The book ZEUG is a hybrid between an artist book and a catalogue raisonné and provides a complete overview of the works created since 2006 by the Berlin-based painter René Wirths. The works are also sorted into groups based on in part formal, in part content-related, and often surprising criteria. Wirths is a painter of things whose pictures, despite their hyper realistic attention to detail, nevertheless dissolve again into colour and abstraction. The motifs depicted are thus robbed of their “authenticity” (to quote Heidegger) and become a phenomenological examination of the things that surround us. The book pursues these examinations and supplements the astounding oeuvre by positing new aspects.


Text in English, German and French.