Employed as an office manager in the former GDR, and working as a self-taught artist, Ruth Wolf-Rehfeldt used her typewriter to create patterns and abstract compositions with characters and letters at the junction of Concrete Poetry, Dada, and Minimal Art. Her linguistic explorations that she developed further into collages later on, are often based on ambiguity. Published on the occasion of the large retrospective at MINSK Kunsthaus in Potsdam, NICHTS NEUES explores her typewritings, prints, collages, and paintings in thematic episodes. Although Wolf-Rehfeldt discontinued her artistic practice after the fall of the Berlin Wall, her art has lost none of its relevance. In a poetic, idiosyncratic, and often humorous way, the nonconformist artist explored themes such as environmental issues, intellectual freedom, community, and communication. Her sometimes subtle, sometimes more literal play with words, meanings, and forms continue to reveal the unexpected.

DAS MINSK is the latest project of the Hasso Plattner Foundation. Located in Potsdam, southwest of Berlin, the new exhibition space presents modern and contemporary art, as well as art from the former GDR, in new contexts. This catalogue for the two inaugural exhibitions links two artists from the Hasso Plattner Collection: GDR painter Wolfgang Mattheuer and Canadian photographer and filmmaker Stan Douglas. As the exhibitions direct their gaze to nature and the urban landscape of Potsdam, the volume presents familiar and novel perspectives on their work, complemented by a wide range of viewpoints on the motifs of landscape and (allotment) gardening in art. Beyond art theoretical voices, the book also features numerous experts addressing the socio-political dimensions of the subject-matter.