Designers always have used natural materials, thinking of wood, stones, clay. With mass production, however, mass exploitation and destruction became an indispensable part of the design world. ‘Nature: Collaborations in Design’, the catalogue of the sixth Cooper Hewitt Design Triennal, mirrors the profound awareness of designers, that it is time to change the paradigm. In seven chapters - Understand, Simulate, Salvage, Facilitate, Augment, Remediate, and Nurture - designers collaborate with specialists stirred by the desire for a more holistic approach and regenerative future. Together with biologists, engineers, agriculturists, and environmentalists the contributors rethink design processes and anticipate future challenges. They let algae cultivate pre-shaped materials, rain create pattern structures, or salt crystals grow whole stools. And by that undergo the ultimate collaboration - the one with nature itself. Buy

Ever stepped into a neon hair cave? If you’ve already visited this year’s Venice Biennale you probably wouldn’t have missed the Icelandic pavilion by artist Shoplifter, who works with real and synthetic hair to address issues of identity and consumer culture. Not only since Christo and Jeanne-Claude famously wrapped distinguished buildings and tracks of land, the connection to fabrics is sewn into the identity of art. With Vitamin T. we've got a hairy extension of this into the contemporary, with sculptures, paintings and installations made from UV print, ropes, cotton, strips, frisson, hand tufted wool, used clothes, corn flour linen, silk tapestries, embroideries on organdies or recycled lobster rope - only some among the materials used by more than 100 contemporary artists compiled in the volume ‘Threats and Textiles in Contemporary Art’, the latest in Phaidon’s ‘Vitamin’ series, including Kimsooja, Sarah Lucas, Adrian Kiss and many more. Buy

The eccentric and singular dwellings of Salento, a little piece of suburban earth in Southern Puglia, form an unique architectural panorama. While one could categorize these post-WWII family houses as kitsch or ‘horror shows’, the three photographers and two historians behind Salento Moderno decided to look upon this non-conform suburban terrain with a rather different perspective: as a many-sided architectural phenomenon mirroring the innermost dreams of their inhabitants, expressing their desires to leave their archaic life in poverty behind for a better life etched in concrete. Thus, the photographs of Salento’s private houses come with a great attention to the details, tucked away corners, swinging lines, floating forms, wild converging shapes and colors while exploring an architectural clutter which is as diverse as Southern Italy’s history. Buy

Christof Nüssli’s sequence of photographed fried eggs with all its variations is, both unexpectedly illusionary and disillusioning. Googly eyes captures the well-known storefronts of New York’s Deli’s in a fairly unfamiliar way. The Swiss artist reproduces reproductions in order to tell essential stories about the values and norms of our contemporary visual culture, about the absurdity which reigns the current art world, about how we relate to our own transience, about New York, about racism... In short, Nüssli’s narrative which evolves in between egg yolks, sausages and textural fragments of John Berger, Jack Kerouac or the Beastie Boys goes far beyond olfactory delights. What the food factor does tell though is that something has cracked - and this time it's not an egg shell. Astonishing profound, poetic and witty googly eyes, a hymn to all 'the curves and all your edges all your perfect imperfections’, is a synesthetic treasure - even though a bittersweet one. Buy

Michael De Feo aka the ‘Flower Guy’ is coming to town and we’ll warmly invite you to join us on the 29th of May to our little shop in Auguststrasse 28. While we’ll indulge ourselves in the good, ‘old-school’ time, Michael will be so kind and sign some books and talk about his flower projects, from the very beginning as a street artist in the early 1990s to his latest intervention with fine art. As you (probably) know we are infamous for our limited space so please submit that you are coming here! We look forward to seeing you there! For everybody who is as curious as we are, we had the fortune to ask Michael some questions beforehand: More

