Rare Special Editions available from ACC Art Books –  More Information

Painter, draftsman and engraver, Pierre Lesieur (1922-2011) was one of the most influential French artists of the second half of the 20th century. Trained at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris – where he took lessons from André Lhote – and at the Académie de Montmartre, he had his first exhibition in 1952.

Lesieur’s paintings of the 1950s are characterised by the use of brightly coloured areas, in line with the work of Henri Matisse and Pierre Bonnard. In the 1960s, this research bordered on abstraction, particularly in still lifes and representations of objects. From the 1970s onwards, through his paintings and drawings, Lesieur took a particular interest in interiors, as well as in portraits and female nudes.

Early in his career, Pierre Lesieur was recognised as an important artist. After his first personal exhibition in 1952, his work was regularly shown at the Coard Gallery in Paris. From the 1990s, Lesieur’s notoriety became international, resulting in further exhibitions in Japan and the United States. Some of his works are now housed in major museums such as the Center Pompidou, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Hiroshima Museum.

Text in English and French.

What are your chances of living through the next 24 hours? This week? This month? This decade? Will your job kill you? Your car kill you? Your spouse kill you? Will your own bad habits kill you? Or will a rogue asteroid just kill us all?

Each time you lay your head on the pillow at night or set your feet on the floor come morning, you bet your life. Exactly what odds do you face 24/7?

You Bet Your Life applies to you, the individual, the analytical approach insurance companies use to calculate risk: actuarial science. The result is a comprehensive, encyclopedic, real world assessment of more than 1,000 of the risks we take every day of our all-too-finite lives, from boarding an airplane to tempting a shark attack by dipping a toe in the ocean.

You Bet Your Life is introduced by an authoritative essay explaining how professional actuaries calculate risk and how less objective entities—in government, finance, science, technology, and religion—apply their own competing calculi of risk and reward.

When does a carpet transcend the category of interior accessory to become art? This well-illustrated book features 200 carpets found in behind-the scenes tours of amazing homes around the world. In thematic chapters, it covers the main international trends, from Ethnic to Art Deco and from Contemporary to Artsy. These dressed-up living spaces provide inspiration for anyone fascinated by stylish living, creative interior design and the myriad possibilities for home decor. In addition, the author provides helpful information on the provenance of materials, quality of design, composition and workmanship possibilities for home decor. It’s a fascinating glimpse into the homes of people with a good taste. Carpets & Rugs is comprehensive and more relevant than ever.

You can put an armchair next to a sofa and a chair next to a table. But you can also bring walls to life, craft a magical diorama, and build an artistic domestic kingdom! With over 200 pages, this lavishly — illustrated interiors book is packed full of design ideas to help you add comfort and creativity to your home. Brilliant photography and detailed descriptions show you the latest and greatest collaborations from architecture and interior design around the globe — on trend or avant-garde, all showcase elegance, style, and imagination.

Text in English and German.

What wouldn’t animal-loving humans do to create the perfect modern habitat for their cherished animals? Not surprisingly, pet owners are forever seeking ways to provide the best environment to make life for their pets as enjoyable and engaging as possible.

Designing the perfect architecture and interiors for pets and animals of all shapes, sizes, species, and breeds is all about creating a seamless coexistence. Showcased here are heaps of fun and unique projects created by an inventive global design community. The charming, imaginative, and inspired interiors and architectural systems presented in this book offer a beautiful combination of aesthetics and creature comfort, be they for cats, dogs, birds, rabbits, guinea pigs, hamsters, chickens, turtles, horses, and many others.

This carefully curated selection includes not only ingenious yet elegant built-in cat ladders, scratchers, and walkways, and private dog nooks — even a noise-cancelling kennel for the most pampered of pooches — but also amazing modular mazes for the busiest cat, rabbit, guinea pig, or hamster, as well as beautiful, sculptural birdhouses and charming log-cabin-style chicken coops. It also features funky cat cafés and special shelter ideas to keep both human and animal creatures calm.

This delightful book presents a lovable assortment of safe and sustainable pet-friendly projects, ideal for design- and animal-conscious folk who want to turn their interiors or workspaces into the most comfortable living/playpen environments for their beloved fur-babies (and other pets) to roam and rest.

