This beautifully illustrated book, with over 300 colour reproductions, showcases many of the greatest masterpieces of 19th century Orientalist art. During this period, colonization, and a revolution in means of transportation allowed artists to visit countries from North Africa to the Middle East that had previously been relatively inaccessible. The patterns, colours, and light of this region influenced artists such as Delacroix, Decamps, Berchère, Bridgman, Ziem, Gérôme, Corrodi, Dinet, Matisse, Majorelle and many others. Upon returning to Europe, these artists captured the atmosphere of these distant and exotic lands in painted scenes of daily life and wrote memoirs of their travels. Some returned to settle there, including painters like Dinet, who spent a large part of his life in Algeria, and Majorelle, known as the “painter of Marrakech.” This book offers insight into the Orientalist aesthetic that inspired the movement, and lays the groundwork for a deeper understanding of these vibrant works of art.

Text in English and French.

From rockstars, pop icons, soul singers to jazz musicians – Michael Putland has photographed them all. Over his 50 year-long career, he has captured some of the world’s most famous singers and bands. Now he brings them all together in one fulminant photographic anthology.
Here, pictures of action-packed concerts are set aside intimate portraits of stars, and atmospheric still life shots accompany those of tension-filled tours and legendary performances. An exclusive insight into this era and the stories behind each photograph is offered by Putland’s personal anecdotes, creating a testament to music’s greatest moments and a must-have for all fans of music and photography.
– unique picture book with images from photographer Michael Putland – in black and white and in colour
– various famous artists found in this book: Madonna, Bob Dylan, Neil Young, Pink Floyd, ACDC and many more
– the photographer’s view tells the stories behind the photographs
– a great present for every music and photography enthusiast 
A photographic journey through 50 years of music history
Throughout the years, Putland’s work led him around the world. With great passion he photographed greats such as ABBA, The Rolling Stones and Tina Turner. His unique and incomparable photographs capture the soul of each musician, on and off the stage. With an eye for detail, he manages to portray the artists’ individual styles from new and unseen perspectives, making their music tangible through light, shadow and colour.
This photographic anthology is an homage to the greatest legends in music history and to the distinctive work and artistry of Michael Putland!

Text in English and German.

Carlos Luna, one of the foremost contemporary Cuban award-winning painters is part of a generation of Cuban artists who embrace their strong heritage and traditions but have reinvented themselves along the way. Thrumming with the spirit of Afro-Cuban tradition, Luna’s works range from jacquard tapestries, works on metal sheets, and Talavera ceramic plates to mixed media on wood and largescale oil paintings. This monograph illustrates Luna’s blend of influences from living and working in Cuba until 1991, then in Mexico for thirteen years, and now in Miami, since 2002. This book, lavishly illustrated, will take the reader through the artist’s amazing world of bright colours and will show, by a selection of plates and details, some unpublished works as well as his renowned masterpieces. Carlos makes visible the invisible, conveying messages and lessons from his past to offer to the present and future. His work is not on the surface, it is filled with subtle embedded messages. One must know the issues to decode. Often these messages are hidden in plain sight, lessons to be learned through reflection. His towering centerpiece, El Gran Mambo, a massive six-panel painting, which stood on display at the Museum of Latin American Art in 2008, serves as a focal point for 2015’s Green Machine: The Art of Carlos Luna at The Frost Art Museum in Carlos’s adopted home of Miami. Text in English and French.

Sibylle Mania’s Insights into 19 Ateliers are more than just a chronicle of studios and workshops – they are windows into the world of creative processes. Yet in these analog black- and-white photographs, the artists themselves remain hidden. Within the intimate interiors, secretive chaos merges with productive efficiency. It is this interplay that fully draws the viewer into the world of painters, sculptors, ceramicists, photographers, metalworkers, and graphic artists. Sibylle Mania takes a step back as photographer and, in her meticulously selected details of the untouched workshops, leaves us with the impression of being immersed in a place where inspiration can turn into creation at any moment.

Text in English and German.

