Experiences of Art: Reflections on Masterpieces is a book that explores the history of art through the insights of students and critics. It engages with challenging, thought-provoking themes such as the origins of creativity in prehistoric art, the meaning and significance of the classical paradigm in art history since antiquity, the actual application of Renaissance art theory to an examination of famous masterpieces, and the tradition of individual subjectivity and expression in modern art reaching back to Van Gogh. In addition, one of its special features is an exploration of a new area of philosophical inquiry, which re-examines the 18th century as both a period of rationalism and anti-rationalism (rather than the “Age of Reason”, as it is commonly referred to). With its focus on well-known and often-discussed masterpieces, this work is adept at including both the mandatory framework of current critical thought and introducing fresh ideas and perspectives.
In its considered response to the globalisation of culture, HCMA has consistently achieved an architecture that is expressive of time and place, and uniquely interprets Canadian values of openness and inclusivity. The firm’s concentration on civic buildings denotes a deeply-rooted concern for community, and recognition that in contemporary pluralistic society’s schools, libraries and community centres are both symbolically and literally, the meeting places for all sectors of our communities regardless of demography, faith or ethnicity. What distinguishes HCMA’s design approach is its conceptual shift from the traditional departure points of form or function, to a more organic and humanist approach by which inhabitation of the building and its surroundings mediate the interface between these two opposing forces. While function implies an empirical definition of purpose, and form a pre-occupation with sculptural abstraction, inhabitation connotes an understanding that buildings should embrace the richness and diversity with which our lives unfold. Places: Public Architecture explores a selection of key projects by HCMA which offer insight into the firm’s specific approach to community building through public architecture. Featured projects many of which have been challenged by contemporary advancements in technology, include schools, libraries, fire halls, childcare centres, and more. Through the practice of architecture HCMA asks what is the future of the library, of education, and of public space in an increasingly online age? The book features critical text by accomplished writer Jim Taggart, professional photography, lucid architectural drawings, and details, as well as a look at the firm’s design process of iterative modelling/diagramming and research on contemporary topics.
Over the past years, Dhaka-based architect Kashef Chowdhury has become renowned for a body of work that responds with great sensitivity to places, local circumstances, and the demands of a building’s users. At the 2016 International Architecture Exhibition of the Venice Biennale, Chowdhury presented four recent projects his firm URBANA has realised in Bangladesh in a fascinating exhibition which he has designed with equal sensitivity and care.
The labyrinth is an age-old space of intrigue, discovery and accident, which has fascinated architects throughout history. For his installation in Venice, Chowdhury challenged spatial perceptions by a simple turn: the labyrinth – which hides and blocks – is suddenly made transparent. Notwithstanding the obvious reference to Venetian glass, the labyrinth retains, or even accentuates, a sense of spatial disorientation.
The installation was conceived not merely as a hyper-maze but rather as an expression of the anxiety that the artist experiences in his work due to a myriad of uncertainties. From design to construction, funding to maintenance, the part of the world where URBANA chiefly works presents itself with challenges at every turn, and it is in this milieu that an architect must operate with firm resolve. Chowdhury’s Glass Labyrinth in Venice seems to explicate the notion that, although an architect has a clear vision of what he wants to do, the path to achieving that in the environment in which he operates, is laden with perplexing barriers.
This new book explores and documents Kashef Chowdhury’s intriguing installation in Venice with beautiful photographs by Eric Chenal and an illuminating text by Robert McCarter.
What does an architectural guide look like in an age when the world’s knowledge is carried around in small devices in your pocket? The second edition of the Guide to Buildings in Zug, documenting a century of planning and construction in the canton, provides an answer: It is a large, 300-page illustrated volume that is dedicated not only to the architecture, but also to questions of spatial and landscape planning. Packed with images, the architectural guide is intended for the coffee tables of a wider audience, rather than the library.
Text in German.
U Thong, 100 or so km north of Bangkok, has been an important site for over 2,000 years, as witnessed by the discovery of a 3rd century Roman coin. The moated city was connected to the Chin river, thereby gaining access to international trade routes.
The inhabitants of the early centres of Classic Southeast Asian civilisation were already wealthy enough to own large quantities of ornate jewellery such as imported beads from India and carved stone from Taiwan. They had so much gold that central and western mainland Southeast Asia including the U Thong area was known in Sanskrit as Suvarnabhumi, the Golden Land.