As a child Michael De Feo dreamt of being a cartoonist working for Walt Disney. It didn’t turn out exactly as he expected - so to say - but definitely for the better for us! Ever since his street art is flourishing the public sphere. First growing his blooming fields of flowers in an improvised studio located in the basement of his parents home, in the early 1990s his iconic flowers started to adorn the vibrant streets of New York. Placed in unexpected corners, walls and on public transport his wheat-pasted graffiti has woven itself into the fabric of the grit jungle of concrete, glass and steel. The monograph Michael De Foe - Flowers is tracing the genesis of the, best known as, 'flower guy' from the very beginning to his fashion ads and lately intervention with Pre-Raphaelite paintings and Victorian portraiture. Together with texts by Eric Sutphin, James Danzinger and De Foe himself, the book immediately will catch you up with great excitement. A bit like in 'Where is Wally?' the reader sets out, searching for flowers in the turbulent hustle of the city streets around the globe, while getting an impression of how this beautiful mind is varying for more than 25 years now flowers as symbol of the circle of life. Buy

Some are describing it as "You get the idea, or you don't. And don't even dream of asking why." (Christopher Isherwood) Others don't even bother trying to find the right words for it, but enact what camp might be. Both, theory and practice, are now gathered together in an opulent catalogue 'Camp. Notes on Fashion' published by Yale University Press. And yes, this book is indeed rose and turquoise. But honestly, how should it be otherwise - approaching fashionable notions of camp and supported by no one less than Gucci? Becoming popular at a moment of social, political and economic instability, to be camp was certainly the move of rebellion at the time. A time when popular culture was reaching out from its shadowy subculture spheres to the Olympus of Art - much to the horror of the establishment. More than half a century later The Metropolitan Museum of Art Costume Institute's latest stroke of genius, the spring 2019 exhibition 'Camp. Notes on Fashion' curated by Andrew Bolton designed a lavish and not-less extravagant catalogue. Tracing the history of camp, its spectacular forms, the 250 objects dating from the seventeenth century to the present are not left on their own. As aesthetic grammar to decline the multifold notions of camp's exuberant stylistics serves Susan Sontag's probably most controversial seminal essay 'Notes on Camp' which she wrote shortly after leaving the sacred tin foil halls of Andy Warhol's Factory on East 87th Street in 1964. This two-folded booklet will escort you into a world of haute couture's most extravagant side, showing the exceptional work of fashion designers as Thom Browne, John Galliano, Jean Paul Gaultier, Marc Jacobs, Karl Lagerfeld, Alessandro Michele, Franco Moschino, Yves Saint Laurent, Jeremy Scott, Anna Sui, Gianni Versace, and Vivienne Westwood on the one side whereas on the other side you'll find an extraordinary illuminating theoretical examination of camp in different times and different verve. Buy

Egal ob über Protest, die Wiederverzauberung der Welt, ein Leben im Konjunktiv, die Bedeutung von Irrelevanz oder ob über die Generationenfrage, die Epilog lässt alte Kamellen (u.a. die großen Fragen der Menschheit) in neuem Licht erstrahlen. Sie bereitet ihrem Namen alle Ehre und schafft es regelmässig große, bereits immer dagewesene Themen nicht nur anders zu denken, sondern ihnen immer auch etwas Positives abzugewinnen. Das Gesellschaftsmagazin für Gegenwartskultur, das bei ein, zwei (drei, vier…) Bier in einer Eckkneipe in Weimar aus den synaptischen Kurzschlüssen zwischen Mads Pankow, Viola K. Steinberg und Fabian Ebeling entstand, geht in eine neue Runde. Zeit also, ein paar Fragen an die Macher hinter der Die Epilog zu stellen. More

Furniture and the objects we surround ourselves with have always had a representational function. They represent status and taste, but also a mindset and personality and, in a way, that gives them that same personality. The exhibition Typecasting, curated by Robert Stadler with pieces from the extensive Vitra archives, plays with that thought and arranges the pieces by characters, such as spartans, dreamers, and compulsive organizers. The transhistorical, non-hierarchical presentation allows to draw connections, that go beyond timeline and iconography. But the real twist is the simultaneous real-time video footage of the exhibition on big screens, hanging over the theatrical stage, which equalizes the object and its digital depiction. Typecasting proposes that in a time when the depiction of our social-media-self becomes more important than the representation of our real-life-self also the digital images of objects become more important than the object itself. To constitute a status or mindset you only have to add a certain piece of furniture to your feed. Design became a mere prop for self-presentation on the internet. The newly published catalogue of the same name documents the exhibition and continues the questions of authorship, representation, identification and social function of design in times of social media. Buy

