This richly illustrated monograph delves into the innovative output of one of the world’s most prolific international design and architecture practitioners, Tokyo-based Shigeru Ban. Canvassing an enormous compilation of works, this title is a significant contribution to IMAGES’ stable of works showcasing renowned architects from around the globe. This book features an array of innovative projects, from commercial and residential innovation strategies to humanitarian works, such as emergency shelters made from paper and modular shelters for earthquake victims. Shigeru Ban’s visionary residential design philosophies encompass timber hybrid structures, including a building constructed from cardboard tubes; the tallest hybrid timber structure in the world for a residential tower in Vancouver; as well as the new home designed for the Aspen Art Museum, which features woven wooden cladding. His innovation extends to the industrial design of an architect’s scale pen used for drawing. This book also helps to relay Shigeru Ban’s contemporary discourse on architectural culture, and how it is moving in new directions. This title is a must-have for any serious aficionado of modern architecture, innovative thinking, and design.

This publication, which features 220 large-format photographs, offers us a visual tour of the houses that belong to the Duchess of Alba in Madrid (The Liria Palace), Seville (The Palace of Las Dueñas), Salamanca (The Palace of Monterrey), Ibiza and San Sebastián.

The images were taken by the renowned interior photographer, Ricardo Labougle, whilst the architectural notes were written by the architect and university professor, Rafael Manzano. The whole project was coordinated by Naty Abascal.

Born in 1926, the goddaughter of Queen Victoria Eugenia of Spain, the Duchess of Alba holds the world record for the most aristocratic titles. Indeed, her full name is Maria del Rosario Cayetana Alfonsa Victoria Eugenia Francisca Fitz-James Stuart y de Silva and she is a duchess seven times over, a countess 19 times and a marquesa 23 times.

The 86-year-old noble, who is internationally famous for holding more titles than anyone else in the world (and for having fabulously eccentric style) is head of the 530-year-old House of Alba, and as such is entitled to ride her horse into Seville Cathedral, and according to protocol does not have to kneel before the Pope. It is said she could walk from the northern tip of Spain to the southernmost point without leaving her native lands. In 1947, the Duchess married Don Pedro Luis Martinez de Irujo y Artacoz, son of the Duke of Sotomayor. The wedding was considered to be the last great feudal wedding in Spain and attracted the attention of the international media.

The Duchess has been the subject of much media attention in her native Spain, and is admired for her eccentric and bohemian fashion sense. A famed beauty in her youth, she once famously declared that her style icon was “myself”.

‘To critics who said that the full-lipped so-called ‘Beardsley mouth’, which adorned many of his women, was ‘inexpressive and ugly’, the artist countered, ‘Well, let them criticise. It’s my mouth and not theirs. I like big mouths. People like the little mouth – the “Dolly Varden” mouth, if that describes it better. A big mouth is the sign of character and strength. Look at Ellen Terry with her great, strong mouth. In fact, I haven’t any patience with small-mouthed people.’ ‘The popular idea of a picture is something told in oil or writ in water to be hung on a room’s wall or in a picture gallery to perplex an artless public.’ ‘To my mind, there is nothing so depressing as a Gothic cathedral. I hate to have the sun shut out by the saints.’ ‘What a nice ample creature George Sand is: like a wonderful old cow with all her calves.’ And other witty, urbane insights on life, art, and culture, illustrated with selected drawings from his Grotesques series.

Rubens’ Antwerp: A Guide highlights the life and work of Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) in a comprehensive and accessible way. The Antwerp museums and churches contain about a hundred paintings, drawings, designs and sketches by Rubens. A large part of those are public. Antwerp is the only city in the world that is so deeply rooted with Peter Paul Rubens and his baroque heritage. Rubens’ Antwerp: A Guide allows you to experience Rubens and the Baroque in an intense way. This multifaceted acquaintance with Rubens goes hand in hand with a dive into the glorious past of the vibrant city of culture, where the master’s life largely took place. A mapped walk takes you to the various places in Antwerp where Rubens’ work can be seen. You can visit his house with the studio, where so many masterpieces came about. You also visit the homes of his friends Balthasar Moretus and Nicolaas Rockox, and you can admire paintings of him in the historic churches in the rooms for which they were made. 2018 is the official Rubens’ year.

This publication brings together over 60 works on paper created from 2005 to the present day by London-based artist Neil Gall (born 1967, Aberdeen), whose works balance the profound with the absurd.

In works that buzz with art historical reference, Gall has consistently explored matters of perception and mimesis through the visual language of household detritus. He translates the visceral and psychological interactions between materials and their surfaces – corrugated cardboard and pressed tinfoil, ping-pong balls enshrouded in black tape – to an unsettling, surreal and sometimes erotic effect.

