Kabul was once famous as a city of blossoming gardens. What once was, can one day become again, wrote the political scientist Ekkehart Krippendorff. In line with this motto, some twenty artists from Afghanistan, Kazakhstan, Iran, Turkey, the United States and Switzerland reflect on a different Kabul, without ignoring the past and present crises. Whether with a reference to the locality or starting out from intuition and imagination - the volume assembles newly created artworks which reflect on the Afghan garden as a microcosm of the entire world. It contains the life of humans with animals and plants in all its wonder and beauty. Contributions on the gardens of Kabul, the garden as a symbol of generosity and friendship and the history of a private garden near Teheran amplify the forward-looking vision.

At the centre of Rene Myrha's (*1939) expressive oeuvre lie landscapes and rigorous compositional room perspectives which are transformed into stage-like settings. They form the scenery for the choreography of his figures. Myrha examines them through specific media in drawings, oil, acrylic, sculpture and reliefs. Born in Delsberg in Switzerland, the painter encountered the contemporary movements of art and design during the 1960s in Paris and Milan. In the foreground of his activities lie forms and volumes which combine and breakthrough constructed and organically created spaces. In his later works they are animated by a surreal figural universe. The publication shows a representative cross-section of Myrha's oeuvre, from Pop Art to an obsessive preoccupation with a mysterious and dramatic world of figures.

The Bauhaus master Johannes Ittenis one of the prominent protagonists of early Modernism in twentieth-century art. Few people are aware of the close links between his beginnings as an artist and his experience of landscape and nature in the town of Thun and Lake Thun. Johannes Itten gained decisive impulses for the development of his concept of art and his path towards abstraction through various stations and sojourns in Thun and its surroundings. By means of examples of the representations of nature in his early work the publication shows in scholarly depth how Itten discovered his own, very personal and later internationally famous approach to art and painting style and presents his pictorial transformation of natureextending through to the artist's late works.