The Francis Bacon Collection is the result of an extraordinarily lengthy discovery and authentication process of previously unpublished works by Francis Bacon. This stunning volume includes the nearly 700 drawings, pastels, and collages in possession of Italian journalist Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. All the works have been photographed in ultra-high gigapixel, captured exclusively for the book. Commentaries and essays especially written for this edition are by noted art historians Edward Lucie-Smith and Fernando Casto Florez, together with an authentication report by Ambra Draghetti, the graphological consultant to the Court of Bologna for the authentication process. This elegantly produced edition presents new scholarship by Professor Umberto Guarini, who defended the legal authentication of the works at the Court of Bologna; Dino Cura, the President of The Francis Bacon Collection; and by Professor Maurizio Saracini, who pioneered the use of multi-spectrum diagnostic imaging and applied his technique to the drawings providing fascinating new details for the first time.
Text in English and Italian.
For 40 years, Lisbet Friis has worked with textile printing as an art form. In this book she presents a wide selection of hand-printed patterns, along with descriptions of techniques and dye formulas. Examples and instructions for textile printing using reactive dyes and printing with mechanical and chemical resist techniques, as well as explanations of how the different methods are carried out are also included. All techniques are illustrated with printed works. Textile printing is a specialised discipline within textile design that requires mastering the combination between artistic approach, technical execution, and aesthetic expression. It is an artistic field with a distinct visual and tactile impact. A great deal of knowledge is being lost as the textile industry becomes increasingly digitalised—this publication aims to preserve this knowledge and expertise and in doing so impart it to future generations.
Award-winning illustrator Lin Hai reimagines China’s oldest mythological encyclopaedia dating from the Zhou dynasty, the Shan Hai Jing (Classic of Mountains and Seas), through 100 vibrant, playful artworks accompanied by notes and cultural stories. Blending traditional aesthetics with modern charm, Lin Hai has transformed the original ancient legends into amusing, visually stunning characters – from fluffy mountain guardians to mischievous sea spirits.
With chapters covering the mountains, seas and distant lands described in the Shan Hai Jing, a picture begins to emerge of a magical world where trees, plants, minerals and creatures hold great medicinal and supernatural value. While such things that have long held importance over millennia in China have lost much of their significance today, Lin Hai’s Mystical Creatures of Ancient China brings them alive once more, inspiring an appreciation for our vast and diverse world, and all that lives in it.
Mother Goddess worship took shape in the 16th century as an alternative to Confucian ideals that cast women in passive, subordinate roles. In this religion, female deities and their spirit mediums stand at the centre of vivid ceremonies filled with fire, music, trance, and offerings. Women needed a symbol and found it in the goddess Lieu Hanh, who represents their desire for freedom, independence, and happiness.
The narrative would follow selected mediums and their communities in several regions, from the birthplace of the religion in Nam Dinh to urban temples in Hanoi and beyond. Through long nights of ceremony and the everyday presence of the religion in local life, we see how this faith gives women and their families a way to negotiate power, identity, and hope in a rapidly changing country. Modernisation, urbanisation, and social media are reshaping the practice. Once associated mainly with farmers and working class families, Mother Goddess worship now attracts civil servants and high-level officials. The religion is being revived, regulated, and commercialised at the same time, which makes this an ideal moment to document what endures, what transforms, and what may be lost.
For over 30 years, Paolo Pellizzari, a Belgian photographer of Italian origins, has observed and described the shared spaces of contemporary times. Its sweeping panoramas capture squares, beaches, crowds, and places of passage, transforming them into settings in which the individual —alone or among others— becomes the protagonist of social dynamics.
Halfway between documentary photography and artistic research, his work combines formal rigor and attention to detail, in dialogue with the tradition of the German School. Each image is constructed as a dense, layered field of view, where the gaze can be lost and found again.
Like a contemporary flâneur, Pellizzari traverses public space, capturing its invisible choreography. His photographs precisely and sensitively question the relationship between the individual and the community, conveying the complexity of the contemporary world.
Text in English and French.
From “calle” Vapor to Perseverancia, from San Lázaro to “parque” Trillo, from “callejón” de Hamel to the Malecón. Centro Habana is an Indian reservation, a place where geographies and legends, memories and illusions, surreal existences and crude realisms intersect continuously, transforming reality into a transit of time, where history seems to have stopped, yet moves under the skin, hidden, clandestine, a bridgehead between its extraordinary lost beauty and an unresolved present.
A journey where every place becomes as deep as a wrinkle, as alive as an ever-open wound. A possible itinerary in an elusive, labyrinthine city, poised between joy and despair, with its destiny suspended, between a cumbersome past and a complicated, perhaps possible, future. (Davide Barilli)
Texts by Davide Barilli, Ilaria Campioli, Paolo Simonazzi.
Text in English, Italian and Spanish.
While in the West photography seems to have lost its way amid the endless proliferation of images since the advent of the digital era, photographic practice across the Global South remains widespread and supported by research and production centres of international standing.
This volume presents the work of three contemporary Nepalese photographers, Uma Bista, Sagar Chhetri, and Kishor Sharma, united by their engagement with social, political, and gender-related issues. Their projects reflect the transformations currently reshaping Nepal, where the language of images foregrounds the social responsibility of the photographer, going far beyond traditional reportage and documentary inquiry.
Text in English and Italian.
Herbert Matter (1907–1984) is a leading figure in 20th-century graphic design. Born in Switzerland and educated in Geneva and Paris, he lived in the United States from 1936, where he had a distinguished career as a designer, photographer, and educator. He created iconic posters, developed editorial designs for major magazines such as Vogue and Harper’s Bazaar, and collaborated with great artists of his time, including Le Corbusier, Alberto Giacometti, and Alexander Calder.
Herbert Matter: Visual Sensation fills a gap. Unlike earlier books on Matter, this monograph comprehensively covers his entire career and the full range of his multifaceted work. It is heavily illustrated with some 600 colour images of his works in all genres, sketches, and references—many of which have never been published before, and others featured in colour for the first time. It reveals the expanse of Matter’s creativity that goes far beyond his famous poster designs, highlighting in particular his photographic and cinematic work as well as his significance as an educator. And it offers a nuanced discourse on Matter’s visual art by connecting with the cultural spheres of Switzerland, France, and America that shaped his personality.
In 1981–82, the then up-and-coming architects Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron designed a studio for photographer Rolf Frei in the German town of Weil am Rhein, on the German–Swiss border near Basel. The building became widely known as Project 014 Photographic Studio Frei and was revered as one of Herzog & de Meuron’s early key designs. It is a space for light, shadow, and staging, constructed with great precision: architecture as an instrument of photography. Over time, it fell somewhat into oblivion and narrowly escaped demolition. In 2023–25, Basel-based architectural firm studio ne restored and carefully transformed it for new cultural and public uses.
This book traces Photographic Studio Frei’s history over more than four decades. Previously unpublished images and original plans from Herzog & de Meuron’s archives, as well as newly taken photographs, form a multilayered visual narrative about the building, its use, transformation, and atmosphere, bringing the restored space’s presence to life. This is supplemented by a conversation between architect Jacques Herzog, entrepreneur and collector Rolf Fehlbaum, and author and journalist Niklas Maak about Photographic Studio Frei’s origins and its importance today, and on how a building continues to live once it has lost its original purpose.