Fedele Maura Friede (b. 1997) is the 8th winner of the prestigious Horst-Janssen Graphic Art Prize awarded by the Claus Hüppe Foundation, which supports outstanding work in the field of graphic art. In the accompanying exhibition at Hamburger Kunsthalle entitled ‘der saum löst sich’ (the hem comes undone) Friede explores, through map-like lines and folds in paper, the relationship between space and landscape from microcosmos to sweeping panoramas. Her works hint at a hidden narrative without being too literal or following a set story. To achieve this, she makes use of various forms of expression that combine drawing in a broader sense with writing, allowing them to enter into a dialogue. The quality of her images lies in their inherent disorientation: Her drawings are constructed and legible from all angles of the sheet of paper. With their map-like lines and folds, Friede’s works elude a rigid structure so that the perspective constantly shifts. The lines create a social space in which varied types of perception can unfold.

The accompanying artist book Standortbestimmung combines texts and artworks by Friede, which are poetically examined in a contribution by the writer Tatjana von der Beek. In her words: “The thin wallpaper is cracked and sharp beneath my palms. If I were to suddenly drag my hands across the wall, it would lacerate my skin.”

Text in English and German.

The American design firm Simplehuman invites a multitude of global voices to celebrate 25 years of excellence and innovation in the functional home goods sector. Narrating the secret lives of their iconic homewares – from touch-free trash cans to shaving mirrors, shower caddies and laundry hampers, this playful compendium revels in the human stories that unfold from behind the brand’s polished facade. Featuring a deep-dive into design and production processes from Los Angeles to Taipei, alongside sensitive portraits of Simplehuman’s friends and design world family, this 200-page tome showcases the intricacies of industrial design alongside the deeply human side of our day-to-day domestic realities. 

Five Houses on the Wild Side is a visual feast showcasing the wildly imaginative, rules-free, cozy and sumptuous interiors Elena Agostinis has created for her family’s homes in New York, Montana, and Mexico.

Bold and courageous choices of colours and patterns, elements from the wildlife and fauna of her South African childhood, mixed and matched with the best of local artisanry, textiles purchased from souks and markets all around the world, giant papier-mâché’ animal garden sculptures, and wall art that spans from the elevated to the quirky and amusing, are Elena’s traits that will inspire readers to free-styling their own homes.

Elena’s irresistible style, originality, and use of wild colours has not only been restricted to her family homes, but inspired a quiet town in Upstate New York, Tannersville, to repaint its own Main Street store fronts, contributing to the town being selected in 2021 for the $10-million-dollars New York State Downtown Revitalization Initiative award.

Elena shares the inspiration from her childhood, travels, heritage, and family needs, encouraging readers to find their free spirit and apply it to their own interiors.

We associate food and drink with rituals, rules and traditions – they create community, but they can also be exclusive. How, where and with whom we eat says a lot about social structures.

For the ongoing project A Painting for a Family Dinner by Alina and Jeff Bliumis, the artist couple were invited to dinner by 62 families to date – in return they received a painting. A group photograph was taken afterwards. The resulting ‘family portraits’ tell a story of hospitality, exchange and artistic interaction, and invite us to take a fresh look at eating as a unifying practice.

Text in English and German.

Continuing the publication program that aims to disseminate the Collection through albums that present specific sections in a systematic manner, this volume focuses on Egyptian Art. The section was first studied by Christiane Desroches-Noblecourt, when the pieces that would be included in the Museum’s permanent exhibition were selected, and first published in 1991 by the curator of the section, Maria Helena Assam. 15 years on, new texts have been written by Egyptologist Luís Manuel de Araújo, a professor at the Arts Faculty of the University of Lisbon.

Calouste Gulbenkian mostly assembled his collection of Egyptian art between 1922 and 1929. Relatively small but very diverse, it includes pieces of exceptional quality from the various periods when art in pharaonic Egypt was at its height. The catalogue not only covers the pieces on display at the Museum, but also those kept in the storeroom.

