The Taschen Collection: Art of our time
By Marga Paz
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Taschen's collection began to germinate over twenty years ago in Cologne, a city that had become Germany's art centre, a European hub for artists, collectors and gallery owners.Cologne's international atmosphere and remarkably fluid contact with American artists, were instrumental in its becoming an art powerhouse, featuring figures who regularly exhibited or lived there, including Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelley. These artists played a key role and exerted considerable influence on Benedikt Taschen himself, who brought their visual strategies to his publishing career.
Mass culture
Referring to Mike Kelley's oeuvre, Elisabeth Sussman said, "All these works share a brusque, aggressive vision full of humour. Kelley firmly remains in the anti-aesthetic camp; the roots of his work can be found in everyday discarded objects, kitsch and the mass media."
The same could undoubtedly be said of the majority of the works that comprise the Taschen Collection, since the preponderances share this same "aesthetic / anti-aesthetic" founded on concepts such as scepticism, transgression, pop culture, personal memory, sex, the body, irony and gender. The movement reached its pinnacle thanks to certain artists who made a great impact in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Although he would later begin to also show an interest in works by younger artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, André Butzer and Darren Almond, Benedikt Taschen belongs to the same generation as most of the artists he collects (i.e., Kippenberger, Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Sherman, Kelley and Werner Büttner). Since his initial foray into publishing and collecting, he has embraced the "anti-aesthetic" practised by these artists. Both his collection and his publishing house follow the same path guided by the artist's "obsessions" with printed popular art in its varied guises: porn magazines, comics, advertising posters, fashion magazines and so on. At the outset of the collection, the artists in it were under-appreciated or forgotten by critics, the likes of Kelley and Kippenberger took it upon themselves to prove the critics wrong. Taschen's enthusiasm and intuition have contributed to validating underground artists like Eric Stanton, Tom of Finland and Elmer Batters, as well as the re-discovered Julius Shulman (famous for his photographs of the Case Study Houses and California modernist architecture of the 1940s and 1950s). He has firmly placed their work within the co-ordinates of an artistic context, thus reviving their innovative, radical nature. He created a monument to the worldfamous photographer and artist Helmut Newton by publishing one of the most extravagant books of the twentieth century, SUMO.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Taschen's collection began to germinate over twenty years ago in Cologne, a city that had become Germany's art centre, a European hub for artists, collectors and gallery owners.Cologne's international atmosphere and remarkably fluid contact with American artists, were instrumental in its becoming an art powerhouse, featuring figures who regularly exhibited or lived there, including Albert Oehlen, Martin Kippenberger, Jeff Koons, Cindy Sherman and Mike Kelley. These artists played a key role and exerted considerable influence on Benedikt Taschen himself, who brought their visual strategies to his publishing career.
Mass culture
Referring to Mike Kelley's oeuvre, Elisabeth Sussman said, "All these works share a brusque, aggressive vision full of humour. Kelley firmly remains in the anti-aesthetic camp; the roots of his work can be found in everyday discarded objects, kitsch and the mass media."
The same could undoubtedly be said of the majority of the works that comprise the Taschen Collection, since the preponderances share this same "aesthetic / anti-aesthetic" founded on concepts such as scepticism, transgression, pop culture, personal memory, sex, the body, irony and gender. The movement reached its pinnacle thanks to certain artists who made a great impact in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Although he would later begin to also show an interest in works by younger artists such as Wolfgang Tillmans, André Butzer and Darren Almond, Benedikt Taschen belongs to the same generation as most of the artists he collects (i.e., Kippenberger, Oehlen, Christopher Wool, Sherman, Kelley and Werner Büttner). Since his initial foray into publishing and collecting, he has embraced the "anti-aesthetic" practised by these artists. Both his collection and his publishing house follow the same path guided by the artist's "obsessions" with printed popular art in its varied guises: porn magazines, comics, advertising posters, fashion magazines and so on. At the outset of the collection, the artists in it were under-appreciated or forgotten by critics, the likes of Kelley and Kippenberger took it upon themselves to prove the critics wrong. Taschen's enthusiasm and intuition have contributed to validating underground artists like Eric Stanton, Tom of Finland and Elmer Batters, as well as the re-discovered Julius Shulman (famous for his photographs of the Case Study Houses and California modernist architecture of the 1940s and 1950s). He has firmly placed their work within the co-ordinates of an artistic context, thus reviving their innovative, radical nature. He created a monument to the worldfamous photographer and artist Helmut Newton by publishing one of the most extravagant books of the twentieth century, SUMO.
Page [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8] [9] [10] [11] [12] [13]
Taschen Collection
Hardcover, 29.7 x 42 cm (11.7 x 16.5 in.), 254 pages
$ 70.00
$ 70.00
The Benedikt Taschen Collection on show at Reina Sofía
