The significant and rapid trend toward small office design globally is testament to increasing economic imperatives, where often commercial rentals are pushing business into innovative ways to manage and minimise their space and resources. Fast-evolving technological advances are also making it possible for people to work from home, where their home office environment needs to be not only stylish, but also conducive to productivity, and ergonomic to support and encourage good health and well-being. Also, there are those who seek to start their own business and are looking to establish a creative, professional and inspiring home office environment. Big Design for Small Workspaces combines form with function, and presents innovative interior designs for offices with compact floor plans of up to about 3230 square feet (300 square meters). This book showcases a selection of richly photographed, sleek and modern solutions, and presents insightful design concepts and appealing examples of imaginative and resourceful spaces, with informative commentaries describing aspects such as furnishings and materials, workstation layout, including the use of vertical space to its fullest advantage, and multipurpose areas. This book will provide an essential source of inspiration for architects, interior designers, small business owners, the homeoffice renovator, and anyone looking to create a smart small office environment.
Public markets are the world’s oldest retail trading format. The recent resurgence of public markets is unlocking a new era of market cities, which have sparked urban revitalisation and fostered community diversity. This new book will look at the latest developments in market design across the globe, bringing readers up to date with the latest developments and demonstrating ideas, projects, and visions that will offer not only information, but inspiration too.
In this timely book, three noted fashion historians examine the global transformations in the fashion industry today, and identify the challenges of the future. Since the dawn of designer fashion at the beginning of the 20th century, the role and position of the designer has drastically changed. This book addresses how the interpretation of creativity, authorship, craft, and innovation have evolved in this new context, and asks what role designers play in a globalised and digitised fashion world.
In the decade before his death in 2011, John Hoyland began to reckon with mortality. Confronting his own demise, he painted elegies to departed artist friends and tributes to illustrious artistic forebears. Imagery of the void looms large, but it is a void faced with defiance and vitality, less a rumination on the end than a celebration of life. This publication explores the paintings Hoyland made in this decade, including his final series, the Mysteries.
Essays by Natalie Adamson, David Anfam, Matthew Collings and Mel Gooding offer a rich and multifaceted account of a complex body of work. Hoyland’s veneration of Vincent van Gogh, his connections to J.M.W. Turner, the use of black as a colour, his deployment of risk and attempts to subvert his own taste, and his development of the cosmic visual language of the Abstract Expressionists are all discussed. Richly illustrated, the book extends our understanding of Hoyland’s late work within the story of modern painting as a whole.
Stripped of their typical narrative and commercial contexts, the fragmented collages of this collection act as visually tantalizing ciphers, reflecting the desires and imaginings of the beholder.’ – Jennie Waldow, Brooklyn Rail
This beautifully illustrated catalogue showcases works by British artist John Stezaker made between 1976 and 2017 and brought together in the 2018 show “Love” at The Approach, London.
Stezaker is celebrated for his distinctive collage works: interruptions of, and interventions into, found images dating mostly from the mid-20th century – products of modernist culture such as film stills, press and publicity photographs, magazines and postcards. His works engage with themes such as psychological archetypes, fragmentation, identity, self and other, desire, inscrutability and enigma, glamour, fantasy, dreams and the gaze.
A sense of romance pervades Stezaker’s imagery. As demonstrated most dramatically by the artist’s ‘Love’ series (2016), his work seduces and ensnares the viewer’s gaze, arresting their perceptual expectations. Disquieting, poetic, compelling, glamorous and strange, the anatomies of love and desire comprising ‘Love’ resemble a visual encyclopaedia of human consciousness. Featuring essays by Michael Bracewell and Craig Burnett.
“His is a warm, charming page turner of an autobiography: from start to finish full of fascinating characters, incredible and amusing anecdotes, self-effacing humour and wry asides, beautifully detailed observations and, of course, stuffed with great nuggets of jewellery and art history.” — The Jeweller Magazine
“In this dazzling memoir revealing his encounters with royal and celebrity clients including the Queen Mother, Sir Elton John, Dame Joanna Lumley and Frank Sinatra, Antiques Roadshow presenter and jewellery expert Geoffrey Munn reflects on his stellar career, having spent more than five decades bejewelling some of the biggest names in the world.” — Hello!
