“Bookended by a highly personal dialog between the two, we are treated with insights into collaboration, process, the rise of technology, and the joys of teaching.” — Fast Company
This autobiographical monograph presents a retrospective of the 40-year innovative graphic design practice of husband-and-wife team, Nancy Skolos and Thomas Wedell. The two have seamlessly merged the boundaries between graphic design, photography and typography, fusing two-and three-dimensional space through overlapping type and image. Long-time influential designers and educators, and 2017 AIGA medalists, Skolos-Wedell’s work has been widely exhibited and published in the US and internationally. The book has been written as a series of interviews between Skolos and Wedell, and beautifully designed by the artists themselves. The result is a work of total design that showcases their unique way of thinking and working.

Prototypes, iterations, and studio set-ups shed light on the process behind the finished work which unfolds in chronological order, subdivided in decades: ’80s, ’90s, ’00s, ’10s, ’20s, with each section beginning with a timeline of notable events. While a time-based taxonomy may seem unimaginative, it was critical for presenting the evolving working methods. To provide the most direct view of the studio’s collaborative design process, much of the text unfolds as a series of interviews with each other. 

This multifaceted reader explores the cultural heritage of the pre-colonial Kingdom of Benin, in the territory of what today is Nigeria. Objects from Benin are held also in Swiss museums and, as in other countries of the Global North, have become the subject of controversial debate. The richly illustrated volume offers new findings on the historical and current significance of artefacts. Moreover, it highlights the current dialogue with partners from Nigeria and the diaspora, reflecting on the methods of cooperative research and the future of the objects currently kept in Swiss collections. Biographies of individual items and examples of mediation and exhibition practice provide an insight into interwoven histories, the international art trade, and post-colonial reconciliation work between Africa and Europe.

Mobilizing: Benin Heritage in Swiss Museums is published as part of the Benin Initiative Switzerland (2021–24), a project by eight Swiss museums focusing on provenance research on artefacts from colonial contexts. Texts and images invite reflection on art works and values, relationships, and views of history. The close collaboration with representatives from Nigeria and the diaspora enables new forms of knowledge production. This not only sets cultural heritage in motion, but also the museum as an institution itself.

Mihai Olos (1940-2015) was one of the most prominent Romanian artists of the 1970s. Being interested in various media – painting, sculpture, happenings, Land Art, and even literature – he developed a coherent conceptual system of modular morphologic structures (knots), ultimately leading him to his utopian project, the “universal city” of Olospolis.

This monograph is published as a follow-up to the exhibition The Ephemerist. A Mihai Olos Retrospective, organised by the National Museum of Contemporary Art – MNAC Bucharest in 2016. The publication compiles a representative selection of artworks, photographs from the artist’s archive, which are being published for the first time, and essays on the oeuvre and life of Mihai Olos.

The term “migration of form” describes a curatorial method that takes aim at the contradictions of the Western museum traditions and the ways exhibitions we have been conceived and designed. The method addresses transcultural entanglements in the past and present from which objects emerge, rather than working with distinctions such as art and non-art or cultural identities and concepts such as “Africa” or “Renaissance.” It proposes a new type of museum for global audiences that serves as a platform for discourses on urgent sociopolitical topics and as a space of experimentation with new ideas and forms of display.

This book explains and applies the “migration of form” by offering insights into the curatorial method Roger M. Buergel has experimented with at Zurich’s Johann Jacobs Museum and other venues in Europe and Asia. Descriptions of single exhibitions on global trade, raw materials, or artists such as Maya Deren and Allan Sekula are complemented by concise texts which illuminate the theoretical foundations of the curatorial process. Richly illustrated, the volume invites a timely and broadened view of art and cultural history.

“In conclusion, I have nothing but praise for this book. The production values are top-notch and I am so pleased that Milner both took his time to write this book, and was able to see it through to completion together with Matternes.” — The Inquisitive Biologist
The first career-spanning volume on Jay Matternes (b. 1933), whose scientific rigor and artistic skill set a new standard in natural history illustration.

Millions have grown up inspired by Jay Matternes’ murals of extinct mammals at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of Natural History and the American Museum of Natural History. Others have savoured his depictions of human origins in such prestigious publications as Science, National Geographic, Scientific American, and Natural History. Matternes’ art has also graced popular books by such trailblazing wildlife scientists as Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Louis Leakey.

Now, for the first time, the entire scope of Matternes’ achievement is revealed in this full-colour retrospective, prepared with the artist’s full cooperation and featuring many works never before published. Here are his depictions of living species, whose anatomical accuracy and vivid detail owe much to Matternes’ lifelong devotion to painting from nature: the wildlife of Africa, the birds of America, chimpanzees and gorillas, and more. Here, too, is his paleoart, meticulously reconstructed from the fossil evidence and ranging from dinosaurs, through the rise of mammals, to our hominid ancestors — including Matternes’ groundbreaking reconstruction of the 4.4-million-year-old hominin Ardipithecus, on which he laboured in secrecy for more than a decade. The highly readable text includes, among other special features, selections from the artist’s 20-year correspondence with the late Dian Fossey.