Christian Krohg was a key figure in the Norwegian art community of the 1880s and 1890s, and was strongly influenced by the ideology of realism. In his view, art should have meaning for a broad segment of the population, not merely serve as wall decorations for the bourgeoisie. Three types of motifs were recurrent themes for Krohg during this period: the working-class hero, scenes from family life and “the fallen woman”. Many people responded to his literary and visual representations of the poverty-stricken girl Albertine. He depicted members of the working class with great sympathy in paintings such as Errand Boy Drinking Coffee and Woman Cutting Bread. The Gaihede family, fishermen from Skagen in Denmark, are portrayed in many everyday situations, as are members of Krohg’s own family. The catalogue sheds light on the subject matter of the exhibition, Krohg’s period of study in Berlin and its impact on him, his relationship with Georg Brandes, the novel Albertine and Krohg’s own use of photography as a model for his work and a medium.

Text in English and Norwegian.

Hotspot Leipzig and the subsequent Neue Leipziger Schule represent a highly influential movement within contemporary figurative art. Originating at the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig, this artistic tradition places strong emphasis on craftsmanship and realism. Artists such as Werner Tübke, Bernhard Heisig, and Wolfgang Mattheuer laid the foundation with their technically refined and socially engaged works. Following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Neue Leipziger Schule emerged, with artists like Neo Rauch, Rosa Loy, and Matthias Weischer blending realism with dreamlike and surreal elements.

Since 2009, the Drents Museum has devoted considerable attention to these movements. Exhibitions such as Realism from Leipzig and solo presentations by Rosa Loy, Kristina Schuldt, Mirjam Völker and Tilo Baumgärtel reflect the museum’s long-standing commitment to these artists. The museum has also built an extensive collection of works from both the original and the new Leipzig schools, including recent acquisitions like Baboom by Tilo Baumgärtel. The book includes essays by leading authors and a comprehensive selection of works.

Text in English and Dutch.

Sebastian Dannenberg (b.1980) sees painting as a universal action that transforms observations and considerations and lends them material form. Backspace brings together groups of works from the last 15 years and showcases Dannenberg’s interventionistic approach: his paintings can be found on ceilings and floors, in passageways, corners, or in the form of wall brackets. Often, they provide architecture with contours, disrupt the perception of space and open up new perspectives on the supposedly familiar. Precision and wit converge in a practice that combines the formal rigour of minimalistic methods with the subjectivity of handwriting and personal expression. Backspace documents, among other things, Dannenberg’s participation in exhibitions at institutions such as the Bundeskunsthalle in Bonn and the Kunsthalle Bremen, as well as various projects in public spaces. Three accompanying essays contextualize his extensive oeuvre and reveal a view of painting that constantly redefines its own boundaries.

Text in English and German.

Gumshoe is a new series of architectural books that introduces an original approach to the writing of architectural history. Emulating the detective novel, the focus is on actual buildings rather than on speculative designs and theories. The style and form is fresh and scholarly but also easy and enjoyable to read. In Mysteries of a Communist Cave, the second book in the Gumshoe series, Lytle Shaw conducts an investigation of Oscar Niemeyer’s building for the French Communist Party’s (PCF) central committee in Paris.

Designed in 1965, just as party theorists began to rethink many bedrock assumptions about representation, Oscar Niemeyer’s PCF building is a microcosm of the shifting political and architectural landscape of the 1960s. It is also a literal Marxist structure that can thus help us concretely picture just exactly what Structuralist Marxism might have been. Shaw draws out the PCF’s language and context one element at a time and puts the elegant curtain-wall building with its cave-like assembly hall into revelatory dialogue with interlocutors in film, philosophy, anthropology, and politics.

Perhaps the ultimate mystery of the communist cave is that its owners have not more often and more powerfully presented their landmark building as the vivid source of imagery it could be for the kind of world the PCF might like to construct.

Geneviève Bonnard and Denis Wœffray belong to a generation of architects from western Switzerland who established themselves following the decline of postmodernism. Their architectural language is characterised by minimalism, an awareness of materials and a focus on the location, while at the same time being experimental and multifaceted. This is reflected in the work of the Monthey-based practice in their diverse construction projects: from the primary school in Bovernier (2010), whose new volume nestles topographically at the foot of a slope and, with a wall that folds in both plan and section, provides the necessary outdoor spaces for breaks and sports, to the drop-in centre for adults in need in Saxon (2015), where communal areas are located on the ground floor and living spaces for short and longer stays are located on the upper floors, and whose choice of materials combines an industrial character with a homely atmosphere, to the Complexe Gare Sud in Siders (2019), whose sloping parapet bands allow the building envelope to shine in varying colour accents depending on the position of the sun.

