Katharina Grosse (b. 1961) has created walkable artworks in three historical spaces within the Albertina in Vienna. The shimmering colour fields extends across the walls, ceiling and floor, crossing spatial and conceptual boundaries. Their power, intensity and sheer size is overwhelming. The catalogue documents the three-dimensional image world with detailed photos of the installations and pictures from the studio. Expansion and permanent boundary-crossing, freedom and autonomy form the basis of Grosse’s oeuvre. Her creative work is experimental and unpredictable, like untamed thoughts. Numerous photos from the artist’s personal archive provide an insight into her working methods and sources of inspiration, as well as the processes by which she develops her ideas.

“I am not aiming to provoke. For me, art is a possibility to defend myself, to retaliate.� Gottfried Helnwein’s (b. 1948) paintings of children are both touching and disturbing. The hyperrealistic character of his images serves to intensify this effect still further. The vulnerable and defenseless child serves as the central motif in the artist’s examination of the themes of pain, injury and violence. The catalogue provides an overview of his creative work during the past twenty years. The child in Helnwein’s works embodies and serves as proxy for psycho logical and societal fears. The artist also uses his images to denounce Nazism or to address the Holocaust as well as the taboo subject of abuse. Helnwein is considered a provocateur to this day. He still succeeds in shaking up people with his works, which are produced from photographic references and which captivate us through their technical perfection.

The Italian-American artist Francesco Clemente (b. 1952) is one of the main representatives of the postmodern Transavantgarde and Arte Cifra, the Italian version of Neo-Expressionism. Among his extensive oeuvre, the publication focuses on Clemente’s major works series. Clemente’s life spent in Europe, India, and New York has lent a remarkably multifaceted quality to both his art and his character. Indian culture and philosophy as well as the human body are recurring themes rendered in his figurative, Neo-Expressionist style. This volume guides through Clemente’s pastels, watercolors, gouaches, and printed graphics, including such major series as The Departure of the Argonaut, the From the Terreiro pastels, the Amalfi watercolors, and The Tarots, as well as his self-portraits, which have a quality all their own.

On the occasion of his 85th birthday the famous international German artist Georg Baselitz (*1938) has donated a collection of works on paper to both the Albertina Museum in Vienna and the Morgan Library in New York. The publication combines the 100 sheets to create a representative retrospective, providing by virtue of its concentration an important contribution to the understanding of his entire oeuvre. The two extensive sets of drawings and watercolours date from different creative phases from the early 1960s to the present day. Through this direct medium the works provide an intimate insight into the artist’s creative process across the past five decades. An interview with Georg Baselitz conducted to mark this publication provides information about the significance of the works on paper in the genesis of his works and within his oeuvre.

His mostly precisely composed, large-format paintings, with deserted spaces as their main motif, made Ben Willikens (*1939) famous in the second half of the 1970s. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue present nearly 50 works created between 1971 and 2021 and thus span the artist’s entire oeuvre. Three groups of works form the central pillars: the Anstaltsbilder of the 1970, in whose motifs Willikens processes a dark chapter in his life, and the series ORTE (PLACES) And ORTE 2 (PLACES 2), which deal with Willikens’s examination of the architecture of the National Socialist period. There are also various works from the series Räume der Moderne (Spaces of Modernity). Text in English and German.

Before the rise of Pop Art proper, Alex Katz developed an iconic style of figurative painting in the early 1960s— influenced by film, television, and billboard advertising. Seemingly detached and incredibly stylish, he created portraits of the New York scene as well as idyllic landscapes. Printmaking plays an equally central role in Katz’s work. He uses lithographs, etchings, silkscreens, woodcuts and linocuts to reproduce, reflect and further reduce his bold aesthetic, while retaining the radiant color characteristic for his paintings. Since the first edition in 2011, Katz has almost doubled his output of prints—this timely new edition includes his complete prints, cutout editions, artists’ books, and also lists his works of applied art like book illustrations and public art projects. New essays and interviews with the artist give profound insights into the work of one of the foremost American artists of the present.