Mmm, Gotta Try a Little Harder, It Could Be Sweet is the first institutional solo exhibition of work by Harold Offeh in the UK. This fully illustrated book documents two decades of video, performance and collaborative projects by the artist, as well as a new series of photographs depicting Offeh re-performing works in his archive. Offeh’s work interrogates our acceptance of social, political and racial models in society, often drawing inspiration from mainstream music, film and media. The title of the exhibition is taken from lyric by the British band Portishead and corresponds to three thematic sections of the exhibition: Mmm, a new multi-channel sound installation, Gotta Try a Little Harder considers Offeh’s use of performance as an investigative tool and It Could Be Sweet looks at the artists participatory and collaborative works on themes of desire, utopianism, queer identity and acts of resistance. The book includes a preface by Lubaina Himid and new essays by Sepake Angiama, David. A. Bailey, Anna Khimasia and Harold Offeh. 

In the 1910s and 1920s the unique landscape of the chalk downs of southern England began to exert a new fascination on writers, historians, archaeologists and artists. Modernists such as Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious and William Nicholson immersed themselves in exploring these enigmatic, ancient places. The stark, rolling forms of the downs suited the modern aesthetic, offering a place where prehistory and modernity could converge.

With the growing political tensions of the 1930s, this modern engagement with ancient landscape took on a symbolism that still resonates. Images of Britain evolved as the downs became both symbols of wartime vulnerability and resilience and the site of machine gun emplacements and crashed aeroplanes.

Art of the Chalk Downs investigates this extraordinary collision of ancient and modern, idea and place, and the network of artists who worked and lived there. Seventy-five plates of paintings, watercolours, prints and photographs are accompanied by texts written by leading art historians James Russell and Stephens.

Jewelry Stories highlights the Museum of Arts and Design’s unique, world-class collection of studio and contemporary art jewellery from the US, Europe, Australia, and Asia, a medium that comprises one-third of its permanent collection. Artists working in this field create jewellery rooted in sculptural experimentation and the concept of art as a wearable medium. The pieces featured represent the history of art jewellery as told from a largely US perspective. Jewellery artists are inspired by such subjects as found objects and materials, as well as by politics and pressing social issues, allowing for the development of unique, personal narratives in each piece. Each of the jewellery stories is written by an expert on the artist or subject, thus the book also celebrates the contributions they have made to the field.

Published to accompany an exhibition at Museum of Arts and Design, New York (US), on permanent display.

In the spring of 2023, Fondation Louis Vuitton will be holding Basquiat x Warhol… Painting 4 hands, the most important exhibition ever devoted to the collaborative work of these two artists. The exhibition will feature more than 100 jointly signed paintings, in addition to individual works by Basquiat and Warhol, and works by other major artists (Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, etc.) in order to recreate the New York downtown art scene of the 1980s.
From 1984 to 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) and Andy Warhol (1928–1987) jointly produced about 160 paintings, some of the largest in their respective careers. A genuine artistic dialogue of style and form had developed between them that dealt equally well with crucial issues such as the integration of the African-American community into the narrative of North America, a continent where Warhol was a major manufacturer of icons.

The 1920s in Germany witnessed a revolution in visual communication, typography, and graphic design that still influences us today. In 1929, Hungarian avant-garde artist and Bauhaus professor László Moholy-Nagy was invited to design a room dedicated to the future of typography at the Martin-Gropius Bau in Berlin as part of a larger exhibition called New Typography (“Neue Typographie”).

The exhibition was organised by the Ring of New Advertising Designers (“ring neue werbegestalter”), a group started by Kurt Schwitters in 1927 which consisted of 12 avant-garde designers and artists who explored a common vision of modernity in advertising and graphic design. In five years, the Ring put on over 20 shows in Germany, and invited guest artists to exhibit with them.

Moholy-Nagy’s room in the New Typography show was called “Where is Typography Headed?”. He created 78 freestanding panels with work by himself, other artists, and contemporary printed matter, which addressed the current trends and future direction of typography. The panels are reproduced together in this book for the first time, along with an Abcdarium of terms and concepts by a roster of noted typography and design historians.

