Thomas Zander Boeken

This retrospective look at the career of Henry Wessel, one of the late twentieth century's most original and dryly funny photographers, tracks his contribution to the New Topographics movement of the 1970s and continues through more than 30 years of incisive observations on the American social landscape. In 133 photographs, it offers up a range of work from the earliest in the 1960s to a recent series on Las Vegas, made between 2000 and 2004. Throughout, Wessell not only chronicles the idiosyncrasies and anomalies of Southern California and the American West, but demonstrates over and over that photography can surpass its documentary role to speculate and to suggest narratives within and beyond the frame. Ultimately, he challenges not only our expectations of his medium, but our ways of seeing and our preconceptions about the familiar. Sandra Phillips, Curator of Photography at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, writes of his emergence from the era's pack, "Wessel's remarkable work, witty, evocative and inventive, is distinctive and at the same time a component part of the great development of photography which flourished in the 1970s. The pictures continue to grow and evolve and the work is now regarded as an individual and important contribution to twentieth-century American photography."

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 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)

Grey pictures by Richter from the years 1965 to 1974 as well as?Spiegel, Grau / Mirror, Grey? from 1991 are juxtaposed with photos by Michael Schmidt of?Waffenruhe? (1985?1987) and?Berlin Wedding? (1976?1978).00Exhibition: Galerie Thomas Zander, Cologne, Germany (01.12.2018 - 06.03.2019)

Diese zweibändige Publikation präsentiert Einblicke in das Frühwerk von Robert Adams im Zusammenhang mit dem Schaffen des Architekten Rudolf Schwarz. Ein bislang unveröffentlichter Text von Robert Adams erläutert anschaulich dessen Wahrnehmung der modernen Sakralarchitektur und macht die bislang unbekannte, enge Verbindung zwischen dem Künstler und dem Architekten deutlich. Auf seiner einzigen Europareise besichtigte Adams gezielt moderne Architektur und vor allem die Kirchen von Rudolf Schwarz. Die dabei entstandenen Eindrücke inspirierten ihn nachhaltig und waren ein Auslöser für seine Entscheidung Fotograf zu werden.

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.