In October 2018 Cornelia Parker’s Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) lands in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London. This meticulous and unsettling installation – first shown on the roof of The Metropolitan Museum of Art against the skyline of New York’s Central Park – is half stage set, half sculpture. The work, which draws on archetypal images of American culture such as the red barn and the infamous Bates motel from Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, will now be seen against a backdrop of Burlington House’s neoclassical buildings. Cornelia Parker was elected a Royal Academician in 2009. She has since had solo shows at the Whitworth Gallery, Manchester, and the Frith Street Gallery, London. She is well known for her installations, including Cold Dark Matter: An Exploded View (1991), a reconstruction of an exploded shed, which now forms part of Tate’s collection. Generously illustrated with supporting imagery and installation shots, this book comprises a conversation with the artist and a text on the work’s installation in London. Transitional Object (PsychoBarn) will be on display in the courtyard of the Royal Academy of Arts, London, from October 2018 to March 2019.

Renovation continues to be an important and fundamental part of modern architecture, whether it be through a desire to preserve history, or resurrect an old family home. This book provides a useful overview of nearly 30 case studies from across the globe, providing inspiring examples of how to refresh an old structure through sensitive modifications without changing the original architectural type. An inspiring guide to the daunting task of renovation, this book covers the whole process of renovating an old house, and provides fitting examples of work from around the world. Covering the entire process of renovation, the book includes “before” and “after” photos to clearly illustrate the skillful work involved in adapting an older residence. The decision to renovate rather than rebuild brings its own set of complications, but this book reminds us that this is not a hopeless endeavour but rather one that refreshes the architecture and provides a revamped home, perfect for the modern world.

For the second edition of the Dulwich Pavilion in 2019, the commission was awarded to London-based architects Dingle Price and Alex Gore in collaboration with British artist Yinka Ilori. This elegant, large-size book documents this piece of built poetry in a series of striking, atmospheric photographs by Sophie Roycroft. The concise essays by Job Floris and Sumayya Vally situate the project within a social, political, and cultural context, complemented by technical details and selected plans and drawings on and inside the book’s cover.

In mythology, art history and religious iconography, the apple has been imbued with every imaginable human desire. It has been a symbol of love and beauty, of temptation, of immortality, peace, death and poison, of sin and redemption. From Adam and Eve to the trials of Heracles, to the art of Cézanne and Magritte, to Newton’s theory of gravity, the death of Alan Turing and the growth of Steve Jobs, the apple resonates throughout western culture. It is Snow White, William Tell, it is The Beatles and the Viking gods, it is even the American frontier.

Now, Barnaby Barford offers a celebration of this fruit, exploring its impact on the history of humankind. Apples have become a recent feature of Barford’s eye-catching installations, whether ripe and healthy or in a state of decay. The Apple is Everything guides the reader through Barford’s work and ideology.

This first ever monograph in English on Olga Jevrić offers a unique opportunity to discover the work of a remarkable Serbian artist whose long and distinguished career established her as the most significant modernist sculptor from the former Yugoslavia.

Despite gaining widespread acclaim from her contemporaries both in Europe and the USA, economic, social and geopolitical upheavals meant that her work has been little seen outside Serbia in the past four decades.

As a witness to the Second World War and its aftermath, Jevrić sought to give voice to the spiritual roots, cultural foundation and social conditions of the war-torn environment in which her work developed.

Through her materials – primarily a mixture of cement, iron oxide, rods and nails – she created distinctive forms that communicate the relationship between matter and void; weight and weightlessness; containment and release. Though many of her works are modest in scale, they have an immensely powerful presence.

This collection of texts and images provides a range of perspectives on, and a thorough contextual overview of, Jevrić’s work from some of the UK’s most influential sculptors, alongside prominent art historians from the former Yugoslavia. It was produced in celebration of Jevrić’s exhibitions at London art platforms PEER (28 June–14 September 2019) and Handel Street Projects (28 June–13 December 2019), along with the acquisition of nine of her sculptures by Tate Modern.

This publication brings together over 60 works on paper created from 2005 to the present day by London-based artist Neil Gall (born 1967, Aberdeen), whose works balance the profound with the absurd.

