Works from 'Fifty Are Better Than One' on display at Phillips' Berkeley Square Galleries
In celebration of Edition Schellmann’s 50th anniversary, Phillips is proud to present works from their archives in Fifty Are Better Than One, an auction to benefit the Ars Publicata® project. Standing out as a publisher who has challenged tradition in both his choice of artists and in the technical freedom he has offered them, Jörg Schellmann’s main goal has been the democratisation of art through wide distribution, achievable through editioned works. In an extension of this vision, the Ars Publicata® project, an ambitious and selfless endeavour, will create a global online directory of reference information for artist editions and their publishers.
After opening his first gallery in Munich in 1969, Jörg Schellmann started publishing limited edition artworks in the following decade during the advent of Conceptual art. Influenced by his surroundings, instead of being inclined to only work with talented draftsmen, Schellmann embarked on a journey along which he has consistently published works by artists who have focused on the idea behind the work of art rather than the finished object alone.
Andy Warhol Joseph Beuys, 1980-1983
His first significant collaboration under Edition Schellmann (later Schellmann & Kluser, then Schellmann Art) was with Joseph Beuys, resulting in an extensive creative relationship that lasted until the artist’s death in 1986. Throughout the 1970’s, Schellmann published mainly European artists, but his attraction to Pop Art and especially his fascination with the New York art scene drew him to the US, where in 1980 he published his first of over twenty projects with Andy Warhol: a portfolio of three screenprints of his first artistic partner entitled, Joseph Beuys.
Peter Halley Static Wallpaper, from Wall Works, 1998
Following his own aesthetic orientation towards an art that responds to contemporary life, and fostering his interest in the leading Conceptual artists of his time, Schellmann went on to work with Hanne Darboven, Peter Halley and Gerhard Merz, creating works of highly socio-political and conceptual frameworks. His free-thinking approach to materials, making and craftmanship, including works of wood, neon, and steel, saw ideas by Keith Haring, Dan Flavin and Donald Judd come to fruition in the 1980s and early 1990s. The variety of objects like Haring’s plywood Dog (1986) and Judd’s extruded aluminium works (1991) demonstrate the versatility of Schellmann’s publishing and originality in ‘making’, even in the early stages of his career.
Joseph Kosuth Sigla, Finnegan's Wake, from Wall Works, 1998
The Wall Works project commenced in the 1990’s and aimed to establish a relationship with architecture, presenting art in the context of a surrounding space. This series - made up of site-specific, and unique wall installations in which artists created a conceptual design executed on walls of varying sizes and proportions – was born of Schellmann’s interest in architectural installations, and how this could be realised as an edition. The project celebrates architecture as a fusion of arts.
Elmgreen & Dragset Belly Door, from Door Cycle, 2006
Inspired by de Kooning’s Door Cycle series, exhibited at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1996, Schellmann considered the formal and poetic qualities of the door – its metaphoric values, its measurements corresponding to the human size, and its appearance and dimensions representing a canvas – and concluded the door to be an appropriate contemporary object to make works in editions. Schellmann thus invited a group of artists to create works on prefabricated hollow-core doors, resulting in the Door Cycle, 2006.
The variety and originality of Edition Schellmann’s output is unparalleled and some of the more eccentric and idiosyncratic projects that Jörg Schellmann supported include a fibreglass tree trunk chair by Franz West, a handmade collage by Ellen Gallagher, and an installation of bathroom cosmetics by Sylvie Fleury. Viewed alongside more traditional printmaking techniques, this collection demonstrates the richness of Jörg Schellmann’s contribution to edition making and publishing, and his continual search for the unexpected and the innovative.
Keith Haring Dog, 1986
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of Edition Schellmann, a catalogue of their publications was produced entitled Forty Are Better Than One 1969–2009, in reference to the serial concept of editions and alluding to the Andy Warhol painting Thirty Are Better Than One, 1963, which depicts a series of Mona Lisa reproductions: a tongue-in-cheek comment on the worshipped aura of unique works of art versus the mass-production and global distribution of images in our time. A decade on, Fifty Are Better Than One continues this heritage and fuels an exciting new endeavour for Edition Schellmann in the Ars Publicata® project.