20th Century

For Hex (b. 1964), found steel objects are often the basic material for his abstract sculptures. With the help of welding equipment, angle grinder, hammer and polishing machine, he creates beautifully shaped and extremely impressive works of art – sometimes small and sometimes monumental. Today, works by him can be found in collections but also in public places worldwide. This book gives an overview of his works of the last 10 years.

Parviz Tanavoli – who has been widely recognised as the only Iranian artist to fully capture the duality and interplay of Iran’s pre-Islam and Islamic cultural identities – created a visual symbology through his sculptural work that would have a lasting impact on modernism in Iran.

Sculpture is just a word, an English word, which elicits an image in the mind’s eye. Sculpture is a European idea. In China, on the other hand, statues, stele, and other figural objects were made for millennia without being thought of as Sculpture. There was no Sculpture in China. "Imagining Sculpture" is the story of this something that did not exist.

Heinz Mack’s Sahara Project is legendary. In 1968 he installed for the first time light columns with a height of up to 11 metres which reflected and mirrored the glaring sunlight in the Tunisian desert. Nature and object fused to create an artwork of breathtaking beauty. This comprehensive volume records the history and ideas of this spectacular project over four decades.

At the centre of René Myrha’s (*1939) expressive oeuvre lie landscapes and rigorous compositional room perspectiveswhich 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.

Founded in 1948, Hirmer Publishers soon established a name for art books produced to the highest standards. Over the past decade they have become equally well-known in English-speaking countries, with a reputation as one of the most prestigious publishers in this field. This survey of English titles from 2010 to 2020 encompasses a wealth of subjects across the centuries, from antiquity to the modern age.  

Steles, rotors, light sculptures and monumental works for the public space – over the past 20 years the range of Heinz Mack’s sculptures has remained as comprehensive as it is diverse. He has created spectacular works like "The Sky over Nine Columns" in Venice in 2014. This lavish catalogue raisonné documents Mack’s sculptures between 2003 and 2020.

In Ludwig Mies van der Rohe’s villas such as Haus Lange in Krefeld the sculptures by Lehmbruck and Kolbe function both as independent artworks and also as elements of an organism made up of space, light, material, water and plants. The publication traces the interaction between the three outstanding modernist artists and the interrelationship between sculpture, architecture and nature.

The private art collection of the Hilti Art Foundation includes over 200 top-quality paintings, sculptures and photographs from Classical Modernism to the present day. Volume 1 of the two-part catalogue of the collection presents 80 selected works from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth century, from Paul Gauguin to Alberto Giacometti.

Modernisms explores art from the 1960s and early ’70s from Iran, Turkey, and India via selections from an unparalleled collection at New York University. Featuring new scholar ship and seminal essays, this book also illustrates paintings, sculptures, drawings, and prints from these three countries alongside biographical narratives of each Artist.