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

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

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

The largest surviving portion of the first major collection of Classical antiquities in Britain – the sculptures and inscriptions collected in the early 17th century by Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel for his London house and garden – is in the Antiquities Department of the Ashmolean Museum. This handbook tracks their eventful history before they came to rest in Oxford.

Together with the Indigenous communities of the Wanjina Wunggurr – comprising the Ngarinyin, Worrorra, and Wunambal peoples – we look back at the Frobenius Expedition to the Kimberley Region of North West Australia in 1938-39. Organised by the former Institute for Cultural Morphology and the Frankfurt Museum of Ethnology (today: the Frobenius Institute and the Weltkulturen Museum), it was the first comprehensive ethnographic research expedition to a region still today characterised by a vibrant rock art tradition. The publication accompanying the exhibition of the same name is the result of a joint exploration of the expedition’s research history and includes contemporary interpretations of the collections acquired at the time.

Exhibition: Country bin pull’em at the Weltkulturen Museum, Frankfurt am Main, Germany. From 1 November 2024-31 August 2025.

Howard Carter’s excavation of the tomb of Tutankhamun in 1922 was one of the most significant archaeological discoveries of the 20th century. The name of Egypt’s ‘boy king’ is now synonymous with the glories of this ancient civilisation, and the spectacular contents of his tomb continue to capture the public’s imagination. This book tells the story of the search for Tutankhamun’s tomb and its discovery using Howard Carter’s original excavation records that were deposited in the archives of the Griffith Institute at the University of Oxford. The meticulous recording process and conservation work on the thousands of objects took Carter and his team an astonishing 10 years and for its time the entire enterprise was a model of archaeological investigation.

Against this backdrop of painstaking scholarship, the book also explores the phenomenon of ‘Tut-mania’, when the world was gripped by all things Tutankhamun, from jewellery and clothing to dance music and curses. In the final section, the authors re-evaluate what the tomb’s contents can tell us about the king and his time, and explore various projects that have in recent years sought to ensure the preservation of Tutankhamun’s tomb and its contents for future generations. For all of these projects, the Howard Carter archive in the Griffith Institute remains an invaluable resource.

Nicole Callebaut (1935) is an internationally renowned Belgian visual artist who has tirelessly explored for 50 years the relationship between line and surface, between light and colour in a desire for both pictorial and intellectual research. After studying decorative arts at the Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent, she became a journalist for Belgian radio and television, co‐wrote the book on Rites and Mysteries in the Near East published by Robert Laffont, co‐directed films for ethnographic character before settling for several years in New York where she reconnected with painting, then founded an art school in Loulé in Portugal and continued tirelessly to make her paper in the tank, to paint and to exhibit on both sides of the Atlantic, testifying to an apparently inexhaustible vitality. Her works are among others in the collections of the Center Pompidou (Paris), the National Museum for Women in the Arts (Washington DC), the Museum of Sharjah (USA), the French Community of Belgium, the Museum of Mons, the Museum of Ixelles (Brussels), the Centro Cultural Loulè and the Centro Cultural Faro (Portugal).

Text in English and French.

The collection of drawings in the Ashmolean is one of the greatest treasures of the University of Oxford. It began spectacularly in 1843 when a group of drawings by Raphael and Michelangelo that had previously belonged to the portrait painter, Sir Thomas Lawrence, was bought by subscription. Lawrence’s collection was one of the greatest collections of Old Master drawings ever assembled and its dispersal was much regretted. The Raphaels and Michelangelos, however, were the jewels in its crown. Following their arrival in Oxford, their fame attracted a number of gifts and bequests of drawings and watercolours by Dürer, Claude Lorraine, Brueghel, J. M. W Turner, Henry Moore and many others.

This is a story not only of Old Masters but of benefactors – Francis Douce, Chambers Hall, John Ruskin and their successors – whose different tastes account for the variety of the drawings in the modern Print Room. It is a story also of the curators who bought them. In particular, it is the story of Sir Karl Parker who arrived at the museum in 1934 and left a collection when he retired in 1962 that comprehensively covered the history of the art of drawing in Europe from its origins to the present day. The exhibition, Master Drawings: Michelangelo to Moore, celebrates this history. It includes many of the finest drawings in Oxford, representing the work of many different artists: Raphael and Michelangelo; Dürer and the artists of the Northern Renaissance; Guercino and Rubens; Boucher and Tiepolo; German Romantics; J. M. W. Turner; Degas and Pissarro; the artists of the Ballets Russes; British twentieth-century artists from Gwen John to Hockney; and much else.

