Isa Genzken — Urlaub, Lukas & Sternberg, 2000

Published for Genzken's exhibition Urlaub at the Frankfurter Kunstverein, Frankfurt am Main, 27 May–6 August 2000, this compact third volume in the Lukas & Sternberg Pocket-Book series arrives at an important turn in her work. The precise concrete and architectural forms of the 1980s and early 1990s had begun giving way to increasingly provisional constructions assembled from glass, tape, plastics, aluminium, photographs and everyday materials. Vanessa Joan Müller focuses particularly on Genzken's small "beach house" structures: models that borrow the promise of resort architecture only to make it unstable, improvised and faintly absurd.

The reproductions are excellent evidence of the change. Little architectural bodies sit on white plinths carrying paint, tape, reflective surfaces, logos and loose debris. Architecture remains, but modernism has lost its clean shirt.

Edition of 2,000. An exhibition catalogue deliberately reduced to something closer to a paperback carried around in a coat pocket. Specific Object records the edition as 2,000 copies, sewn and offset printed.

That portability feels especially right for Urlaub. A book about leaving one place for another is itself designed to travel.

And the subject has proved remarkably persistent. In 2026 David Zwirner returned explicitly to the 2000 exhibition for VACATION in New York, revisiting Genzken's language of leisure, transit and escape more than twenty-five years later.

Edited by Nicolaus Schafhausen and Caroline Schneider. Text by Vanessa Joan Müller. Design by Surface. Lukas & Sternberg, New York, 2000. 140 pages. 11 × 17 cm. 21 colour and 14 black-and-white illustrations. German / English. Softcover; sewn binding. First edition; edition of 2,000. ISBN 0-9671802-1-X.

Condition: very good; light rubbing and handling to black wrappers, minor edge wear consistent with age; internally clean.