Strong Women

"Chakaia Booker: The Observance" is the first comprehensive monograph on this important yet understudied American artist. Illuminating more than three decades of Booker’s practice, the publication explores her signature form – monumental works made of rubber – while showcasing her innovations across mediums including photography, painting, and prints.

In her elective home country of Mexico, the artist Olga Costa (1913–1993), a native of Leipzig, has long been established as an important female voice of Mexican Modernism. This volume presents impressively her autonomous artistic work between Mexican and European Modernism, and follows the traces of her life from Germany out into the world and back again.

The English illustrator Anna Atkins (1799–1871) was in every respect a modern woman. For the publication of her plant collections she used the latest technology, the recently invented cyanotype. In 1843 she used the process to create the first photo book in history, with images of breathtaking beauty and originality which often look like modern art.

As we navigate the early decades of a new epoch defined by the measurable human imprint on the earth, the question of how we will reconcile our behaviour with the evidence of its catastrophic effect is yet to be answered. With her works on sustainability, US artist Mary Mattingly (b. 1979) examines how we can connect and reconnect to Earth.

Jin-me Yoon is an important Canadian lens-based artist who has been working steadily since emerging on Vancouver’s contemporary art scene in the 1990s. "About Time" focuses on Yoon’s monumental and multifaceted production of the last decade, which typically combines photography, video, performance and installation.

Kubra Khademi (b. 1989) lives in Paris and focuses in her work on her life as a woman and a person with direct experience as a refugee. This makes it both political and highly topical. Multi-faceted themes pervade her art, including her function as a mouthpiece and as an element in the fight for the fundamental rights of women, as well as artistic work in exile and in a Muslim society.

Abstract and expressive – the works of the color virtuoso Annette Werndl (b. 1956 in Deggendorf, Bavaria) are internationally appreciated and exhibited. The monograph assembles her works from the past years which were inspired mainly by sojourns in the United States and especially New York, and by the development of the music of the time (jazz, blues and pop).

Wiebke Siem (b. 1954 in Kiel), who was awarded the prestigious Goslar Kaiserring in 2014, is an important representative of contemporary art with an oeuvre that questions the boundaries between the genres of fashion, design and sculpture and engages in a rewriting of the history of modern art from a female perspective that is as knowledgeable as it is humorous.

Over the course of seven decades, Twinka Thiebaud has collaborated with more than thirty artists working in photography, painting and drawing. This catalogue explores her body of work as an artist’s model alongside developments in photographic techniques and technology, and the role of nature in defining West Coast experimentation.

Xenia Hausner ranks among the most important Austrian painters of our time. This splendid volume focuses on the aspect of stagecraft which characterizes all her works. Starting from the early paintings of the 1990s up to her moving Exiles series, the publication lures us into a female world filled with mysterious interpersonal relationships.