After training as a graphic designer in Hungary, the plastic artist Vera Székely (1919-1994), a member of the Székely-Borderie ceramicist collective, tackled work in clay, metal, wood and glass to reach her artistic fulfillment in textiles.

From this point on, Vera Székely acknowledged “swimming and dancing in space to leave a trace in it” with her ephemeral installations of bent felt, her stretched canvas structures and “braced sails” that would be exhibited throughout the world, notably at the Biennale internationale de la tapisserie, Lausanne (1981) the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou (1982), the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (1985), the Lunds Konsthall, Sweden (1988).
Text in English and French.

The use of pictures to communicate a story has a long tradition in Japanese culture that dates back more than a thousand years. Such narrative illustrations draw on Buddhist texts, classic literature, poetry, and theatrical scenes to create rich visual imagery realised in a wide range of media and format. Quotations from and allusions to heroic epics and romances were disseminated through exquisite paintings, woodblock prints, and in pieces of applied arts such as lacquer ware or ceramics, thus becoming anchored in the collective consciousness. As story-telling art found expression in a variety of materialities, it became an integral part of daily life. A fascinating narrative space evolved that combined artistic excellence and aesthetic pleasure.

Love, Fight, Feast features some one hundred paintings, woodblock prints, illustrated woodblock-printed books, as well as lacquer and metal objects, porcelain, and textiles from the 13th to the 20th century, alongside scholarly essays on a range of aspects of Japanese narrative art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the renowned Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the book offers a unique survey of the multifaceted, colourful, and imaginative world of Japanese narrative art across eight centuries.

A hundred years after the fall of the Ottoman Empire, the Museum Fünf Kontinente is showing the special exhibition In trockenen Tüchern! Gewebtes und Besticktes aus dem Osmanischen Reich [A Stitch in Time! Woven and Embroidered Textiles from the Ottoman Empire]. The accompanying publication provides an insight into the different aspects of inhabitants’ life during the Late Ottoman Empire, based on selected textiles and everyday items from the collections of the Museum Fünf Kontinente as well as the private collections of Ther and Middendorf. Together with their rural counterparts featuring woven red and blue patterns, the napkins and hand towels from the 18th to 20th century, artistically embroidered with blossom, fruits, or architectural elements, accompanied people from cradle to grave and bear impressive witness to their craftsmanship. Today these textile objects are a significant part of the cultural legacy of Turkey.

Text in German with partial Turkish translation.

From Bauhaus jewellery and West African textiles to contemporary portraiture and sculpture, this unique volume explores the rituals of making that underpin an artist’s work.

Accompanying an exhibition curated by the groundbreaking Nigerian-born British fashion designer Duro Olowu at Camden Art Centre, London, this book offers the opportunity to re-evaluate art and textiles from the nineteenth-century to the present.

Olowu selects material by more than 60 artists from around the world, including rarely seen works by Anni Albers, Wangechi Mutu, Alice Neel, Chris Ofili and Irving Penn, and newer paintings by Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. By setting up unexpected dialogues between historic and contemporary artists working in a myriad of media – textile, painting, sculpture, photography and collage – Olowu reveals a shared preoccupation with themes of gender, race, beauty, sexuality and the body.

The volume includes an in-depth conversation between Olowu and artist Glenn Ligon, along with texts by Jennifer Higgie and Shanay Jhaveri, that together highlight the intricate layers of history and place that influence the making of art.

Pio Abad’s artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, encompassing drawing, painting, textiles, installation and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events and offers counternarratives that draw out threads of complicity between incidents, ideologies and people. Deeply informed by unfolding events in the Philippines, where the artist was born and raised, his work emanates from a family narrative woven into the nation’s story. Abad’s parents were at the forefront of the anti-dictatorship struggle in the Philippines during the 1970s and 80s and it is the need to remember this history that has shaped the foundations of his work. 