In the wake of its 30th anniversary, the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art of Saint‐Etienne Métropole wishes to publish a large‐scale retrospective catalogue, intended to offer a fresh look at its collection. This substantial work is in line with the two previous catalogues, published on the occasion of the 10th and 20th anniversaries of MAMC +. Aimed at a large audience, it aims to become the institution’s new reference work. It will also be sent to the museum’s many partners and collaborators (artists, curators, curators, art critics and historians, journalists, institutional and political leaders). The MAMC + wishes to approach the collection through its strong axes, constituting markers of the museum’s identity, such as American art or post‐war German art. But it also intends to make visible groups that are less well known: the Symbolist collection, the collection of primitive art by Victor Brauner, the photographic collection of Raul Hausmann or the collection of contemporary drawings, will thus be the subject of substantial developments. The book will also be punctuated by short focuses intended to deepen certain aspects of the collection.

Text in English and French.

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

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

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

In her practice, Rajkamal Kahlon recuperates drawing and painting as sights of aesthetic and political resistance. Submitting the lingering spectre of colonialism in historical and contemporary archives to a transformative process of deconstruction and intervention, the artist proposes painting as a strategy of radical care. Her sensual, humorous, formally rigorous artworks address the reclamation of humanity for racialised, gendered and indigenous communities that have been distorted, erased or maligned, thus allowing for their rehabilitation.

This catalogue documents a selection of works from over 20 years of Kahlon’s practice. In addition to comprehensive visual material, the publication features three new essays as well as an extensive interview with the artist. 

How many cubic metres does the little Michelin man actually take up? What insurance value does the potato peeler Rex have and how fragile is Sophie Taeuber-Arp’s Dr. Komplex? The designer pack of cards The Happy Collector shows 52 objects from the design and decorative arts collection at the Museum of Design Zurich. Playfully – as a classical card game or top trumps – it presents not only the favourite objects and collection highlights of the museum, but also conveys important aspects of the collection procedure: from purchase, storage and handling to insurance and documentation. The Museum of Design Zurich is the leading museum for design and visual communication in Switzerland. The collection of international importance comprises around 500,000 objects from the areas of decorative arts, textiles, graphics, typography, as well as poster, furniture and product design. Sabine Flaschberger and Renate Menzi are its curators.

Food is more than just nutrition – it is culture, identity and history. The new Nordic cuisine movement has challenged our ideas about Nordic food culture and forged a new understanding of what it means to eat in harmony with nature. With its ideals of sustainability, seasonal ingredients and modern culinary innovation, the movement has had a deep impact on both the restaurant sector and the world of everyday food. This book has been compiled on the occasion of the exhibition New Nordic. Cuisine, Aesthetics and Place at The National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design, which explores the interaction between the evolution of new Nordic cuisine and trends in other forms of contemporary culture. Architecture, contemporary art, design and studio crafts are woven together to provide a broader understanding of the movement’s aesthetic characteristics. How did materials, people and landscape interact to produce a distinctly Nordic culinary identity?

Text in English and Norwegian.

This book accompanies a major exhibition in the Ashmolean Museum on the early work of internationally acclaimed German artist Anselm Kiefer. It focuses on his paintings, drawings, photographs and artist books created between 1969 and 1982, in the private collections of the Hall Art Foundation. Anselm Kiefer: Early Works is the first institutional show and publication in the UK dedicated to Kiefer’s early practice. The book introduces themes, subjects and styles that have become signature to Kiefer’s work, while providing a more intimate and complementary context for his large-scale installations that he is best known for today. The early works are accompanied by three recent paintings from the artist’s own collections and White Cube, chosen by the artist himself.

Art historians, artists, curators and experts of Kiefer’s art from Germany, Austria, Belgium, Britain and the US have contributed 46 original texts on individual works, organised in a chronological structure. An illustrated chronology at the end of the book compiled by Stephanie Biron from the Hall Art Foundation provides an overview of the artist’s early practice and life, to contextualise the works.