Jay Matternes: Paleoartist and Wildlife Painter will be an essential volume not only for aspiring illustrators and paleoartists, but for anyone with an interest in the natural world and how we visualise it.

British Conceptual artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) is known for his distinctive, often deceptively simple, collages. He has been making art since the 1970s, but achieved prominence relatively recently.

In 2011, he had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and, in 2012, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, even though he does not take photographs.

Stezaker says collage is about ‘stuff that has lost its immediate relationship with the world’ and involves ‘a yearning for a lost world’. A collector, he works from an archive of out-of-date images — mostly old film stills, vintage actor head shots, and antique postcards. These images come in standard sizes and are highly conventionalised — all variations on themes.

Art critic David Campany says, Stezaker ‘is drawn to that very slim space between convention and idiosyncrasy.’

In addition to collages, Lost World includes poignant found-object-sculptures: a selection of antique mannequin hands, offering a repertoire of gestures. There’s also a film, Crowd, presenting hundreds of film stills of crowd scenes, each for one frame only, in a bewildering blur.

“…his stories are always interesting, lively and well written, giving an insight to the art world as he experienced it.” — Literary Review

“If you read one book on art this year, it must be this brilliant critique of art today seen through the lens of retired museum curator Julian Spalding.” — International Property & Travel

Julian Spalding’s career as a curator and creator of museums was amongst the most controversial and effective of his time. In this collection of essays and memoirs he revisits some of the important events and battles of the last 40 years, when he spearheaded resistance to the cult of conceptual art being promoted from the centre. Witty, illuminating, coruscating and blazingly intelligent, this book is a vital guide to the ways in which we consume art today, for good or ill. 

Show Time initially awakens thoughts of glittering entertainment, shiny surfaces, and fancy stunts — a world that does not really belong in a museum. But here the title is associated with something more literal: time being shown to us.

In Sabine Groß’s (*1961) exhibition at the Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte Saarbrücken, archaeological finds meet contemporary art for the first time. As a professor of sculpture, Groß has specialised for many years in this type of confrontation, practising a kind of “archaeology of the future” in which she presents recent significant works of art as potential archaeological objects.

Published to accompany an exhibition Sabine Groß. Show Time – Eine Archäologie der Zukunft, which runs from 11 December 2020-7 November 2021 at Museum für Vor- und Frühgeschichte, Saarbrücken, Germany.

Text in English and German.

During the German occupation, a Jewish Dutch couple had to sell a painting to go into hiding. Their daughters were placed in a children’s home, but were rounded up in early 1944 and deported to Auschwitz, where they died. The parents survived the war and did not discover their children’s fate until 1946. The search for the painting also remained fruitless for a long time, until Origins Unknown Agency discovered that it had ended up in a German museum. The museum had previously tried unsuccessfully to trace its provenance. Thanks to the Origins Unknown Agency, the heirs of the original owner were found. The German museum and the heirs agreed that the painting, an 1882 work by Camille Pissarro, would remain at the museum. As part of the compensation, the painting will be kept on display from November 2024 to February 2025 at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

In a spectacular move, the Albertina presents Sean Scully from a hitherto unfamiliar side with a series of large figurative paintings of his son Oisín playing on the beach of Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas. Scully’s inimitable pictures used to rely solely on paint – applied with a strong, but above all abstract gesture – the new series however appears like a surprising point of reversal. Yet, the new paintings are a return to his earliest beginnings, as, in the 1950s, Scully embarked along the Fauves and German Expressionism from realism into the realm of pure colour. Even today, abstraction, as he sees it, is still infused with memories of figurative sources. This richly illustrated catalogue brings together all Oisín-Paintings, enriched by graphic works from Albertina’s collection, extensive material from Scully’s private archive, as well as in-depth essays by Werner Spies and Elisabeth Dutz elaborating on this newly obtained painterly freedom.

The Flemish Primitive artist Hans Memling (c. 1435–1494), who played a crucial role in early Netherlandish painting, is inextricably associated with Bruges. Among his most impressive creations are the St John Altarpiece and the St Ursula Shrine, which he created for St John’s Hospital in the city. Seven more of this 15th-century master’s finest works can also be seen in Bruges, at what is now the St John’s Hospital Museum and at the Groeninge Museum.

This book describes Memling’s breathtaking paintings in close detail, while offering readers the opportunity to (re)discover his oeuvre as a whole.

Text in English and Dutch.

