Jean-Christophe Ammann (1939–2015)

Featuring established and emerging photographers including Thomas Ruff, Peter Fischli and David Weiss, Beat Streuli, Thomas Struth, Nobuyoshi Araki, Anna and Bernhard Blume, Baltasar Burkhard, Günter Förg, Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, Axel Hütte, Martin Liebscher, Inge Rambow, and Jörg Sasse, XL-Photography presents the photography collection of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange, assembled by Jean-Christophe Amman, Director of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt. XL-Photography presents close to 200 large-format works by the 14 aforementioned photographers, with pieces that range from the ironic pictorial narratives of Anna and Bernhard Blume to Hütte's landscape images; from Candida Höfer's interior shots to Araki's provocative erotic stagings; from Ruff's deconstructions of subjectivity to Streuli's urban views. Much more than a simple collection catalogue, this smartly designed and lavishly illustrated book presents some of the essential positions taken in photographic art over the past ten years.… (meer)

The German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt, headquartered in Germany and Luxembourg, has significantly extended its collection of photographs in the last year, acquiring primarily large-format works by upcoming artists. Hence the necessity to produce XL Photography 2, sequel to the two-year-old XL Photography. This volume features photographers who employ an unparalleled range of modes of design and expression, spanning the rather classical black-and-white photographs of Nicholas Nixon and the cool color photographs of Stephen Shore, as well as the innovative One-Minute Sculptures of Erwin Wurm. Under the artistic guidance of Jean-Christophe Ammann, the photographic collection of the German Stock Exchange in Frankfurt places established artists such as Bernd & Hilla Becher, SebastiNo Selgado, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Rineke Dijkstra, Roni Horn, and Jürgen Teller next to younger, as yet-undiscovered talents. This luxuriously designed, large-scale picture book represents all significant positions taken by photography in the past ten years.… (meer)

The oeuvre of Marlene Dumas is primarily characterized by her watercolors. Suggestive works, they appear to be based mostly on photographs from magazines which Dumas blurs, crops, or distorts. In doing so, the artist explores the sexualized dynamics between the picture, the painter, and the viewer. Her always openly sensual representations of human bodies and faces deal with some of the questions central to life. Wet Dreams features a broad selection of Dumas' loaded and expressive watercolors, expanding on the primary topics found throughout her work: the clicha picture of the female, the relations between the sexes, role playing, sexuality and pornography, guilt and violence, birth and death. Specially featured here are a number of collaborative works which the artist created with her daughter and with the painter Bert Boogaard.… (meer)