There’s an elemental satisfaction in living in a cosy sanctuary in the midst of a snowy landscape. It evokes feelings of warmth, security, refuge, and comfort. Winter Homes beautifully illustrates examples from winter wonderlands around the globe and provides ingenious solutions on how the home’s design is formulated, and the architectural and interior design techniques used to create both a connection to nature and contend with biting winter conditions.

Curl up in front of the fire with this gorgeous edition, crammed full of evocative images, and take a journey through some of the world’s best contemporary and stylish winter residences, be they atop mountains, deep in the valleys, forests or plains, or along coastal regions. Bask in the splendid vicarious warmth from your sofa and enjoy the beauty of a home that is perfectly designed for a moody winter landscape.

Cheerful and warm, this Cactus Notecard Set by favourite illustrator Maria Carluccio is right on trend with your other favourite stationery/home fashion designs. Our notecards are blank inside and are the perfect way to drop a note to a loved one or friend to say thank you or just a simple hello.

We choose the best images from well-known classic and contemporary fine artists, plus talented emerging illustrators and designers from around the globe. Maria Carluccio has received multiple awards for her work from the New York Society of Illustrators and 3×3 magazine. Her artwork can be seen on children’s books, gift products, wall decor, and fabric.

This book offers the first-ever survey of Swiss artist Nicolas Party’s entire body of work. Born in 1980 in Lausanne, Party now lives and works in New York and has established himself as one of the most important figures of international contemporary art.

Nicolas Party—Rovine (Italian for ruins) features pastels and sculptures that Party has created since 2013. The book focuses on the core genres of painting: still life, landscape, and portrait. Party’s works stand out in these genres due to his use of wild, anti-naturalistic colours, as well as through his extremely precise rendering of the subjects. The artist explains his fascination for each of these genres in accompanying texts. The book also shows a large-format wall painting and a sculpture created especially for Party’s major solo exhibition at MASI Lugano in the summer 2021. Contributions by the art critic and curator Michele Robecchi and by MASI Lugano’s director Tobia Bezzola supplement this beautiful volume.

Text in English, German and Italian.

“A pagan happiness entered my paintings in the spirit of both my subjects and work, which became freer and more lyrical”. These are the words used by Massimo Campigli himself to describe his visit to the Museum of Villa Giulia in Rome in 1928. He attributed to this event a fundamental value for the development of the mature phase of his artistic production.

This catalogue compares a specific selection of Campigli’s works with Etruscan finds, with which they naturally share atmospheres, signs and colours. This innovative and learned analysis brings about the opportunity to present for the first time to the public valuable archaeological items, mostly unpublished and to date preserved in the deposits of the Soprintendenza Archeologia, Belle Arti e Paesaggio per la provincia di Viterbo e per l’Etruria Meridionale.

Text in English and Italian. 

Self-Portrait explores 30 years of artistic research by Paolo Canevari (Rome, 1963), proposing a series of sculptures, drawings and installations ranging from the first creations in the wake of Arte Povera, to those made of rubber from the 1990s, up to the more recent series Monuments of the Memory: Landscape and Constellations.

The works tell of Canevari’s vision of art-making, which moves from a classical training combined with a profound conceptual research, while also animated by a strong political character.

Through the use of different media and materials – with a predilection for the rubber of inner tubes and tyres – Canevari adopts a language that is sometimes brutal, often ambiguous, certainly evocative, to bring light into the dark territories of man, understood both as an individual and as humanity.

His radical and subversive approach aims to stimulate a reaction in the observer, with the intention, on the one hand, of breaking prejudices and clichés, on the other of investigating personal, intimate and inner aspects in relation to the work of art and its universal meaning.

The volume includes a critical text by Robert Storr, two interviews with the artist collected respectively by Robert Storr and Francesca Pietropaolo and by Shirin Neshat, and a tribute to Canevari written by late Sicilian novelist Andrea Camilleri.

Text in English and Italian. 

The first monograph on French architect Guillaume Terver and his team. This beautiful book presents high-end houses and apartments in Paris and Brussels.