This publication brings a new perspective to the study of ancient gold from U Thong. The author is a trained research metallurgy scientist, and these skills have been brought to bear on the highly significant corpus of early gold artefacts found in and around the moated city, the largest accumulation of such artefacts from any of the ancient muang of Thailand.
The goldsmiths were as highly skilled as those anywhere else in the world, but almost all previous studies have been written by people who can only study the outer appearance to draw conclusions regarding its age and place of origin.
Mishmash is a narrative poem about a funny mix up that happens amongst a group of animals. These animals refuse to stick to their own conventional sounds and take on the sounds of other animals instead. Here you will find kittens that ‘oink’ like pigs and ducklings that ‘ribbit’ like frogs! A truly delightful tale of animal mischief. The author Korney Chukovsky was a renowned Russian writer and poet. This book is illustrated by an award-winning artist Francesca Yarbusova, the wife and collaborator of Yuri Norstein. She was the co-creator of the animated films Hedgehog in the Fog and Tale of Tales – the films that were declared to be the Best Animated Film of All Time. Also available in the Norstein & Yarbusova Collection – a beautiful series of children’s picture books based on the art of famous Russian artists and animators Yuri Norstein and Francesca Yarbusova are: The Fox and the Hare ISBN: 9780984586714 and The Hedgehog in the Fog ISBN: 9780984586707.
David Hockney’s interpretation of the Brothers Grimm fairy tales are like no other version you will have read before. Although inspired by earlier illustrators of the tales, from Arthur Rackham to Edmund Dulac, Hockney’s extraordinary etchings re-imagine these strange and supernatural stories for a modern audience, capturing their distinctive atmosphere in a style that is recognisably the artist’s own. Reprinted for the first time since its original publication in 1969, Hockney’s book brings together some well-known tales – Rapunzel, Rumpelstiltskin – with others that are less familiar. Informed by great art of the past, attuned to idiosyncrasies of character and incident, and fresh in execution and content, his illustrations invite us to read each one as if for the first time.
Charlotte Perriand (1903-99) is undoubtedly one of the most significant figures in 20th-century interior design. She was one of the pioneers in introducing the metal tube as building material for furniture, paving the way for machine age aesthetic in interiors in the 1920s and 1930s. Together with Le Corbusier and Pierre Jeanneret she created a number of iconic classics, such as the chaise-longue LC4, the armchair LC2, or the sling chair LC1.
This second part of the new three-volume monograph on Perriand covers the period 1940-55 with her extensive stays in Japan 1942-42 and 1953-55, and with her designs for the reconstruction in France after WW II. It also investigates extensively her collaboration with Jean Prouvé 1952-55. Moreover, the new volume looks at her work together with with Jeanneret and again also Le Corbusier during the 1950s, and it documents Perriand’s involvement and role in founding the Useful Forms movement in 1949. The book features again an abundance of images and documents, mostly in colour and many of them previously unpublished.
Charlotte Perriand: Complete Works is the authoritative source on this key figure of 20th-century interior design for scholars, dealers, and collectors. Each of the three lavishly illustrated volumes is completed by annotations, index, and bibliography.
Also available: Charlotte Perriand – Complete Works Vol. 1: 1930-1940
This is an artist’s book on illness and dying. Elisabeth Zahnd, artist and photographer, had to experience and bear the fatal illness and death of her child, who was diagnosed of an incurable brain tumour at the age of five. Zahnd soon started not only to accompany as a caring mother the child’s long ordeal, but also to document as an artist the transition and transfiguration of this young human being. She never exploits the child’s suffering for her artistic project, though. Even in close-up she keeps a distance and the child’s privacy. Two essays accompany the images. One is on the artistic and art historical context of Elisabeth Zahnd’s portraits of Chiara. The second, philosophical-ethical text is about illness, dying and death and the our related fears and emotions. Created out of personal affection, this photographic essay reaches beyond an individual destiny. Its images touch on the question of how we deal with suffering and death. But they are also about life, warmth and security, and love. The book also aims at helping to take away the taboo from these important issues concerning everyone. Text in English and German.
Guadalupe Ruiz has undertaken an artistic research of the social and demographic discrepancies between the various parts of the Colombian capital Bogotá. The population of each of the city’s six taxation classes ranges from extremely affluent to impoverished. Ruiz looks at their houses and apartments, whole interiors and single pieces of furniture, decorative elements and other of the inhabitants’ personal items, family photographs and depictions of saints. This panorama of private rooms and traces of their inhabitants’ tastes and ways of life shows economical discrepancies but also makes traceable remarkable cultural parallels between the classes. Guadalupe Ruiz – Bogotá D.C. is a subtle, yet provoking examination of the artist’s native city. It presents Ruiz’s work for the first time in print and complete. The series’ 120 images are arranged by neighbourhood, and an included map locates each individual image within the neighborhoods and the entire city. Text in English, French, Spanish and German.