“In this colourful and witty narrative, Geoffrey Munn, OBE, MVO, FSA, FLS, best known as a presenter on BBC’s Antiques Roadshow, reflects on his career in the London art world, spanning over 50 years.” — Arts & Collections magazine
“Discover delightful anecdotes from Fabergé expert Geoffrey Munn’s time at Wartski in 1970s London, featuring encounters with royalty, Hollywood icons, and the pursuit of Imperial Eggs.” — The Jewellery Editor
Born and bred in Sussex, Geoffrey Munn, Antiques Roadshow presenter and jewellery expert, came from a traditional rural background – but only weeks after leaving a country Grammar School in 1972, he was plunged into the vortex of the London art world. It was the beginning of the career of a lifetime at the famous firm of Wartski, whose showrooms scintillated with gem-set necklaces, tiaras and three of the famous Fabergé Imperial Easter Eggs.
In a colourful and witty narrative, Geoffrey relates his daunting but delightful encounters with HM Queen Elizabeth The Queen Mother, HRH Princess Margaret and HRH The Duchess of Cornwall. In their wake, Geoffrey met a rich variety of luminaries, including Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby, Joanna Lumley, Stephen Fry, Elton John, Vivienne Westwood and Dame Edna Everage. This is certainly a rapid and amusing read but it is also unique study of a narrow and fast-changing society.
During the mid-1980s, Riley introduced a new pictorial device, the rhomboid, to her then predominantly vertical stripes, developing her exploration of interplaying tones of green, yellow and orange. This allowed the artist to construct new visual relationships between divergent colours and forms, creating what she terms a ‘harmony of contrasts’ that animates the entire visual field.
Tracking a transitional period in Riley’s career, the works on paper in this volume – studies produced between 1984 and 1995 – shift from a focus on the vertical stripe to increasingly complex diagonal compositions. Illustrated in full colour, the works are accompanied by a historic interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka and a text by Riley’s archivists Natalia Naish and Alexandra Tommasini, situating these studies in relation to major paintings produced during this period.
An overview of John Stezaker’s film still collages, this book showcases the evolution of the artist’s relationship with a specific material.
Leading British collage and appropriation artist John Stezaker began his ongoing series of film still collages in 1979 – the result of a period that marked a crucial change in the direction of the artist’s work, which had previously been centered around a text-based ‘conceptualism’.
The series moves with Stezaker’s changing interests, using stills from classic American-period Hitchcock films as raw material before shifting towards the undistinguishable mass of 1940s and early 1950s low-budget studio films. Featuring collages based on a combination of film still excisions and superimpositions, this ongoing series is catalogued comprehensively for the first time in this volume, which brings together Stezaker’s earliest film still collages with his most recent.
Full-colour illustrations are accompanied by an essay by David Campany and a conversation between the critic and the artist. John Stezaker (b.1949, Worcester) is one of the leading artists in contemporary photographic collage and appropriation. Employing vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, travel postcards and other printed matter, Stezaker creates small-format collages that bear qualities of Surrealism, Dada and found art. Stezaker studied at the Slade School of Art and has taught at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. In 2012 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize following a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. His work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s and is held in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Arts Council England; and Tate.
The photographs of these journeys form one of the most extensive records of any region taken in the 19th century. The range, depth and aesthetic quality of John Thomson’s photographic vision mark him out as one of the most important travel photographers.
Thomson arrived in Siam in 1865 and with the help of the British Consul in Bangkok, he was able to gain an audience with King Mongkut who granted him permission to take some formal portraits of the King, his royal family and chief ministers, as well as recording important ceremonies and travelling to Ayutthaya, Petchaburi and the surrounding countryside. Staying in Bangkok for several months he photographed many aspects of the city, river scenes, its surrounding countryside and people, before journeying to Cambodia and the amazing Angkor Wat ruins. After an arduous and dangerous journey, Thomson became the first photographer to document Angkor Wat before returning to London.
Between 1868-1872 Thomson turned his attention to China, making extensive trips to Guangdon, Fujian, Beijing and China’s north-east travelling down the Yangtze river and covering nearly 5,000 miles.
In China, Thomson’s photographic skills reached their zenith and his portraits of women are particularly remarkable.
