Tag: germany

Fritz Kahn

Illustrations of Fritz Kahn

Fritz Kahn was a German physician who published popular science books and is known for his illustrations, which pioneered the art of infographics. Through the use of often startling metaphors, both verbal and visual, Kahn succeeded in making complex principles of nature and technology comprehensible to a person of average education.

Kahn described the human body as the most competent machine in the world; and his work reflects the technical and cultural state of development of Germany during the Wiemer Republic. He himself did not draw well; the illustrations were made by others on his instructions. Kahn established studios for this purpose in Berlin, New York and Copenhagen.

In late 1938, shortly after the Kristallnacht in Germany, Kahn’s books were placed on the list of “damaging and undesirable writing” and in addition his book on sexuality, “Unser Geschlechtsleben”, was banned by the police and all available copies destroyed. Fritz Kahn’s illustrations were returned to public attention in 2009 with the release of Uta and Thilo von Debschitz’s monograph “Fritz Kahn- Man Machine”. The first exhibition of his work was held in 2010 at the Berlin Museum of the Histoy of Medicine.

Club des Belugas, “Let’s Go”

Club des Belugas, “Let’s Go” from the Album “Fishing for Zebras”

Club des Belugas is one of the leading lounge & nujazz projects in Germany, perhaps in Europe. They combine Contemporary European Lounge & Nujazz Styles with Brazilian Beats and American Black Soul of the fifties, sixties and seventies, using their unique creativity and intensity.

Main members are Maxim Illion & Kitty the Bill, with such exquisite guests as the Californian jazz lady Brenda Boykin, trumpeter Reiner Winterschladen (Nighthawks), Swedish singer Anna Luca, London based jazz singer Iain Mackenzie, Anne Schnell from Jojo Effect, Dean Bowman from New York and trumpet player Thomas Siffling.

Meute, “REJ”

Meute, “REJ”, 2016

MEUTE is a techno marching band – a dozen drummers and horn players from Hamburg, Germany, who fulfil the job of a dj with their acoustic instruments. The archaic conglomerate of brass and drums creates a new genre by combining hypnotic driving techno and expressive brass band music. MEUTE detaches electronic music from the dj desk and evolves the thrust of energy on stage or directly in the crowd, be it on the streets or in the club, with or without electricity.

In this video, MEUTE plays a street version of the all time deep house classic “REJ”, originally performed by Berlin based Duo ÂME.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer, “Abendland (Twilight of the West)”, 1989, Lead Sheet, Polymer Paint, Ash, Plaster, Cement, Earth, Vanish on Canvas and Wood, 400 x 380 x 12 Centimeters, National Gallery of Australia

The huge scale of “Twilight of the West” creates a confrontational impact on the viewer that is not achieved with smaller easel paintings. Kiefer constructs works of this size with an underlying skeleton of broad gestural marks reminiscent of Abstract Expressionism. He adopts a wide variety of pictorial devices, in particular the nineteenth-century Romantics’ use of the symbolic landscape to create a drama of epic proportions.

Kiefer uses his camera as a sketching tool: a number of his works are painted directly onto enlarged photographs or are based on photographs. The image of the railway tracks was recorded during his visit to Bordeaux perhaps as early as 1984. The sky is a vast sheet of lead above the horizon line. The metal sheet is worked, wrinkled and crumpled like paper. Lead is a powerful metal, both as a protection against radiation and as an industrial pollutant. It also has associations with alchemy as the base metal that might be transmuted into gold and, as such, it parallels the idea of metamorphosis that underlies Kiefer’s art.

Like the lead curtain, the landscape below it is near monochromatic. The limited range of colour reproduces the muting effect of twilight, with its dominance of red-browns and raking illumination. The sun, an impression of a manhole cover stamped in the soft lead sheet, is low on the horizon. Twilight, and a leaden veil of darkness, descends on our civilisation in this painting. But just as the manhole suggests a way out, so the sun will follow the night.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer: Paintings from the “Walhalla” Series

Anselm Kiefer, a German painter and sculptor, was born in 1945 and grew up playing in the rubble of postwar Germany, a childhood that has had a huge effect on his life and art. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. He works incorporating materials into his work, such as straw, ash, clay, lead and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan, whose works were also affected by the horrors of the war, played a role in developing Kiefer’s themes of German history and the horror of the Holocaust.

Markus Ecke Wie Kante

Markus Ecke Wie Kante, Urbex Places in Germany

Fantastic shots of urbex places around Germany by Markus Ecke Wie Kante, talented self-taught photographer, adventurer and urban explorer based in Berlin, Germany. Markus focuses on abandoned photography. He travels all over Europe to capture impressive urbex places.