This beautifully designed book accompanies the Ashmolean Museum’s second exhibition of its new Ashmolean NOW series, featuring the work of Pio Abad. Abad’s artistic practice is concerned with the personal and political entanglements of objects. His wide-ranging body of work, which includes drawing, painting, installation, textiles and text, mines alternative or repressed historical events, offering counternarratives. Abad’s new works link narratives found in the Museum’s collections and Oxford with his personal life in the UK and Philippines, where the artist was born and raised. The book features a new text by Abad and contributions by art historical experts including Dan Hicks.

When the survival of the Catholic Church was threatened during the Republic and Catholic shelter churches were not allowed to be recognisable from the street, what was not allowed to be shown on the outside was compensated for on the inside. In the 17th century, the robes became gold, silver and silk expressions of silent resistance, but also of a feminist agenda of the makers. Behind closed doors, everything was literally and figuratively pulled out to propagate the Catholic faith. Worn ball gowns with colourful flowered French, English and Chinese fashion fabrics were donated to the church by rich, pious women so that beautiful and special church vestments could be made from them. So it could easily happen that a priest in a pink robe with flowers stood at the altar.

“Prepare to be inspired at National Galleries Scotland: Modern One, as Everlyn Nicodemus opens her first retrospective this Saturday” — The NEN
“Experience Everlyn’s joyful, defiant and searingly honest artworks, with over 80 drawings, collages, paintings and textiles from over 40 years of her career, from 1980 through to the present day.” — Art Daily
This is the first major publication on the artist Everlyn Nicodemus and accompanies the first ever retrospective of her 40-year career. It offers a fascinating introduction to her life, career and art.

This book introduces readers to Nicodemus’s practice – from the very first work she painted to newly commissioned oil paintings. Many of Nicodemus’s drawings, collages, paintings and textiles are published here for the first time.

Nicodemus engages with complex subject matters, unflinchingly addressing human suffering and societal responsibility. While her works convey and process traumatic experiences, they are ultimately hopeful, focusing on healing and the power of creativity. This publication will reveal the scope and ambition of this astonishing artist’s practice.

Expert contributors offer new insights into Nicodemus’s practice, including a new interview with the artist. Exhibition curator Stephanie Straine explains and contextualises the rich pages of artworks, drawing on extensive primary research with the artist and her archives.

Five Houses on the Wild Side is a visual feast showcasing the wildly imaginative, rules-free, cozy and sumptuous interiors Elena Agostinis has created for her family’s homes in New York, Montana, and Mexico.

Bold and courageous choices of colours and patterns, elements from the wildlife and fauna of her South African childhood, mixed and matched with the best of local artisanry, textiles purchased from souks and markets all around the world, giant papier-mâché’ animal garden sculptures, and wall art that spans from the elevated to the quirky and amusing, are Elena’s traits that will inspire readers to free-styling their own homes.

Elena’s irresistible style, originality, and use of wild colours has not only been restricted to her family homes, but inspired a quiet town in Upstate New York, Tannersville, to repaint its own Main Street store fronts, contributing to the town being selected in 2021 for the $10-million-dollars New York State Downtown Revitalization Initiative award.

Elena shares the inspiration from her childhood, travels, heritage, and family needs, encouraging readers to find their free spirit and apply it to their own interiors.

An unprecedented history of Christian art—spanning two millennia—in the lands where the religion originally took root and spread.

This splendidly illustrated volume is the first to survey the artistic achievement of the Christian communities of the Near East, living in present-day Iraq, southern Turkey, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, Jordan, and Egypt. Although these communities belong to diverse churches, they share elements of a common history: they date back to the earliest days of Christianity, they adopted the Arabic language in the ninth and tenth centuries while preserving their original language (Syrian, Greek, Coptic) in their liturgy, they had the status of dhimmis under the Arabs and the Ottomans, they have often served as intermediaries between East and West, and in recent years they have often faced destruction or exile.

Raphaëlle Ziadé, a noted authority in the field, brings together the holding of churches, monasteries, museums, and private collections, as well as the findings of archaeology, to present an artistic panorama stretching from the birth of Christianity to the end of the Ottoman empire. Her rigorously researched account—encompassing architecture, frescoes, mosaics, wood and ivory carvings, metalwork, illuminated manuscripts, icons, and textiles—breaks down denominational, political, and geographic barriers to reveal the civilisational dimension of Christian art in the Near East.

