Every month, the art association HMKV presents the latest videos by international artists in its series “HMKV Video of the Month” which has been ongoing since March 2014. The idea for the series came from the desire to show the newest artistic productions in rapid succession, changing works at a faster pace than in the exhibitions of the HMKV.

For the first time, this publication unites all 78 works that have been exhibited since 2014. The videos address a variety of different topics and stories, ranging from labour conditions, structural changes, speculative technologies, or posthuman machines to technology (and its history) as well as artificial intelligence. A wide array of works is devoted to the old ‘new’ right-wingers and the alt-right. The book not only shows stills of all videos, but each work is also accompanied by an introductory text to provide a comprehensive overview.

Text in English and German.

François Meyer was awakened very early on to the appeal of contemporary art; his father was a great collector. Even as a child, Meyer would accompany his father to art galleries and auctions.

Meyer began his photography career at world-renowned Swiss photographers Boissonas. Here, he developed a love of photography, portraiture in particular, and has, over the years, gone on to photograph some of the world’s best-known and best-loved artists. Included in this stunning book are portraits of Max Bill, Fernando Botero, Francesco Clemente, Sonia Delaunay, Helen Frankenthaler, April Gornik, David Hockney, JonOne, Wilfredo Lam, Roy Lichtenstein, Marilyn Minter, Beverley Pepper, Pierre & Giles, Kurt Sonderborg, Andy Warhol, and Yan Pei-Ming to name just a few.

This book tells the story of the forty-year career of a passionate art collector and photographer.

Text in English and French.

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.

With the exhibition catalogue Back into the Light: Four Women Artists – Their Works, Their Paths, the Jüdisches Museum Frankfurt has dedicated itself to four rediscovered women artists. Erna Pinner (1890–1987), Rosy Lilienfeld (1896–1942), Amalie Seckbach (1870–1944), and Ruth Cahn (1875–1966) shaped the artistic life of the 1920s in Frankfurt am Main and were also noticed supra-regionally. National Socialist rule brought an end not only to the cosmopolitan way of life that they cultivated, but also threatened their work and their lives. Renowned art historians examine the works of the four artists in essays for the catalogue. Numerous illustrations and hitherto unpublished documents and letters accompany these texts. The various historical contexts of their individual lives and fate are also presented in cultural studies essays by international experts.

RHS Botanical Illustration: The Gold Medal Winners collects outstanding examples of botanical illustration from around the world, all of which have been awarded prestigious gold medals by the famous Royal Horticultural Society. This new updated and extended edition includes all new gold medal winners from 2019 to 2024, with an additional 29 stunning works from 14 new and accomplished artists. 

The RHS only award their gold medal to the most outstanding artists, encouraging the international artistic community to perform to the highest standard for the RHS annual exhibition, now held at the Saatchi Gallery in London, which runs for six weeks every summer. This gold medal is a highly coveted testament to an artist’s abilities, and the illustrations gathered in these pages demonstrate great attention to detail, masterful colour work and outstanding technical skill.

Insightful commentary on the artists’ creative process accompanies each picture. The perfect book for the lover of horticulture, as well as an excellent reference both for botanists and aspiring artists, this collection also includes an updated introductory essay that delves into the history of the RHS.

The catalogue for The power with which we leap together. Women artists in Spain and Portugal between dictatorship and democracy stems from an exhibition held at IVAM – Institut Valencià d’Art Modern, in partnership with CAM and curated by Giulia Lamoni and Patricia Mayayo.

Bringing together works by 59 renowned Iberian women artists, the exhibition examines the work created during the pre-revolutionary period in Portugal, before the Carnation Revolution in 1974, and in Spain, prior to the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, in 1975. In both countries, women had already started to challenge the established order, and there was a strong feeling of sisterhood on either side of the border.

In addition to the curatorial text, the publication features four essays by prominent Portuguese and Spanish researchers, interspersed with images of several of the works on display, spread through the nine sections that also structure the exhibition.

With design by the artist Dayana Lucas, each essay is jointly written by a Spanish and a Portuguese researcher, thus forging relationships and allowing for the examination of themes that have been little studied until now: abstractionism in the work of women artists between 1960 and 1970, feminism in Iberian pop art, the mobility of women artists in the Iberian Peninsula in the final decades of the Cold War, and a proposed dialogue between the two countries through artists’ books. 

