Hannah Höch: Bilderbuch

Hannah Höch's picture book dates back to 1945 and is now finally appearing in a new edition. The mythical creatures Rennquicke, Döfchen, Schnifti and Meyer 1 come together to tell whimsical stories. The everyday objects, transformed into animals, seem like reveries in a zoological garden, surrounded by exotic blossoms and plants rooted in a fairytale garden. With an afterword by Gunda Luyken. Hannah Höch (1889-1972) is probably the most important German artist of Classical Modernism. Her work is determined by the Dadaist principle of photomontage, in whose development Hannah Höch, together with Raoul Hausmann, played a decisive role at the beginning of the 20th century. Through the diverse combination of contradictory sequences cut out of magazines, brochures and photographs, she opened up new irritating visual worlds. Hannah Höch subtly encoded her critique of political conditions and traditional gender roles in hallucinatory plant images and grotesque scenes of absurd hybrid beings. The English edition of the picture book was awarded a prize by the Stiftung Buchkunst as one of the "Most Beautiful German Books 2010".