Böcker av Christoph Tannert

Hans-Hendrik Grimmling (*1947 in Zwenkau near Leipzig) is one of the most important painters of his generation in Germany, an initiator of the legendary First Leipzig Autumn Salon in 1984, regarded as a milestone exhibition in non-conformist GDR art. For more than 40 years, he has been painting at the fringes of abstraction. He is preoccupied with the experience of letting go, detaching himself from the figurative and the narrative, from East German identity, thus breaking away from predetermined physical forms. Grimmling visualizes his prime concern: the drama, the struggle, and the tragedy of human existence. Large areas, wide swaths and interlinked bands of black stretch across the canvas. The colour black prevails, becoming intoxicating and, for two decades now, the painter's only visual content. This publication is the first monographic work to present Grimmling's complete oeuvre. Retrospective of a non-conformist GDR artist An overview with works from five decades Exhibition: Kunstmuseum Magdeburg. Kloster Unser Lieben Frauen, 14.09.2014 to 08.02.2025, book launch in January 2025

Tracing the Wear of the Life of Labor. The visual art of Jan Muche (b. 1975, Herford; lives and works in Berlin) revolves around forms that bring to mind structural steelwork, giant industrial installation components, or scaffolding. His constructivist-abstract paintings and sculptures look back on steel as a symbol of industrialization and the working class, which featured in unflappably cheerful and adulatory depictions that were characteristic of the twentieth century's ideologies--Communism, Stalinism, National Socialism, actually existing Socialism. Muche's roughhewn aesthetic combines proletarian charm with the spirit of onward and upward, taking the beholder to regions not untinged by dissonance. This book, supported by the Leinemann-Stiftung für Bildung und Kunst, brings his reflections on the significance of work and the impact of digital technology on physical toil as well as his engagement with yesteryear's "heroes of labor" into focus. Jan Muche trained as lithographer and studied with Karl Horst Hödicke at the Hochschule der Künste Berlin.