For more than four decades, jewellery artist and educator Laurie Hall has been making stories the subject of her work. Her playful, often whimsical jewellery made with found objects is about the places she lives, the landscapes that fill her imagination, her family history, and her ideas of what it is to be an American. As a jeweller, Hall never plays it safe, preferring to fly by the seat of her pants and push her skills and technical knowledge. Her work is part of numerous private and public collections including The Museum of Art and Design in NYC, The Tacoma Art Museum, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. She is a product of the jewellery histories that make the Pacific Northwest unique within the larger story of American contemporary jewellery. Featuring 58 images of Hall’s jewellery spanning the period from 1974 to 2019, this book explores why she is an important maker whose practice deserves to be more widely known.
The career of architect Sergei Tchoban, born 1962 and educated in St. Petersburg, follows multiple yet closely linked trajectories in his native Russia and in Germany. He is a founding partner with the Moscow-based firm SPEECH as well as with Tchoban Voss Architekten, with offices in Hamburg, Berlin and Dresden. His designs reflect a deep interest in local and historical contexts of a project rather than an aim to create singular iconic structures. His design process is deeply rooted in sketching and drawing by hand. In 2009 he established the Tchoban Foundation and in 2013 opened the Museum for Architectural Drawing in Berlin as a home to his vast collection comprising ancient and modern masterpieces from around the world.
In four conversations with Kristin Feireiss, Tchoban offers very personal insights into his design process, his understanding of architecture, and his engagement as a collector and museum founder. An essay by the British writer and broadcaster Deyan Sudjic as well as some 130 illustrations round out this beautiful volume.
The bilingual book comes in two volumes – one in English with 295 images and the other in Chinese. A well-researched and lavishly illustrated book, that offers a wealth of new facts, images and insights into the subject in a broad context.
This book has detail research into saddle rugs from China and related areas like Inner-Mongolia, Xinjiang and Tibet. The research includes images of saddle rugs published in books, magazines and on the internet. The literature research the author conducted has not been exhaustive. The author has used major manuals, museum-collection and exhibition catalogues, auction catalogues, magazines and other publications.
Simply a must for anyone who loves textiles, horses or the history of China’s military, sports or culture.
Text in English and Chinese.
Diamonds tell stories that are captivating and timeless. On the one hand, they are just stones, pieces of pure carbon with optical properties that make them glitter and sparkle like stars. On the other, they are mystical entities hypnotically drawing the viewer into a time machine as it were, wherein a cinematic montage of their journey unfolds. Diamonds Across Time presents a sweeping overview of diamonds across time and space, featuring ten essays by world-renowned scholars in love the stone. Here, these authors present new discoveries; explore extraordinary collections; investigate histories, science, and trade; the nature of diamonds; legendary gems, jewellery collections, and great designers. Above all, they tell the human stories that underpin the adoration of diamonds.
Diamonds Across Time is a richly illustrated publication with high-quality images of gems and jewels, archival documents, rare drawings, and fabulous photographs. The volume places diamonds in the context of the time in which they were discovered, and on the political, social, and cultural stage on which their histories were etched. In a rapidly changing world, diamonds are eternal. They were created by nature and grew in the womb of the earth. They tell stories, and they record history. With this book, diamonds will finally have their own storytellers.
The Romanov Diamonds: History of Splendour – Stefano Papi; The Londonderry Jewels, 1819-1959 – Diana Scarisbrick; Dress to Impress in Southeast Asia – René Brus; Powerful Women, Important Diamonds – Ruth Peltason; One in Ten Thousand: The Unique World of Coloured Diamonds – John M. King.
Palazzo Vecchio portrays the architecture of the historic Florentine palace immortalised by the internationally-renowned photographer Massimo Listri. The first complete and organic photographic documentation of the building, updated in the wake of recent restoration and re-functionalization, the sequence of images runs page after page through the exterior and the interior of the palace. The alternation of rooms, courtyards and museum spaces, enriched by countless pictorial and sculptural elements, gives life, in Listri’s view, to a faithfully objective overview of the building that, since the end of the 13th century, has been the heart of Florence’s civic and political life, still today a place for meetings, debate and dialogue. The volume, edited by Sergio Risaliti, offers brief essays by experts on the subject such as Serena Pini and Carlo Francini, with a contribution by Mayor Dario Nardella.
