Lucas Arruda’s oeuvre comprises paintings, graphics, light installations, slide projections, and films. It reflects an intense examination of a wide range of themes—from the conceptual framework of painting to the existential conditions of life. Arruda pays particular attention to the depiction of landscapes and seascapes, although these never refer to specific places. Instead, the artist is concerned with the thoughts and memories that certain localities evoke, exploring their lighting conditions, atmospheres, and emotions to produce imaginary images. From June 6 to September 8, 2019, the Fridericianum presented Deserto-Modelo, Arruda’s first institutional survey show in Germany, conceived especially for Kassel. The accompanying publication of the same title offers a multifaceted art historical and cultural contextualization of Arruda’s work, an exploration of its philosophical dimensions, and detailed documentation of the exhibition.

Lucas Arruda’s oeuvre comprises paintings, graphics, light installations, slide projections, and films. It reflects an intense examination of a wide range of themes—from the conceptual framework of painting to the existential conditions of life. Arruda pays particular attention to the depiction of landscapes and seascapes, although these never refer to specific places. Instead, the artist is concerned with the thoughts and memories that certain localities evoke, exploring their lighting conditions, atmospheres, and emotions to produce imaginary images. From June 6 to September 8, 2019, the Fridericianum presented Deserto-Modelo, Arruda’s first institutional survey show in Germany, conceived especially for Kassel. The accompanying publication of the same title offers a multifaceted art historical and cultural contextualization of Arruda’s work, an exploration of its philosophical dimensions, and detailed documentation of the exhibition.

With texts by Paulina Pobocha and Moritz Wesseler.

On November 3, 2020, Trisha Baga illuminated the facade of the Fridericianum in Kassel with HOPE, a film produced especially for the occasion. The work is a reflection on the state of our world today and, more specifically, a commentary on the US presidential election that took place on the same date. Baga’s film reflects the markedly contrasting events, conditions, and moods of the present moment, which combine to form a new sense of unity within the work. The result is an echoing declaration in which, like in most of the artist’s works, the boundaries between film, painting, sculpture, and architecture, between the work of art and its surroundings, blur. The relevance of Baga’s themes was underscored through the presentation of HOPE as a widely visible illumination, giving rise to a resounding call for both hope and action. 

Bottled humanism, colored neon contaminations, tattered flaps of skin, and limp penises bring humanist self-assurance crashing to the ground. What appears as poison or chemical devastation is in fact an appeal to understand metamorphosis as a state of being. Over a period of three decades, from the mid-1950s to the late 1980s, the Japanese artist Tetsumi Kudo created a consistent body of work that serves as a model for contemporary conceptual approaches of Posthumanism and the New Materialism. The catalogue brings together contributions by artists and theorists and documents Kudo’s comprehensive oeuvre in work and archive images as well as exhibition views from the retrospective at the Fridericianum (2016).

The artist’s book Full House is based on a new series of drawings by Keren Cytter, who was born in 1977 in Tel Aviv. The images depict the interior of apartments in Netanya, Lausanne, and New York, in which the artist and writer lived between 2020 and 2022. Cytter used a variety of felt-tips to make the drawings, which are composed like puzzles, but here the pieces do not seem to quite fit together. In this way, the view into the everyday life of Cytter, which is not least reminiscent of the tradition of diaries, is regularly undermined.

The publication My Own Personal Bess, an artist’s book by Richard Hawkins was published on the occasion of the Forrest Bess exhibition. It is composed of collages, for which Hawkins combined reproductions of paintings by the visionary artist with selected text fragments and advertisements from the article “His Name Was Forrest Bess,” published in 1981 by Texas Monthly magazine. The book empathically approaches both the artistic work and biography of Bess, whom Hawkins discovered in his youth and considers to be a pioneering figure. Today Hawkins’s own work has likewise become an important point of reference for a younger generation of artists. 

We are pleased to announce the publication of the artist’s book and catalog of works #GIVEPOETRYATRYCOLLECTEDPOETRY1990-2020… by Karl Holmqvist. The publication includes all the writing works created over the past thirty years by the artist and author, who was born in 1964 in Sweden and now lives in Berlin. The book, which was realized in close collaboration with designer Dan Solbach, is published on the occasion of Holmqvist’s projects at the Fridericianum and at gta exhibition / ETH Zurich. Edited by Moritz Wesseler, Fredi Fischli and Niels Olsen.

Karl Holmqvist lives and works in Berlin. He has realized solo exhibitions and site-specific projects at the Fridericianum in Kassel, LAXART in Los Angeles, the Center d’Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Kunstverein Braunschweig (with Klara Liden), the Power Station in Dallas, and Camden Art Center in London. In 2003 and 2011, Holmqvist participated in the Venice Biennale, and in 2005, 2007, and 2013 he was part of Performa, New York. In 2013 Holmqvist  was awarded the Arthur Köpcke Prize (Arthur Køpckes Mindegat).

With a text by Ron Nagle and a conversation between Massimiliano Gioni and the artist.

“Years later I rediscovered the photo booth at a novelty shop on 24th Street in San Francisco. I spent a lot of time there, taking dozens of pictures. Simultaneously, I began collecting random postcards from my favorite shop in North Beach. My photo shoots got more involved when I decided to merge the two elements. I would adjust my posture, pose, and attire to best accommodate the postcard. Sometimes it would take a hundred shots to get it right. By carefully selecting the proper combination of sticker and postcard, I was able to make a somewhat convincing tableau. These collages allowed me to insinuate myself into a scene from someone else’s experience.” (Ron Nagle)

The artist’s book is published on the occasion of the exhibitions:

Euphoric Recall
Fridericianum, Kassel
June 6 – September 8, 2019

Ron Nagle
Secession, Vienna
November 23, 2019 – February 9, 2020

The Fridericianum in Kassel and the Lafayette Anticipations Foundation in Paris are pleased to announce the publication of the catalogue Rachel Rose. The illustrated edition is published to accompany the first major solo exhibitions of the New York-born artist (1986) to be held in Germany (October 26, 2019 – January 12, 2020) and France (March 13 – September 13, 2020).

In recent years, Rachel Rose has quickly risen to prominence for her compelling video installations and films. In her work, the artist often explores how our relationship to landscape, storytelling and belief systems around mortality are inseparably linked to one other. Through multiple subject matter she questions what it is that makes us human and how we seek to alter and escape that designation.
The catalogue offers a complete overview of the artist’s work through well-founded text contributions and extensive documentation of her works.