Markus Oehlen (*1956) is one of Germany’s most unmistakable painters. As an anarchic pictorial inventor, since the 1980s he has revolted against any visual convention and aesthetic convenience. Due to his integration of digital techniques and the contemporary reservoir of images, he creates stunningly hybrid paintings. Collage-like fragments of art history and popular culture interfere with each other. Abstraction and figuration swiftly blend into one another. With the utmost freedom, Oehlen expands the possibilities of today’s painting in his both daring and calculated pictorial experiments.

Though little known outside her native country, Helene Schjerfbeck (1862-1946) is one of Finland’s best-loved artists. Her career, which stretched from the late 1870s to the end of the Second World War, encompassed both Impressionism and Modernism. This book records an exhibition that marks the first time her works have been seen in the UK since she exhibited in London herself in 1890. It presents the full range of her exceptional paintings and drawings, with 70 works in all genres, including portrait, landscape and still-life. Schjerfbeck’s technique, her social and cultural context and her legacy are all examined in depth by the authors. The book also explores the role of the masquerade in Schjerfbeck’s work, and the impact of old-master paintings on her practice.

Wat Si Chum is unique among Sukhothai temples. Inside, lining the ceiling of a dark and narrow staircase leading to the open roof, are 86 inscribed stone reliefs depicting jatakas, the former lives of Gotama Buddha. Their unique character and arrangement have puzzled generations of scholars. In this original volume, a team of experts presents the latest evidence and new solutions.

This book offers the first-ever English translation of the inscriptions, photographs of the reliefs supplemented by 19th century jataka paintings from Wat Khrua Wan, Bangkok, essays on all aspects of the temple, as well as a discussion of the significance of jatakas in international Buddhist literature, art and ideology.

The Chinese artist Liu Xiaodong is one of the most famous contemporary artists in Asia. His oeuvre depicts moments of human life with an extraordinary immediacy and exceptional empathy. A family, a refugee boat, agricultural workers, or the demi-monde – he shows a wealth of subjects, representing the unlimited diversity of people and cultures. His work is characterised throughout by the greatest possible degree of openness and tolerance toward the other.

Kunsthalle and NRW-Forum Düsseldorf are staging a major double exhibition on the artist. It is the first retrospective show dedicated to him in the world. The accompanying monograph attempts to capture the tremendous complexity of Liu Xiaodong’s art. It contains a selection of works from 1983-2018, about 60 paintings, drawings, photographs, and film stills.

Liu has always sympathetically portrayed minorities both in and outside China. For the very first time, this book showcases paintings from his project ‘Transgender/Gay’ – a series of portraits from Berlin’s gay and transgender scene, which Liu created in 2018 while staying in the German capital.

Text in English and German.

Anthony Green’s idiosyncratic art is anchored in one central theme: family. It forms the core of his immediately recognisable work, revealing an intrinsic connection between his personal and artistic lives. The pictures in Green’s mind have no edges, so his paintings are not contained within a traditional shape. They have irregularly shaped supports, reflecting the unpredictable range of situations and emotions that characterise family life. Green has exhibited across the globe, and was shortlisted for the Jerwood Painting Prize in 1996. A distinguished and long-serving Royal Academician, Green has exhibited at every Summer Exhibition for the last five decades. He was elected ARA in 1971 and RA in 1977, after winning that year’s Summer Exhibit of the Year. He served for some years as Chairman of the RA’s Exhibitions Committee. He lives and works in Cambridgeshire. Contents: Preface and essay by Martin Bailey; plate section; endmatter including a family tree, chronology, a section on Green’s exhibitions, public collections of his work, works included in RA Summer Exhibitions, Further Reading and a Catalogue Raisonné of paintings.

Artist Ellen Marie harks back to the craft of the old masters. A technical style she perfected at the Barcelona Academy of Art. Lux Æterna, Latin for ‘Eternal Light’, is a series of 57 paintings in which we follow the process of a man on his way to self-realisation.

In the first act, we find him writhing in agony, tormented by a blindfold, which prevents him from seeing the light that surrounds him. In act two the blindfold has come off and gradually a dance unfolds, a dialogue between the light falling on his body and the life forces welling up from within him. In the third act, blobs of paint splash from the canvas. The form falls apart and transmutes into an unrecognisable mass that contains merely the suggestion of a figure. In the last part our man finally finds kinship with like-minded souls bathing in the divine light.

The story visualises the artist’s inner quest for Truth, Light and Freedom. The thematic repetition gave her the opportunity to deepen the technical aspect of oil paint and to experiment. Art critic Koen Van Damme composed five accompanying poems.

