Overview

• Piper Verlag published Otto Waalkes’s new book on July 4, presenting a five-chapter exploration of art history from Leonardo da Vinci to Gustav Klimt.
• The volume draws on da Vinci’s Traktat über die Malerei to organize chapters around light and shadow, color and material, form and composition, proximity and distance, and movement and rest.
• Waalkes reimagines iconic works by embedding himself, his Ottifant character or Sid the sloth into humorous parodies of masterpieces by da Vinci, van Gogh, Monet, Hopper and Klimt.
• Fictional interviews with artists such as Caspar David Friedrich, Vincent van Gogh and Salvador Dalí offer playful commentary on their styles and creative contexts.
• Waalkes’s artistic path includes a childhood disqualification in a painting contest, formal art–pedagogy studies in Hamburg beginning in 1970 and gallery exhibitions of his reinterpretations since 2013.