Of course, Natalie Portner was not on Mars. But she was there with her eyes, and the visual impressions the images of probes and rovers made on her led to a complex emotional response. That Emotional Response is found in the fourteen never-before-publicly-shown images reproduced in this book. A powerful appeal for a love of the world we live in and a call to live with awareness and responsibility. The art of Natalie Portner breaks the conceptual aesthetic rules of the classical concept of art. The quality of her work is in its demand on the viewer, a challenging manifesto that makes committed art and responsible living a unity.

Natalie Portner: Natalie Portner was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1963. She studied in New York at the School of Visual Arts and was a fellow of the Joe and Belia Broner Foundation. She lives and works as a painter and art teacher in New York. Marcellus M. Menke: Marcellus M. Menke engagiert sich für Entwicklung und Realisation von Projekten aus den Bereichen Kunst, Musik, Literatur und Bildung. Dabei ist ihm das Aufzeigen von Beziehungen und das Sichtbarmachen von Zusammenhängen wichtig. In der von ihm initiierten und betreuten editionHIC[ veröffentlicht er neben eigenen Texten auch ihm wichtige Texte anderer Autoren. Von ihm geförderte Projekte aus dem Bereich der bildenden Kunst finden in der conTEMPart-Edition ihre Heimat. In seinem Projekt "buchmanufaktur.m4art.de" schafft er Bücher, die es erst in der Zukunft gibt. Marcellus M. Menke, publisher of Edition HIC[ is committed to the development and realization of projects in the fields of art, music, literature and education.