Contrary to the monochrome vision of Queen Victoria’s mourning dresses and the coal-polluted streets of Charles Dickens’ London, Victorian Britain was, in fact, a period of new and vivid colours. The Industrial Revolution had transformed the Victorians’ perception of colour and, over the course of the second half of the 19th century, it became the key signifier of modern life. Colour Revolution: Victorian Art, Fashion & Design charts the Victorians’ new attitudes to colour through a multi-disciplinary exploration of culture, technology, art and literature. The catalogue explores key ‘chromatic’ moments that inspired Victorian artists and writers to think anew about the materiality of colour. Rebelling against the bleakness of the industrial present, these figures learned from the sacred colours of the past, the sumptuous colours of the Middle East and Japan and looked forward towards the decadent colours that defined the end of the century.
“Legendary Bruce Springsteen photographer’s iconic travel images showcased in lavish new coffee-table book, from storms in South Dakota to penguins in Antarctica.” — The Daily Mail
“… a dazzling collection that bursts with vibrant colours and energy. This book is more than just a visual feast; it’s a journey into the stories behind each photograph, offering readers a behind-the-scenes look.” — Digital Photographer Magazine
“This richly designed monograph is both a masterclass in color photography and a deeply personal reflection on a life spent chasing light.” — About Photography
Multi-award-winning photographer Eric Meola is a master of using colour and light in photography, creating vivid, evocative, and graphic images. From his famous “Coca Kid” and Bruce Springsteen’s “Born to Run” album cover to his Lifetime Achievement Award in 2023, Meola has had an extraordinary five-decade career.
Bending Light: The Moods of Color is a retrospective bursting with colour. It features 100 iconic photographs from Meola’s editorial, advertising, and personal work, as well as his recent experiments with colour abstracts. Meola also takes readers behind the lens to reveal the stories and anecdotes behind the creation of each image. Through this intimate and personal account of his creative process and self-expression, the photographer examines his use of colour, its symbolism, and how it affects our moods.
For professional and aspiring photographers, and people who appreciate photography, art, and a colourful perspective of the world, this extraordinary collection of images, captured over more than fifty years, showcases why Meola is considered a true innovator in colour photography.
Artisans of Israel is a very special book on crafts. Author Lynn Holstein is in search of a national identity in the artisanry of the still young country – and she finds it in the unifying pursuit for innovation. Forty artists, including Jews, Muslims and Christians, tell their stories and show in five different trades how emancipation can be promoted through creativity. Working with one’s hands stands unfailingly at the centre of this reflection. From the hybrid of cultural and religious backgrounds emerges a unique compilation that brings together the fields of metalwork and jewellery, ceramics, textiles, paper and wood. This compilation portrays a sensitive and inspiring portrait of Israel and its inhabitants. This book accompanies an exhibition at The Open Museum, Tefen (IL), in January 2018.
Text in English, Hebrew and Arabic.
Depot Boijmans Van Beuningen, located next door to Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam’s Museumpark and designed by MVRDV, is the first art depot in the world to be fully accessible to the public. Visitors can see the result of over 170 years of collecting: more than 151,000 objects of art and design, housed in 14 storage spaces, are arranged by material, size, and sometimes chronology or geography. All the activities involved in the management and conservation of a collection are also on view. This is a fascinating account of a unique new type of museum building and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen collection.
This book covers all the phases in its creation, from the first crazy ideas to the last work of art to be rehoused. It takes you on a journey through the building and provides brief glimpses of the storage compartments on each floor. The essays describe the growing collection, its storage conditions over the last 172 years, and the Depot’s design and construction process. And includes details of the designers and artists involved about their contributions to the building.