The book begins with Kiefer’s iconic Occupations and Heroische Sinnbilder series, created in 1969 and 1970, which Kiefer views as his first serious works. Kiefer was among the first generation of German post-war artists to directly confront the country’s troubled past and identity. Full of complex references to German socio-political history but also to culture, literature and his personal life, Kiefer’s early works carry a unique iconography, linking classic ideas of great art with a distinctive understanding of concrete artistic materiality. The landscapes in his watercolours are historically charged; hand-written words on paintings are closely linked with poetry well known to most German viewers; motifs and symbols point at Nazi ideologies and a collective feeling of guilt.

Marking the remarkable century of Ben Uri Gallery and Museum, from humble beginnings in London’s East End in 1915 to a fully-fledged mainstream art museum, under its banner ‘Art, Identity and Migration’, this publication vividly illustrates rarely-seen masterworks from its collection by some of the greatest artists of the twentieth century, including Soutine, Chagall, Auerbach, Bomberg, Kitaj and Kossoff. Further highlights include the ‘Whitechapel Boys’; Les Peintres Juifs de L’Ecole de Paris, Official War artists from both conflicts; mid-century émigrés influencing the direction of the arts, and contemporary artists making ground-breaking work across new media. This unique collection, primarily of artists born into the Jewish faith, many shaping modern British, European and American art history, represents a distinct visual survey of artistic and social life in Britain and the cultural heritage of British Jewry. A range of texts provides a fascinating context for a collection born ‘Out of Chaos’.

In March of 2008, The National Museum – Architecture opened at Bankplassen 3 in Oslo with an exhibition on Sverre Fehn. He is the architect behind the renovation of Grosch’s bank building from the 1800s and the new museum pavilion. Fehn was also active in selecting which projects should be included in the exhibition and this catalogue. In addition to articles, pictures and drawings, this catalogue also includes quotes and project descriptions by Fehn himself.

Aenne Biermann (1898–1933) was one of the leading figures of photography in the 1920s and 1930s. Today, she is considered one of the most important avant-garde photographers of the 20th century. In just a few years of practice, the self-taught artist became a well-known representative of German photography, participating in almost all the important exhibitions of her time. She captured plants, objects, people, and everyday situations in pictures that have to this day lost none of their allure and poignancy. By means of clear structures, precise compositions of light and contrast, as well as narrow framing, she drew a special kind of poetry out of the motifs of her personal environment and developed her own, distinctly modern pictorial style.

This is the first substantial new book in English on this exceptional artist since the 1930s, published to coincide with a major exhibition at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in fall 2021. The large-format volume features some 100 of Aenne Biermann’s photographs in colour and duotone reproduction, several of them published here for the first time ever. This impressive selection is complemented by essays on Biremann’s photography in art-historical context and on selected aspects of her oeuvre.

Text in English and Hebrew.

An exhibition featuring the work of Aenne Biermann is taking place at the Tel Aviv Museum of Art from 5 August 2021.

This catalogue documents an exhibition at the Baur Foundation that brings together work by the French painter Pierre Soulages (b.1919) and the Japanese master bamboo artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV (b. 1973). Soulages, still working at 102 years old, has painted almost exclusively in black since 1979 and is known as the “master of luminous blacks”. Tanabe Chikuunsai IV is a renowned bamboo artist, known for his twisting organic sculptures and room-sized installations made from tiger or black bamboo. The aim of this exhibition is to explore how their work resonates, despite different approaches, in the dark and light effects of their materials.

Text in French and English. 

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Baur Foundation in Switzerland, a museum of Far Eastern Art, from November 2021–March 2022.

“With his technique, Casper refers to the theme ‘Vanitas’ that was often used in 17th-century painting: symbols that represent the transience of earthly existence. This places Casper in a long line of painters who have passed on inspiration from one generation to the next.” —Meta Knol, director Museum De Lakenhal

Beauty is central to the artworks of Dutch visual artist Casper Faassen. He has developed a unique visual language through the combination of photography, paint, and the application of craquelure to his canvases. He builds them up from multiple transparent layers, creating a distance between subject and viewer, highlighting the contrast between beauty and apparent decay. This first overview of his photographic work includes his Asia series, dancers from the Dutch National Ballet series, cityscapes, and still lifes in the style of Morandi.

