Norbert Bisky's artistic cosmos is as colorful as it is gruesome. Many of his figurative paintings are suffused with densely packed body parts-heads, torsos, arms-caught in flood waves and wedged into one another. Orange skin tones, light pink, green, yellow, and violet against radiant blue or somber black-brown dominate the palette, an intense chromaticity that often contrasts with the themes of the paintings: nude male bodies are torn apart, handsome faces mangled. Bisky's powerful painting engenders ambivalent feelings in which he explores the boundaries of representation. The publication provides a first, long-overdue art-historical examination of Bisky's oeuvre. Hubertus Gassner, Kathleen Buhler, Dorothee Brill, and other authors pursue the questions prompted by this vehement style of painting: Why this brutal treatment of the body and its image? Why the decomposition of figuration and fixed structures? Where is Bisky to be positioned? Exhibition: Kunsthalle Rostock 16.11.2014-15.2.2015

English Description: The three artists to whom the exhibition is devoted, Ferdinand Hodler, Aleksandr Deyneka and Neo Rauch, stand in the twentieth century for the story of the utopia of the 'New Man', from its conception to its failure or continued life as the case may be. They exemplify with their artistic uvre the three stages through which the concept has passed. The early years of the twentieth century were marked by the life-reform movement, which fed on the one hand from the ideas of Romanticism, and on the other reactivated secularized Christian motifs in the nativity of the 'New Man'. The Swiss artist Ferdinand Hodler (1853-1918) was one of the leading artistic exponents of this movement. In an artificially created harmony with nature, his monumental figures set the surface of the picture in rhythmic motion with silhouette-like expressive gestures. One of Hodler's hitherto most important successors was the Russian painter Aleksandr Deyneka (1899-1969). In his motifs, but also in the body language and modelling of his characters, he took his bearings from the eurhythmic movements of the Swiss artist's figures, but placed them in prospering industrial landscapes. Finally, the painter Neo Rauch (b. 1960), who grew up and received his artistic training in communist East Germany, takes up once more the type of the 'New Man' on which Hodler and Deyneka had put their stamp. However, his figures exaggerate the aspect of inhibited action, recognizable already in his predecessors, and this aspect emerges, in the end, in aimless messing around in absurd configurations. Here the utopia of the 'New Man' is turned on its head to become a rejection of the belief in progress and of all ideology. German description: Die drei Kuenstler der Ausstellung, Ferdinand Hodler, Aleksandr Dejneka und Neo Rauch, stehen im 20. Jahrhundert fuer die Geschichte der Utopie des -Neuen Menschen- von seinem Entwurf bis zu seinem Scheitern bzw. Nachleben. Sie verkorpern mit ihrem kuenstlerischen Werk exemplarisch die drei Etappen, in denen sich dieser Prozess vollzieht

Throughout his life, Edgar Degas (1834-1917) not only created his famous pastels and paintings, but also a large number of sculptures; those, however, were never shown to the public. This catalog presents the complete inventory of 73 bronze casts, complemented by a wide selection of drawings, pastels and paintings. German text.

Imposing and famous sailing ships are the subject of countless Dutch paintings of the 17th Century. But the works not only bear witness to the skills of their creator; they are documents of historical, topographical and meteorological events. Visibly billowing sails, glorious and proud sailing ships, a ship heeled in the swell and the salvation of banks never to be reached: Many of the paintings of Dutch painters from the mid-17th Century give impressions of maritime affairs that never occurred. These images thus open a wide horizon of interpretations from different areas of knowledge from the period. They document the range and richness of Holland's marine culture in the 17th Century. The works stimulate multiple interpretations: the ship as a metaphor for life, as a symbol of the state, for the exploration of distant lands, as a demonstration of foreign and trade policy in the 17th Century. This book explains the various interpretations in selected examples while at the same time laying bare the picturesque characteristics of eachwork. In cooperation with the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, London, the exhibition brings together masterpieces from the leading marine painters of the Golden Age, and show alongside unique, large-scale seascapes the subtle drawings from the Print Room of the Hamburg Kunsthalle. German text.