Jürgen PartenheimerDie Entfernung im Stand luftwärts

Master of the artists’ books – since 1970, with his unique, reworked and edited books, Jürgen Partenheimer (b. 1947) has seized the opportunity to distil his art down to essentials. His pictures and books, distinguished by a poetic quality and convincing in the rigorous syntax of their formal elements, breathe an “invitation to follow one’s curiosity and appetite for adventure, to set out into the unknown,” as Gabriele Wix, the editor of the catalogue raisonné, writes. Each of Jürgen Partenheimer’s books calls for reflection on its manner of production and on how this is bound up with meanings of content and with emotions. They stand for much of what distinguishes these highly esteemed artists’ books: their intrinsic status as a medium and as a work of art, the enormous aesthetic and qualitative awareness with which the artist accompanies every step of their making, and the open, associative dialogue of image and text that constitutes the specific “space” of the book. In this catalogue raisonné all the artists’ books are reproduced, recorded in precise bibliographical detail and accompanied by selected picture sequences.