Text in English and German.

Since 2009, historian and photographer Philipp Sarasin has been travelling the globe for his visual research on major cities and megacities. He visited Los Angeles, London, Berlin, Cairo, Nairobi, Dubai, Mumbai, Beijing, Jakarta, Panama City, and 10 other places, driven by his search for a relevant photographic image of the world in which we live. It is an urban world for more than half of humanity—and the trend is going up.

The Big City features some 120 of Sarasin’s colour photographs that are marked by his analytical observing eye. His focus is on urban space with all its images and signs, embedded in the faceless architecture that shapes 21st-century cities. Sarasin’s shots are neither architectural photography in the narrow sense nor classic street photography. He follows the tradition of urban photography, inspired in particular by the concepts of artists such as Stephen Shore, Thomas Struth, and Jeff Wall.

An essay by architectural historian and curator Martino Stierli and an introduction by Philipp Sarasin supplement the full-page colour plates in this striking volume.

Text in English and German.

A great American novelist, illustrated by a great American artist – now available in a collectable two-volume set.

In 1936, the Heritage Press, a publisher of fine editions, commissioned Norman Rockwell to illustrate Mark Twain’s Adventures of Tom Sawyer; four years later, they asked him to illustrate The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn as well. For each book, Rockwell created eight full-colour paintings and numerous pen-and-ink drawings, the product of extensive on-the-ground research in Twain’s hometown of Hannibal, Missouri. Famously, Rockwell even tried to buy some Hannibal residents’ old clothes, to dress his models in.

For years, the Rockwell editions of Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have been unavailable in stores. Now, Abbeville Press is proud to reissue them as a handsome new clothbound set. The colour plates are reproduced from new photography of Rockwell’s original paintings, the typesetting has been done anew to a high standard, and new introductions – illustrated with Rockwell’s rarely seen preliminary sketches – examine this unique encounter between two legendary chroniclers of America.

Also available: Treasure Island and Kidnapped boxed set ISBN 9780789214089

The National Galleries Barberini and Corsini contain paintings and sculptures of exceptional historical and artistic value. Page after page, through the masterpieces of many of the greatest Italian artists from the Middle Ages to the 18th century (Angelico, Raphael, Piero di Cosimo, Bronzino, Lotto, Tintoretto, Cortona, Caravaggio, Bernini, Reni, Guercino, Batoni, Canaletto) the reader can follow the development of art history. The collections also include artwork by Holbein, Murille and Van Dyck, besides a few antique pieces. In addition to the 100 entries, there are descriptions of particularly important elements that are part of the palaces’ architecture, such as Borromini’s spiral staircase, Bernini’s main staircase and the huge ceiling frescoed by Pietro da Cortona.

This is the story of the Reeves Collection of botanical paintings, the result of one man’s single-minded dedication to commissioning pictures and gathering plants for the Horticultural Society of London. Reeves went to China in 1812 and immediately on arrival started sending back snippets of information about manufactures, plants and poetry, goods, gods and tea to Sir Joseph Banks. Slightly later, he also started collecting for the Society but despite years of work collecting, labelling and packing plants and organising a team of Chinese artists until he left China in 1831, Reeves never enjoyed the same degree of recognition as other naturalists in China. This was possibly because he had a demanding job as a tea inspector. Reeves himself never claimed to be a professional naturalist and the plant collecting and painting supervision were undertaken in his own time. Furthermore, fan qui (foreign devils) were restricted to the port area of Canton and to Macau, so that plant-hunting expeditions further afield were impossible. Furthermore, Reeves never published an account of his life in the country, unlike Clarke Abel and Robert Fortune, but he left us some letters, notebooks, drawings and maps. The Collection is held at the Royal Horticultural Society’s Lindley Library in Vincent Square, London. It is a magnificent achievement. Not only are the pictures accurate and richly coloured plant portraits of plants then unknown in the West, but they stand as a record of plants being cultivated in nineteenth-century Canton and Macau. In John Reeves: Pioneering Collector of Chinese Plants and Botanical Art, Kate Bailey reveals John Reeves’ life as an East India Company tea inspector in nineteenth-century China and shows how he managed to collect and document thousands of Chinese natural history drawings, far more than anyone else at the time.

