Michael Wolf / Real Fake Art

Real Fake Art

by Michael Wolf

Real Fake Art

by Michael Wolf

Strange, this is how these pictures appear at first sight. In front of typical Chinese urban backdrops young Chinese men and women present oil paintings by American and European artists from different epochs. Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Andy Warhol, Ed Ruscha, even photographs by Lee Friedlander, William Eggleston, Bernd and Hilla Becher or August Sander can be found among the works. What stands behind all this?

In fact we see pictures of a multi-million dollar industry – the production of copies of popular artworks, which are sold at giveaway prices into the whole world. Van Gogh: $ 75, Andy Warhol: $ 45, Ed Ruscha $ 50. The handpainted copies mainly come from China, the buyers can almost entirely be found in the United States and Europe, the countries of origin of the unaffordable originals.

Michael Wolf has photographed the Chinese copy-artists in a fantastic way and in his pictures he has placed manifold relations between the picture subject, the urban environment and the portrayed artists, that reach far beyond the superficial humor. The list of questions, which arise, is long:

- Did Rubens and Rembrandt paint their works all by themselves?

- Aren’t the copies produced, in order to palm them on collectors?

- What’s the value of an original in the age of technical reproducibility?

- Who buys these copies?

- Why do the Chinese provide this market?

- What does this mean for other industries?

Boris von Brauchitsch discusses these and other questions in his comprehensive essay, which accompanies the series of images.

Michael Wolf

Real Fake Art

With an essay by Boris von Brauchitsch
112 pages
51 color illustrations
25 x 32 cm
Hardcover
English
ISBN 978-3-941825-20-8
EUR 40

Michael Wolf / Tokyo Compression

Tokyo Compression

by Michael Wolf

Michael Wolf is known for his large-format architectural photos of Chicago and primarily of Hong Kong, where he has been living for more than 15 years.

His latest pictures have also been created in a big city: Tokyo. But this time Tokyo’s architecture is not the topic. Michael Wolf’s “Tokyo Compression” focuses on the craziness of Tokyo’s underground system. For his shots he has chosen a location which relentlessly provides his camera with new pictures minute per minute.

Every day thousands and thousands of people enter this subsurface hell for two or more hours, constrained between glass, steel and other people who roll to their place of work and back home beneath the city. In Michael Wolf’s pictures we look into countless human faces, all trying to sustain this evident madness in their own way.

PEPERONI BOOKS

Michael Wolf

Tokyo Compression

With an essay by Christian Schüle
112 pages
75 color illustrations
20 x 25 cm
Hardcover
English
ISBN 978-3-941825-08-6
EUR 28