Published in conjunction with the exhibition Roma pittrice. Artiste al lavoro tra XVI e XIX secolo (Rome paints. Women Artists at Work Between the 16th and 19th Centuries), at the Museo di Roma in Palazzo Braschi, this guide highlights to an even wider audience the presence of several women artists who where either born in Rome or made the eternal city their place of study and work. Starting from the artists represented in the Capitoline collections, such as Maria Felice Tibaldi (Subleyras), Angelika Kauffmann, Laura Piranesi, Luise Seidler and Emma Gaggiotti (Richards), the book includes other important artists who worked in the city, such as Lavinia Fontana, Artemisia Gentileschi, Giovanna Garzoni and many others, sometimes less known, whose oeuvre has been discovered in recent decades. The initial essay presents the gradual integration of women painters into the cosmopolitan Roman art market, with their laborious achievement of full access to education and to the most prestigious art institutions of the city and then explores the numerous pictorial genres to which they devoted themselves. The second part of the guidebook includes 56 biographies of these artists, revealing a rich and varied production until recently overlooked.

Fitzrovia is a notional area not to be found on any official document and, indeed, was not so called until the 1940s, named by a habitue at the Fitzroy Tavern, the journalist-cum-member of parliament, Tom Driberg. It was, for some half century, a haven for artists. This was partly due to the cheap accommodation it offered, along with cheap cafes and food shops, many run by French and German refugees, several of generous nature when it came to impoverished artists. But even more significant was the siting of the Slade School of Fine Art, just across Tottenham Court Road, in Gower Street. Founded in 1871, it offered a more liberal education than that provided by the Royal Academy Schools.

Although many artists of the period lived and worked independently in Fitzrovia, others clustered round charismatic personalities – Walter Sickert in Fitzroy Street, Roger Fry in his Omega Workshops in Fitzroy Square, Wyndham Lewis with his Vorticist plotters at the Restaurant de la Tour Eiffel in Percy Street; and, into the 1930s when some artists became activist, establishing the Artists International Association in Charlotte Street.

Many of these artists would be able to get their supplies at George Romney &Co. and Windsor & Newton in Rathbone Place and Percy Street.

And then there were the imbibers, Nina Hammett and Augustus John frequenting the various taverns of Rathbone Place and Charlotte Street, centering on the Fitzroy. Fitzrovia was awash!

“We are living history right now. I believe we need to do more to document this unique moment in America, and who better to convey what we all are feeling than our country’s greatest artists? It is my hope that in 50 years, art history classes will pull this book off the shelf and understand the deep emotion of this time.” — William Weinaug

Around the world, many individuals and families have faced isolation due to COVID-19. Our lives have been changed as we face a historical crisis of unprecedented scale. But beauty has also come from this hardship. The Great American Paint In® was birthed to allow artists to paint their emotions during the pandemic, capturing this period of history in a unique way — through art.

This book curates the products of the Paint In️®, revealing the responses of over 50 artists from across the continent. Artists share their experiences, their losses, and their hopes for the future. In doing so, they demonstrate the real grit and backbone of the American pandemic story. Like so many enduring these difficult times, they discovered a whole new world and a brand “new normal” that allows them to live, work, survive — and, most importantly, create.

These stories have been shared by Wekiva Island online, at Gallery CERO, and around the country in several travelling art exhibits. Now, for the first time, they are being brought together in a single volume.

Select artists include: Hai-Ou Hou, Olena Babek, Barbara Fox, Jill Stefani Wagner, Paul Schulenburg, Morgan Samuel Price, Kyle Stanley, Raymond Bonilla, Kathleen Dunphy, Jennfer Miller, Michelle Held, David Arsenault, John S Caggiano, Tony D’Amico, Karen Blackwood, Jeanne Rosier Smith, Justin T Worrell, Thomas Kegler, Shawn Krueger, Erik Koeppel, Ken Salaz, Hillary Scott, Thomas Adkins, Michael Orwick, Kim VanDerHoek, Cindy House, George Van Hook, Kim Lordier, Marc R Hansen, Sergio Roffo, Sam Vokey, Mary Erickson, Tom LaRock, Josh Clare, Howard B Friendland, Marc Dalessio, Andrew Orr, Kari Ganoung Ruiz, Charles Muench, Jim McVicker, Trish Coonrod, Joseph Daily, Jeffrey Hayes, Mitch Kolbe, Dogulas Wiltraut, Ray Howard, Nick Patten, Brett Scheifflee, Jeff Gola, Eleinne Basa, Bill Farnsworth, Garin J Baker, and Mary Jane Volkmann.