Essays by art historian Lexi Lee Sullivan and artist Alexander Ross are augmented by thoughtful insights from gallerist George Newall and an introduction from Gall’s dealers David Nolan and Aurel Scheibler.

Benjamin Rubloff’s paintings in this book are all based on fragments of found graffiti. For many years, the artist photographed tags as he walked around the city, mainly because he was interested in their painterly qualities: the speed of a gesture, the way they sit on a wall, their random drips and splashes. As an experiment, he began copying these marks into oil paintings, altering the scale and framing, but otherwise aiming for an exact transcription of the original tag. His intention was to create abstract paintings that would not bear the qualities of his own hand. Instead, they would be records of the traces of others.

When he retraced his steps — sometimes years later — to find the original tags, Rubloff often found them gone. Sometimes the sites themselves had been radically altered. He began to write about these places in conjunction with the paintings, exploring the intersection of their histories with his own. As a result, each painting in the book is accompanied by a text and a photograph of the site, intended to provide an anchor back to the city itself.

Was there such a thing as ‘shitposting’ in the 17th century? Is Rembrandt really always a safe investment? What florid dramas lie behind the scenes in Rachel Ruysch’s still life paintings, and has Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp finally gone to the dogs? The Tyrolean State Museums are taking a closer look at their small but nonetheless impressive collection of Dutch paintings, posing topical contemporary questions in relation to the works of Rembrandt and Co. Selected paintings dating from the 16th to the 18th century are presented and staged anew through essay-style texts that are not meant to be taken too seriously. The resulting questions relating to the role of artists, the value of art, or the significance of climate change hundreds of years ago are an invitation to see Dutch painting with fresh eyes and to view art history as an entertaining dialogue between the past and the present. 

The series contains a collection of masterpieces by famous Chinese painters of all ages, with a rich variety of subjects and styles. It presents a selection of paintings from the Tang and Song dynasties, including figure and landscape paintings, showing the splendid charm of traditional Chinese painting at its peak from multiple perspectives. The volumes are accompanied by expert interpretations, analysing the characteristics of the paintings and the key points of appreciation, and guiding the reader through the beauty of the paintings in an insightful text.

When an apple falls to the ground, we see the effect of gravity. Yet not all laws of nature are as apparent. Swiss artist Barbara Ellmerer uses invisible principles of physics, biology, and cosmology as her starting point and translates them into paintings. She sends us into the realm of colours and shapes in which forces, movements, and processes from nature are synonymously realised and palpable. Ellmerer thereby also captures something inexplicable, which reminds us of how steeped in wonder the world still is.

Barbara Ellmerer – Sense of Science presents a selection of oil paintings and works on paper created by the artist between 2010 and 2020. Ellmerer’s sometimes large-format pictures are shown both in full as well as in enlarged details to show the intricacies of her brush stroke, colour qualities, surfaces, depths, movements, and emphases. This combination also makes productive use of the migration of media – from painting to photography – and its reproduction in the book. In an accompanying essay, Laura Corman, a quantum physicist, explains how Ellmerer’s art relates to natural science. A contribution by Nadine Olonetzky, culture journalist and photo expert, describes art’s capabilities of rendering invisible processes comprehensible.

Text in English and German.

The series of Collection of Ancient Calligraphy and Painting Handscrolls: Paintings has a large time span, rich themes and diverse styles. It selects 10 paintings from the last five dynasties of ancient China (Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming and Qing Dynasties), including vivid portraits, exquisite landscape paintings, and meticulous paintings of flowers and birds.
The artworks in this boxed set are presented in the traditional format of a handscroll, which can be extended indefinitely, so that the postscripts and observations of later generations can be directly followed by the end of the works.

During his reign, King Charles I (1600-1649) assembled one of Europe’s most extraordinary art collections. Indeed, by the time of his death, it contained some 2,000 paintings and sculptures. Charles I: King and Collector explores the origins of the collection, the way it was assembled and what it came to represent. Authoritative essays provide a revealing historical context for the formation of the King’s taste. They analyse key areas of the collection, such as the Italian Renaissance, and how the paintings that Charles collected influenced the contemporary artists he commissioned. Following Charles’s execution, his collection was sold. This book, edited by the curators of a spectacular exhibition at the Royal Academy, reunites its most important works in sumptuous detail. Featuring paintings by such masters as Van Dyck, Rubens and Raphael, this striking publication offers a unique insight into this fabled collection.

Filled with Bridget Riley’s mesmerising stripe paintings, this catalogue conveys the artist’s unique development in using stripes to animate the entire visual field.

Published in conjunction with the Bridget Riley: The Stripe Paintings 1961-2012 exhibition at Galerie Max Hetzler, Berlin, key paintings and studies of Riley’s stripe works are collected for the first time. This well-illustrated title demonstrates how Riley regularly returned to this seemingly simple pictorial device to achieve complex, surprising results.

