Carlo Borer creates objects in chrome steel or aluminium, which he designs, develops and constructs using 3D-CAD. Rotation and the perfect tension between dynamics and statics play an important role in the definition of forms. The laser is used to cut, round and weld the shapes from sheet metal. This publication brings together Borer’s sculptures, sculptures or installations, which he calls “Transformers”, “Loops” or “Clouds”, but also his “Spaceships” and “No Readymades”. These objects suggest a supposed use and pretend to be everyday objects of a technically advanced civilization. With a wink they lead the viewer on a false track.
2017
German, English
194 pages
29 x 23 cm
Hardcover
The visual aesthetic of Sonja Braas (*1968 in Siegen) is one of dazzling paradox. Viewers see clearly recognizable natural phenomena and forces, such as icy alpine regions, thundering avalanches, tempestuous surf, or urban centers and cities flooded or in flames. Yet nature’s essence seems alienated. The images look artificial, for they are only partially based on actual nature and landscape photographs. Many of the images are of models built by the artist, and this lends them a characteristically uncanny atmosphere. While Romantic painting assigns the viewer a fixed viewpoint, generally represented by a figure in the picture, from which he or she can perceive the sublimity behind the terror of nature from a safe distance, Braas rejects any foothold whatsoever. Only the disembodied camera seems immersed in the events taking place in the photographs.
Texts by Stephan Berg, Diana Edkins, graphic design by Sonja Braas, Felix Kunkler
German, English
2013
122 pages
27 x 30 cm
Hardcover
This book presents the many facets of photographer Balthasar Burkhard (1944–2010), showing his self-invention as an artist and tracing the trajectory of the medium of photography in the later half of the twentieth century. Burkhard’s work combines a sensitive understanding of the body as sculpture and the photographic image as a canvas, making him one of the pioneers in translating photography as a monumental “tableau” into contemporary art. This comprehensive book coalesces Burkhard’s early role as a chronicler of the contemporary art of his time, especially as the main photographer for Swiss curator Harald Szeemann, his conceptual redefinition of photography together with other artists, and finally his emancipation as a photo artist. It accompanies a major retrospective organized by Museum Folkwang in Essen, Fotomuseum Winterthur and Fotostiftung Schweiz, the Museo d’arte della Svizzerra italiana in Lugano and the Balthasar Burkhard Estate in Bern.
Cuban artist Adrián Fernández’s latest photographic series combines images of the backsides of derelict billboards and digitally manipulates them into imagined architectural installations. Industrial and surreal in form, these farcical sculptures evoke the failure of certain large-scale social projects.
2022
TURNER
English, Spanish
28,7 x 24,64 cm
160 pages
Hardcover
How to convey the horror of industrialized warfare? How close to get? How much suffering and death to reveal? For his series on the European battlefields of the twentieth century, Swiss photographer Peter Hebeisen (* 1956) took a different approach. Large-format tableaus in the tradition of Romantic painting show Verdun, Stalingrad, and Sarajevo from the perspective of the general sitting high on his horse and overlooking the scene from a strategic military vantage point. To convey this view, the camera was symbolically placed in an elevated position three meters above the ground. Military leaders’ brutal actions had traumatic consequences that were felt for generations. Working with a military historian, Hebeisen traveled some forty thousand kilometers to visit the battlefields of Europe that had claimed the most lives, from the French Atlantic coast to distant Russia. His shattering new survey of these European landscapes confronts us with unfathomable events in history and commemorates the sites where they unfolded.
Graphic design by Robert Di Falco, Josef Haas, text(s) by Gerhard Paul, Moisés Prieto, Gisela Fempel
2014
German, English
144 pages
28 x 32 cm
Hardcover
The first monograph with concrete photography by Roger Humbert(born in 1929). Roger Humbert is a Swiss pioneer of concrete photography which has produced an extensive photographic oeuvre since the 1950s. Humbert worked in the darkroom until 1974 only with light sources, form elements such as stencils, punch cards etc. and the chemical process of development. The mysterious quality of the light that is drawn into the sensitive gelatine was not directed at extra-illustrative motifs, but at the form and structure of the photo itself, and helped this type of artistic photography to gain international recognition.