This two-volume set marks Jo Farb Hernández’s fifty years of scholarship on art environments and the capstone of her work on self-taught artists who have built art environments in Spain. Singular Spaces II evolved from her 2013 book, Singular Spaces. Together these works constitute an encyclopaedic exploration of Spanish art environments and an epic narration of the stories of those who made them.

Singular Spaces II introduces and examines 99 artists and their intriguing and idiosyncratic sculptures, homes, and gardens, most of which have never been thoroughly documented or previously published. The author has cast a wide net to ensure all regions of Spain are represented, as are all kinds of spaces assembled with all kinds of materials.

These sites are developed organically, without formal architectural or engineering plans: they are at once evolving and complete. Often highly fanciful and quixotic, the work is frequently characterised by incongruous juxtapositions, the result of a dynamic approach to creation that may appear impulsive and spontaneous. But these artists and their works have much to teach us about the process of creation and also about the confidence to undertake a path radically different from the one they had followed during the prime of their working lives.

Hernández combines detailed case studies of the artists and their work with contextualised historical and theoretical references to a broad range of interlocking fields, including art, art history, anthropology, vernacular architecture, Spanish area studies, and folklore, complemented with compelling visuals of each of the artists and their artworks. Breaking down the standard compartmentalisation of genres, she reveals how most creators of art environments, building within their own personal spaces, fuse their creations with their daily life in a way generally unmatched in any other circumstances of making art, in the process providing an open self-reflection of their life and concerns. The universality of the need to create, and the issues that are confronted when one does so in a public and non-sanctioned way, are relevant to art and artists worldwide.

Sverre Bjertnæs is considered one of the leading contemporary Norwegian artists today. He himself often refers to his body of works as a fragmented ‘stream of images’ collected from art history, vernacular culture and his own life.

This authoritative monograph on the artist features his oeuvre from the 1990s to the present day, with more than 200 illustrations. The book presents the full range of Bjertnæs’s works, covering painting and drawing as well as sculpture and the tableaux installations he has developed in later years. Bjertnas embraces the conceptual approaches of photorealism as well as merging figurative and abstract painting, and experimenting with the use of new media.

Exhibition at the Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg (NO), 29 April – 8 September 2019.

Text in Norwegian.

Sverre Bjertnæs is considered one of the leading contemporary Norwegian artists today. He himself often refers to his body of works as a fragmented ‘stream of images’ collected from art history, vernacular culture and his own life. This authoritative monograph on the artist features his oeuvre from the 1990s to the present day, with more than 200 illustrations. The book presents the full range of Bjertnæs’s works, covering painting and drawing as well as sculpture and the tableaux installations he has developed in later years. Bjertnas embraces the conceptual approaches of photorealism as well as merging figurative and abstract painting, and experimenting with the use of new media.

Exhibition at the Haugar Vestfold Kunstmuseum, Tønsberg (NO), 29 April – 8 September 2019.

“Sensuous details of one of the most beautiful nude portraits in the Louvre.” VOGUE
The idea for this book was born in the course of a visit through the Louvre, when Catherine Belanger ventured to call the Louvre ‘the biggest brothel in the world’. Jointly with author Jean Galard and photographer Lois Lammerhuber, she selected key paintings spanning five centuries to illustrate the fascinating art of depicting nudity and the artists’ struggle for acceptance of the nude in art and society. Lois Lammerhuber detaches the nudity, sensuality and sexuality of the paintings from the context of their artistic intention, conceiving them as ‘material’ in a fictional photography studio and recreating them in his photographs. He resorts to these ‘models’ to translate them into the language of fashion, nude and advertising photography, reading their body language and interaction in a way reminiscent of artists like Richard Avedon, Helmut Newton, Horst P. Horst or Herb Ritts – sensual and unexpected. Text in English & French. Also available: The Louvre Nude Sculptures ISBN: 9783901753121