In works that buzz with art historical reference, Gall has consistently explored matters of perception and mimesis through the visual language of household detritus. He translates the visceral and psychological interactions between materials and their surfaces – corrugated cardboard and pressed tinfoil, ping-pong balls enshrouded in black tape – to an unsettling, surreal and sometimes erotic effect.

Essays by art historian Lexi Lee Sullivan and artist Alexander Ross are augmented by thoughtful insights from gallerist George Newall and an introduction from Gall’s dealers David Nolan and Aurel Scheibler.

Recounting an art dealer’s recuperation from major surgery in the famous Claridge’s Hotel in London, this idiosyncratic (and semi-autobiographical) novel interweaves reality with fantasy. Room 225–6 follows the author-character ‘The Protagonist’ – accompanied by his beloved terrier ‘The Bitch’ – around London’s Mayfair as he hosts endless art world gatherings and tea parties for twenty, and visits a multitude of local galleries and shops.

Incorporating multi-layered voices and devices, the distinctive narrative introduces the reader to a memorable host of characters – from the ‘The Political Prisoner’ to ‘The Little Mondrian’ – in a tale filled with humour of observation and incident. Bringing to life this frightening yet extraordinary period in one man’s life, it is at once honest, satirical, idiotic and bold. Room 225-6 is sold to benefit the Oracle Cancer Trust (oraclecancertrust.org), the UK’s leading national charity dedicated to funding head and neck cancer research.

Issam Kourbaj was born and grew up in Syria before settling in Cambridge in 1990. Following the uprising in Syria in 2011, Kourbaj has been a constant creative witness to the continuing conflict in his home country, his art increasingly addressing the endemic pain and suffering that accompanies displacement and forced migration everywhere. Published to accompany two substantial solo exhibitions at Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge and The Heong Gallery, Downing College, Cambridge, Issam Kourbaj explores the life and work of an artist characterised by collaboration and endless curiosity. Kourbaj’s art is expressive and alive, suggesting even in the darkest hours the potential for change and renewal.

“How can we grasp the remarkable artistic breadth of Issam Kourbaj? Here is an art so full of invention and purpose that its images and ideas reverberate well beyond the walls of any gallery. Kourbaj’s achievement is to make us look, pause and imagine. Engaging with his acute and powerful work makes us consider our responsibility for the conditions of others on our shared planet” – Andrew Nairne, Director of Kettle’s Yard

A humorous analysis of facadism in London – why it is happening and what it means – accompanied by a gallery of the most notorious examples guaranteed to induce laughter and horror in equal degree.

The London Press Exchange (LPE), founded in 1892, grew out of an agency set up by two young reporters in London to supply news items to provincial papers. It was to grow to become the biggest and most profitable advertising agency in Britain. Yet it never was to attract the publicity as did lesser fry as Crawford’s or Colman, Prentis, Varley. It’s policy was actually declared to be one of reticence, which is not what advertising is all about. Yet some of the characters it conceived were to become household familiars as Mr.Therm for the gas industry and ‘the little man’ for Double Diamond. And in carrying out the first major readership survey in Britain, under the aegis of Mark Abrams, LPE kick-started market research here, The Market Research Society being founded in its offices. This tribute is to establish LPE as ‘leader of the field’.

“Neighbours and Rivals, more than a travelogue, is a tract: one that calls for more pragmatism in the running of a modern city and out of which our policymakers would do well to take a leaf.” — Country Life

The first work of great French journalist Louis-Sébastien Mercier, this seminal work of travel writing remained unpublished for over 200 years.
Mercier first travelled to London, and began recording his impressions, in 1780. An exemplar of a new form of journalistic, reflective literature, he presented emotive representations of the city as collections of experiences, habits and personalities. And differently from Dickens’s London or Baudelaire’s Paris, with their contrasts of opulence and misery, Mercier describes a less familiar urban environment – more optimistic, perhaps even utopian. His version of London is, in fact, a projection of his philosophical imagination – not simply a rounded portrait but also a reflection of what he hoped Paris could become.

For this first publication in English, Laurent Turcot and Jonathan Conlin’s translation preserves the life and humour of Mercier’s text. It is illustrated with contemporary images, with an emphasis on Thomas Rowlandson and Gabriel-Jacques de Saint-Aubin, the first Parisian flâneur-artist.