His collection of over 600 glass negatives form a unique archive of images, which are today housed in the Wellcome Library, London.
This book pays homage to an iconic fashion duo, Ossie Clark and Celia Birtwell, two English creatives whose short but very intense artistic and personal partnership gave rise to an unmistakable style that left its mark in London during the period between Mary Quant’s miniskirt and the subversive punk movement of Malcolm MacLaren and Vivienne Westwood, from 1965 to 1974. Ossie and Celia is the story of a special alchemy, one of the first artistic couples in which a designer and a fabric designer worked together to complete each other in total harmony, up until their separation in 1973.
Celia created wonderful prints inspired by nature and the different artistic currents that Ossie, with his skill in cutting and modelling, transformed into sensual and feminine clothes. This also thanks to the lightness of the fabrics such as crepes, silks and chiffons that conquered the international jet-set and the music scene of the time. From Brigitte Bardot to Liz Taylor, up to Verushka, everyone was fascinated by their fashion. Mick Jagger, Brian Jones, Keith Richards, Jimi Hendrix, Marianne Faithfull, Anita Pallenberg, Eric Clapton, George Harrison, Bianca Jagger and Marisa Berenson are just some of the people that Ossie Clark dressed. Starting with a first important nucleus of clothes from the archive of Massimo Cantini Parrini, then enriched with further loans from the American collection of Lauren Lepire and from the London archives of the Clark family and Celia Birtwell herself, the exhibition recounts the context and evolution of the two artists with clothes, fabrics, unseen sketches, videos, photos and vintage editorials.
Text in English and Italian.
In Venice, on the Grand Tour in 1731, the future fourth Duke of Bedford met with the great art agent, Consul Joseph Smith. The commission he placed resulted in 24 of the greatest and most typical works of Canaletto. First installed in Bedford House London, they were moved to their splendid position in the Dining Room at Woburn in 1800, where they have remained ever since. Fully illustrated with many details, this publication marks the first time these paintings have been reproduced in colour. An extensive introduction by the leading Canaletto scholar Charles Beddington puts these works into perspective.
The book will coincide with the first Ashmolean NOW exhibition in Gallery 8, opening in July 2023. The Ashmolean NOW Program features exciting works by prominent early to mid-career artists based in the UK, seeking to attract new audiences interested in contemporary art. Artists who have established international reputations and emerging artists whose international status is anticipated with a strong degree of confidence are approached pro-actively. In addition to exhibiting their existing works, all artists are invited to create at least one new work as a response to the museum and/or its collections. This first exhibition presents two linked solo shows: paintings/drawings by Flora Yukhnovich, and paintings/drawings by Daniel Crews-Chubb. The double-sided style of the book will mirror the exhibition concept, while presenting itself as a unique, well designed object that has a life beyond the exhibition.
Renowned for such prominent buildings as London’s Tate Modern, Beijing’s Bird’s Nest National Stadium and 1111 Lincoln Road in Miami Beach, Herzog & de Meuron sits at the cutting edge of contemporary design. Founded in Basel over 40 years ago, the Swiss architectural practice is now an international partnership with projects across the globe – among them museums, hospitals, skyscrapers, arenas, and private and civic buildings.
Produced in close collaboration with the architects, and comprising new texts by leading writers, practitioners and thinkers, this exciting new publication gives an authoritative account of the inner workings of what the New York Times dubbed ‘one of the most admired architecture firms in the world’.
“…delivers an absorbing portrait of actor’s final preparation during their last 30 minutes before going on stage.” – The Lady
British photographer Simon Annand has been shooting candid photographs backstage at West End theatres in London for 35 years. In these meditative portraits, often shot in the intimate space of the dressing room, he captures the focus and tension of world-class actors right before they go on the stage. Actors such as Cate Blanchett, Orlando Bloom, Anthony Hopkins, Jake Gyllenhaal and Judi Dench are seen in these moments of vulnerability, which every actor experiences no matter how long they have been working. Backstage, with an introduction by Cate Blanchett, contains a hand-picked selection of Simon Annand’s remarkable and unique portraits.
