Published by Nora Hauschild and Ilknur Özen
Verlag & Galerie Vollherzig, Mainz 2019
View excerpt !!!

The art book DENKSTAHL. art of a rebellious mind is a collection of images and texts that reflect a part of AL’s work. The first part of the book is a biographical account and contains illustrations of his earlier artworks. Later turning to digital art, AL digitally adopts the expressions and motifs known from street art. The resulting picture series Digit-AL Streetart, Heads, Living On The Wall, Denkstahl and United Colors Of Denkstahl are presented in the corresponding chapters of the book.

The images are often accompanied by provocative and humorous titles as well as poetic and philosophical texts that deepen the artist’s message. AL knows the higher forms of thinking (intuition, imagination, inspiration); he has mastered the art of thinking in pictures like no other. He often uses the symbolic language. His play with old symbols and new modern logos on his digital canvas highlights what is worth considering.

With over 240 illustrations and equally extensive words, AL calls on you to question your own values and motives, while addressing the dimensions and consequences of an egoistic and consumer-oriented way of being with unshakable vehemence.

The name DENKSTAHL says it all and suitably describes the artist’s message. Whether in pictures, poetry or prose; in essence, his works are all the same. AL is about confrontation, about radical food for thinking! His book is reminiscent of the axe, which Kafka aptly describes:

»I think we ought to read only those kind of books that wound or stab us. If the book we‘re reading doesn‘t wake us up with a blow to the head, what are we reading for at all? So that it will make us happy (…)? Good Lord, we would be happy precisely if we had no books, and the kind of books that make us happy are the kind we could write ourselves if we had to. But we need books that affect us like a disaster, that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us.« Franz Kafka