The volume includes full-colour illustrations alongside important texts by John Elderfield and Paul Moorhouse – in both English and German – which situate these exhilarating works within the artist’s oeuvre and a broader art historical context.

The series contains a collection of masterpieces by famous Chinese painters of all ages, with a rich variety of subjects and styles. It presents a selection of paintings from the Tang and Song dynasties, including figure and landscape paintings, showing the splendid charm of traditional Chinese painting at its peak from multiple perspectives. The volumes are accompanied by expert interpretations, analysing the characteristics of the paintings and the key points of appreciation, and guiding the reader through the beauty of the paintings in an insightful text.

Born and bred New Yorker Jill Gill is equal parts artist and author, commentator and collector, a true inamorata of the ever-changing city. Since the mid-1950s, she has captured the buildings and streetscapes of the city (especially those about to be lost to urban renewal) in a series of more than 100 watercolour and ink paintings. The New York she portrays is one of classic movies, vintage postcards, and hand-painted wall advertisements.

The scenes in Site Lines: Lost New York, 1954–2022 extend from Midtown South, home of the artist from the mid-1940s to the mid-1960s, to the Upper East Side, where she and her family lived in a historic Rhinelander townhouse. Along the way she passes through Midtown, including storied Fifth Avenue and the Theater District, and the Upper West Side.

Her work includes buildings both important and unimportant that would otherwise have been lost to memory: the glorious Helen Hayes Theater, the Art Deco Horn & Hardart Automat on 57th Street, and blocks upon blocks of ordinary yet distinctive retail and commercial structures. In addition, Gill includes buildings that have themselves been quietly observing the changing city, often changing along with it: St. Bart’s, the Villard Houses, and MoMA before it “ate” 53rd Street. Each scene is accompanied by text that blends in-depth research with first-hand observation.

Kenton Nelson’s art is rooted in the collective visual memory of American popular culture. His paintings navigate between nostalgia and enigma, between a perfect surface and hidden tensions. Stylistically, they draw on elements of public murals from the New Deal era, simultaneously calling to mind the visual language of advertisements from the 1930s to 1950s and American Scene Painting. However, this controlled, formal order conceals a quiet melancholy and the sensation that this supposedly perfect world is merely imagined.

This publication, created in collaboration with Galerie Nikolaus Ruzicska, Salzburg, and Peter Mendenhall Gallery, Pasadena, honours Kenton Nelson’s oeuvre with numerous images, alongside an accompanying essay and an interview with the artist.

Text in English and German.

Zhong Kui – the only “God of all response” in Chinese civilisation. He is not a prominent god who is always worshiped, but the legend surrounding him has been passed down to this day. This generous patron saint eventually became a classic symbol of Chinese culture. Ancient and modern paintings of Zhong Kui have no been gathered together in one book.

Portraits of Zhong Kui by Timeless Masters includes 120 high-definition Zhong Kui paintings of 97 ancient and modern masters, such as Xu Beihong, Qi Baishi, Li Keran, Zhang Daqian, Fan Zeng, Fu Baoshi, etc. Masters of different eras and different painting styles have distinguished themselves, constantly enriching Zhong Kui’s image in the long river of history. Not only is the subject matter numerous, the book also includes a variety of works such as vertical axes, fans, and lenses. In addition to the paintings, more than 80 abstracts and inscriptions from different dynasties included in this book, as important textual supplements, will follow the history of the trace of Zhong Kui.

Paintings featuring harpsichords, virginals and organs offer us a glimpse of gorgeous interiors, amorous scenes and finely‐dressed ladies ‐ and the occasional young man too ‐ at the keyboard. Keyboard instruments can also be the key to decoding an allegory, myth or hidden message in a painting. This exhibition catalogue showcases a collection of such paintings and also includes painted harpsichord and virginal lids as well as original instruments. Loans from the National Gallery in London, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam, the Suermondt‐Ludwigmuseum in Aachen and many other museums and collectors offer a delight for eyes and ears.

Featured artists include Frans Floris, Jacob Jordaens, Maerten de Vos, the Francken family, Jan Miense Molenaer, Jan Steen, Gerard Dou, Gabriël Metsu en Jacob Ochtervelt.

Ilya Kabakov (*1933) is one of the former Soviet Union’s most important and influential international artists today. After the two-volume catalogue raisonné of paintings (2008) and 2017’s catalogue raisonné of installations, we are now publishing a complete overview of Kabakov’s recent paintings.

Different ideas, phases, and styles unfold across the 350 works of art, but the artist’s inimitable signature can always be recognised. Visual themes include, for example, the colour white, the relationship between complete and incomplete, and the combination of either various styles or of painting and photography. Still, all of the pieces have one thing in common: they all pursue a conceptual approach and make references to art history.