On 5 February 1916, Hugo Ball and Emmy Hennings, together with Marcel Janco, Tristan Tzara, and Jean Arp, inaugurated the Cabaret Voltaire in Zürich. The evening marked the birth of Dada as an artistic movement, and Cabaret Voltaire with its legendary performances became a place of historic significance. It was soon to be followed by the short-lived, while no less significant, Gallery Dada in Zürich, where the Dadaists staged four exhibitions over the course of half a year. Dada’s further evolution was significantly shaped by these two spaces, each with its own particular atmosphere, constituting the differing poles of the Dada movement. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at Arp Museum Bahnhof Rolandseck in Spring 2016 to celebrate the Dada centenary, this new book for the first time tells the full story of Dada’s genesis. It sheds light on the early years of 1916 17 in Zürich in historical context and, from today’s point of view, and also explores the intellectual and social background that informed Dada, considering aspects such as the Great War, psychoanalysis, or the art scene of the time. Genesis Dada illustrates how Dada turned into a worldwide phenomenon with which artists and intellectuals such as Joan Miró, Marcel Duchamp, Jean Cocteau, or Man Ray were associated, and which has lost nothing of its momentum and topicality over time. Also available: Dadglobe ISBN 9783858817754

King Stag is a play originally written in 1762 by Italian playwright and champion of Commedia dell’arte Carlo Gozzi (1720–1806). It is about love and conspiracy at the court of King Deramo. In search of a bride, Deramo falls victim to the intrigues of his adversary Tartaglia and is temporarily transformed into a stag.

In 1918, on the occasion of a major art exhibition staged in Zurich by the modernist association Swiss Werkbund, Swiss dramatist René Morax (1873–1963) and director Werner Wolff (1886–1972) produced a modern adaption of Gozzi’s fairy-tale play that turned it into an amusing parody of Sigmund Freud’s and Carl Gustav Jung’s psychoanalysis, which had caused much controversy in Zurich at the time. The production was conceived as a puppetry, for which avant-garde artist Sophie Taeuber-Arp (1889–1943) designed the stage sets and created an ensemble of 17 radically abstracted marionettes that broke with every tradition of the genre.

This book offers the first English translation of Morax and Wolff’s adaption of King Stag. The text is supplemented with photographs of a restaging of the puppetry, produced especially for this volume, featuring Taeuber-Arp’s striking marionettes. Essays by distinguished scholars explore the genesis of the original 1918 production and place it in historical context, shed new light on the play and its model, the Commedia dell’arte, and highlight its significance for Switzerland’s avant-garde.

Chemical Alterations presents a photographic series by Doug Fogelson (b. 1970) that reflects the range of impacts caused by climate change around the planet. Using a process that combines traditional landscape photography with a chemical bath of toxic cleaning products to alter the original analogue film, Fogelson illustrates what are often invisible changes to the environment. Such changes culminate as disastrous events like fire, flood, drought, increasingly powerful storms, and overall global warming. Images of natural spaces that include mountains, deserts, volcanoes, jungles, oceans, rivers, and forests become represented in a state of flux. Through the processing of the film, traces such as bubbles, crystals, fingerprints, and dust are integrated into the images, probing the borderline of abstraction.

The Chemical Alterations series has been in-progress over a decade and exhibited through various iterations internationally at both galleries and museums including: The Royal Geographic Society, United Kingdom, Museum Belvedere, Netherlands, The Museum of Contemporary Photography, Chicago, Alpenium Produzentengalerie, Luzern, SFO Museum, San Francisco, The University of Michigan Museum of Art, Ann Arbor, Sasha Wolf Projects, NYC, Klompching Gallery, NYC, The Arts Club of Chicago and others. It has been covered by The Brooklyn Rain, Humble Arts Foundation, Ain’t Bad, The OD Review, Great Lakes Writers Corps, and others.

In 2013, five years after the world has been convulsed by a global banking and financial crisis, Isaac Julien (b. 1960) premiered his film PLAYTIME to address an important question: Can capital be rendered visible? By following the stories of six protagonists — interconnecting figures in the world of art and finance — Isaac Julien subsequently found narrative images for the process of capital interlocking at a global level, intertwining a macroscopic and a microscopic perspective dialectically, as it were.

The Palais Populaire and the Wemhöner Collection have joined forces to shed new light on PLAYTIME from today’s perspective and to testify to the work’s topicality, as capital as a medium plays into almost all political, social, and societal issues and influences the lives of nearly every human being on this planet.

Texts by Zeigam Azizov, Philipp Bollmann, Anna Herrhausen, Isaac Julien. Design by Pit Stenckhoff, Anna Bühler, Flo Paizs, Neue Gestaltung, Berlin.

Text in English and German.

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.