This volume accompanies the Art Brut CUBA exhibition organised by Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne and features essays by Cuban authors and other experts, reproductions of works and previously unpublished letters from the collection’s archives.

The exhibition represents a voyage of discovery that explores the world of outsider art in Cuba more than 40 years after the first exhibition, which came about as a result of Jean Dubuffet’s desire to gather together in Collection de l’Art Brut works by self-taught Cuban artists assembled by his friend Samuel Feijóo, the curator of the 1983 exhibition.

Being an island with a distinctive history that has long been isolated for political and economic reasons, Cuba is a fertile breeding ground for artistic creations unaffected by the traditional artistic influences of the world outside.

The exhibition is divided into two sections: the first presents historical works by the Signos Group, founded by Samuel Feijóo in the late 1960s to promote popular Cuban culture through the graphic arts; the second presents works by contemporary outsider artists from the Riera Studio. Most of the works on display are made from recycled materials – cardboard packaging, newspaper, scrap metal, recycled waste – or natural materials, such as wood and jute fibre.

The works reflect the artists’ personal experiences, the economic, social and political circumstances of their country, and their inner worlds and obsessions. They offer an alternative and authentic view of Cuba, far from the stereotyped imagery associated with this nation.

Text in English and French.

In his second book on street art, Michael Harker once again travels to the most diverse centres for this art of the street. The varied structure of the topics with fascinating large-format photographs shows examples from Paris, Lisbon, Rome, Singapore, Vienna, Turin, São Paulo… and other places, and brings together works by numerous artists.

The artists use different stylistic devices to convey their messages. More and more international festivals are emerging as promoters of street art. Pars pro toto, the book presents the ‘Calle Libre’ festival, which has been taking place in Vienna since 2014.

Inspiring images familiarise the reader with the world’s largest gallery. Informative and scrutinising texts are combined with quotes and excerpts from interviews. The book encourages readers to see street art from a new perspective and to discover cities in new, less familiar ways.  

Text in English and German.

Founded in 1921 and the first of its kind in the country, the National Gallery of Canada’s Department of Prints and Drawings boasts a world-class collection of historical drawings dating from the 15th to the 20th centuries. These works, rendered in a wide range of mediums – graphite, ink, pastel, watercolour – reflect the diversity of techniques used over the ages.

Incorporating the latest research and a displaying wealth of scholarship, this richly illustrated book celebrates the recent centenary of this outstanding collection. It brings together a spectacular array of drawings, including newly acquired additions and little-known but historically significant works. The wide selection of plates showcases preparatory studies for paintings, depictions of historical and mythological themes, portraits, landscapes, forays into abstraction, and poignant explorations of the human condition. Featured artists include Élisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, Théodore Géricault, Gustav Klimt, Edvard Munch and Wassily Kandinsky, among many others.

Starting in Autumn 2017, Kunstmuseen Krefeld will take a fresh look at the legacy of the Bauhaus in the context of the former Eastern Bloc in the postwar period. With exhibitions in the two villas by Mies van der Rohe and a focus on ‘Ideology, Abstraction and Architecture’, Kunstmuseen Krefeld are carrying out pioneering work in reappraising a unique artistic movement and raising public awareness. In Haus Lange, an exhibition will be devoted to EXAT 51, an interdisciplinary association of artists and architects who aspired to synthesise the fine and applied arts, supporting non-representational art in socialist ’50s Yugoslavia. EXAT 51 was built upon the ideals of pre-war modernism: Bauhaus, Constructivism and De Stijl.

By presenting a selection of representative works and collaborative projects, the exhibition and book show the interdisciplinary outlook of the group and their attempt to position their ideals in everyday life under socialist rule. They designed pavilions for World’s Fairs as well as trade fairs, furniture, tapestries, magazines, objects, sculptures and animated films. In addition, this volume contains numerous essays, shedding light on the artistic statements in view of the socio-political context in Yugoslavia in the 1950s and 1960s, and many primary sources which are published in translation. For the first time, this movement and its positions have been scientifically researched and are now presented in Germany.