Text in English and French.

Yafeng Duan (*1973) was born in Hebei in northern China, in the shadow of the Great Wall. For the artist – now based in Berlin – nature is the mirror of the soul, and the source from which she draws is a spiritual one. Artistic creativity is a vehicle for approaching and exploring reality and transferring it through painting into non-spaces. Her pictures testify to her notion of a breath of energy, which spreads out into a great void and, thanks to the constitutive factors of yin and yang, solidifies into all manifestations of existence, only to pass away again.

Text in English, Chinese and German.

“Charles Higham – rugby player, talented excavator and one of the great archaeologists of his generation – is an engaging raconteur. His fast-moving autobiography tells of the life well lived, of a world authority on Southeast Asia’s past. This is a fascinating and adventurous journey complete with academic debates, serious archaeology, its triumphs and minor disasters galore. Read this book if you aspire to be an archaeologist. It will inspire you to great deeds.” – Brian Fagan, Distinguished Emeritus Professor of Archaeology, University of California, Santa Barbara.

“Higham charts an archaeological Odyssey from Roman Britain via the Bronze Age stock-breeders of central Europe to prehistoric Thailand and the origins of Angkor. This complements a personal journey equally eventful, from a double first and rugby blue at Cambridge to building a university department in New Zealand. Here is a life laden with academic honours and the thrill of discovery on a series of digs that have transformed understanding of the human past in a hitherto-under-evaluated part of the ancient world.” – Professor Norman Hammond, Senior Fellow, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, Cambridge University.

“Charles Higham presents a readable and often witty account of a golden age in archaeological excavation in Thailand, Neolithic to Iron Age, from his perspective as a fundamental contributor. A must-read for colleagues, students, and the interested public are like.” – Emeritus Professor Peter Bellwood, Australian National University.

In this unique memoir, Charles Higham, one of the great archaeologists of his generation, describes the inside story of how his many excavations have introduced Southeast Asia’s past to a worldwide audience. For over 50 years, he and his Thai colleagues have explored the arrival of early humans, the impact of the first farmers, the remarkable rise of social elites with the spread of metallurgy and the origins of civilisations. Once seen as a cultural backwater, Southeast Asia now takes centre stage in understanding the human past.

‘”As Paul Moorhouse shows in this thorough and sensitive first biography, which concentrates on [Riley’s] early years up to the age of thirty-four, it was only after many false starts, bracing shocks and firm decisions that Riley found her way as an abstract painter in the early 1960s with her eye-dazzling lines, squares, curves … in ultra-hard-edged black-and-white”. –Times Literary Supplement

“In “Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person – The Early Years,” Paul Moorhouse … homes in on the period between the artist’s childhood and her earliest success, and makes a surprising but compelling case for the influence of landscape on Ms Riley’s distinctive style.” –Wall Street Journal

“An entertaining and informative text that adds greatly to our understanding of a very prominent and still highly intriguing British artist.” –Hyperallergic

In January 1965 the international art world converged on New York to pay homage to a brilliant new star. The glittering opening of The Responsive Eye, a major exhibition of abstract painting at the Museum of Modern Art, signalled the latest phenomenon, op art – and its centre of attention was a young painter named Bridget Riley, whose dazzling painting Current appeared on the cover of the catalogue. Riley’s first solo show in New York sold out, and, following a feature in Vogue magazine, the Riley ‘look’ became a fashion craze. Overnight, she had become a sensation, yet only three years earlier, she was a virtual unknown. How did success arrive so suddenly?

Authored by the acclaimed curator and writer Paul Moorhouse, A Very Very Person is the first biography of Bridget Riley and addresses that tantalising question. Focusing on her early years, it tells the story of a remarkable woman whose art and life were entwined in surprising ways. This intimate narrative explores Riley’s wartime childhood spent in the idyllic Cornish countryside, her subsequent struggles to find her way as an artist, and the personal challenges she faced before finally arriving as one of the world’s most celebrated artists in Swinging Sixties London.