Images reblogged with thanks to https://photogrist.com

Florian Hetz

Photography by Florian Hetz

German photographer Florian Hetz deconstructs, dissects and sexualizes the bodies of his models. He mainly shows body fragments and details: muscles, hair, faces, and genitals fill the photos.

Florian Hetz previously managed the Panorama Bar at the legendary Berlin techno club Berghain. He is based in Berlin and travels Europe photographing in the cities of the continent. The images from his shooting during December to February in 2018 in Los Angeles is available in a limited edition book titled “Echo Park”.

Image reblogged with thanks to http://eenvanvelen.tumblr.com

Source: digitalaidsss

Calendar: June 19

A Year: Day to Day Men: 19th of June

The Sky Encompassing the Earth

On June 19, 1603, Merga Bien, a citizen of the town of Fulda, Germany, was arrested and accused of witchcraft.

Merga Bien was a German woman born in the town of Fulda Germany. She was married three times and was the heiress of her first two husbands upon their deaths. In 1588, she married Blasius Bien and moved from the city; but they returned to Fulda after a conflict with her husband’s employers.

At that time, Prince Abbot Balthasar von Dembach, a Benedictine monk born into a family of knights, returned to power in 1602 after a long exile. Twenty six years earlier he had been forced to abdicate by an alliance of magistrates and knights against his religious prosecutions of the Protestant movement. Upon his return, Balthasar continued his policy of counter-reformation and achieved a complete restoration of Catholicism in the city and the principality.

Starting in 1602, Balthasar von Dembach ordered an investigation of witchcraft in the city and started trials which were presided over by Balthasar Nuss, who had attached himself to the abbot during his exile and was now appointed judge. In March 1603, the first arrests of  suspected witchcraft practitioners occurred in the city. On 19 June of that year, Merga Bien was arrested and put in jail.

Her husband protested before the High Judge in Speyer, a city at the center of the Reformation movement, and pointed out that she was pregnant; but Merga Bien was not released. In jail, Merga Bien was forced by coercion to confess to the murder of her second husband and her children with him and one member of the family of her husband’s employers, and that she had taken part in a sabbath of Satan.

Merga Bien’s pregnancy was considered an aggravating circumstance; she and her husband had had no children although they had been married for fourteen years. She was forced to confess that her current pregnancy was the result of intercourse with the Devil.

Merga Bien was judged guilty of witchcraft and was burned alive at the stake in Fulda in the autumn of 1603. The Fulda witch trials continued from 1603 until 1605, resulting in the deaths of approximately 250 people. After Balthasar von Dembach’s death in 1606, the presiding judge Nuss was arrested by the new Prince-Abbot and spent 12 years in prison before being beheaded in 1618.

Sven Fennema

Sven Fennema, “Corridorio di Tristezza”, from his “Rise and Fall” Series

Sven Fennema was born in 1981 in Xanten, Germany. He currently lives and works ooutside of Dusseldorf. He started his journey into photography in 2007 and started his own company, Living Pictures, in 2009. The focus of his photography is “Lost Places” – deserted places and buildings, stripped of their functions. Whether if it’s a hidden fairytale castle, rust-eaten industrial sites or former mental hospitals. Fennema tells their stories, good as well as bad ones. He captures the ailing motifs in a touching world, somewhere in between the past and today in vibrant and living pictures.

His company site is https://www.sven-fennema.de.  His photographs and books are available from this site.

Katharina Fritsch

Three Sculpture Installations by Katharina Fritsch

German sculptor Katharina Fritsch is known for her sculptures and installations that reinvigorate familiar objects with a jarring and uncanny sensibility. Her works’ iconography is drawn from many different sources, including Christianity, art history and folklore. She attracted international attention for the first time in the mid-1980s with life-size works such as a true-to-scale elephant. Fritsch’s art is often concerned with the psychology and expectations of visitors to a museum.

Katharina Fritsch takes on relatively ordinary subjects in new, and often times jarring, ways. Most notably is the size of her works. Though many are meant specifically for museums, the size and scope of these works make a real impact. The images above are examples of that:  “Child with Poodles” (1995),  “Company at the Table (1998)” and “Rattenkonig” (1993).

The first, “Child with Poodles”, has rows of poodles facing in at a single child. This thick ring of objects creates a barrier between the viewer and the child, creating a dark or sinister feel to the piece. The second work, “Company at the Table”, leaves a haunting impression on many levels. The identical, faceless people and the size of the fifty foot table leave quite a cold and impersonal impression. Her sculpture “Rattenkonig” consists of a circle of large polyester resin rats painted black Facing out to the museum visitors. The scale of the piece is again quite large and formidable; nine foot rats in a circle forty two feet wide.