The extraordinary life of Barbara Cartlidge (b. 1922 in Berlin) – influential gallerist, curator, jewellery artist and author – together with the history of her legendary Electrum Gallery, which she founded in 1971 with Ralph Turner in London, are documented for the first time in a single publication. Pioneers and colleagues as well as around seventy internationally renowned artists of the gallery all have their say and, in anecdotes and recollections, countless illustrations and hitherto unpublished images, tell of a strong and resolute woman and the significance of her gallery as a promoter and platform for the understanding of contemporary art jewellery. Particular attention is paid to the life of Barbara Cartlidge, who fled from Germany in 1938. For over fifty years she was a driving force in what she described as the ‘the brotherhood of jewellers who make modern and thought-provoking jewellery all over the world’.
This major retrospective catalogue accompanies the first institutional exhibition focusing on the visual works of art by Stanley Donwood and Thom Yorke. The majority of the paintings, drawings and digital works were specifically made for Yorke’s internationally celebrated band Radiohead, formed in Oxford in 1985. The book is beautifully designed in the same size as a record cover and features iconic artworks from the 1980s until today, relating to Radiohead albums, their covers and promotional band images, as well as sketchbooks and rare materials from their archives that have never before been published. It offers fresh views on the art of album covers, exploring the complex relationship between visual art and music.
Radiohead was formed in Abingdon, Oxfordshire, in 1985. The collaboration with the artist Stanley Donwood began in 1994 when the band was developing their second album, The Bends, which was released on 13th March, 1995. 2025 is therefore the 40-year anniversary of the band and the 30-year anniversary of the release of The Bends. The catalogue’s focus is upon the art produced by both Stanley Donwood and the band’s lead vocalist, Thom Yorke presented chronologically. Radiohead’s popularity has never waned and they have a strong core following and new fans (many of who are the children of ‘original’ fans).
The high-quality reproductions are complemented by exclusive interviews with the artists, and essays by Alex Farquharson, Nico Kos Earle, Benjamin Myers, James Putnam and Jennifer Ramkalawon.
A major retrospective is held at the Ashmolean Museum from August 2025 to January 2026.
Abstract and mysterious, the sculptures of Lisa Seebach (b. 1981) are reminiscent of industrial objects like gas cylinders or oil drums, which she transforms into autonomous actors in a poetically enigmatic staging filled with associative meta-narratives. In the labyrinth of postapocalyptic science fiction, dark utopias, and posthuman aesthetics, they point to potential threats in the face of dystopian escalation and explore ways of escaping them.
Earthy Liquids and Heavy Metal [Hypersleep] is Lisa Seebach’s largest solo museum exhibition to date and shows numerous works from the last 10 years alongside works specially conceived for the exhibition space at Lechner Museum in Ingolstadt. The publication of the same name brings together numerous images of the installation and accompanying texts.
Text in English and German.
An elegant photographic book highlights BFF’s new headquarters. Viale Scarampo, in Milan, saw the inauguration in 2025 of the BFF Banking Group’s new headquarters, a building whose transparent airiness and environmental and social sustainability ensure it provides an entirely original contribution to the city’s skyline. Designed by OBR (Open Building Research), the structure places the accent on the brightness of its interior and does not seek to compete in height with the skyscrapers of the nearby City Life district. The book is organised in a series of alternating photographs and text, drawing attention not only to the architectural features and the building’s functional characteristics, but also to the aim of creating a working environment that is intimately linked to its surroundings, in contrast to the traditional view of corporate architecture.
Casa BFF is not only the headquarters of a B2B bank, it is also a building that embraces the neighbourhood and the city as a whole, starting with the museum it houses, which is accessible to all and contains the BFF Collection of post-war Italian art. Here the visitor will find works by Valerio Adami, Franco Angeli, Enrico Baj, Alberto Burri, Lucio Del Pezzo, Lucio Fontana, Gianfranco Pardi, Mario Schifano, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Giò Pomodoro and Emilio Tadini. The Bank inaugurated the museum with an exhibition dedicated to Enrico Baj’s series of 40 etchings inspired by John Milton’s Paradise Lost. The book does full justice to the exhibition spaces, as well as to the works that hang on the building’s walls.
Text in English and Italian.