Davide Balliano (Turin, IT 1983) is an artist whose research operates on the thin line of demarcation between painting and sculpture. Utilising an austere, minimal language of abstract geometries in strong dialogue with architecture, his work investigates existential themes such as the identity of man in the age of technology and his relationship with the sublime.

Through a practice that is self-described as monastic, austere and concrete, Balliano’s meticulous paintings appear, upon first glance, clean and precise. However, closer inspection reveals scrapes and scratches that uncover the organic wooden surface underneath the layers of paint, as a decaying façade of abandoned modernistic intentions.

In addition to painting, Davide Balliano is also known for his sculptural work, which translates the visual vocabulary found in his paintings into solid objects, often in stainless steel or ceramic.

The volume, which offers a wide selection of works that offer a complete overview of his production, contains a conversation between Osman Can Yerebakane and the artist, and a critical text by Michele Robecchi.

Text in English and Italian.

Although Adam Elsheimer (1578-1610) painted on an almost miniature scale and died very young from, it was said, the overwork that resulted from the intensity of his methods, his paintings remain some of the most strangely poetical in the history of Western art. They were also extremely influential: Elsheimer’s often recondite subject matter, his astonishing ability to render night scenes, his uniquely lyrical use of landscape deeply affected generations of artists; one of the first to fall under his spell was Rubens. Most of what we know about Elsheimer’s life and sadly curtailed career comes from the biographies reprinted in this volume, which also includes personal reminiscences by friends and other painters. Unavailable for many years, these writings bring Elsheimer’s extraordinary art to life. A new introduction by Claire Pace sets the paintings and these writings into the context of their times.

Wolfgang Beltracchi is a phenomenon of the international art world. His name is inextricably entwined with one of the greatest upheavals in the global art market. Emulating numerous world-famous artists, he developed and painted new paintings, continued their narrations and biography, and concluded them with a forged signature. His wife Helene Beltracchi then smuggled them onto the art market. Many experts were deceived by Beltracchi’s stupendous skill and auctioneers cast many doubts aside in the interests of insatiable market demand, selling the paintings as authentic works by the purported artists.

Reading the artistic handwriting of a painting requires an exceptional willingness and ability to be able to empathise and identify with the artist, until you “can feel what the other feels” (Wolfgang Beltracchi). Through extensive discussions with the painter and his wife, the psychoanalyst Jeannette Fischer explored this capability that is so pronounced for Beltracchi. In her new book, she places this in relation to the disappearance of Beltracchi’s own signature. As with her previous highly successful book about the performance artist Marina Abramović, Jeannette Fischer has created an exceptionally insightful portrait of a fascinating artist personality.

In this lavishly produced volume, authors Virginia and Lee McAlester explore outstanding landmark houses that exemplify America’s major architectural and interior design styles from Colonial times to the mid-20th century. These 25 houses are illustrated with more than 350 specially commissioned full-colour photographs of interior and exterior views, 125 black-and-white line drawings and floor plans, historical paintings, and vintage photographs.

The text not only discusses the houses architectural innovations and design elements but also profiles the architects and their clients. The featured houses were built by many of the country’s leading architects – from Alexander Jackson Davis, Richard Morris Hunt, Henry Hobson Richardson, and McKim, Mead and White to Frank Lloyd Wright, the Greene brothers, and Walter Gropius – and owned by some of its most celebrated citizens, including Thomas Jefferson, Mark Twain, Thomas Edison, Jay Gould, the Guggenheim’s, the Phippses’, and the Vanderbilt’s. As a result, the book is as much a cultural history as it is an architectural study. The authors also include an informative discussion of each style as it can be seen in vernacular versions around the country.

