Böcker utgivna av Edition Cantz

Ralf Cohen uses a wide range of possibilities to manipulate the material of photography. In the beginning he stayed within the limited conditions of the darkroom. Now he additionally uses external factors from nature to transform the visual material embedded in the gelatin of the baryta paper, for example, in his works entitled "NEULAND." The treatment is done manually and shows a high level of knowledge and skill in handling of developer and fixer. Finely graduated overexposure, negative prints alienated by color filters and reversion, and the deliberate use of the effect of light and shadow work against accustomed viewings. The aim of Ralf Cohen's art is not superficial visuality but a vision of hidden and invisible elements behind material objects. In his images Ralf Cohen "exposed" some of them for us.

An unreal view of reality. In her works, Ute Bartel (b. 1961 in Halle, lives and works in Cologne) deals with everyday circumstances, the "mansionaticum." A term which at first glance seems epochal, but etymologically simply means "belonging to the household." In a concrete confrontation with particular places and situations, she is interested in things in and of themselves, in their formal characteristics, such as their forms, colors, and structures. The artist's work is characterized by her idiosyncratic approach to the multiple creative possibilities of photography. Using analog and digital techniques, she creates collages, objects, and works that project into the respective space, in which materials such as waxed tablecloths, plastic bags, or straws are also used. This generously illustrated monograph presents structures of familiar and yet unknown realities marked by highly pronounced forms and bold colors, and provides comprehensive insight into one of the focal points of Ute Bartel's oeuvre. Ute Bartel studied at the Academy of Art in Münster, where she was a master student of Reiner Ruthenbeck. Her works have been widely exhibited at, among others, the Kunstverein Speyer, the Deichtorhallen Hamburg, and the Westfälischer Kunstverein, Münster.

Franziska Windisch explores the entanglement of trace, sound, and movement in her work "walk with a wire" (2018). She initiates the sound production from the material of a cassette's magnetic tape, which she scans by hand in a loop. The touch of the fingers and the surroundings leave traces on the empty magnetic tape, which produce different noises when played back afterwards. Both the text as well as the concept of the performance were created at a historical excavation site in Greece. The confrontation with the remnants of an ancient urban space resulted in a reflection on temporality.

A representative of Abstract Expressionism, Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was one of the most important artistic personalities of the twentieth century. He began his career as a teacher and artist in the United States in the mid-1930s. The previously unpublished graphic oeuvre shows an interesting and varied development process that preceded the influential painting of the post-war period.

In her often space-consuming installations, Laura Schawelka makes use of photography, video, and sculpture in a multilayered dialog in which traditional definitions such as subject, image content, or image carrier are called into question. Images are shown as larger than life or miniaturized; they become backgrounds or are equipped with props. In her latest work, the artist focuses on the role of photography in the development of modern consumer society--from the first department stores in Paris to the present day. In doing so, she shines a light on online trade, among other things: What does it mean if goods are only communicated through other goods, computers, cell phones, tablets--in short, screens? If feeling something in a store is replaced by swiping on a touchscreen? If this distance, this withholding of the genuine object, is precisely what prompts the desire for it in the first place?

In his extraordinary sculptures, Nobuyuki Tanaka combines a treatment of lacquer practiced for centuries in Japan with an organic language of form. An exceptional representative and pioneer of the use of lacquer in contemporary art, Tanaka uses the lacquer mostly in polished deep black, sometimes also in intense red, as a multi-layer coating for his large-scale sculptures. This exhibition catalog presents twenty unique wall and floor works created between 1994 and 2018. It is the first solo exhibition of Nobuyuki Tanaka's work in Europe.

An attempt to break a taboo - trivial, provocative, and humorous. A black, pure-bred Great Dane named Hitler (1991-1998) accompanied the Austrian performance artist and documenta participant FLATZ (*1952) like a shadow through the 1990s. The naming--as well as the subtitles of the photographs created--relates the banal everyday life of the dog to the inglorious life of its namesake, thus opening up an extremely provocative range of possible associations. "Hitler is always with me," says the artist, "just as we always carry the historical Hitler around with us, because he is part of our history, which--as long as it is suppressed, transfigured, or tabooed--is not overcome." With more than 350 illustrations, Hitler--A Dog's Life is an extended and revised reprint of the book published in 1992, which has been out of print for a long time.

The importance of the moment in artistic photography. Can photographs exist which represent concrete places? In view of the daily flood of images, this question seems superfluous at first. Only on closer inspection does the distance between the visual experience of places and the media images generated from them become apparent. "There is nothing in this world that does not have a decisive moment," Henri Cartier-Bresson once stated. The present volume examines this decisive moment and explores the question of how artistic photography can describe the gap between spatial reality and photographic image, and make the present at the time the photograph was taken visible. With texts by Holger Kube Ventura and works by Viktoria Binschtok, Julian Faulhaber, Mareike Foecking, Stephanie Kiwitt, Nikolaus Koliusis, Barbara Probst, and Wolfgang Zurborn.

Finnish artist Elsa Salonen examines our relationship to nature in a poetic manner. Salonen's works emerge out of her artistic interpretation of ancient alchemical knowledge. In her art, she activates animist rituals and magic practices once believed to have been lost, asking questions about our relationship to the environment. A profound act of listening to the world is made available to us as "stories told by stones," an enrichment of the millennia-long encounter between humans and stones and a record of the transformation from stones into pigments and from pigments into art. The respectful relationship of the artist to the stones transforms our own encounter into an audience with some of our oldest kin. This is animism at its most life- and world-affirming.