Real Life is introduced and curated by Wells Fray-Smith. It is published in collaboration with Gallery Sofie Van de Velde on the occasion of the group exhibition Real Life. The publication gathers works by Ilse D’Hollander, Lois Dodd, Christopher Colm Morrin, Jesse Murry, Heidrun Rathgeb, Peter Shear, Trevor Shimizu, and Frank Walter, presenting a dialogue across generations and geographies around painting’s enduring engagement with lived experience. The book explores how these artists, much like Ilse D’Hollander herself, use paint to address reality in its most porous, poetic, and capacious sense. Whether working through figuration or abstraction, their practices blur the boundaries between pigment and picture, illusion and observation, the tangible and the transcendental. At its heart Ilse D’Hollander’s quiet yet profound vision. Through sketchbooks and paintings from 1988 onward, she offered intimate glimpses of her daily surroundings — a window frame, a stairway, a cat — each rendered with the same precision and restraint that define her painting. These drawings were not preparatory studies but complete reflections on perception itself, acts of seeing that transformed the ordinary into the contemplative.

The talented printmaker and Royal Academician Chris Orr turns his humorous gaze on some of the most famous – and fabulous – artists of the past. With over 30 new works, accompanied by Orr’s captions, artists from Edward Hopper to Pablo Picasso find themselves in weird and wonderful situations. Edvard Munch holidays at the seaside, John Constable RA is disturbed at his easel by frolicking nudists and an unfortunate incident occurs in Barbara Hepworth’s studio… No one can escape Orr’s imagination: Walter Sickert is distracted from a spread-eagled model by a fly in his soup, Dame Laura Knight RA is caught shoplifting, and Frida Kahlo enjoys a fry-up. Each image is packed with detail to pore over, and the book concludes with notes from the artist, ‘Notes from the Cages’, accompanied by preparatory drawings for the finished work. This new collection, published to coincide with an exhibition of Orr’s works at the Royal Academy, is a delightful fantasy, which affectionately pokes fun at well-loved artists.

Have you ever wondered who your favourite artists admire and who they want to shine a spotlight on? Wonder no longer.

In this first volume of Accolades, a wide range of musicians, composers, and songwriters praise and present their treasured gems. Contributors from Steve Albini to “Weird Al” Yankovic, from Julien Baker to Margo Price, present accolades to cherished colleagues, to amazing actors and authors, to admired activists and athletes, to precious poets and esteemed engineers. Belgian‐based illustrator Tom De Geeter thoughtfully curated this line-up of contributors. He interviewed close to 200 artists and asked them just these two questions: who do you want to honour and why? De Geeter’s vivid, bold yet delicate line drawings accompany their answers in style and make Accolades a more than exceptional project for you to dive right into.

Close to 200 contributions by musicians like Steve Albini, Julien Baker, Jehnny Beth, Dan Deacon, Feist, Steve Gunn, Tim Heidecker, Page Hamilton, Joan As Police Woman, Lambchop, Larkin Poe, Ian MacKaye, Mark Mothersbaugh, Margo Price, Mauro, Sun Kil Moon, Mike Watt, “Weird Al” Yankovic, but also from members of bands like Amenra, Bad Company, Bauhaus, Efterklang, Fleet Foxes, Godspeed! You Black Emperor, Grandaddy, Grizzly Bear, Guided by Voices, The Hold Steady, Khruangbin, Royal Trux, Unsane, Xiu Xiu, and many more.