Text in English and Dutch.

His mostly precisely composed, large-format paintings, with deserted spaces as their main motif, made Ben Willikens (*1939) famous in the second half of the 1970s. The exhibition and accompanying catalogue present nearly 50 works created between 1971 and 2021 and thus span the artist’s entire oeuvre. Three groups of works form the central pillars: the Anstaltsbilder of the 1970, in whose motifs Willikens processes a dark chapter in his life, and the series ORTE (PLACES) And ORTE 2 (PLACES 2), which deal with Willikens’s examination of the architecture of the National Socialist period. There are also various works from the series Räume der Moderne (Spaces of Modernity).

Text in English and German.

In the last quarter of the 19th century, the Netherlands was a popular travel destination for artists. The American artists Gari Melchers and George Hitchcock visited the country in the 1880s. In 1884, they settled in Egmond aan Zee, then little more than a small, isolated fishing village. There they painted the life of the people and the landscape. Melchers soon garnered international success with The Sermon, while Hitchcock caused a furore with A Tulip Field. The presence of Melchers and Hitchcock in Egmond exerted a great attraction on professionals. A large crowd of artists travelled to Egmond, especially after Hitchcock in 1891 started his summer courses, which attracted remarkably many female artists. Among the artists who worked there were James Jesuba Shannon, Henri Moret, Florence Upton and Letta Crapo Smith. Longing for Egmond offers an overview of the developments in the Egmond artist colony and the key role played by Hitchcock and Melchers fulfilled there.

Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen has been collecting Surrealist art since 1965. In something over half a century, what began with a single purchase has now grown into a world-class core collection with works by Dalí, Magritte, Man Ray, De Chirico, Ernst and many others. Surrealism, which started as a literary movement, is not a school, but rather a collective attitude or lifestyle in which automatism, chance and the subconscious are key. The museum’s collection includes paintings, sculptures, objects, drawings, prints and photographs – as well as a large number of Surrealist publications, magazines, manifestos and pamphlets. This dream collection has now been brought together in a catalogue raisonné for the first time.

The catalogue raisonné contains three introductory essays. Sandra Kisters, the current Head of the Collection and Research Department, provides an outline of the Surrealist movement. Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art, Saskia van Kampen-Prein, explains the acquisition history and establishment of the museum’s Surrealist art collection. Surrealism expert Laurens Vancrevel examines the museum’s unique, often neglected collection of Surrealist publications. The essays are followed by the catalogue, consisting of 108 short texts about the artworks. Most of the texts were written by Marijke Peyser, who was awarded her doctorate in 2008 with her dissertation on the Zodiaque, a circle of patrons around Salvador Dalí. The Duchamp texts are by Bert Jansen, who obtained his doctorate with his thesis on Marcel Duchamp in 2015.

The myth of a wild, untouched landscape is persistent in American history. Imaginary wilds helped define an American identity in the early nineteenth century when Thomas Cole produced a series of masterwork paintings of American landscapes. And today the myth of imaginary wilds continues to have a major influence on attitudes toward landscape, nature, and the use of resources extracted from the earth. This book presents a series of student-designed architectural projects for a new gallery building sited within the landscape of Cedar Grove, Thomas Cole’s historic home and studio in Catskill, New York. Cole’s artistic legacy can be interpreted in different ways because he was concerned with landscapes and nature as both material and ideal conditions. Complexities arising from considering landscapes and nature as both real and ideal create a productive frame for exploring how architects might design buildings in relation to landscapes and nature. Throughout the book, these relationships are seen to play out in five different directions under the guidance of five different design studio instructors. The architectural projects presented here are contextualised in relation to landscape, nature, and Thomas Cole’s artistic legacy in a series of essays by a distinguished group of designers and thinkers. 

Maggie’s Cancer Caring Centres are quietly extraordinary spaces, inspired by a belief in the healing powers of architecture. It was while suffering from advanced cancer that Maggie Keswick Jencks conceived the idea of a beautifully designed space offering support to those affected by the disease and, following her death in 1995, the first centre opened in Edinburgh in 1996. There are now 17 centres around the UK. In September 2011 Timothy Hyman was asked to be artist in residence at the Maggie’s Centre at the Charing Cross Hospital in London, and this book records his drawings, paintings and reflections.

“Forget ordinary stationery! teNeues, the luxury German publisher, transforms notecards, journals, puzzles and even clipboards into works of art, with its latest lineup highlighting paintings by celebrated names such as Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Claude Monet.” – Life & Style Magazine

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement. His paintings, characterised by luxurious, radiant colour, mosaic-like patterns, abstract floral motifs, and expressive lines, are among the most popular and celebrated works of the Art Nouveau style.