“Wow! Just wow! … It’s a really stunning thing. A love letter that is itself a work of art about a work of art that is Grayson. Both playful and deadly serious … these photos are not simply about ‘serving looks’ but about restlessness and identity and transience. That world is full of possibilities because Grayson has given himself the freedom to be whoever he wants to be, to look how he wants. His gift is that he passes that freedom to us. Ansett’s work is mind-blowing … not cosy at all. Just brilliant photography.” – Suzanne Moore
Grayson Perry is an award-winning artist best known in the art world for his ceramic works. To the wider public, he is perhaps equally famous for his cross-dressing alter ego. This book reveals a unique relationship between Perry and renowned portrait photographer Richard Ansett through a previously unseen archive from photoshoots spanning over 10 years.
Ansett astutely captures the wit, style and irreverence of Perry’s many complex personas. Beyond the snazzy outfits and cheeky poses, these thematic portrait collections offer wry social commentaries on current and popular phenomena, including the EU referendum, American pop culture and the existential questions of life and death.
At once glossy, fabulous and cutting-edge, Muse: A Portrait of Grayson Perry offers a complex, fascinating and ultimately affectionate insight into our recently knighted national treasure with anecdotes and narration from Ansett himself, this is a masterpiece of rhetorical observations and quick-thinking camerawork. Perfect for art geeks, style freaks and Perry’s long-devoted following.
Famous and beloved classics are reinterpreted to capture the attention of young audiences in this engaging book series. This magnificently illustrated edition of Jack London’s classic novel White Fang brings new life to this timeless story of a wolf-dog struggling to survive in a human society every bit as violent as the natural world.
The author was able to keep the spirit of each original novel intact while recounting it with fresh and accessible language. A series designed to make children fall in love with literature and characters they will likely encounter again as older readers. Even the illustrations bring new life with a colourful, contemporary, and almost cinematic style. Other titles in the series includes Moby Dick ISBN 9788854420564, Tom Sawyer ISBN 9788854420540 and The Secret Garden ISBN 9788854420557. Ages 7+
Burst! Abstract Painting After 1945 looks at the close, but previously unexplored relationship between Abstract Expressionism and Art Informel. Through texts and close to 100 illustrations, the book describes a vital creative exchange across the Atlantic that would entirely redefine painting. Big, expansive, paint-splattered surfaces; spontaneous actions captured on canvas; new ideas of freedom. A story of post-war recovery and Transatlantic dialogue. On both sides of the ocean, society was reacting to the horrors of the Second World War, the Holocaust and the coming of the atom bomb. The book shows how artists searched for new ways to deal with these shattering events. With works by Jean Dubuffet, Natalia Dumitresco, Helen Frankenthaler, Asger Jorn, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, Sam Francis, Joan Mitchell, Ernst Wilhelm Nay, Barnett Newman, Georges Mathieu, Hedda Sterne and Clyfford Still, and more.
There are cities that have made an indelible mark on music as incubators of genres that changed, and are changing, history. These are their stories.
From London told by Blur at the height of Brit Pop, to evenings in Lagos punctuated by Afro beats, and the underground sound of Seattle shaped by Sub Pop. The pages of this book map an atlas of musical cities, from Rio de Janeiro to Seoul, that have made a notable and significant contribution, and bring them to life through the stories of their most important experiences.
Enriched by in-depth “bonus tracks” on the most famous and unforgettable musicians.
Cities featured include: Seattle; New York City; Los Angeles; San Francisco; Nashville; Memphis; Austin; Chicago; Salvador, Bahia; Kingston; Havana; Dublin; London; Manchester; Glasgow; Liverpool; Berlin; Paris; Ibiza; Seoul; Tokyo.
A.S. Jasper’s memoir of growing up in the East End of London before the First World War was acclaimed as a classic when it was described by the Observer as ‘Zola without the trimmings.’ In this definitive new edition, it is accompanied by the first publication of the sequel detailing the author’s life in the cabinet-making trade, The Years After.
Illustrated with line drawings by James Boswell and Joe McLaren.
During the 1890s and early 1900s Édouard Vuillard (1868–1940) produced a body of work that combines intimate subject matter with abstract form through the simplification of pictorial elements and observation of decorative fabrics and wallpapers. Through these devices he developed an art that is unashamedly decorative and yet always replete with subtle suggestions of deeper meanings. In balancing form and content, psychological drama and abstraction, his pictures are about as close to poetry as any artist’s, and all the more brilliant for their understatement and the near imperceptibility of their craft.