“Fascinating details of the original pictures and a social history of footwear fashion” VOGUE
In acclaimed photographer Lois Lammerhuber’s pictures, shod feet in the Louvre paintings reveal undreamt-of information about people. The details are not only separate works of art, but also studies on centuries of shoe fashion and an excursion into social history. Almost intimate, the photographs raise the world of feet and footwear to eye level, showing delicate shoes and stout limbs; feet without shoes and shoes without feet. The viewing angle is a special one, not only for art enthusiasts but also for shoe lovers. Raphael, Goya, or Ingres did not produce or design footwear, but they all ‘recorded’ shoes, contributing to a history of footwear and at the same time creating fashion archives of shoes that people stepped out in between 1280 and 1863. In a brilliant discourse, Margo Glantz, an icon of Mexican literary studies, introduces the viewer to original thoughts on painting and footwear design, the history and sociology of shoes. Text in English, German, French & Spanish.

This book is the most important monograph devoted to the Swiss artist-photographer Béatrice Helg. It offers a survey of her work from the past twenty-five years, and is accompanied by a poem dedication by Robert Wilson, critical essays by Serge Linarès and Philippe Piguet, and a poem by Sylviane Dupuis. Helg’s oeuvre has a singular position within the photographic tradition of “constructed images.” Remote from hyperrealist or narrative imagery, her work displays abstract forms and luminous worlds. Drawing on a passion for music and a marked sensitivity to notions of space and time, to architecture, and to the staging of plays and operas, the artist creates monumental spaces in which sculpture, painting, installation, and light interact. As poetic as they are spiritual, her photographs show strangely beautiful universes of shadow and of light. Her work opens onto an infinity – onto a quest for the absolute or a search for inner mystery.

In the years 1945-1963, Jean Dubuffet set about documenting his collection of Art Brut. He had the pieces photographed by recognised photographers on the Paris art scene, including Henry Bonhotal and Emile Savitry. But he also had pieces photographed that were not in his own collection, including works that interested him because, like Art Brut, they were marginal to the official art world. These notably include works of popular and naïve art, children’s drawings, tattoos, graffiti photographed by Brassaï and graphic works from the Solomon Islands. Dubuffet arranged these photographs of artworks by over a hundred artists – including Gaston Chaissac, Aloïse Corbaz, Joseph Crépin, Auguste Forestier, Somuk and Adolf Wölfli as well as anonymous artists – in extraordinary sequences contained in 14 albums (755 pages in total). These have been preserved since 1976 in the archives of the Collection de l’Art Brut, Lausanne. Classified by artist, the images document paintings, drawings, embroideries, sculptures and collages. In assembling this image bank in the years 1945-1963, Dubuffet set up a dialogue between highly diverse forms of expression of his period, all of which flowered away from the more familiar terrains of art history and culture. This facsimile edition of the Photographic Albums of Jean Dubuffet is combined with a booklet of essays by specialists: preface by Sarah Lombardi, Director of the Collection de l’Art Brut and essays by Baptiste Brun, Nicolas Garnier, Karoline Lewandowska, Jean-Hubert Martin, Jérôme Pierrat and Michel Thévoz. Text in English and French.

The modifier bb Auto, founded in Frankfurt, 1973 by Rainer Buchmann and his brother Dieter, caused a stir in the European and international car scene of the ’80s. Their technical innovations and spectacular design made them stand out from the crowd.

Initially focused on Porsche cars, bb established themselves as a name to be remembered when they presented their Porsche Turbo Targa with prismatic coloured varnish on the Polaroid stand at Fotokina 1976 Cologne. At IAA Frankfurt 1979 they launched bb CW 311, a contemporary modification of the legendary Mercedes 300 SL. Mercedes-Benz was so enthusiastic about the car that they allowed Buchmann to continue using the Mercedes star as a brand logo. During the 1980s, bb was one of the most successful modifiers of production cars. They transformed off-the-line automobiles into bespoke luxury vehicles for those who could afford it – customers from the Arab world, celebrities from the jet-set, and many more…

However Buchmann’s real passion belonged to the area of electronic innovations. The money he earned with his tuning activities was invested into research in this field. He was the first to think about centralised door locking by means of remote control as well as parking distance control and he invented the first car computers. In 1983 his multi-function steering wheel was protected by patent. This comprehensive book, produced in close co-operation with Merck Group, one of the world’s leading chemical companies for whom Buchmann popularised a new and special kind of bright enamel varnish, presents the complete history of Rainer Buchmann’s technical and entrepreneurial achievements.