Exhibition Kunstmuseum Krefeld: October 1st, 2017 – January 14th, 2018

Text in English and German.

The appearance of the Human Immunodeficiency Virus and the Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome (HIV/AIDS) in the early 1980s and its subsequent rapid spread around the world has left deep marks in society. The illness itself and its effects on society have also caused manifold responses by artists and activists in many countries. United by AIDS, published in conjunction with an extensive group show on the topic of loss, remembrance, activism and art in response to HIV/AIDS at Zurich’s Migros Museum of Contemporary Art (Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst), sheds light on the multi-faceted and complex interrelation between art and HIV/AIDS from the 1980s to the present. It examines the blurred boundaries between art production and HIV/AIDS activism and showcases artists who played – and still play – leading roles in this discourse. Alongside images of artworks and brief texts on the represented artists, the book features voices from the past and present. Essays by Douglas Crimp, Alexander García Düttmann, Raphael Gygax, Elsa Himmer, Ted Kerr, Elisabeth Lebovici ,and Nurja Ritter broaden the view of the international discourse on HIV/AIDS and society’s confrontation with the disease. Published to accompany an exhibition: ‘United by AIDS – An Exhibition about Loss, Remembrance, Activism and Art in Response to HIV/AIDS’ at the Migros Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Zurich from 31 August to 2 November 2019.

The complex oeuvre of the American artist Cy Twombly (1928-2011) comprises a time period of around six decades, during which it never lost any of its expressive power. Twombly was one of the most productive artists in the history of more recent art. Acclaimed as one of the most important painters of the second half of the 20th century, he fused the legacy of American Abstract Expressionism with European and Mediterranean culture. The book focuses to a degree never before seen on his major cycles: Nine Discourses on Commodus (1963), Fifty Days at Iliam (1978), and Coronation of Sesostris (2000). The artist’s development as a whole is traced based on nearly 200 paintings, sculptures, drawings, and photographs. This thus provides unique insights into the overall intellectual and sensual richness of the oeuvre. From his early works at the beginning of the 1950s, which are characterised by the use of text, to his compositions of the 1960s, his reaction to the minimal art and conceptual art of the 1970s to his final paintings, the overview of the oeuvre underscores the significance of the series and cycles in which Cy Twombly invented history painting anew. With its polyphonic conception, the monograph offers numerous approaches with essays that shed light on the various aspects and phases of Twombly’s path as an artist. It comprises et al. the reflections and personal impressions of other artists as well as the memories of his assistant Nicola Del Roscio. These diverse testimonies make it possible to discover Cy Twombly not only as an artist, but also as an individual.

This is the first study of a fascinating, international phenomenon in the art of the past century. Naked portraiture is an original hybrid of the traditional genres of the nude and portrait, and has been created by an astonishing range of major artists, in many different media and in a variety of major artistic centres. Martin Hammer’s ground-breaking book compares work by painters such as Egon Schiele, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Pierre Bonnard, Stanley Spencer, Lucian Freud, Tracey Emin and Jenny Saville. The analysis encompasses a rich tradition of naked portraiture using photographic media, produced by figures such as Alfred Stieglitz, Richard Avedon, Diane Arbus, Boris Mikhailov, Nan Goldin, Gary Schneider and Melanie Manchot.

The subjects are men and woman, old and young, black and white, healthy and disabled. They might be lovers, close relatives or friends, with their nakedness suggesting the intimacy and tenderness existing between artist and subject. Conversely, the artist might not know them beyond the circumstance of making the pictures. Many of the images represent the artists themselves, with nudity carrying connotations of self-exploration, vulnerability, playfulness or fantasy.

Martin Hammer’s innovative study seeks to explain naked portraiture as a symptom of wider currents in modern culture, a visual parallel to various other manifestations of an impulse to reveal what is hidden, profound, or authentic, beneath the surface facade. The book also opens up for consideration the wider issue of how and why the genre of portraiture has been radically extended and reinvented, in so many different ways, within the art of the last hundred years.