Illustrating many rarely seen paintings from private collections, this book offers a fresh look at the early career of this much-loved artist. Introduced by Chris Stephens, director of the Holburne Museum, and with an original essay by Belinda Thompson.
Stezaker attended the Slade School of Art in London in his early teens, he graduated with a Higher Diploma in Fine Art in 1973. In the early 1970s, he was among the first wave of British conceptual artists to react against what was then the predominance of Pop art.
Solo exhibitions for Stezaker were rare for some time, however, in the mid-2000s, his work was rediscovered by the art market; he is now collected by several international collectors and museums.
Made across a 32-year span, the works in Tabula Rasa unite the central themes in the art of celebrated British artist John Stezaker, from the capacities of collage to the current flow in an age of mass media. This volume brings silkscreens on canvas from the early 1990s and film still collages from the 1990s and 2009 together for the first time. An essay by art critic and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell looks at the connections within Stezaker’s practice, centering on notions of screens, voids and cut-outs.
The essays range from biographical and career overviews to detailed analysis of specific aspects or themes that occur throughout Riley’s career. The selection reflects a rich body of work, which sustains the interest of important authors, as evidenced by multiple pieces by Éric de Chassey, Lynne Cooke, Robert Kudielka, Paul Moorhouse and Richard Shiff. Together, this volume of essays tells the story of an artist whose art has continuously evolved over nearly six decades.
Most of the critical texts have been written in close consultation with the artist, the result of long conversations, studio visits and archive access. Largely commissioned on the occasion of particular exhibitions, these essays track and trace Riley’s focus and influences at different moments in time. Each essay builds upon the next, with more recent authors clearly responding and referencing earlier discourse. The result is a collection of great breadth and cohesion.
An important resource, About Bridget Riley represents a monumental body of research and analysis by some of the most important art historians of today. It also offers the opportunity for the reader and the viewer to approach Riley from a plethora of perspectives to form their own view, much reflecting Riley’s own particular approach to art history. As John Elderfield puts it: ‘Effectively, Riley makes a pact with the viewer, through the medium of the painting, that they will collaborate in eliciting from a particular painting a particular sort of mobile visual array. And, when the viewer stops looking at the painting, it will therefore be as if leaving something that continues to go on.’
German artist Lother Götz (b. 1963 in Gunzburg, Germany) completed an MA at the Royal College of Art in 1998, after studying in Germany at Aachen, Düsseldorf and Wuppertal. He has exhibited widely in the UK and abroad, with solo shows at galleries such as Gasworks (London), the Chisenhale (London), Mappin Art Gallery (Sheffield), Museum Goch (Germany), David Risley Gallery (Copenhagen) and the Petra Rinck Gallery (Dusseldorf), and has been included in group exhibitions in Amsterdam, Dublin, Hamburg, Hanover, Salamanca, Wilhelmshaven and Wuppertal.
Perhaps best known for his large-scale wall paintings and installations, Götz’s drawings lie at the centre of his practice.
Brought together in dense compositions on painted card and board, Götz’s thin pencil lines explore the impact of using varying colours and intensities on the work’s surface. Referencing and expanding upon the abstract language of Suprematism and the Bauhaus, the colours appear to oscillate in front of the viewer to immerse them in the surrounding space.
Alongside over 40 colour illustrations, an essay by Charles Darwent explores the range of influences on Götz’s recent body of work.
To commemorate the publication, Götz created a limited-edition lithograph, Correction (2015), in collaboration with Hole Editions. Each edition is hand-finished by the artist and contained within a custom-made slipcase.
This popular collection of the best of Art Monthly’s interviews since the magazine’s inception in the early 1970s provides a supplementary history of twentieth-century art, from over 150 perspectives, through discussions between artists and critics.
The interviews provide the most immediate access to an artist’s thought processes and offer compelling narratives of changing creative activities. Many leading practitioners – from Naum Gabo to Douglas Gordon – have been interviewed, often at highly significant moments in their careers.
The artist interview has occupied an important position in Art Monthly since its first issue, and the book was first published as part of the magazine’s 30th anniversary celebrations in 2007.