Reality Bites: Making Avant-garde Art in Post-Wall Germany

Sabine Eckmann

2007

$55

Edited by Sabine Eckmann with essays by Diedrich Diederichsen, Beate Kemfert, Gertrud Koch, Lutz Koepnick, Iain Whyte, and Sabine Eckmann

The fall of the Berlin Wall in November of 1989 instigated a new era of German history, rapidly—yet profoundly—altering everyday German life. Reality Bites investigates the effect of that historical context, identifying the new kinds of work that have grown out of it, full of strategies and materials borrowed from and referring back to one kind of recent German reality or another, aesthetic exploration of experience in which the themes of reality and history take on increased meaning. This representative selection of about seventy pieces created since 1989 includes work from Franz Ackermann, Kutlug Ataman, Cosima von Bonin, Sophie Calle, Tacita Dean, Thomas Demand, Bernhard Garbert, Isa Genzken, Beate Gütschow, Rudolf Herz, Sabine Hornig, Christian Jankowski, André Korpys & Markus Löffler, Ulrike Kuschel, Eva Leitolf, Via Lewandowsky, Michel Majerus, Mariele Neudecker, Olaf Nicolai, Marcel Odenbach, Manfred Pernice, Daniel Pflumm, rude_architecture (Friedrich von Borries, Gesa Glück, Tobias Neumann), Silke Schatz, Gregor Schneider, Collier Schorr, Renata Stih & Frieder Schnock, and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Bilingual German and English

Cloth 320 pp.
ISBN 978-3-775719-06-3

Copublished with Hatje Cantz