese landscape painting in their Asiatic motifs. The absence of shadows in these photographs is visible testimony to a seemingly frozen time, whose light doesn't actually illuminate the scenes as such, but instead hangs upon the open surfaces rather like an emanation from the landscape; a fleeting substance. Thus these photographs can be situated in the place where painting and photography, perception and imagination intersect. At the point where the photographs allow time to become the yardstick of their own perfect genesis, the artist duly formulates the experience of time as an endless repetition of abrasive and lengthy spiritual retreats in his powerful video piece "Sometimes Still" (2010). Darren Almond, running at a pace with his camera, was allowed accompany a Buddhist Tendai novitiate monk on a thirty kilometre nocturnal cross-country run through forests alongside the holy mountain Hiei--an ascetic and simultaneously physical and spiritual exercise of the utmost rigour, which the novitiate had to perform 1,000 times over a period of seven years. In the course of this he had to stop at appointed places and utter prayers, which he then rounded off with two hand claps. The special nature of this publication in cassette form relates to the specific execution of individual works, sometimes as a concertina folder or a simple booklet. Thus all of the photographs in the exhibition are adequately covered and the film receives a form of publication which can been viewed in particular as a mirror of the artist's experiences.

Andreas Baur

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