When Nobuyoshi Araki is handing two „Teller“ into photoflash brightness - exposing himself kissing Juergen Teller - nothing more than another piece on the Master’s plate is served. Coming from a small town in southern Germany, Juergen Teller never ceases to surprise in merging the mundane with the glamorous. Like the past three editions of the photo book series, the 4th features Teller’s plain straightforward visual identity compressed into a simple and clear designed small, thin booklet with a complex statement that needs no words to explain itself. Deriving eccentric and ironic layers of small town realities to his preferred place of residence London and other hotspots, he turns around the plate in making the private public and the public private, offering insights to bizarre moments in the lives and houses of key figures of the world of art. Breakfast with Boris Mikhailov - his own photo book on the coffee table next to orange juice and cold cuts. Charlotte Rampling cuddling a fox next to another version of herself as a fox crawling on the floor and William Eggleston smiling at a bunch of weapons or a pink Gorilla. These photographs appear like Teller, now himself a celebrity, is looking back to rural life in Bavaria, showing life in it’s most real and fame in it’s most ironic appearances, removing the glossiness from fashion photography, like in his renowned self portraits. The masterful is embedded in the everyday, in the ridiculousness of life, Bon Apétit! Buy

Not far from the French border, down in southern Belgium a young boy learnt from an early age, how to use his hands properly, helping his parents farming maize, beets and cows. When he turned eighteen Dirk Zoete chose art not farming. Nearly 30 years later and by now well-known for his archaic sculptures and naive-looking drawings things are still the same. The unique amalgam between his hands and every material he comes around emerges ever since in artworks driven by simplicity and rudimentary. While the art cosmos is chasing all kinds of new technological inventions, Dirk Zoete's world remains flat. Taking this in astutely consideration, it indeed suits pretty well that Mousse Publishing brings Zoete's latest solo-exhibition on a flat format such as paper. Funny though, by adding one and one together, one flat world within another, his masks, objects and drawings seem to slowly leave their pages - ready to enter the viewer's universe. Zoete himself was still creating new art works during and after the opening of his exhibition 'To be determined. According to the situation' at the S.M.A.K. Museum in Gent and that's exactly what this publication is about: A celebration of a man who trusts his hands and follows his intuitive-associative methods, so to say, a Gesamtkunstwerk in progress. Hence, an excellent choice to have chosen art. Buy

The sky is the place that invites for contemplation. It stays quite the same, no matter when or where looked at. Nowadays the cloud turned into a metaphorical trope for an ever-present data space, which by up- and downloading creates another archive placed in the sky. Atlas, encyclopedia, grammar - these relations to the archive are exactly the structures Batia Suter uses as a template for her visual surveys, but in the same way here she confronts this new digital metaphor with a poetic, romantic view of the cloud. As in Parallel Encyclopedia and Radical Grammar, Cloud Atlas is a kaleidoscope of the relation of all visual phenomena circled around one blurred thematic circle. But with it’s thin, soft paper and light feeling, this time it appears more like a misty cumulus cloud than a bold image archive. This associative journey takes you through the dull and fluffy, to heavy rainy clouds and spheric dust, floating underwater plants and glimmering sand dunes, until you’ll find yourself counting sheep - thinking about this really deep sleep that takes you to cloudy dreamscapes again. It’s this kind of unexplainable associations that give you the feeling of having solved the puzzle in the order of things while looking at it. Apophenia is the tendency to mistakenly perceive connections between unrelated things -in this case it’s a really satisfying tendency of our perception. Buy