This soft-covered paperback notebook has full-colour artwork on the front and back cover by the best illustrators and artists from around the world. 140 pages of 5mm dot-grid paper is an excellent canvas for bullet journaling, list-making, all forms of writing and doodling. Bring it everywhere you go. Handsome exposed, section-sewn binding means the notebook lies flat when open on any page.

Until the early seventeenth century, the distribution of paintings and other art works was in the hands of the artists, but after that to an increasing extent it was taken on by specialists.The most important art dealers were active in Amsterdam, the art centre par excellence. Hendrick Uylenburgh and his son Gerrit Uylenburgh were leading figures among these dealers. The Uylenburghs, father and son, ran an art business and at the same time headed a painters’ workshop where renowned artists worked. Rembrandt worked for this business from 1631 to 1635. He painted countless commissioned portraits and as well as historical paintings and ‘tronies’ also did grisailles and etchings. While working for this business he met Saskia Uylenburgh, a cousin of the art dealer, whom he married in 1634. Uylenburgh & Son provides insight into the nature and significance of the Uylenburghs’ enterprise and also discusses their investors and customers. A great deal of new material has been found about the Uylenburgh family and is presented here for the first time.

Father Andrew, an artist and priest of the Archdiocese of New York, recounts his impressions during a peripatetic retreat in Tuscany some years ago, under the guidance of Timothy Verdon an art historian and Catholic priest. Timothy Verdon’s hope was to help the listeners open to the spiritual as well as aesthetic beauty of the buildings, sculptures and paintings seen and Father Andrew’s book tells that something of this sort happened, at least in his case. Tuscan Résumé is an ‘inspired’ work, in response to the same Spirit that touched the architects and artists whose masterpieces Father Andrew describes.

The essays in this lavishly illustrated volume offer a multi-faceted portrait of American financier J. Pierpont Morgan (1837–1913) as a collector of art. A riveting exploration of Morgan’s acquisitions from antiquities to medieval manuscripts to Old Master paintings and European decorative arts, Morgan—The Collector introduces the reader to how and why he amassed his vast collection. The lively essays also serve as a tribute to Linda Roth, curator at Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT, who dedicated much of her forty-year career to researching Morgan and the over 1,500 works from his collection now in the museum. This much-needed publication focuses on Morgan as a collector and is directed at both a scholarly and more general audience that is interested in the history of collecting, America in the Gilded Age, Pierpont Morgan, and European 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.

“Forget ordinary stationery! teNeues, the luxury German publisher, transforms notecards, journals, puzzles and even clipboards into works of art, with its latest lineup highlighting paintings by celebrated names such as Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo, Jean-Michel Basquiat and Claude Monet.” – Life & Style Magazine

Gustav Klimt (1862–1918) was an Austrian symbolist painter and a founding member of the Vienna Secession movement. His paintings, characterised by luxurious, radiant colour, mosaic-like patterns, abstract floral motifs, and expressive lines, are among the most popular and celebrated works of the Art Nouveau style.

Our QuickNotes boxed notecards are full colour, collectable greeting / notecards that are blank inside and can be used to convey personal greetings, thank-yous and invitations. This QuickNotes notecard box holds 20 full colour cards with and 20 classic white envelopes. 4 notecard styles are included, all wrapped up in a keepsake box with magnetised lid.

Danish artist Michael Kvium, born 1955, works in painting, prints, drawing and watercolour, and sculpture, as well as performance and stage design. His paintings and graphic works often resemble comic strip art or extensions of 17th-century Baroque paintings, depicting the more negative aspects of Western culture. Motifs include grotesque monsters, half man half woman, sometimes approaching self-portraits. He is expressing himself in a personal world of images. His works seem familiar, making the viewer smile at one time and causing disgust at another, yet in their strange way all sharing this familiarity. Kvium defines and expresses his wholly personal and unflinching understanding of powerful human presence in an area unexplored by others.

This first comprehensive monograph takes the reader through Kvium’s entire career since his beginnings in the 1980s. It reveals the various lines in his work from early experiments as a young artist in the world of bikers to an outspoken critic of our current Western society.

Magritte, Bacon, Ensor, Moore, Jordaens, Rubens … These were just some of the world-famous names on display at the MAS. The not-to-be-missed exhibition ‘Rare and Indispensable’ brought a unique selection of masterpieces from the Flemish masterpiece list and has been captured here in this accompanying catalogue. Works of art you normally would have to travel all over Flanders to see, or which were never even publicly accessible, could be temporarily admired in one museum hall. All in honour of the 20th anniversary of the ‘Flemish Masterpiece Decree’.