Swiss artist Mirko Baselgia, born in 1982, already made a name for himself internationally in the first decade of his career. Baselgia works within the context in which he lives and with the conditions available to him. His works appear to be calm and soulful, unassuming and endless. They invite the viewer to pause and reflect on their place on planet earth. Philosophical and scientific questions are reflected by means of the local, natural, and recycled materials Baselgia uses.

This book offers a snapshot of Mirko Baselgia’s current creativity and is published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Kunst(Zeug)Haus Rapperswil-Jona. Its subtitle )in(out) till sundown refers to a quote by the Scottish-American author John Muir (1838–1914): “I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown, for going out, I found, was really going in.” Baselgia’s art also stimulates reflection on the meaning of inside and outside, the boundaries that separate us from our surroundings, as well as their permeability.

Text in English and German.

Just as its nickname, ‘cream city’, has nothing to do with beer or dairy, the city of Milwaukee itself is fraught with surprises. While it is undoubtedly the jovial land of beer and cheese (and brats, bowling and The Brewers, for that matter) the city is also a centre for world-class art, architecture, culture and innovation, and has been since the 1800s.

Discover Milwaukee’s most unexpected treasures – visit a 15th century French chapel, or a 425 million-year-old tropical reef. Throw a turkey at the nation’s oldest sanctioned bowling alley. Watch an art museum flap its wings, or tour the city’s only urban cheese factory to find out why cheese curds squeak.

Milwaukee, a city both stunning and charming, also possesses a dry, self-deprecating wit and goofy cleverness. Visit 111 amazing places that reveal this unique character, one that keeps Milwaukee’s locals local, and beckons visitors back again and again.

Sharing this story was not something that Christopher Capozziello ever set out to do, but, over the years, one picture has led to another and a story has emerged. Capozziello says, “The time I have spent with my brother, looking through my camera, has forced me to ask questions about suffering and faith and why anyone is born with disability. Nick has cerebral palsy. Taking pictures has been a way for me to deal with the reality of having a twin brother who struggles through life in ways that I do not.” Capozziello’s photographs take us on a journey through his worries and inquiries, ending his debut book with a different sort of question: what comes next? Part two of the book is a journey he and his brother take across the United States. The work has been shown throughout the United States and has won 33 national and international awards. “The collection, titled The Distance Between Us, is both a brother’s touching tribute and Capozziello’s attempt to come to terms with the reality his brother lives and one from which he happened to be spared”. The Mail

In Mother Tongue, Mika Sperling (*1990) examines how origins and culture influence interpersonal relationships based on her personal family history. Language plays a key role in this. Her young daughter and her Vietnamese stepmother are the focus of the photographic examination. Sperling experiments with perspectives, close-ups, and reflecting surfaces and shows the surroundings and personal objects of the individuals portrayed.

Trained in a documentary tradition, Sperling represents a new generation of photo-essayists that takes up historical references and processes them in various mediums and objects so as to engage more intensively with the audience.

Text in English, with additional texts in German, Russian and Vietnamese.

Serena Ferrario (*1986) is the 7th winner of the renowned Horst Janssen Graphic Prize, which this year will be awarded at the Kunsthalle Hamburg for the first time. The catalogue accompanying the exhibition not only documents the various facets of Ferrario’s work with its large-scale installations, with a focus on her graphic works, collages, and films, but also explicitly takes a look behind the scenes with the title Where the Drawings Live. It is about an open process that not only provides insights into her studio work, but also reveals in particular the connection between the individual mediums in which her figures — whether drawn or real in film — live.

In addition to numerous pictures, including installation views from the Kunsthalle Hamburg, the catalogue also contains an interview with Serena Ferrario.

Text in English and German.

Stripped of their typical narrative and commercial contexts, the fragmented collages of this collection act as visually tantalizing ciphers, reflecting the desires and imaginings of the beholder.’ – Jennie Waldow, Brooklyn Rail

This beautifully illustrated catalogue showcases works by British artist John Stezaker made between 1976 and 2017 and brought together in the 2018 show “Love” at The Approach, London.

Stezaker is celebrated for his distinctive collage works: interruptions of, and interventions into, found images dating mostly from the mid-20th century – products of modernist culture such as film stills, press and publicity photographs, magazines and postcards. His works engage with themes such as psychological archetypes, fragmentation, identity, self and other, desire, inscrutability and enigma, glamour, fantasy, dreams and the gaze.

