Mary Bauermeister (*1934) is regarded as the “mother” of the Fluxus movement. During the 1960s she set out from the United States and conquered the art world with her lens boxes and stone spirals. Her works are represented in many major museums including MoMa and the  Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. This magnificent volume presents her artistic, enchanted studio not far from Cologne.

Elvira Lantenhammer’s paintings are colour events which rely to a considerable extent on intensity of colour. The choice of colour and its application take place intuitively in an examination of the effects of colours and their interaction with regard to a specific location. The term Site Plan, under which the abstract works are subsumed, serves here as an open action grid which conquers new spaces for the colours.

The elements of Astrid Lowack’s (*1969) photographic-artistic transcendence are light, movement and water. As the driving forces of life they relentlessly bring about change and reflect our innermost being – our feelings and experiences. Her snapshots remain thereby constant imaginative challenges to human perception.

This book marks the triumphant return of Frida Kahlo to San Francisco, the city where her artistic life began to unfold. Kahlo’s sojourns to the United States were brief, but formative. It was in the California city – the first she visited in the US – that she ventured into a new world beyond the scope of Coyoacán, Mexico City, and Cuernavaca.

László Moholy-Nagy (1895–1946), painter, photographer, Bauhaus teacher and founder of the “New Bauhaus” and the “School of Design” in Chicago, is one of the most important artist personalities of the modern age. As one of the first artists to work in multiple media, who practised painting, sculpture, photography, film and design as equally valid art genres, he set standards which are still relevant today.

Kurt Schwitters (1887–1948) is one of the most influential protagonists of the avant-garde, both as an artist and an author. With his utopia of the total Merz vision of the world he aimed at the unification of art and non-art. The art of assemblage and material art reached its first high point in his work; his Merzbau is regarded as a forerunner of present-day installations.

When Paula Modersohn-Becker’s artist friends examined her extensive estate a few weeks after her death, they were overwhelmed. They only gradually realised that in the painter, who had died so young, they had had an outstanding artist in their midst. Modersohn-Becker was largely unrecognised during her lifetime but is regarded today as one of the pioneers of Expressionism.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, when Alfons Mucha went to the United States for four years as a lecturer, the world-famous poster designer, Art-Nouveau book illustrator, designer, photographer and painter was greeted with enthusiasm. Mucha is regarded as one of the most important representatives of Jugendstil; he knew how to move between the various genres more skilfully than virtually any other artist of his day.

The publication provides an overview of the fascinating work of the contemporary Dutch artist Juul Kraijer. Her monumental drawings, photographs, sculptures and video works sound out and dissolve the boundaries of the human body and show hybrid creatures between animal and human. 

Teresa Margolles abstracts the subject of terror: she extracts the body into abstract forms which are manifest in fired bricks or in mud, water and blood-soaked cloths. They form a memorial to the victims of the Mexican drug wars and the waves of migration.