‘Rare and Indispensable‘ was an absolute must-see that took the visitor on an art-historical walk along several masterpieces from Flemish collections. Some 35 large and small museums, as well as churches, libraries and private collectors temporarily lended masterpieces from their collections. All of them works that have been included in the Flemish Masterpiece List since 2003.

Famous paintings by Hugo van der Goes, Rubens, Jordaens, Ensor, Magritte and Bacon, sculptures by Lucas Faydherbe and Henry Moore, as well as precious silver, medieval manuscripts and a rare piece of furniture by Pierre Gole, ébeniste du roi of the French king Louis XIV, were available to be admired in one place at the same time.

Curators Thomas Leysen and Ben Van Beneden, members of the ‘Topstukkenraad’ (Masterpiece council), selected all the masterpieces for this exhibition.

Aldo Mozzini. Casematte is the first major book on the work of Swiss artist Aldo Mozzini. It features his energetic art through more than 200 illustrations along with texts by distinguished Swiss curators. A conversation with the artist rounds off the volume, which highlights Mozzini’s contribution to the contemporary art scene in Switzerland.

Born in Locarno in 1956, Aldo Mozzini has lived and worked in Zurich since the 1980s. Galleries and museums in Switzerland, Italy, and France have shown his works in solo and group exhibitions, and he has won the Swiss Art Award twice, in 2012 and 2019. His oeuvre comprises drawing, painting, objects, photography, sculpture, and installation, moving restlessly from one form of expression to another.

The book reviews 40 years of Mozzini’s career and explores various aspects of his humorous and poetic art. The impressive body of his paintings and graphic works is closely linked to the sculptures and installations that remain Aldo Mozzini’s preferred media.

Text in English, German and Italian.

Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899) is revered as one of the most eminent exponents of symbolism and an inventive painter of alpine motifs of the fin de siècle. More recently, he has also been acknowledged as a leading early modernist. Exhibitions of his work regularly attract vast audiences. Yet a number of Segantini’s key works have not been on public display for many years and none of the recent books on him really covers the entirety of his oeuvre. This new monograph fills this gap.

An introductory essay on Segantini’s life and work also investigates the reception of his work over more than a century and looks at his role as paragon, for example for the Futurists or for Joseph Beuys. The core of the book form sixty paintings from all stages of Segantini’s career in full-page plates, with descriptive texts and comments illustrated with details and additional images. The easy-to-read texts offer latest findings on aspects such as topography, iconography, the importance of light, on the modern style of divisionism in Segantini’s later work and, on his biography.

Giovanni Segantini (1858-1899) is revered as one of the most eminent exponents of symbolism and an inventive painter of alpine motifs of the fin de siècle. More recently, he has also been acknowledged as a leading early modernist. Exhibitions of his work regularly attract vast audiences. Yet a number of Segantini’s key works have not been on public display for many years and none of the recent books on him really covers the entirety of his oeuvre. This new monograph fills this gap.

An introductory essay on Segantini’s life and work also investigates the reception of his work over more than a century and looks at his role as paragon, for example for the Futurists or for Joseph Beuys. The core of the book form sixty paintings from all stages of Segantini’s career in full-page plates, with descriptive texts and comments illustrated with details and additional images. The easy-to-read texts offer latest findings on aspects such as topography, iconography, the importance of light, on the modern style of divisionism in Segantini’s later work and, on his biography.

Text in Italian.

Günther Wizemann, born 1953 in Graz (Austria), came to Switzerland as a child in 1960. He graduated from Zurich’s School of Design and has since been working as a painter and concept artist. Studying the Russian modernists raised the question of what he could possibly paint in the aftermath of Kazimir Malevich and Aleksander Rodchenko. Equally, Mario Merz’s installation Che fare? or, as Barnett Newman put it, What to paint? were statements that became programmatic for Wizemann’s work. The 43 paintings of The Black Garden Wizemann has created between 2003 and 2013 are a possible response to his queries. Done in oil and resin on canvas, they are the result of lengthy artistic processes and a multitude of layers of paint, forming an inner and outer image space. Featured in its entirety for the first time in this new book, the paintings are published alongside essays placing Wizemann’s largest series to date in art history. The accompanying texts reveal formal and conceptual relations, ranging from the Renaissance to his contemporaries. Starting from the title The Black Garden they also look at literary and philosophical connotations. Text in English and German.