‘The Indian tribal art, a new field of exploration of contemporary art’ – Le Monde.
India’s cultural richness makes it an endlessly fascinating country. India is known for its profusion of sacred art reaching back several thousand years, but we are less aware of the fact that over 60 million Indians come from the several hundred miscellaneous tribes with which the country is studded. The Indian government has done more than any other to preserve and give visibility to its tribal and popular art and since 1976 the Indian authorities have regularly accorded the great names in tribal art the same status as those in the modern art that has followed independence. These are India’s ‘other Masters’, as the title of an exhibition held in New Delhi in 1998 put it. At the instigation of the great modern painter and guru Jagdish Swaminathan, the year 1982 saw the inauguration in the very heart of India of the Bharat Bhavan, the first museum to give an equal standing to contemporary artists from both dominant and minority cultures. The groundbreaking historical figures among these other masters, such as Jangarh Singh Shyam and Jivya Soma Mashe, who were present in the historic exhibition Magicians of the Earth (Centre Pompidou, 1989), are enjoying a burgeoning international reputation. Their works are now on display in the great private collections, from the Devi Art Foundation to the Fondation Cartier, and the international press, ranging from the New York Times to Le Monde and including The Hindu, have celebrated these artists’ imaginative range. India astonishes once again through its extraordinary capacity simultaneously to provide a stage for all the best examples of contemporary art generated by its diverse cultures, whether they be dominant, minority, global, local, urban or rural. Like contemporary art, India is itself multi-faceted. One word, manifold cultures.

Francisco de Goya and Edvard Munch revolutionised art through their groundbreaking pairing of raw realism and unique imaginative power. Exploring inner worlds and existential questions, they had a formative impact on art history and our understanding of our times.

The book is published in conjunction with the exhibition Goya and Munch: Modern Prophecies, the first comprehensive presentation of these two artists in tandem. It is lavishly illustrated with reproductions of all the exhibited works and features texts by Trine Otte Bak Nielsen, Manuela B. Mena Marqués, Janis Tomlinson, Ute Kuhlemann Falck and Ask Salomon Selnes.

This is the first book to be entirely dedicated to the artwork of Jivya Soma Mashe. Through the quality of his work, Jivya Soma Mashe stands comparison with other outstanding enigmatic artists, such as Bill Traylor or Frédéric Bruly Bouabré, who broaden our understanding of the diversity of forms and cultures.

Jivya Soma Mashe (1934–2018) is a legendary figure among his people, the Warli, a tribe of around 300,000 inhabiting an area 150 km north of Mumbai (Maharashtra, India). Its members are animists and speak a language that has never developed a written form. To the best of human memory, it is Warli women who have always painted ritual and ephemeral paintings directly on the walls of their huts. The Warli have developed an extremely basic pictography based on circles, triangles, and squares to express their animist culture and represent their only deity, the mother goddess Palghatta, at the centre of each painting.

After losing his mother at a young age, Jivya Soma Mashe took refuge in drawing, immersing himself in a personal style that first elicited the admiration of his peers and later that of regional, national, and international authorities. Jivya Soma Mashe received his first national award in 1976 – from Indira Gandhi herself. His works featured prominently in the Magiciens de la terre exhibition (Centre Pompidou, Paris 1989) and in the exhibition celebrating the 30th anniversary of the Cartier Foundation (Paris 2014).

Text in English and French.

A giftable miniature book celebrating the achievements of women artists throughout history.

This colourful little volume presents more than 250 works from the renowned collection of the National Museum of Women in the Arts, the first museum in the world solely dedicated to championing women in the arts. Now in its third edition, the Women Artists Tiny Folio has been revised and updated from cover to cover to include works by a diverse array of creators from around the world, and from the 16th century to the present. From Lavinia Fontana to Frida Kahlo to Amy Sherald, and from Louise Bourgeois to Niki de Saint Phalle to Faith Ringgold, here are women artists to inspire every reader.

“The book is an impressive work of scholarship” – Studio International

“Richard set about to produce a study of distribution networks, and achieved this through immaculate and thorough research. It is no criticism of the book to say that there are many questions left unexplored … As scholars of the future think through these and other questions, they will remain grateful to Richard’s extraordinary and meticulous scholarship.” – Mark Godfrey, Frieze

Emerging in the late 1960s, conceptual art was spurred by a network of artists, dealers, curators and critics. These little-known connections are detailed for the first time in this highly significant volume.