Gisbert Stach’s (b. 1963) monograph Jewellery and Experiment presents a multifaceted opus from twenty-five years of gold- and silversmithing. In his oeuvre the primarily conceptual artist combines jewellery with video, photography and performance. One focus of his work deals with processes of transformation and experiment – pieces disappear through chemical dissolution, and form is determined by agencies of growth in nature. Stach works with means of alienation and irritation. Ground amber serves as pigment, which he works into jewellery pieces in the form of fish fingers, sliced bread or schnitzel. A further characteristic of his work is the performative act, for example when brooches are pelted with knives.
Gisbert Stach is represented in numerous museums and collections, including Die Neue Sammlung – The Design Museum, Munich (DE); Fondazione Cominelli, Brescia (IT); Museo de Arte Moderno, Tarragona (ES); Museum of Arts & Crafts, Itami (JP); Gallery of Art, Legnica (PL); Museum of Bohemian Paradise, Turnov (CZ); Amber Museum, Gdansk (PL).
Published to accompany exhibitions at Arnoldsche Art Publishers, Stuttgart (DE), 9-11 November 2018, and Bayerischer Kunstgewerbeverein (BKV), Munich (DE) 28 February-24 March 2019.
Text in English and German.
The tale of the shepherd girl Radha and the Hindu god Krishna is probably the most famous love story in India. Written by Jayadeva at the end of the twelfth century, the Gitagovinda narrates the highs and lows of Radha and Krishna’s relationship. As a vivid metaphor for the human yearning for god, the work is today closely associated in India with the religiosity of Krishna. In the eighteenth century, in the former princely residence of Guler, the artist family of Nainsuhk and Manaku created the outstanding picture series of the second Guler Gitagovinda of 1775/80, which recounts the love story with an unparalleled elegance. This book retells the story using selected pieces from this series (printed in original size) and whisks the reader off into the atmospheric world of Indian miniature painting and poetry. This book accompanies an exhibition at Museum Rietberg, Zurich, 24 October 2019 – 16 February 2020.
Text in English and German.
This catalogue assembles sumptuous photographs of the world’s leading collection of Cham sculpture, along with the most recent insights of Vietnamese and international scholars. The Champa culture thrived in magnificent temples, sculpture, dance and music along the central and southern coast of today’s Vietnam from the 5th to the 18th century. A focused exploration here uncovers this brilliant yet almost lost culture to newcomers and experts alike. The Danang Museum has been recently expanded and refurbished to house what is generally considered the world’s greatest collection of Cham Art.
Lotte Reimers’ joining forces with Jakob Wilhelm Hinder and the extensive ceramics exhibition with which he was touring West German cities in 1951 marks the onset of her passion for this craft. Committed to making the public aware of ceramics as art, Hinder and Reimers ended their tour at Deidesheim in 1961. Lotte Reimers’ creative approach to managing the Deidesheim ceramics museum and gallery has received critical and popular acclaim both at home and abroad. Acquired by the state in 1993, the Deidesheim museum collection is now known as the Hinder/Reimers Collection of the State of Rhineland-Palatinate. Lotte Reimers embarked on a career of her own as an art ceramist in 1965. While running the museum and gallery, she has been adding to her impressive uvre for nearly forty years.
The essays in this lavishly illustrated volume offer a multi-faceted portrait of American financier J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) as a collector of art. A riveting exploration of Morgan’s acquisitions from antiquities to medieval manuscripts to Old Master paintings and European decorative arts, Morgan—The Collector introduces the reader to how and why he amassed his vast collection. The lively essays also serve as a tribute to Linda Roth, curator at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, who dedicated much of her forty-year career to researching Morgan and the over 1,500 works from his collection now in the museum. This much-needed publication focuses on Morgan as a collector and is directed at both a scholarly and more general audience that is interested in the history of collecting, America in the Gilded Age, Pierpont Morgan, and European art.
Architecture and automobiles have been intrinsically linked since the dawn of the internal combustion engine – from the assembly plant to the showroom and on to that ubiquitous fixture of the artificial landscape, the service station. The streamlined forms of automobiles have often inspired architects and some have even ventured into designing their own cars. Features Foster and Partners, Bohlin Cywinski Jackson, ONL, Renzo Piano, Populous, Zaha Hadid, UNStudio and Massimiliano Fuksas. Projects presented include the BMW Museum in Munich, the Porsche Museum in Stuttgart, the Audi museum in Ingolstadt by 24-H, Manuel Gautrand’s Citroen museum on the Champs Elyssee in Paris, and the Regio Emilia bridge by Santiago Calatrava in Italy.