With essays by Bernd Stiegler, Katharina Lang and Martin Gasser
2017
German, English
19 x 25 cm
208 pages
Flexcover
DVD video produced by Aaron Levy and Osvaldo Romberg in collaboration with the artist’s studio, Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie and the Slought Foundation and a booklet with contributions by Aaron Levy and Willoughby Sharp.
The catalogue shows the most important aspects of Thomas Ritz’s painting and sheds light on the work in the discourse of contemporary painting, which claims an independent meaning for itself between photography and drawing. The central theme of Thomas Ritz’s work is the interaction of inner and outer images, of abstraction and representationalism and the self-referentiality of painting. The landscapes and surreal spaces that Thomas Ritz paints are full of transitions and intermediate stages. They appear to disappear. The position taken here is made clear by a chronological section of selected works from the last ten years. A text by the art historian Simon Baur deepens the examination of the work, while a studio discussion between the two painters Thomas Ritz and Guido Nussbaum explores the question of the picture and the conditions of its creation.
With texts by Jean-Christophe Ammann and Simon Baur and a conversation between Thomas Ritz, Guido Nussbaum and Simon Baur.
2013
German
96 Seiten
28 x 23 cm
Hardcover
To mark the occasion of the exhibition “Installations in situ” of Luzia Simons at the Archives nationales, Paris, Fabian & Claude Walter Galerie has published this catalogue.
2016
French, Portuguese
48 Pages
28 x 21 cm
Softcover
The luxuriant equatorial forests and voluptuous vegetation of Brazil and the cultural implications of plant genera and flowers are integral to the imagery of Luzia Simons’s (b. Quixadá, Ceariá, Brazil, 1953; lives and works in Berlin) art. In watercolors, paintings, photographs, and tapestries, the artist probes the impenetrable role that nature plays, employing pictorial techniques of her own devising to create poetic studies of forms and colors. Simons is a pioneer in the development of the scanogram—a media technique that combines elements of painting and photography. Arranging blossoms and leaves of a wide range of tulip cultivars on a high-resolution scanner, she produces imposing works that boast intense and brilliant colors and stupendous definition. Just as nature and culture are in constant transformation, identities never remain fixed: that is what Simons’s work illustrates to stunning effect.
The publication Traces presents a comprehensive survey of the artist’s oeuvre and an overview of her exhibitions of the past three decades. With essays by Tereza de Arruda, Chantal Colleu-Dumond, and Irina Hiebert Grun.
2021
196 pages
German, English, French
34,5 x 25,5 cm
Hardcover
Before Romeo Vendrame began his artistic career, he often travelled to London, exploring the streets of the city with his camera, documenting the nighttime in Soho, famous buildings, modern architecture, urban signs and everyday street scenes from Brixton and Piccadilly Circus. Hundreds of slides made during his stays in London rested for 40 years in the artist’s studio and were forgotten over the years. It was not until 2014 that Vendrame looked at his photographs of London again. Inspired by Graham Greene’s spy novel The Human Factor (1978), which was set in London, atmospheric memories of Vendrame’s time in London awakened. In Choreography, Vendrame transforms images from the past into his current photographic language. The artist achieves this in an “analogue” way by projecting the slides through translucent materials onto foil, creating a multi-layered, new image. This translation is then photographed again. In this series, Romeo Vendrame defines himself as author and director in one. In the 1970s, he took the photographs, thus writing the photographic piece, and only decades later did he stage it. The photographer describes this process as choreography.
Texts by Roberta Valtorta, Lena Fritsch
Graphic design by Katarina Lang, Zürich
2017
German
104 pages
33 x 23 cm
Softcover
