In 1992, Helke Bayrle began videotaping the installation of each exhibition at the Portikus exhibition space. These videos form a remarkable and intimate archive of the storied Frankfurt contemporary art institution and the artists who have worked within it. This publication pays tribute to Bayrle’s extraordinary work, through a comprehensive timeline, video stills, and statements by past and current directors and curators.

Birgit Megerle’s figurative and abstract paintings are characterized by an artificial, rigid, and stage-like atmosphere. The female characters featured in her works are poised with a determination and a readiness to act, and while based in a tradition of representational painting, they are eerily unreal and remote.

First published in German in 1987, this is artist and writer Jutta Koether’s meditation on painting. In novella form, f. follows several disembodied female characters as they consider velvet, coral, the curtain, money, color, red.

Merlin Carpenter’s exhibition “MIDCAREER PAINTINGS” filled Kunsthalle Bern’s rooms with transit blankets stretched over identically scaled frames, each named after one of the artist’s seven galleries and marked “not for sale.” This publication documents these “paintings,” how the works thematize the limbo of the “midcareer” artist, as well as the circulation of the artwork as a commodity that signifies material wealth or value.

10 minutes after features installation views from Josephine Meckseper’s recent exhibition at Timothy Taylor, a gallery of “psychoimages.” Independent curator and writer Piper Marshall considers ideas of détournement, the readymade, and base materialism in Meckseper’s oeuvre, while writer and editor Domenick Ammirati explores the significance of painting and text within Meckseper’s installations.