The term ‘craftsmanship’ is associated with individuality, uniqueness, decorative potential, artistic quality, attention to material and to process. But what does craftsmanship mean today? This exhibition catalogue of nearly 600 pages explores the meaning of craftsmanship in the context of the outstanding collection of the Museum Angewandte Kunst (Frankfurt, Germany) in a monumental survey of 700 items dating from 1945 to the present. Scale reproductions of plates, furniture, cutlery, jewellery and vases highlight their surprising variety of form. In their essays, the ten authors take diverse approaches to the broad terrain of craftsmanship: from the relationship between East Asia and Western ceramics, via the handicrafts of the Romantic period, to the adventure that is arts and crafts today. The title plays on the perceived parallel between the ability of the cactus to survive and thrive in adverse conditions, and the future of the hand-made object in an industrial world.
Text in German.
The Ashmolean is fortunate in having the finest collection of Indian art in Britain outside London, one which includes many works of great beauty and expressive power. For this we are indebted above all to the generosity, knowledge and taste of our benefactors and donors from the 17th century to the present. This book offers a short account of how the collection developed and a selection of some of its more outstanding or interesting works of art. While it is written mainly for the general reader and museum visitor, it includes many fine objects or pictures, some of them unpublished, that should interest specialist scholars and students.
Since 1987, the Ashmolean has made many significant new acquisitions of Indian art and these are highlighted in this collection. As the book’s title implies, it also ventures beyond the bounds of the Indian subcontinent by including works from Afghanistan and Central Asian Silk Road sites as well as many from Nepal, Tibet and Southeast Asia. From the early centuries AD, Indian trading links with these diverse regions of Asia led to a widespread cultural diffusion and regional adoptions of Buddhism and Hinduism along with their related arts. Local reinterpretations of such Indic subjects, themes and styles then grew into flourishing and enduring artistic traditions which are also part of the story of this book.
The selection of works ends around 1900. By the 16th century and the early modern period in India, growing European interventions and Western artistic influences under Mughal rule saw a significant shift in sensibility and the practice of more secular and naturalistic forms of court art such as portraiture. By the late 19th century, fundamental cultural changes under British rule and the advent of new technologies brought about a gradual decline in many of India’s traditional arts.
Anna Reivilä (b. 1988, Helsinki) is a land artist and photographer living and working in Porvoo, Finland. In her book Nomad she studies the relationship between humanity and nature by referring to the Japanese bondage tradition. She explores the symbolism of bondage, regarding connections among people and the divine. The Japanese word for bondage, kinbaku-bi, literally means the beauty of tight binding. It is a delicate balance between being held together and being on the verge of breaking. In Reivilä’s photographs the ropes outline the shapes of the objects while exploring the boundaries of humanity.
In 2008 and 2013 the GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts in Leipzig presented two representative inventory publications under the title Vessel / Sculpture. German and International Ceramics since 1946, which attracted great interest from across the globe and were regarded as standard reference works. This third volume continues the series, against a backdrop of a renewed and extensive increase of modern studio ceramics in the museum’s collection. As in the previous publications, the objects in the book enter into aesthetic dialogues, thus facilitating interesting perspectives in the development of artistic ceramics up to the present day. In doing so it becomes clear how ceramic objects are developing from a servient-functional gesture into ever consistent autonomous artworks yet without necessarily losing the vessel theme. Its multitude of current artists’ biographies and illustrations of makers’ marks make this a highly recommendable reference work.
Contents: Contributions from selected artists: Felicity Aylieff, Thomas Bohle, Werner Bünck, Carmen Dionyse, Allesandro Gallo, Louise Hindsgavl, Beate Kuhn, Sonngard Marcks, Ken Mihara, Sarah Pschorn, Elke Sada, Carolein Smit, Julian Stair, Robert Sturm and Henk Wolvers.
Published to accompany an exhibition at GRASSI Museum of Applied Arts Leipzig (DE), 10 November 2018 – 13 October 2019.
Text in English and German