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The project takes its name from the demand for the transfer of power and other things to the newly independent Indonesia in 1945. It travels through time, from European colonial occupation through the development of the republican state to the trans-national contemporary cultures of today. It looks at the various international exchanges that happened in the territories of contemporary Indonesia, through the images and ideas of artists. These exchanges were of different kinds: trade, culture, religion, ideology and war. They produced a variety of results: violence, oppression, racism, creativity, spiritual awakening, and other things. The ideologies and challenges of modernity are common ways in which Indonesia has been depicted by others and has defined itself over the period. As this modern period recedes into history, the project will seek ways to remember how it has influenced contemporary understanding and ask the current generation of artists to look back in order to rewrite the past and potentially create the conditions for a different future. The catalogue and the exhibition will follow a broad chronological narrative, allowing readers and visitors to learn more about how this huge archipelago has changed over the past two centuries and to observe how it has responded and adapted to influences originating from both inside and outside the islands. The influence of the imperial Dutch and Japanese occupations naturally form a significant element in the narrative of the exhibition as does the constant struggle for different forms of independence or equal treatment by the Javanese and other Indonesian cultures. The importance of Chinese and Arab influence on Indonesia’s cultural history will also feature as the exhibition tries to look for alternative ways, alongside the post-colonial, for understanding the present. The presentations will include work made during the residencies as well as new commissions.

The work of Kohn Pedersen Fox is international in scope, collaborative in design, and a product of individual voices focused on a single objective – making an architecture, of our time, which creates strong bonds with the the specific place it occupies.

While William Pedersen founded the firm, with partners Gene Kohn and Shelley Fox, he never aspired to be a ‘director of design.’ They had the components with Gene’s entrepreneurial drive, Shelley’s management and Bill’s design leadership – to be a large firm. ‘Directing’ the work of a large firm was not Bill’s desire, instead he wanted to focus on a body of work which he could call his own. The example that work set would inspire others, and it did. Now there are several voices leading their design – all of them rose to their position within the office.

The purpose of this book is to define the work of one of the voices – Bill Pedersen’s. Pedersen has worked with many different designers, in close collaboration, throughout his career, though his work speaks with a singular voice. Here it is represented chronologically and concludes with the latest phase – furniture. Working from the largest scale to the smallest has always been a preoccupation of those who lead design in KPF. Many of Pedersen’s architectural heroes designed chairs, and he strives to follow in their footsteps.

Kwan Architects and their associates Percy Thomas Partnership were founded in 1979. These 3 monographs show off their body of work and include residential, office, hotel and industrial buildings, both in Hong Kong and overseas.

Collage is one of the most popular and pervasive of all art-forms, yet this is the first historical survey book ever published on the subject. Featuring over 200 works, ranging from the 1500s to the present day, it offers an entirely new approach. Hitherto, collage has been presented as a twentieth-century phenomenon, linked in particular to Pablo Picasso and Cubism in the years just before the First World War. In Cut and Paste: 400 Years of Collage, we trace its origins back to books and prints of the 1500s, through to the boom in popularity of scrapbooks and do-it-yourself collage during the Victorian period, and then through Cubism, Futurism, Dada and Surrealism. Collage became the technique of choice in the 1960s and 1970s for anti-establishment protest, and in the present day is used by millions of us through digital devices. The definition of collage employed here is a broad one, encompassing cut-and-pasted paper, photography, patchwork, film and digital technology and ranging from work by professionals to unknown makers, amateurs and children.

Contents:

Collage Over the Centuries, an introductory essay by Patrick Elliott; Collage Before Modernism by Freya Gowrley; On Edge: Exploring Collage Tactics and Terminology by Yuval Etgar; catalogue of exhibition works; a Chronology of Collage.