By focusing on 15 artists – including Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, Hanne Darboven and Daniel Buren – and a specific network of dealer-galleries, private and public institutions and collectors around them, author Sophie Richard documents the role of art dealers in the development of conceptual art – which ultimately led to the structure of today’s art world. We learn how conceptual artworks entered private collections and public institutions, how value was conferred to them, and the distribution networks that drove these artists’ success. A detailed account of artistic activity in the decade 1967–77 is accompanied by extensive and previously unpublished data, charting the exhibitions and sales of conceptual works.

The relationships, support structures and strategies of dealer-galleries – such as Konrad Fischer, Wide White Space and Lisson Gallery – are revealed and make fascinating reading. Including numerous interviews with key figures of the period, ‘Unconcealed’ exposes the new dealing, curatorial, collecting and teaching methods formed in this decade that continue to be critical to today’s art world.

Around 1900, a small group of influential patrons, critics, writers, and artists turned Weimar into a utopian centre of modern art and thought. Several artists and writers sought to create a ‘New Weimar’ and position Friedrich Nietzsche at its head, as the radical prophet of modernity.

In 1902, two years after the philosopher’s death, Max Klinger was commissioned to carve Nietzsche’s portrait where his cult was organised. Starting from a heavily reworked death mask, Klinger executed the famous marble herm that still today adorns the reception room of the Nietzsche Archive. Only three monumental bronze versions were cast, one of which is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Canada. With this sculpture in focus, accompanied by a series of paintings, drawings, plaster casts, and small bronzes, Radical Modernism will show how Klinger and his patrons invented the ‘official’ Nietzsche, transforming a highly expressionist portrait into an idealised classical cult image. The exhibition and this catalogue will also include a comprehensive series of early editions of Nietzsche’s most influential books and will bring together work by the other protagonists of the ‘New Weimar’, in order to shed light on this extraordinary artistic and cultural constellation of modernism for the first time in North America.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa – 18 April – 25 August 2019.

The Baroque, for many the most thrilling architectural style ever created, was born in Rome and reached its apogee in the work of three geniuses born in the 1590s – Bernini, Borromini and Pietro da Cortona. Perhaps the greatest student of the style was Anthony Blunt, who spent a lifetime studying and teaching the work of these architects and their importance to us now. This elegant and concise introduction to the style and its flowering in Rome was first published in an anthology of essays in 1978, not long before Blunt died, and represents a summation of his teaching. It is republished here separately, copiously illustrated with contemporary engraved views and measured drawings. Many of these ravishing images have not been republished since the beginning of the 18th century. The combination of scintillating text and superb illustrations make this a delightful book as well as a must have on any student’s list.

Architecture Asia, as the official journal of the Architects Regional Council Asia, aims to provide a forum not only for presenting Asian phenomena and their characteristics to the world, but also for understanding diversity and multiculturalism within Asia from a global perspective.
This issue reveals the development of Thailand contemporary architecture, and features five essays and twelve projects that elaborate this perspective. The five essays elaborate the contemporary architecture of Thailand in Southeast Asia, and how Thailand architecture was influenced by western architectural theories and finally found a good balance between modernisation and localisation. The twelve projects, accompanied with full-colour photos and text descriptions, concentrate on the exploration of modernity, regionalism and futurism in Thai architecture from 1940 to 1980, and highlight architectural works that reflect on practical industrial buildings, demonstrate the exploration of Thai contemporary architecture from form, space and architecture to the complex disciplines of ecology, humanities, society and industry.

“A point, a hole, a gap. A cut, a gash, a wound. The gaze stretches out towards openings, discovers small and large concavities, focal lines converge and branch out between chromatic shadows and traces of light: we go with our eyes towards what wants to be looked at, the object of perceptive desire. […] The work as the starting point of a venture between what exists and what can only be imagined.”

This book is a moment of reflection on Paolo Scheggi’s (1940-1971) multidisciplinary research and his intense investigation developed over little more than a decade: a seemingly insignificant stretch of time in the slow and irrevocable evolution of the history of modern and contemporary Western art which defines him as a very young protagonist of the Italian spatialist and monochrome neo-avant-garde, and pioneer of contemporary languages.

Text in English and Italian.