The history of European landscape design has its beginnings in the early cultures of the Mediterranean. Again and again, especially during the Renaissance, ancient parks and gardens have been imitated as archetypes. The park is still a site of design activity today: human beings use living material to create an artificial landscape, a paradise. This book not only recounts the history of the garden--it conjures it up before the reader's eyes, from the Garden of Eden and the Hanging Gardens of Nebuchadnezzar to the first book on botany and the gardens of the Renaissance, from the invention of the lawnmower to the land art movement in the United States, Hängende Gärten II (Hanging Gardens II) at the Hanover Expo by the Dutch architectural firm MVRDV, and the Gazebo-Berg (Gazebo Mountain) of the Swiss artist couple Studer/van den Berg at the 2005 world's fair in Japan. Every single "station" of this journey through gardens and time is illustrated by an entire double page, with pointedly written texts and an abundance of historical and contemporary images.

Die Familie ihrer Mutter hinterlässt Erinnerungen, Erbstücke und Geschichten. Von der jüdischen Familie des Vaters bleibt lediglich ein kleines Foto. Nur ein einziges Mal erzählt ihr der Vater von dem, was während der Shoah mit ihm und seiner Familie geschehen ist. Da ist sie fünfzehn, und ihr Vater mittlerweile Grafiker und Amateurfotograf, der alles festhalten muss, bevor es verschwindet. Jahrzehnte später stößt sie auf Berge von Akten und erfährt, was ihre Eltern so lange vor ihr geheim gehalten hatten. »Wo geht das Licht hin, wenn der Tag vergangen ist« erzählt unsentimental und poetisch davon, wie man Verlust nicht wiedergutmachen, aber behutsam sichtbar machen kann. »Dass diese Familiengeschichte aus mehr Fragen als Antworten besteht, macht sie so universell und lässt uns darin auch unsere eigenen Familien erkennen.« Peter Stamm

"Born in Vietnam in 1969, the artist and photographer Cat Tuong Nguyen has been living in Switzerland since 1981. His cosmos of photographs, painted-over newspaper photos, and collages is both wild and contemplative. Here, the brutal is juxtaposed with the delicate, the refined with the raw, the serious with the mysterious. Underdog Suite, the first overview of Cat Tuong Nguyen's oeuvre to date, reflects our world as one in which the most disparate cultures, realities, and perspectives coexist, as a world of delightful and disconcerting diversity. It includes essays by Nadine Olonetzky and Burkhard Meltzer." --Book Jacket.

A dialogue between natural science and art: the first major monograph on Swiss painter Barbara Ellmerer. When an apple falls to the ground, we see the effect of gravity. Yet not all laws of nature are as apparent. Swiss artist Barbara Ellmerer uses these invisible principles of physics, biology, and cosmology as her starting point and translates them into paintings. She sends us into the realm of colors and shapes in which forces, movements, and processes from nature are synonymously realized and palpable. Ellmerer thereby also captures something inexplicable, which reminds us of how steeped in wonder the world still is. Barbara Ellmerer--Sense of Science features a selection of oil paintings and works on paper created by the artist between 2010 and 2020. Ellmerer's sometimes large-format pictures are shown both in full as well as in enlarged details to show the intricacies of her brushstroke, color qualities, surfaces, depths, movements, and emphases. This combination also makes productive use of the migration of media--from painting to photography--and its reproduction in the book. In an accompanying essay, Laura Corman, a quantum physicist, explains how Ellmerer's art relates to natural science. A contribution by Nadine Olonetzky, writer and photo expert, describes art's capabilities of rendering invisible processes comprehensible.

Das Amerika der Highways, Tankstellen und McDonald's hat seinen Gegenpart im Amerika der einsamen Berge, weiten Horizonte und wilden Kojoten. Slow Motion ist eine fotografische Reise durch die Landschaft Kaliforniens. Der 51-jährige Fotograf Dieter Berke hat die Polaroids unter Verwendung seiner Camera obscura, einer Lochkamera, seit 2001 in Kalifornien entstehen lassen. Da die Lochkamera extem lange Belichtungszeiten verlangt - von einigen Minuten bis zu einigen Stunden -, resultieren daraus Bilder, die mit Licht, Unschärfe und Farbe arbeiten. Mit langen Belichtungszeiten und dem Einsatz von Farbfiltern, Siliziumplättchen, Kristallsplittern oder einem modifizierten Laser, erzeugt der Fotograf Verwischungen und Verfremdungen, die aus jedem einzelnen Bild eine traumverlorene Spiegelung der Wirklichkeit werden lassen. Die durch die langen Belichtungzeiten entstandenen Überlagerungen führen "zu einem Schimmern oder Dämmern, in dem sich Erkennbarkeit und Bennenbarkeit auflösen". Raum und Zeit verschmelzen zu einer neuen Bildwirklichkeit. Jedes einzelne Bild wir zu einer Meditation über das Verstreuchen und das Aufhalten von Zeit.

Cécile Wick's work, oscillating among photography, painting, and drawing, is one of the most important oeuvres in contemporary Swiss art. Solo exhibitions in various galleries and a large retrospective at the Museum of Fine Art in Berne have recently showcased her prints and etchings to great acclaim. Cécile Wick. Colored Waters offers readers the first glimpse of the artist's more recent photographs and, in particular, drawings. Watercolors, ink drawings, inkjet prints and photographs are presented in series, putting media and motifs in a dialogue and revealing new aspects of Wick's work. Around 160 color reproductions of artworks are complemented with essays by Martin Jaeggi and Nadine Olonetzky on subjects such as light, traces, signs, buildings, nature, and rhythm in Wick's oeuvre.

"A moving document: Artist Elisabeth Zahnd Legnazzi photographed her daughter Chiara who passed away from a brain tumor at the age of six. Emerging from personal involvement, this book refers beyond individual fate. The expressive portraits record the illness, suffering, and departure and disclose an existential experience: mortal illness is also a time of life, which despite great pain, is full of tenderness, closeness, and warmth. The book includes an introduction by the photo publicist Nadine Olonetzky and an essay by the cultural historian and author Thomas Macho on death and dying, and the artistic portrayal of sorrow." --Book Jacket.