The best-illustrated survey of a spectacular ancient art, now available in an affordable edition

Mosaic has been called “painting for eternity,” and it is in fact one of the few arts of antiquity to survive in something like its original condition and variety. Mosaic pavements with geometric and figural motifs first appeared in Greece at the end of the fifth century BC and subsequently spread throughout the classical world, from the palaces of emperors and kings to even relatively modest private homes. Across the Mediterranean, local workshops cultivated many distinctive regional styles, while travelling teams of Hellenistic craftsmen produced figural mosaics of stunning refinement, often modelled after famous paintings; indeed, their work constitutes one of our only records of classical Greek painting, which has been almost entirely lost. The styles and techniques of the ancient mosaicist’s art are given a concise yet authoritative exposition in the first part of this handsome volume.
The second, and larger, part conducts the reader on a chronologically ordered tour of the most important centres of the art form’s development, from the Macedonian capital of Pella, whose compositions in natural pebbles set a high artistic standard for mosaics at the beginning of their history, to the Basilica of San Vitale at Ravenna, whose wall and vault mosaics, with their glittering vision of a triumphant Christianity, mark the transition between antiquity and the Middle Ages. Special attention is given to Pompeii and its surroundings, where the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in AD 79 preserved intact an astonishing variety of mosaics, including such ambitious figural scenes as the famous Alexander Mosaic, composed of some four million miniscule tesserae, as well as characteristically Roman pavements in black and white, and the brightly coloured wall mosaics of garden grottoes.Featuring more than 230 vibrant photographs, many newly commissioned, Greek and Roman Mosaics is the first survey of its subject to be illustrated in full colour. It will be an essential visual reference for every student of classical antiquity, and a source of considerable delight for art lovers.

The Lucerne architects Thomas Lussi and Remo Halter Casagrande competently solve the complex tasks involved in heritage renovation today: the ideal preservation of the substance, discovering and restoring often nuanced, detailed qualities in the original building, the careful static stabilisation of the structure and the gentle renewal of individual elements as a result of use in and around the building. The original building was erected in 1951 according to plans by Otto Dreyer – one of the most important Lucerne architects of the time. The library was widely regarded throughout Switzerland. The book documents the original 1951 building using historical plans and photographs, provides insight into the building-historical analysis before the renovation and uses plans and photo material to describe the strategy and measures by the architects in renovating the architecturally important historical building.

Text in English and German.

Features articles by Cony Grünenfelder, Siegfried Moeri, Ulrich Niederer, and Stanislaus von Moos.

In 1946 (after a stint as a World War II military hospital), quintessential American decorator Dorothy Draper was brought in to restore the Greenbrier hotel. She created a signature look – described at the time as ‘Romance and Rhododendrons’ – that has influenced and delighted not only designers and decorators but also travellers, weary of the grey and beige colour schemes that permeate most hospitality properties even now. Draper transformed the interiors with bold colours, classical influences and modern touches.

When Carleton Varney arrived in Mrs. Draper’s office in 1961 to work as an assistant in the design department, one of his first tasks was to accompany the design icon by train to one of her most well-known and publicised projects. Since that time, he has been involved with every aspect of the hotel’s design, maintaining and continuing the look that Draper designed, as well as modernising, upgrading and putting his own stamp on it. Working with his experienced and innovative team, Varney has turned the historic hotel into a resort for the 21st century.

Berlin’s Aedes Architecture Forum is one of the best-known centres for architecture and architectural culture in the world. Founded in 1980 by Kristin Feireiss und Helga Retzer, Aedes has since put on 500 important exhibitions on current themes, featuring many of the world’s most eminent architects. After Helga Retzer’s unexpected death in 1994, Aedes has been run by Feireiss, together with Hans-Jürgen Commerell and a large, committed team of collaborators.

Faces & Spaces: 40 Years Aedes Architecture Forum looks back at four decades of the gallery’s lively and multifaceted history. It does so in an engaging and accessible way by showing photos of the 500 protagonists who have spoken at Aedes or put on an exhibition there. Arranged by decade, this results in a captivating and amusing Who’s Who of the international architecture scene from the post-modern era until today. Included are also images that document key exhibitions as well as the various spaces in Berlin which Aedes has used as a venue, along with a complete list of all shows staged between 1980 and 2020.

Text in English and German.

When Antje Freiesleben and Johannes Modersohn opened their own Berlin-based firm Modersohn & Freiesleben Architekten in 1994, the city, which had been divided until 1989, needed to be repaired and re-united. The Potsdamer Platz train station and the office block in the Beisheim Centre in Ebertstrasse, close to this central and now revitalised location, are two significant projects that were designed by the firm in the prevalent spirit of urban renewal of those years.