In What I See, Wolfgang Strassl presents a diverse collection of photographic works created over the course of ten years, through which he seeks to further understand and reflect upon what it means to be a photographer today. Strassl spent more than 20 years working as an insurance executive before he embraced his true passion and embarked on an artistic career in photography. Throughout his decade-long intensive exploration of the medium, he has learnt to abandon the rational and structural thinking that he had cultivated and instead to invite emotion, instinct, mystery, curiosity, reflection, and uncertainty into his creative work. He is concerned with themes such as youth, memory, beauty, nature, the environment and how our lives play out within it. However, instead of providing clear answers, his work raises new questions while conveying a sense of the photographer’s personality.

This artist’s book features a selection of Çağla Ulusoy’s abstract paintings distinguished by her unique visual language and colour palette, accompanied by collages that reflect the processes behind her practice. In her paintings, Ulusoy reshapes lived experiences from various cultures and traditions through an abstract visual language, infusing them with subconscious memories and imagery. Her collages, on the other hand, re-imagine her works within a hybrid narrative and fantastical universe, incorporating adorned figures and scenes. Comprising 83 selected paintings — which Ulusoy creates with materials such as acrylic, oil paint, sand, and wax and in which harmony and friction coexist on the same surface and the balance between colour and form is constantly challenged — and the collages accompanying them, the book deciphers the artist’s multilayered and uncanny visual language.

Meet 50 women, from queens and politicians to explorers and sports figures, who changed the world. These 50 women pursued their ambitions and achieved their dreams – even when the world tried to tell them they shouldn’t. They enjoyed successes and triumphs, dealt with tragedies and ordeals, and lived lives as thrilling and moving as a great novel. Ranging from artists, designers, and actresses to entrepreneurs, scientists, and activists, the women include Maria Montessori, Amelia Earhart, Coco Chanel, Simone de Beauvoir, Rosa Parks, Eva Peron, Josephine Baker, Jane Goodall, and Malala Yousafzai.

Nineteenth-Century European Painting: From Barbizon to Belle Époque represents a comprehensive guide to the range of stylistically diverse genres of nineteenth-century European painting. Accessible and insightful, this exquisitely illustrated volume presents the historical context behind the century’s essential artistic movements including Romantic Painting, The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Realist Painting, Academic Painting, and Impressionist Painting. Influenced by an overwhelming wave of political, military and social change, nineteenth-century Europe represented an era more diverse in painterly subjects and styles than any before it. Indeed, it was a period that saw many European painters moving away from the strictures of the academy system, choosing instead to use their training to develop new techniques and traditions. A collection of independent stories, this book also outlines the unique progression between the different movements, exciting and enlightening the reader about the most magnificent period of art the world has ever known. Contents: Foreword; Dr. Vern G. Swanson; Introduction; Author’s Note; STYLES: The Barbizon School; Romantic Painting; Orientalist Painting; The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood; Realist Painting; Academic Painting; Impressionist Painting; The Newlyn School; Post-Impressionist Painting; SUBJECTS: Landscape Painting; Venetian View Painting; Maritime Painting; Sporting Painting; Animal Painting; Genre Painting; Cardinal Painting; Costume Painting; British Neoclassical Revival Painting; Belle Époque Painting; Conclusion; Endnotes; Bibliography. Featured works from museums and collections including: Louvre, Paris, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Wallace Collection, London, Fine Art Museum of San Francisco, The Tate Gallery, London, The Schaeffer Collection, New South Wales, The Royal Collection, The Royal Academy of Arts, England, The Musée D Orsay Paris, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (Catherine Lorillard Wolfe Collection), The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg, Russia, Russell-Cotes Art Gallery and Museum, Bournemouth, England, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery, Stanhope Forbes, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, PA, USA, Paisnel Gallery, London, National Gallery, London, National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Museo e Gallerie Nazionale di Capodimonte, Naples, Italy, Museo de Arte, Ponte, Puerto Rico, Musée Marmottan, Paris, Musée D Orsay, Paris, Auguste Renoir, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, among many others.