Linda MacNeil: Jewels of Glass is the first in-depth monograph to explore the development of leading American jeweller Linda MacNeil’s jewellery and her contribution to late twentieth- and twenty-first century jewellery. MacNeil has inserted her voice into contemporary American jewellery as an innovator transforming glass into proxies for precious gemstones. She and her work have straddled the fields of Studio Glass and Studio Jewellery. A pioneer over her forty-and-counting-year career, she has united glass with metal and, recently, with precious gems. Exploring materiality and methodology, she uses historical precedent as a jumping off point to make stunning, wearable jewellery. This scholarly study presents approximately fifty of MacNeil’s most significant pieces. Davira S. Taragin’s essay interweaves MacNeil’s biography with discussions of the development of her aesthetic. Noted jewellery historian Ursula Ilse-Neuman contextualises MacNeil’s achievement within the art jewellery movement in general and the use of glass in jewellery over the centuries.

Artist Daphne Wright is fascinated with the collections of the Ashmolean Museum and the history of seeing they present. Her latest project grows out of a lifetime’s engagement with this theme. Much of Wright’s existing body of work is steeped in a deep understanding of the iconography and history of Western art, as represented in the Ashmolean’s extensive collection. This book establishes connections to the Ashmolean’s rich collection of 17th century Dutch Still Life paintings. These genre paintings portray a range of subjects from arrangements of flowers to fruit, fish and game. Sometimes the paintings include a symbolic reference to the transience of life, in the form of fruit that has begun to rot or flowers that are losing petals. In Fridge Still Life, the exposed body of a fridge, containing upon its shelves a raw chicken and bundle of asparagus, is topped with a vase of wilting tulips. This is a contemporary re-telling of a still life painting, with its various familiar elements, such as a brace of hanging pheasants, a bowl of fruit and a vase of blooms, with can connote status or vanitas. Wright has explored the transitory nature of life throughout her practice. In previous work, Wright has used plants and animals, with their shorter life spans, to stand in for the human. Wright’s work also resonates strongly with the Ashmolean’s extensive and celebrated cast collection. Prominent amongst the plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures are the gods and heroes of Homeric legend. These idealised images of men still form the basis of our ideas of masculinity today. With Sons on Couch Wright is seeking to capture the elusive moment of transition into manhood. The athletic figures in the cast court may have been updated to social media influencers, but the pressure young men face today to achieve a perceived ideal body type remain the same.

Manhattan Project is a collection of photographs that capture the evolving landscape of Manhattan’s West Side over the past decade. Exploiting the revelatory power of photography, these images explore a city’s architectural transformation.

While Jan Staller’s earlier work focused on industrial decay, these new photographs explore the rise of high-rise construction. By isolating and zooming in on building materials, Staller elevates the ordinary to the extraordinary. The resulting images, reminiscent of drawings or abstract paintings, reveal the hidden beauty and formal qualities of these often-overlooked elements.

This project reimagines the city not as a monolithic entity, but as a composition of intricate details. It celebrates the interplay of light, form and texture, inviting viewers to rethink the familiar and discover the artistic potential of the urban environment.

Text in English and French.

The third brilliant volume in the Humanitas series captures the vibrant lives of the Burmese people.
Following the success of Humanitas and Humanitas II: The People of Gujarat, photographer Fredric Roberts now turns his lens to the captivating and controversial country of Burma. The result of eight years of travel throughout the region, the approximately 120 photographs in Humanitas III focus on the spiritually rich lives of the Burmese people. Featuring temples, portraits, scenes of everyday life, and incredible landscape, Humanitas III offers a rare view of a country that has been closed to —or avoided by— many photographers due to its social isolation and reputation for political repression.
Cicero coined the term humanitas (literally, “human nature”) to describe the development of human virtue in all its forms, denoting fortitude, judgment, prudence, eloquence, and even love of honour—which contrasts with our contemporary connotation of humanity (understanding, benevolence, compassion, mercy). The Latin term is certainly a fitting book title as we are struck with respect and awe for Roberts’s subjects’ individual fortitude and eloquence rather than pity for their plight: each photograph tells us a compelling story.
Curated by Britt Salvesen, the department head and curator of the photography department at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, many of the images present subjects looking directly at the photographer and at the reader, effortlessly prompting a cross-cultural dialogue. Essays by Teri Edelstein and Emma Larkin, an expert journalist/author covering Burma, provide context for Roberts’s photographs by describing the lives of the Burmese peoples.

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.