After the millennium, the architects further honed their approach: whether in the city or the countryside, Modersohn & Freiesleben consistently develop the character of their projects in terms of the site, the materials, the construction, and the lives of their clients. Their deliberate engagement with the given environment while simultaneously aiming at an inventive individuality has created an architecture that ensures their houses are functional objects that combine sustainability with aesthetics.

This new monograph features 12 built houses alongside other projects from the last two decades. They are located in Berlin, Brandenburg, Sweden, and Canada.

Text in English and German.

The new MEETT Toulouse exhibition and convention centre in the French city of Toulouse once again demonstrates how a seemingly dull, functional task results in striking and refined architecture if the Rotterdam-based Office for Metropolitan Architecture OMA and its mastermind Rem Koolhaas take care of it. The vast structure, covering ca 618 by 246 yards of ground, makes for a spectacular spatial experience in its main exhibition hall that offers 484,376 square feet of column-free floor space. OMA also took an unusual path with regard to the configuration and transport connection of the entire complex. Rather than sealing even more ground with tarmac for endless car parks, it concentrated them into a compact multi-storey parking garage at the heart of the complex that also serves as a general traffic hub for MEETT Toulouse.

The book offers impressions of MEETT Toulouse’s enormous dimensions and the vast spaces it provides through images taken by French photographer Marco Cappelletti. The volume is rounded out with selected plans and concise texts on the particulars of the project.

The architectural structuring principle of the cellular compartment floor plan is as simple as it is economical, yet it allows for spatial and combinatorial freedom that can be interpreted in ever-new, ever-different ways. The resulting self-contained units or spatial sequences are suited for residential purposes as much as for office buildings, museums or schools, with the floor plans providing highly dynamic and surprising traffic patterns and views.

The cellular compartment floor plan is the generating principle in many buildings, projects, and competition entries by Basel-based office Luca Selva Architects, who have been continually developing this typology in their many years of practice, modifying it and adapting it for new applications in different projects. It is therefore at the centre of this new book on the work of the prolific office. The numerous plans and photographs are supplemented by a theoretical essay by Christoph Wieser and a conversation between Luca Selva and Patrick Gmür. The book for the first time sheds light on this surprisingly sparsely researched topic, and thus its wider significance for the discourse reaches beyond the exemplary designs by Luca Selva Architects.

Text in English and German.

“This book celebrates teamwork and collaboration over the individual, a refreshing take on a practice which is given to celebrating starchitects.” —Peter H. Miller, Traditional Building
In 1897, Frank Lloyd Wright, Robert Spencer, Dwight Perkins, and Myron Hunt, all young architects just starting out in practice, shared office space in Chicago. This book is both a history of that brief period and an attempt to assess the extent to which they collaborated on their architectural designs and on the creation of architectural theory which would impact a half century of architectural design. While there is little firsthand documentation of the time spent in their shared loft office in Steinway Hall, this study engages in a side by side comparison of projects they each designed while working there. Overlapping ideas, design similarities, and an analysis of their subsequent work, all suggest that these men formed a creative “collaborative circle” of friends, who jointly developed ideas later claimed as the work of Frank Lloyd Wright. This is a book about artistic collaboration at a time when discussions of art and architectural history are still largely dominated by the belief that significant works are created by the lone artistic genius.
At the turn of the last century Spencer, Perkins, Hunt, and Wright were part of a community of architects who were all active members of the Chicago Architectural. Steinway Hall, an office building designed by Dwight Perkins, became a home to Chicago’s architectural community with as many as 50 different architects renting space in that building at the turn of the last century. Based on Real Estate Directories from 1897 through 1910 the book includes a listing of the architects that worked and interacted there. Also included are brief biographies of Spencer, Perkins, and Hunt. Excepting Hunt, none of these men have been the subject of individual publications. While Frank Lloyd Wright’s life and work have been extensively chronicled, this book reexamines the period between Wright’s arrival in Chicago in 1887 and his move into the loft office in Steinway Hall in 1897.

In Dark & Dystopian Post-Mortem Fairy Tales, Mothmeister pays homage to the muses who have sparked their alienating dream world. From artists worldwide, legendary figures, their collection of taxidermy to lurid places where their figures were born, such as the catacombs of Palermo, Pyramiden or the disaster area around Chernobyl. A special fairy tale world that flirts with the morbid, religious and grotesque and in which stuffed animals are brought back to life in an extraordinary way.