The Image Archive of the main library at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH-Bibliothek) is home to a vast collection of photographs. It includes material collected by professors and other staff at the ETH, images created and collected by institutes and chairs within the ETH, but also the entire archives of companies or other institutions, such as Switzerland s legendary former national airline Swissair (1931 – 2001), or private collections bequeathed to ETH-Bibliothek. The aim of the new book series Pictorial Worlds. Photographs from the ETH-Bibliothek’s Image Archive is to build a bridge between analytical treatment of historical image sources and the interest in individual photographs for any possible reason. One of the collections held at the Image Archive has been put together by Swiss entrepreneur Adolf Feller (1879 – 1931) and his daughter Elisabeth (1910 – 1973). Unique in size, scope and period covered, it comprises 54,000 postcards from 1889 – 1980. It documents comprehensively what can be called the ‘Golden Age’ of picture postcards before World War I, with its enormous diversity of motifs, radical changes of style in design and of the era when postcards had their heyday as a communication medium. The collection’s main focus is on images of individual sites, places and landscapes in 140 countries. Around 15,000 motifs are from Switzerland. The period best represented in the collection is from 1893 – 1930. The World in Pocket-size Format is a documentation of this magnificent collection. The book is also an illustrated history of this means of communication that has had its time of utmost importance in human relationships. Text in English and German.
The Vatican Museums is one of the most important museum complexes in the world, housing incredible masterpieces from the Egyptian Age to the late Renaissance.
The Vatican Museums hold a treasure trove of art and history, as well as an inestimable patrimony of our culture and our civilisation. This volume focuses on the paintings to be found in the collection – including The Sistine Chapel.
Text in English and Italian.
Using Caravaggio’s The Cardsharps as the focus, we may understand how the three figures depicted are set in contrast: by social class, age and appearance. These differences are underpinned by the clothing that they wear, and on closer examination, it is apparent that the fabrics described in paint are directly comparable to those of the historic collections of Novara. In their insightful and detailed analysis, the authors of this volume present a comprehensive overview of the development of fashion and fabrics, from the sixteenth to the seventeenth century, when Italy’s textile industry was at its peak. Text in English and Italian.
By analysing the different colour theories that gradually took shape in the turbulent socio-political context that characterised the 20th century, Emotions of Color in Art reflects on a perspective that considers light, its vibrations and the world of emotions, while challenging the standardisation of the use of colour in the modern age (synthetic colours) and the digital era (RGB colours offered by various online palettes), a levelling that considerably reduces our ability to distinguish colours in the real world.
This volume celebrates Luigi Pericle, painter, but also thinker, literate, scholar of theosophy and esoteric doctrines, revealing his extraordinary history, made of profound research and great encounters. From well-known collector Peter G. Staechelin to Sir Herbert Read, trustee of the Tate Gallery; from the museologist Hans Hess, curator of the York Art Gallery, to the famous German artist and director Hans Richter – everyone was attracted by his charisma, his versatile personality, his ‘clairvoyant’ art. With Luigi Pericle, the history of informal art of the second post-war period unexpectedly opens to philosophy, to alternative spirituality, to the mysteries of the cosmos, against the background of the space age. Essays by: Marco Pasi, Luca Bochicchio, Chiara Gatti, Michele Tavola, Andrea Biasca-Caroni, Valeria Malossa, and Giovanni Cavallo. Text in English and Italian.
Passage is a site-specific, two-channel video installation, which expands Nujoom Alghanem’s experimentation with contemporary Arabic poetry through the language of film. Taking her quintessential 2009 poem, The Passerby Collects the Moonlight, as a point of departure, this installation explores the universal experience of displacement. This Brechtian conflation of reality and fiction, culminating in a scene that depicts Falak arriving at the pavilion in Venice, prompts the viewers to consider the parallelism between the film’s three protagonists: the director, the actress and the fictional character. These three women of a similar age share the experience of similar dualities: the hidden and the revealed, fragility and power, belonging and displacement. The experience of passage and duality also permeates the design of the exhibition space, where visitors can enter and exit from either side of the pavilion. A large screen, diagonally positioned at the centre, divides the space into two symmetrical halves. The viewers are invited to engage both with Nujoom and Amal’s real process of creating the film and with the cinematographic portrayal of the fictional character of Falak. Text in Arabic.