Dust Free Friends is a series of designs for small pieces of domestic furniture, designed by London-based 6a architects, that can be made very simply at home, in restricted spaces, with a small number of tools and without specialist skills. The lightness and simplicity of the pieces is derived from a combination of observation of the way simple plywood constructions on a construction site are adapted to become stools, tables, steps, and stairs, changing quickly and without fuss as workers need them. The designs also re-examine the long tradition of self-build that has shared the journey through modernism with industry and craft. With the Dust Free Friends series, Tom Emerson and Stephanie Macdonald invite the reader to make his or her own everyday furniture from dressed plywood. Beautifully produced and illustrated with some 90 easy-to-understand diagrams and images, Dust Free Friends is a comprehensive, precise, and entertaining, manual to furnishing a comfortable place entirely by its users. Also available: Never Modern ISBN 9783906027241

“When you land on this book, if you do not yet have an appreciation of butterflies or Chan’s workmanship, after reading, it will leave you in awe of both.”—Beth Bernstein, Forbes
“When I was a young boy, butterflies were flying colours – I knew not their name. Then butterflies became the Butterfly Lovers: a tragedy, a love story, a symbol of eternal love. As I grew older, I found them to embody the words of a great philosopher: life is but a dream; only we need to decide whether we want it to be the dream of a man, or the dream of a butterfly. I could not decide, and so I became The Butterfly Man.” – Wallace Chan

Father of The Wallace Cut – an illusionary three-dimensional gemstone carving technique – and The Wallace Chan Porcelain – a ground-breaking material five times stronger than steel – Wallace Chan is a guiding light in the world of jewellery design. Always innovating, always testing boundaries with his materials and technique, Chan’s creations are as stunning as they are intricate. Compiled by jewellery experts, this book explores the cultural and personal significance of Wallace Chan’s most famous emblem: the butterfly.

Winged Beauty: The Butterfly Jewellery Art of Wallace Chan features approximately 30 of his finest pieces. Enter a butterfly house of colourful gems, with brooches and necklaces so delicate they might have flown down and alighted on the page.

This publication accompanied a 2018 exhibition by the British painter and printmaker Christopher Le Brun. The body of work explored here develops his long-standing interest in the ‘double’ – conceptual and embodied duality. The arresting diptychs and single paintings provide a direct continuation of his series of prints Composer (2017), which explores the musical form of distinct yet related movements and the essentially layered structure of both painting and music.

Working directly on the woodcut proofs, these new oil paintings extend Le Brun’s lifelong preoccupation with colour – in his words, ‘experiencing rather than seeing a property of the world we delight in for itself’ – and represent radical experiments in the juxtaposition of colour, tone, transparency and form.

The book features an essay by exhibition curator Anna Dempster exploring dualities across a number of disciplines.

When photographer Anthony Dawton realised how dramatically homelessness had increased in London, he took to the streets with his camera. For years, he had taken photographs in areas of need worldwide, but after spending some time in his home city, he noticed how many people were living on its streets. He embarked on a new project to raise awareness for a city he no longer recognised: NOTLondon.

Anthony Dawton photographs his subjects with a beauty and dignity that many of them are often denied. His portraits capture the strength and power of humanity as well as its vulnerability. By accompanying the image with the person’s name and their story, Anthony gives voice to the voiceless and attempts to offer the homeless a place, a home on the page. Governmental institutions turn a blind eye to the homeless, leaving the work up to charities. Homeless shelters are rife with substance abuse, making them a dangerous place for those trying to overcome addiction. Homelessness becomes a vicious cycle and many find it difficult to break free. Since the start of the pandemic, over 70,000 households in the UK have been made homeless. Dawton’s photographs are mesmerising, and as we stare into the eyes of their subjects, we’re faced with reality: this is a problem that’s getting worse and needs urgent attention.

NOTLondon is a provoking campaign to help the city’s most vulnerable and to address the fact that, despite its wealth, the city is not providing for those most in need. NOTLondon includes an introduction by Leilani Fahra, former UN special Rapporteur on the Right to Housing and the Global Director of The Shift. Having dedicated her life’s work to changing attitudes to homelessness and attacking the governmental systems and structures which perpetrate homelessness, she shares her thoughts in NOTLondon, highlighting the importance of Dawton’s project.