Created with the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI), Tales of the People is a series of children’s books celebrating Native American culture with illustrations and stories by Indian artists and writers. In addition to the tales themselves, each book also offers four pages filled with information and photographs exploring various aspects of Native culture, including a glossary of words in different Indian languages.

First published as an oversized clothbound volume in 2009, Botanica Magnifica has received widespread acclaim from the scientific and artistic communities.  In the words of an ARTnews critic, Singer’s flowers and plants, photographed “in large scale and exquisite detail, emerge from the shadows in a manner evocative of Old Master paintings.”
Now Abbeville is to offer this masterwork of botanical photography as a pocket-sized hardcover book, in their trademarked Tiny Folio format.  Mirroring the design of the larger edition, this little volume is organised into five alphabetically arranged sections:  (I) Orchidaceae, presenting the full diversity of orchids;  (II) Florilegium, portraying the complexity and beauty of flowers;  (III) Proteus, illustrating plant forms perfectly adapted for survival;  (IV) Zingiberaceae, a tribute to the fascinating ginger family and  (V) Botanicus, a selection of beautiful and bizarre specimens from the Smithsonian’s research collection.  Each pictured plant is accompanied by a clear and accessible description of its botany, geography, history, and conservation.
With its marvellous reproductions and fascinating text, the Tiny Folio of Botanica Magnifica is a charming miniature version of one of the most impressive volumes of natural history ever published.

In this beautifully illustrated story with a timeless message, a feared and cruel king learns of a wise magician in his kingdom who is rumored to be even more powerful than himself. The magician can predict the future, and even worse, he is more popular than the fearsome king. Jealous and insecure, the enraged king plots to destroy this enemy. But, being a magician, he has a trick up his sleeve that saves his own life and the king’s. With help from an unexpected friend, the king transforms from a feared and brutal monarch to a beloved leader. Enduring messages about the power of wisdom and compassion are conveyed in a classic storytelling style and outstanding, original artwork.

Crusaders for art and design were men and women who were prepared to give their energy, talents, and oftimes money, to encourage young artists and designers to adventure in their chosen fields and generally to raise the status of the ‘fine’ and ‘applied’ arts and their creators.
Many of these crusaders have largely been forgotten, such as John Gloag, who was here, there, and everywhere in support of the cause. Other Crusaders are remembered but for other reasons, such as Pevsner, the surveyor of British architectural heritage who for some years had been seen as the guru of industrial design. Gordon Russell, celebrated as the Cotswold furniture designer is altogether less known as a Director of the Council of Industrial Design. Whilst in the ‘fine’ arts Anton Zwemmer, whose Covent Garden shop is now a hairdressers, has largely been erased from memory as when he had been the king bee of a beehive frequented by artists and designers alike coming to find out the latest cultural news from the Continent to be gleaned from his magazines and books.
Crusaders of Art and Design aims to restore a number of reputations by recording their contributions to the cause.

As one of the Tiny Folio Great Museum series, this book is designed as a tour of the National Gallery’s collection of Impressionist and post-Impressionist paintings, drawings, prints and sculpture. Visitors to the National Gallery in Washington usually make straight for the rooms holding the museum’s works by the greatest Impressionist artists, including Degas, Renoir, Van Gogh, Gauguin, Cezanne and many others. This miniature compendium includes all the favourites, along with many less-familiar works photographed especially for this volume.

Oxford has a special place in the history of Pre-Raphaelitism. Thomas Combe (superintendent of the Clarendon Press) encouraged John Everett Millais and William Holman Hunt at a crucial early stage of their careers, and his collection became the nucleus of the Ashmolean collection of works by the Brotherhood and their associates. Two young undergraduates, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, saw the Combe collection and became enthusiastic converts to the movement. With Dante Gabriel Rossetti, in 1857 they undertook the decoration of the debating chamber (now the Old Library) of the Oxford Union. The group’s champion John Ruskin also studied in Oxford, where he oversaw the design of the University Museum of Natural History and established the Ruskin School of Drawing. Jane Burden, future wife of Morris and muse (probably also lover) of Rossetti, was a local girl, first spotted at the theatre in Oxford.   
Oxford’s key role in the movement has made it a magnet for important bequests and acquisitions, most recently of Burne-Jones’s illustrated letters and paintbrushes. The collection of watercolours and drawings includes a wide variety of appealing works, from Hunt’s first drawing on the back of a tiny envelope for The Light of the World (Keble College), to large, elaborate chalk drawings of Jane Morris by Rossetti. It is especially rich in portraits, which throw an intimate light on the friendships and love affairs of the artists, and in landscapes which reflect Ruskin’s advice to ‘go to nature’.
More than just an exhibition catalogue, this book is a showcase of the Ashmolean’s incredible collection, and demonstrates the enormous range of Pre-Raphaelite drawing techniques and media, including pencil, pen and ink, chalk, watercolour, bodycolour and metallic paints. It will include designs for stained glass and furniture, as well as preparatory drawings for some of the well-known paintings in the collection.