The Ashmolean Museum is fortunate in having the most comprehensive British collection of the art of the Indian subcontinent outside London. Especially strong in sculpture, this rich representation of Indian art from prehistory to the twentieth century has come about through the generosity of our benefactors over more than three centuries. The Museum’s first major Indian sculpture acquisition, a stone Pala-style Vishnu image of the eleventh century, was given in 1686 by Sir William Hedges, a governor of the East India Company in Bengal. From the late nineteenth century, a substantial core of the present collection was assembled at the University’s former Indian Institute Museum (1897-1962), precursor of the Department of Eastern Art, which opened within the Ashmolean in 1963. Since that date many more Indian objects of all periods have been acquired by gift, bequest or purchase.

Contents: Introduction; Prehistoric South Asia; The Northwest; North & Central India; Eastern India and Deccan; Miscellanea; Bibliography.

Buddhist Art of Gandhara is a scholarly catalogue of the Ashmolean Museum’s important but still largely unpublished holdings of the Buddhist sculpture and related art of the historic Gandhara region (modern North West Pakistan / East Afghanistan) in the early centuries AD (c. 0-600 AD). This region was a major centre of Buddhist culture and facilitated the transmission of Buddhism and its art from India via the Silk Road to Central Asia, China and the Far East. The book contains introductory essays, with additional illustrations, suitable for the general reader as well as the specialist. Contents: General introduction; 1. Stupas and reliquaries; 2a. Life panels; 2b. Panels and fragments; 3a. Buddhas; 3b Bodhisattvas; 4. Stuccos; 5. Bronzes; 6. Deities; 7. Household objects; Bibliography, Index.

Illustrated from the Ashmolean’s collection of contemporary sculpture, this book provides a context in terms of the Ashmolean’s world-famous collections of antique and renaissance sculpture and the development of twentieth-century sculpture as a whole. It makes accessible for the first time many pieces by, among others, Epstein, Frink, Maillol, Moore, Underwood and Zadkrine. It includes mainly small bronzes, but some larger works are featured.

The Jewish Journey tells the history of the Jewish people from antiquity to modern times through 22 objects from the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, brought together here for the first time. Many of the objects are little-known treasures and all 22 have remarkable stories. Spanning 4000 years of history and covering 14 different countries, the objects trace the evolution of Jewish life and culture from its earliest beginnings in Ancient Mesopotamia through time and space to the modern day.

Ancient Mesopotamia and Iran are usually treated separately or as part of a much broader ‘Ancient Near East’. However, the developments that lie at the root of our own world – farming, cities, writing, organised religion, warfare – were forged in the tensions and relations between the inhabitants of lowland Mesopotamia (ancient Iraq) and the highlands of Iran. Mountains and Lowlands explores this relationship providing a detailed but accessible account covering the period 6000 BC-AD 650, from the development of the first agricultural communities to the coming of Islam. The story is told through the superlative Ancient Near Eastern collections in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, supplemented by images of photographs of archaeological sites and of iconic pieces in other collections including the Louvre, Paris. The discussion is further supported by six maps commissioned especially for this publication. Contents: 1. Introduction 2. From Village to City: 6000-3000 BC 3. From City to Kingdom: 3000-1500 BC 4. From Kingdom to Empire: 1500-500 BC 5. From India to Egypt: 500 BC-AD 650

Young Rembrandt concentrates on the first ten years of the career of Rembrandt van Rijn (1606-1669). Born in Leiden, he trained there with Isaac van Swanenburg and in Amsterdam with Pieter Lastman. After a short stay in Amsterdam he returned to Leiden and set up a studio where he began his extraordinary career, painting scenes from the Bible and classical mythology and history, as well as a handful of genre scenes and portraits. His progress is remarkable: from the earliest hesitant paintings of the Five Senses in about 1624 to the wonderfully assured Jeremiah of 1630 it is almost possible to trace his development and his increasing fluency and self-confidence from month to month and certainly from year to year. Published to accompany exhibitions at the Lakenhal, Leiden from November 2019 to February 2020, then at the Ashmolean Museum from February to June 2020.

This book looks at bronze through the remarkable collections of European bronze sculptures in the Ashmolean Museum of the University of Oxford. Largely thanks to the generosity of Charles Drury Edward Fortnum (1820–1899), the Ashmolean houses one of the world’s great collections of Renaissance and Baroque small bronzes.

The book provides a survey of the collection and an overview of the development of small bronze sculpture during a period of six centuries running from c.1200 to around 1800, although most of the works illustrated here were made within the shorter time frame of c.1450–1650. Any such survey is inevitably shaped by the strengths of the collection, which is conditioned by Fortnum’s taste, notwithstanding later acquisitions that have broadened its scope. He especially loved earlier Italian bronzes and so-called utensils — objects such as inkstands, candlesticks, salt-cellars, mirrors and seals — that are functional as well as beautiful. Fortnum was less interested in sculpture from the later 1500s onwards although, as this selection shows, he acquired some very interesting bronzes from the 17th and 18th centuries that deserve to be better known.