A sense of romance pervades Stezaker’s imagery. As demonstrated most dramatically by the artist’s ‘Love’ series (2016), his work seduces and ensnares the viewer’s gaze, arresting their perceptual expectations. Disquieting, poetic, compelling, glamorous and strange, the anatomies of love and desire comprising ‘Love’ resemble a visual encyclopaedia of human consciousness. Featuring essays by Michael Bracewell and Craig Burnett.

Multiple Exposures – Allen Jones & Photography explores the numerous ways in which artist Allen Jones has engaged with the possibilities of this medium. Historian Philippe Garner has researched Jones’s extensive archive to develop and present the insightful narratives implicit in this remarkable, often surprising selection of images.
Studying at Hornsey School of Art, then at the Royal College of Art till 1961, Jones achieved swift success within a dynamic roster of artists celebrated as ‘The New Generation: 1964’ at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. Alongside his practice as a painter, sculptor, and printmaker, Jones nurtured an ongoing fascination with photography. This volume – an important addition to the literature on Jones’s oeuvre – reveals how he was first drawn as a student to the camera’s potential, making his earliest experiments in black and white.
Through the sixty-plus years of Jones’s career – using camera and, more recently, iPad, and iPhone – photography has become ever-more integrated within his wider practice as an artist. We observe his incorporation of ‘found’ photographs within his early collaged works; we discover the photographs he has taken as a visual ledger of all that intrigues him; we see a telling selection of the imagery that he has collected, mostly drawn from vernacular sources, such as post cards, newspaper cuttings, and magazine tear-sheets; we find his playful images of his studio and its juxtapositions; and we follow his investigation of the ways in which his paintings and sculptures can interact and invite fresh readings when transmuted into photographs.
The images in Multiple Exposures, mostly hitherto unpublished, are supported by an introductory text by Philippe Garner and by revelatory chapter introductions and pertinent pull-quotes by Allen Jones. The dynamic design of the book is by the legendary graphic artist David Hillman.

Interior design in Barcelona, an important Mediterranean metropolis and a city with a rich history, draws influences from many different styles. The interiors featured here — notable for their airy sense of space and tiled floors — are cool in the summer but remain cozy and inviting. This book takes you behind the elegant facades, where timeless charm is created by the use of wood, warm colours and fabrics. Barcelona Interiors focuses on the most exclusive and unique homes that represent the authentic Barcelona way of living.

At the end of 2020, the concrete factory in Ghent, popularly called ‘the Betoncentrale’, was demolished. With this book, Cultuur Gent, the cultural department of the City of Ghent, aims to keep the memory of this graffiti paradise alive. A team of experts selected the 10 most important street artists who were active onsite: ROA, Klaas van der Linden, and Bue the Warrior, among others. This book showcases the most beautiful work that adorned the walls of the factory. Street art expert Tristan Manco frames the local scene in its international context and Giulia Riva, a street art blogger, spoke to the artists about their memories of that unique place.

Text in English and Dutch.

The Parisian café is an integral part of the city’s daily life no matter the weather, the time of day or year, the mood or neighbourhood. It is the spirit of the café, the dance of the waiters, the camaraderie of the patrons, the perpetual movement and joy, that brings Joanie Osburn to share a dollop of history, a shot of insight, and a boatload of images that celebrate the Paris café as a cultural heritage worth celebrating and preserving.

Café Society: Time Suspended, The Cafés, & Bistros of Paris is neither a history book nor a cookbook, but a non-traditional travel guide, coffee table, and lifestyle book about a treasured lifestyle. Osburn’s unique perspective, honed over many decades as an American in Paris exploring and capturing images of café society, captivates and amuses with anecdotes and insider recommendations.

Café Society: Time Suspended, The Cafés, and Bistros of Paris is a book that matters now as the world reopens and eager travellers return to Paris. The spirit of the café brings Joanie Osburn to share a dollop of history, a shot of insight, and a boatload of images that celebrate the Paris café as a cultural heritage worth preserving.