This catalogue for an exhibition at the Bonnefanten Museum in Maastricht features paintings by Pieter Bruegel the Younger and his contemporaries that depict the popular religious subject “Christ Carrying the Cross,” and examines these works for covert critiques of power and politics in Flanders during the 16th and 17th centuries. The show explores how artists incorporated both direct and indirect social and political criticisms into paintings on this theme, and brings together a selection of works from Bruegel the Younger, his predecessors, contemporaries, and followers.

The review of this book in Apollo Magazine speaks for itself: it describes it as ‘essential’ and ‘hard to put down’, declaring that ‘the reader will be given an education in how to look at and write about works of art’.

The Ashmolean’s collection of European sculpture is among the finest of its kind in the world. The collection accumulated over four centuries, from the dawn of English Art Collecting through to the Victorian period, which saw the arrival of one of the world’s great collections of Renaissance bronzes and other sculpture assembled by the scholar-connoisseur C.D.E. Fortnum, as well as further gifts and occassional purchases leading up to the present day. The catalogue covers the Ashmolean’s collection dating from 1200 to around 1540. From Romanesque bronzes and Gothic ivories to High Renaissance sculpture, this three-volume set is a meticulous and comprehensive record of over 500 pieces, each one fully illustrated.

Michele De Lucchi and AMDL Circle Connettome details the connections activated in the design work of Michele De Lucchi’s studio, named AMDL CIRCLE since 2019.

Through a suggestive photographic sequence, the book traces the most significant creations of the studio, combined in order to make visible what the designer calls the “synapses of architecture”, meaning the associations of emotions, memories and thoughts that stimulate new creativity. Covering over 20 years of activity, the images reveal a way of thinking about architecture and design in the light of a multidisciplinary, visionary, future-oriented – in a word, humanistic – approach. At the end of the book, which includes a text by De Lucchi, is a chronologically arranged selection of projects carried out in the new millennium, in the fields of architecture, interiors, installations, product design, graphics and research.

Text in English and Italian.

The dedicated art dealer Rudolf Zwirner and the artist Jakob Mattner meet to look back at his over 40-year-long career. They discuss the fascination with perspective, the poetic means of light, the change of position, and procedure of reversal through which the essence of art can be achieved without withholding information from the viewer: the secret of transcendence, its cause and effect.

Text in English and German.

Swiss artist Silvie Defraoui realised a significant part of her work beginning in 1975 together with her husband Chérif (1932–1994). Silvie and Chérif Defraoui compiled their photo and video works, installations, sculptures, and performances under the title Archives du Futur. They taught together at Geneva’s École supérieure des Beaux- Arts (today HEAD–Genève), where they founded the legendary studio Média Mixte and counted a number of renowned artists among their students. 

The Archives du Futur, to which Silvie Defraoui has continued adding works since Chérif’s premature death, has been made available as a digital catalogue raisonné to browse online. This book accompanies, supplements, and expands on the digital documentation. It gathers 14 commentaries on individual works of the two artists by distinguished art theorists and curators, originally published from 1984 onwards, in various art journals and exhibition catalogues or newly written for this book.

They reflect on the artists’ joint oeuvre as well as on work created independently by Silvie Defraoui. Interviews with her and selected lecture texts from the couple’s shared teaching activities shed light on their artistic stance and thematic focuses.

The volume invites an exploration of an artistic body of work that is highly topical through its merging of dualities – memory and the present, Orient and Occident, man and woman, tradition and invention.

Text in English, French and German.