These pages are intended as a compact up-to-date guide for readers wishing to find out more about one of the greatest artistic geniuses of all times, an artist epitomising the highest ideals of the age of Humanism whose complex personality challenges even the experts in this field of studies.
The volume is dedicated to the Sacri Monti, the ‘Sacred Mountains’, of Piedmont and Lombardy – Varallo, Orta, Crea, Varese, Oropa, Ossuccio, Ghiffa, Domodossola and Belmonte – which have all been included in the UNESCO World Heritage List since 2003. Made up of a complex of chapels in which episodes of sacred history are represented through paintings and life-size sculptures, the Sacri Monti are a complete expression of the Counter-Reformation age. Built between the end of the sixteenth and the beginning of the seventeenth century with the intent to educate and strengthen the religious sentiment of the faithful, they still fascinate for the decorative richness and the remarkable realism of the setting, as well as for the way in which they have been integrated into their surroundings. The texts and the rich iconographic collection highlight the extraordinary beauty and value of these jewels of history, art and nature.
Text in English and Italian.
Floral art as you have never seen it before. In Flora Mythica floral designer Marco Appelfeller and photographer Hing Ang team up to create a floral universe beyond dreams. Stories from Greek mythology, fairy tales by Hans Christian Andersen, the Brothers Grimm and other classics are brought to life in a magical fantasy world of flowers. Enter hidden caverns, explore forbidden forests and dive down the rabbit hole to discover Marco’s creative wonderland inhabited by mythical and sometimes fearsome creatures. Marco Appelfeller’s imagination is just as vivid and colourful as his floral art. His impeccable designs, that seem to defy what we can imagine as possible, are equalled by the book’s magnificent photography. Flora Mythica is a masterpiece testifying of craftsmanship and creativity and has it all to become a classic, just like the age-old fairy tales that inspired it. Text in English and German.
Surrounded by flowers from a very young age, the decision to become a floral designer was anoabvious one for Hideyuki Niwa. To keep on challenging himself, Niwa often takes part in competitions and tries creating and photographing a new design every day to get a thorough understanding of the characteristics of flowers and their possibilities. His classic, linear style and minimalist expression with careful placement of plant materials, quintessential characteristics of the Japanese aesthetic concent wabi sabi, rightfully won him a Bronze Leaf in the 2010/2011 editio and he Gold Leaf in the 2012/2013 edition of Stichting Kunstboek’s prestigious International Floral Art. Text in English and Japanese. Also available: Ryusaku Matsuda, Contemporary Floral Art ISBN: 9789058562999 Naoki Sasaki, Japanese Contemporary Floral Art ISBN: 9789058562647
With an impressive career of over 40 years that has resulted in the installation of large-scale art projects in numerous public spaces, artist/sculptor Luk Van Soom needs no further introduction in Belgium and the Netherlands. This beautifully designed art book is a first retrospective on his life and career. In a series of discussions and interviews with the artist, author Johan Pas sheds some light on the influences, philosophy, thinking and themes that have been vital for Van Soom’s artistic development: the relation between life and passion, travel and art, etc. Together, these texts present a kaleidoscopic image of Luk Van Soom’s life and work that is just as multifaceted and compelling as his art. At the age of seventeen Van Soom took his first tentative steps as an artist. Now 40 years later, he has an impressive curriculum including many exhibitions, commissions and projects both in his home country and abroad. Moreover, he created more than 50 monumental works for the public space in Belgium and the Netherlands, among which some very well know sights, such as Walhalla (1993, Antwerp), The Man from Atlantis (2003, Brussels), The Wharfinger (2005, Zwolle) and Walking to Magdalena (2012, Ostend). Text in English and Dutch.
It is not an exaggeration to say that today we live in an age of unprecedented sexual freedom. Far from over, the sexual revolution seems on the contrary to have gained a new momentum. Globalised and digitalised, it is spreading its gospel like wildfire. The objects and their creators that feature in Made for Love, reflect this new evolution and its corresponding styles and attitudes. Some names of designers as well as brands will be surprisingly familiar. Sensual pleasure objects, furniture, varying home accessories – they all have a naughty spirit in common, combined with quality, design, a certain flair, and sometime ingenious engineering. Avoiding the trashy in favour of the classy, Made for Love is a treat for anyone wanting to indulge in a sensual experience. Includes texts by famous Belgian erotic writer Amélie O.