Located all over the United States, most of the featured houses are open to the public, and the book provides their addresses and other helpful information for visitors. Great American Houses and Their Architectural Styles will be irresistible to all house lovers, architects, and designers, and will give readers a deeper understanding and appreciation of our rich architectural heritage

“This beautifully produced book will be inspiring to botanical artists and all those who are captivated by the orchid.” — Leisure Painter

“Through these paintings, stories of high stakes orchid breeding and exhibiting are explored, with a cast of characters who helped shape the horticultural world we know today, alongside the dedicated artists who still support their endeavours.” — Lovely Books

Orchids have long held a place of esteem and fascination in the horticultural world. In the 19th century, orchid collecting reached new fanatical heights, with explorers dispatched to every corner of the globe in search of new varieties that could be auctioned at extravagant prices, and orchids are still one of the most popular flowers to breed and buy to this day. These beautiful, diverse flowers are one of the two largest families of flowering plants, with over 30,000 species and over 181,500 hybrids and cultivars.

The RHS Orchid Committee have commissioned watercolours of over 7,000 award-winning hybrids that demonstrate particular value in their fabulous array of colours, patterns, sizes and shapes. Through these paintings, stories of high stakes orchid breeding and exhibiting are explored, with a cast of characters who helped shape the horticultural world we know today, alongside the dedicated artists who still support their endeavours.

In Venice, on the Grand Tour in 1731, the future fourth Duke of Bedford met with the great art agent, Consul Joseph Smith. The commission he placed resulted in 24 of the greatest and most typical works of Canaletto. First installed in Bedford House London, they were moved to their splendid position in the Dining Room at Woburn in 1800, where they have remained ever since. Fully illustrated with many details, this publication marks the first time these paintings have been reproduced in colour. An extensive introduction by the leading Canaletto scholar Charles Beddington puts these works into perspective.

Larry Poons (b. 1937) shot to fame while still in his twenties, on the strength of his “dot paintings,” in which dots or ellipses were meticulously arranged on brightly coloured fields, creating a rhythmic, pulsating effect. But within a few years, Poons first loosened the hard-edged precision of the dot paintings and then abandoned them entirely for an organic mode of abstraction based on vertical drips of flung paint. This marked the beginning of an uncompromising five-decade evolution that has finally led the artist back to a more intimate mode of painting with brushes — and his own hands. At every stage, Poons’s career has compelled the attention of critics and, in particular, other artists.

This handsome volume, the first full-length biocritical monograph on Poons, reproduces more than 140 of his most important works in full colour, some as spectacular gatefolds. The incisive text — a collaboration between four leading critics and historians — traces the development of the artist’s extraordinary career. Larry Poons is a necessary addition to the library of anyone with an interest in American art.

Path of Gold traces the significance and use of gold as an art historical phenomenon, from early cultures to the present day. In periods of fundamental shifts in value and spiritual reorientation, gold appears consistently as a meaningful element: the ultimate precious metal always symbolised temporal as well as spiritual values. In painting, gold always indicates a change, liberation, and transmutation.

Gold as a colour and means of artistic expression of utmost importance also links Swiss artists Heinrich Eichmann (1915-1970) and Barbara Diethelm, born in 1962. Eichmann created numerous plates and murals in different architectural contexts, of which the best-known are his “Gold Paintings.” In her work, Diethelm, who also works as a colour researcher, pursues the creative forces of nature and developed a new gold-coloured substance. Her paintings refer to concrete places where layers of human cultural development overlap and come to the fore.

In this book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at Helmhaus Zurich in spring 2022, full colour reproductions of Eichmann’s and Diethelm’s works are supplemented with texts by artist Barbara Diethelm, art historian Guido Magnaguagno, curator Daniel Morgenthaler, and the South African author and conservationist Linda Tucker.

Text in English and German.

In an age of fast-changing technologies, offering numerous ways of generating images, Elias Wessel challenges the conventional definition of a painting: he creates his “paintings” without resorting to traditional painting techniques and eschews classical genres. The artist’s abstract paintings – which in many ways show connections to painterly practices – are in fact made up of photographs and digital material.

Wessel, for example, takes photos of smartphone displays to produce monumental abstract compositions from the fingerprints left behind on them. He also documents his scrolling behaviour on social media platforms by using long-time exposure to superimpose accessed profiles and their contents: the result is visual and decontextualised structures. His other works present painterly-looking details of damaged displays: where else in the digital world can we experience such a close relationship with the canvas?

Above all, the quality of Elias Wessel’s working method lies in the way he links the fundamental discourses in the history of photography with the latest technology and current social debates. In so doing, he skilfully observes and questions the social consequences and instruments of digitalisation.

Text in English and German.