German conceptual artist Karolin Bräg (born 1961) has devoted the past two decades to an exhaustive close engagement with the experience of loss. Conducting numerous conversations with people from all walks of life who have dealt with the death of loved ones, Bräg compiles these testimonies and reprises them in site-specific installations as a vast quilt of loss and grief, and acceptance of loss and grief. These installations include engraved fragments of text on stone and metal surfaces, that render visible and palpable what is so often abstract and intangible in the words of the bereaved. This publication, the first comprehensive monograph devoted to the artist’s work, examines Bräg’s epic effort to render loss comprehensible. Critical texts by Markus Landert and Florian Matzner are presented alongside images from this project and from throughout Bräg’s oeuvre.
