Art

For 25 years now the Zumtobel Group has had artists design the annual reports. For the jubilee edition, New York architect Elizabeth Diller has devoted herself to the light of the blue hour.

Museum August Kestner is looking back at 70 years of advertising from Hanover – encountering many an avant-garde poster in the process.

Konstantin Grcic recently presented five furniture sculptures at Galerie Kreo in Paris. They create a space in a space and it is no coincidence that they are all called Hieronymus.

Explorations by a new museum director: The exhibition “Wolfsburg Unlimited” stages a journey through the history and present of an exemplary drawing-board city.

For the 13th Small-Scale Sculpture Triennial, Kuehn Malvezzi created an impressive exhibition architecture hung from the ceiling in Alte Kelter in Fellbach.

It’s hard to imagine a more joyous and cunning approach to the designed world: For Michael Erlhoff on the occasion of his 70th birthday.

In Berlin’s Haus am Waldsee, an exhibition pares Jürgen Mayer H.’s architecture down to its essentials.

In the guise of “LDPE” Julian Faulhaber has produced a quite extraordinary photobook.

Do you dance in your bikini round the mountains at Christmas? Or prefer to spend it writing postcards?

In museum stores, different ages and worlds mix unabashedly, such that Munch’s “Scream” can easily become the latest rage.

There can be surprises when early and contemporary paintings of one and the same artist meet up – as in the case of Rolf-Gunter Dienst.

Artist Stephan Huber has created many fantastics map. And they’re now all brought together in his “world atlas".

An attentive viewer will constantly find something new and surprising in Christiane Schlosser’s drawings.

Anyone who saw it probably headed straight for the attic to retrieve the old “Remington”, “Gabriele” or “Hermes Baby” typewriter.

Gustav Klimt’s “The Kiss” is for the Austrian Gallery in the Upper Belvedere in Vienna what the “Mona Lisa” is for the Louvre in Paris. With all manner of consequences for the foyer.

Author Arno Schmidt proved way back when that popular hits can be political, if you only grasp them right.

Backdrop, sculpture or theme world? Temporary architectures in the social media age reveal more than one might at first think: an architecture analysis using Instagram.

Horst P. Horst’s fashion photography is world famous. Now a hitherto unknown facet of his oeuvre is being unveiled as part of a major retrospective at London’s Victoria & Albert Museum: his playful use of patterns of nature.

What do a matchbox and a match have to say about the state of the world in general and of art in particular?

Here are the poor, there are the rich. And neither side is finding happiness – Denmark’s National Gallery in Copenhagen is dedicating a retrospective to the artist duo Elmgreen and Dragset.

In the spaces of Louisiana Museum Olafur Eliasson has created a rough, Nordic landscape made of scree. It changes with anyone moving in it.

At Design Miami, which took place in parallel to Art Basel, the French galleries presented an awful lot of Jean Prouvé originals. The icing on the cake: Konstantin Grcic transformed an Audi TT into a mobile living machine.

Dries Van Noten is an idiosyncratic couturier who has never obeyed the laws of the fashion world and instead favors slowness and quality. Through August, Paris’ Musée des Arts Décoratifs is hosting an elaborately designed exhibition on his work tracing the art and fashion sources that inspired his unique creations.

Today’s overabundance of plastic waste is the focus of the exhibition “An Ecosystem of Excess” currently on show at the Schering Foundation in Berlin. Artist Pinar Yoldas has designed a laboratory featuring plastic-digesting monstrosities.

French designer Martin de Bie couldn’t care two hoots about conventional products. Instead of focusing on functionality and usage, he develops instruments that transform sounds into light and entice the senses.

The pile still hasn’t been cleared. But I’m tempted by what I haven’t yet seen or read. So let’s keep looking. This time in the direction of photography and drawing.

If a critical stance is the order of the day in the Mecca of German media freaks, will electronic networks such as Facebook cease to be as well accepted in the world after Snowden’s NSA revelations?

A year ago Amsterdam’s Rijksmusum launched its Rijksstudio, an online platform that allows users to download images of the museum's artworks for free and edit them at will. Sellout or seductive?

Imagine roadblocks, barbed wire obstacles and sandbag barricades against a backdrop of deserted ruins: A leading member of Magnum Photos, Josef Koudelka took his panoramic camera to document the landscape along the route of the barrier that separates Israel and Palestine. His latest volume “The Wall” presents these images in an album that is as somber as it is impressive.

Mars, the Red Planet and the Earth’s neighbor in the Solar System, has long inspired human imagination. Now, for the first time, a fascinating book of incredibly high quality photographs gives us the chance to see its barren surface in detail.

Hitherto creative types have tended to consider self-help books a waste of time. But that is about to change. Frank Berzbach has written a small book about the “Kunst ein kreatives Leben zu führen” (The art of living a creative life), which looks at how a creative person might achieve a state of Zen in their everyday life.

Not only a treat for lovers of music, the newly opened “Museo del Violino” in Stradivari’s birth town Cremona is also an architectural delight: a valuable collection of historic instruments housed in a beautifully converted 1940s palazzo.

Berlin’s “Illustrative Festival” offers insights into the young world of illustrators.

The central exhibition at the 55th Art Biennale of Venice tries to gather the intuitive knowledge of art in a “Palazzo Enciclopedico”. Another sets out to reconstruct a legendary 1969 show.