Karl Hofer

Karl Hofer, “Young Man Standing”, Date Unknown, Oil on Canvas, Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Germany

Karl Hofer was a German painter notable for his extensive contributions to the German Expressionist movement. He was a figurative painter with subjects and style spanning a wide range over the course of his career. Inspired by artists such as Henri Rousseau, the classical portraits of his early years gave way to polically charged Expressionist figures which during the Nazi years were denounced as degenerate. His style morphed into the Cubist-inspired compositions of the post-war life.

Franz Radziwill

Franz Radziwill, “The Street (Die Strasse)”, 1928, Oil on Canvas

Franz Radziwill studied architecture at the “Höhere Technische Staatslehranstalt” in Bremen until 1915 and also attended evening classes in figure drawing at the “Kunstgewerbeschule”.  He was introduced to artist circles in Fischerhude and Worpswede by his teacher Karl Schwally. There Franz Radziwill met Bernhard Hoetger, Otto Modersohn, Heinrich Vogeler and Clara Rilke-Westhoff. He also studied works by Van Gogh, Cézanne and Chagall.

After returning from a British prisoner-of-war camp in 1919 Radziwill settled in Berlin for a couple of years where he joined the “Freie Secession” and the “Novembergruppe”. He moved to Dangast on the North Sea in 1923, and had his first one-man exhibition in Oldenburg two years later, in 1925. In the same year, Franz Radziwill increasingly abandoned the Expressionist style of his early work. His friend and fellow artist Otto Dix introduced him to the “Neue Sachlichkeit” circles; and Radziwill worked together with Dix in his studio in Dresden until 1928.

He participated in the large “Neue Sachlichkeit” exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1929. Radziwill was much praised when he took over Paul Klee’s chair at the Düsseldorf Akademie in 1933. The Nazis forced him to resign two years later, however, called his artwork degenerate and banned him from practising his profession. After the second war he returned to his house in Dangast, where he began painting religious subjects.

Franz Radziwill was awarded the Villa-Massimo Prize in 1963 and spent some time in Rome. Around the mid 1960s Franz Radziwill began changing his older works by painting over them. Most recently, his works have been on show at the Kunsthalle Emden in 1995 and in the exhibition “Der Geist der Romantik in der deutschen Kunst” at the Haus der Kunst in Munich.

The Art of Writing

The Art of Writing

These images are pages from a 17th century German book on calligraphy. The full title of the book is, in English: “The Proper Art of Writing: a compilation of all sorts of capital or initial letters of German, Latin and Italian fonts from different masters of the noble art of writing”. The book was compiled by Kunstrichtige Schreibart and was published in 1655 by Paulus Fursten Kunsthändlern in Nürnberg, Germany.

A great range of different styles are represented seemingly increasing in elaborateness, and also illegibility, as the book goes on.

Renee Sintenis

Renee Sintenis, “Donkey”, Bronze, 1927, Overall: 30 ½ × 9 × 26 ½ Inches, Detroit Institute of Art

From her early years spent in a small rural town, Renee Sintenis felt drawn to animals, and her sculptures of them formed the basis of her later popularity. from 1908-1912, she studied at the Kunsigewerbeschule in Berlin under Leo von König who instructed her in painting and drawing. She learned the fundamentals of sculpture from Wilhelm Haverkamp.

Her early sculptures are characterized by stylized forms and smooth surfaces. Statues of femal nudes apperar alongside the animal sculptures, such as those of foals, deer and donketys. In the mid 1920′s her style changed to one evoking a sense of natural movements, with rough surfaces emphasizing vitality. Her sculptures of athletes included boxers and football players. Sintenis won the Olympia Prize in 1932 for her sculpture of runner Nurmi.

Walk the Dog

 

“Dame mit Hund (Walk the Dog)”, from Talking Animals on Vimeo

Directed and animated by Sonia Rohleder.
A woman walks her dog in the park, where she meets a man she would have liked to avoid.

  • Sounddesign: Michal Krajczok
  • Animation: Sonia Rohleder and Veronica Solomon
  • Voices: Ivan Baio, Alberto Picciau, Francesca Pili, Ivana Mescalchin

Talking Animals is a collective in Germany of award-winning professionals in animation and sound design/music, united as Talking Animals since 2009. They make short films, music videos, animated documentaries, animation for advertisement, explanatory movies. Their styles range from artistic 3D, over cutout and 2D drawn animation to analogue stop motion under the camera. Their site address is http://talkinganimals.de.

(Source: https://player.vimeo.com/)