Basil Spence (1907-1976) was one of Britain’s most celebrated architects. This book explores his extraordinary career from the 1930s to the 1970s, focusing particularly on the post-war period. Initially known for his work on national exhibitions such as the Festival of Britain, Spence became a household name in 1951 when he won the competition to design a new cathedral for Coventry. He worked on an unusually wide range of projects from housing in Glasgow’s Gorbals to the University of Sussex and the British Embassy in Rome. Central to his work was a sensitivity towards materials and a commitment to working with artists. Spence’s work is discussed here in a series of essays introduced by a personal memoir specially written by the architect’s close family.

Shim-Sutcliffe’s masterful work at Point William intertwines landscape and architecture with ancient rock and water reshaping and reimagining a site on the Canadian Shield over two decades. Found conditions and new buildings are interwoven and choreographed to create a rich spatial experience moving between inside and out. Kenneth Frampton provides an insightful introduction with selected images and his own sketches framing a way of seeing Point William for the reader. Michael Webb’s provocative interview with Brigitte Shim and Howard Sutcliffe describes their evolving vision for Point William and their two-decade journey towards its realisation. Acclaimed photographers Ed Burtynsky, James Dow and Scott Norsworthy contribute through their powerful images capturing the spirit of Point William through the seasons and over time.

In its considered response to the globalisation of culture, HCMA has consistently achieved an architecture that is expressive of time and place, and uniquely interprets Canadian values of openness and inclusivity. The firm’s concentration on civic buildings denotes a deeply-rooted concern for community, and recognition that in contemporary pluralistic society’s schools, libraries and community centres are both symbolically and literally, the meeting places for all sectors of our communities regardless of demography, faith or ethnicity. What distinguishes HCMA’s design approach is its conceptual shift from the traditional departure points of form or function, to a more organic and humanist approach by which inhabitation of the building and its surroundings mediate the interface between these two opposing forces. While function implies an empirical definition of purpose, and form a pre-occupation with sculptural abstraction, inhabitation connotes an understanding that buildings should embrace the richness and diversity with which our lives unfold. Places: Public Architecture explores a selection of key projects by HCMA which offer insight into the firm’s specific approach to community building through public architecture. Featured projects many of which have been challenged by contemporary advancements in technology, include schools, libraries, fire halls, childcare centres, and more. Through the practice of architecture HCMA asks what is the future of the library, of education, and of public space in an increasingly online age? The book features critical text by accomplished writer Jim Taggart, professional photography, lucid architectural drawings, and details, as well as a look at the firm’s design process of iterative modelling/diagramming and research on contemporary topics.

The third publication to come out of the renowned firm, Ronald Lu & Partners celebrates the breadth and creativity of their work in honour of their 35th anniversary. Rather than a retrospective since day one, the book illustrates both their recent works and the people that make RLP what it is today. The book shares their projects, the stories of the people that work there and the changes they have experienced over the past ten years. With raw and un-edited interviews from members of the firm, the book explores a fresh take on what it is like to be a practicing architect in today’s world.

For his entire professional life, British architect Cedric Price (1934-2003) reflected on the mechanisation of society and its effect on people’s lives. In the 1960s and 1970s Price searched for a new language in modern architecture. His multifaceted, interdisciplinary approach and his sense of humour and self-irony, also with regard to his own profession, lead him into the fields of art and of social and natural sciences.

Tanja Herdt’s new book on the work and life of Cedric Price for the first time offers a comprehensive demonstration of his architectural concepts and social visions. Herdt focuses on his view of the city as a socio-technical system, the influence of product and everyday culture on architecture, and the role of science and technology in architectural design. Based on extensive research and drawing from rich and largely unpublished material, she features some of Price’s well-known projects, such as Fun Palace (1961) or Potteries Thinkbelt (1964), in context with her new findings. Herdt’s thorough analysis of his lesser-known works from the 1970s, including McAppy (1973-1975) and The Generator (1976), also questions the common perception of Cedric Price as an “anti-architect”.