Antwerp artist Eugeen Van Mieghem (1875-1930) documents the pulsating life around the port of Antwerp at the turn of the twentieth century. Dockers, sack sewers, passengers, local communities and general labourers are the subjects of his lifelong fascination with Antwerp port. His affinity with his subjects makes his work direct and sincere and is unique in the genre of social realism. The port is one of the great gateways to the city, facilitating the constant movement of goods and people – migrations that are essential for the economy as well as for the evolution of people and society. Ports also are scenes of human tragedy, witnessing the forced emigration of families and communities fleeing persecution and poverty, as immortalised in the paintings and drawings of Eugeen Van Mieghem.

Antwerp has strong associations with Irish artists from the late nineteenth century. Many of these artists – including Roderic O’Conor, Walter Osborne and Norman Garstin – were attracted by the pioneering developments in art practice on the Continent, and travelled to Antwerp to study at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts. The result was light-filled fleeting images painted out of doors, en plein air – a radical departure from the official teachings of the established art academies.

It is not known if Van Mieghem and any of those Irish artists ever came into contact with each other, but this exhibition shows for the first time Van Mieghem’s oeuvre alongside that of his Irish peers, proving yet again how vital are ongoing migrations of culture and people in illuminating and understanding our contemporary society.

Even if you know Doug Hall’s work, you don’t know “this” Doug Hall: the little boy afraid of bears in Boston who became the love-smitten art student who grew into a fearless Conceptual artist challenging many of our most beloved assumptions. Although lavishly and beautifully illustrated, this is not a book only to be looked at but one to be thoroughly read and enjoyed. In an account at once intimate and historical, Doug Hall writes eloquently about his development as a person and an artist. He situates his story within the broader conflicts of the latter part of the twentieth century and shows how these often absurd forces influenced a generation of artists to adopt radical art practices — video, performance, and installation — as a counter to the modernist aesthetics that preceded them. From his hilarious and troubling descriptions of the Altamont Free Concert (1969) and his disorienting confrontation in Berkeley with an LSD-tripping Indian Saddhu to his thoughts about teaching, making art, and the thinking behind some of his most important projects, Hall’s writing is generous and instructive for all those interested in our humanity and how it is nurtured through the arts.  

Through various thematic perspectives and a range of media, this book will shed new light on the history of Surrealism. With the idea of the unconscious as a turning point, The Savage Eye traces the roots of Surrealism in Symbolism and shows how the two art movements both reflect each other and overlap. Some of the most significant artists in modern art meet here in the murky depths of the human mind, where logic and morality give way to dreams, disturbing impulses, and unbridled desire. In this illuminating book you will become familiar with two radical art movements that both explored the psyche with the aim of establishing a new concept of humanity. Through artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Paul Gauguin, Dora Maar, René Magritte, Lee Miller, Joan Miró, Odilon Redon, and Auguste Rodin we will take you on a journey through the limitless world of the unconscious.

In 2019, Cuba celebrated the 60th anniversary of the revolution. In 1959, Fidel Castro and Ché Guevarra ousted dictator Batista and the country entered a utopian future. But Soviet communism and the American embargo forced Cuba to survive because the country remained fundamentally committed to the socialist values of the revolution.

Against this background, an extensive photography project was set up with four Cuban and four European participants. Taking the current reality of the island as a starting point, they each developed a project, which together provide a nuanced picture of the complex country. The eight projects pit the photographic interpretations of the local artists against those of the Europeans. The project starts from ‘heritage’ in the broadest sense of the word and focuses on the past, present and future of Cuba.

Cuba Photography Missions proposes an approach to reality in the country from the personal poetics of our artists and their European counterparts, assuming Cuban contemporaneity as a topic of reflection, among universal aspects that specify the thematic and formal coherence of the exhibition. Participating photographers: Ossain Raggi Gonzalez, Bert Danckaert, Linet Sanchez, Charlotte Lybeer, Liudmila & Nelson, Ulla Deventer, Ricardo Elias and Simon Roberts.

Text in English and Spanish.