About half of the work Rembrandt did in Leiden consisted of paintings, etchings and drawings showing older people. In these works an old woman is frequently portrayed who has traditionally been held to be Rembrandt’s mother, Neeltje Willemsdr. van Zuijdtbroek. Whether Rembrandt really depicted her or whether this is a myth which has persisted for centuries is still not clear. This book discusses the creation of this myth, which although not firmly based on facts, has been an essential part of Rembrandt’s image for centuries. The works for which Rembrandt’s mother was the model and which are reproduced in this book give an idea of the young artist’s iconographic interests. For instance, Rembrandt depicted her as a prophetess, attentively reading a book. Sometimes she plays an active role in religious or allegorical pictures. A similar model can also be recognised in paintings by Rembrandt’s friend Jan Lievens and his first pupil, Gerrit Dou. By showing the paintings of these young masters the book examines the artistic relationships between them. If offers a unique opportunity to compare early, closely related works and to gain a clearer picture of the collaboration among these artists.

Tanz auf der Klinge. Hold Me is the first monograph by the artist Willehad Eilers aka Wayne Horse (b. 1981). This publication features works created between 2018 and 2023, presenting the many facets that make up the artist’s universe—from blind drawing to graffiti and monumental oil paintings. Eiler’s visual world, made up of grotesquely lewd scenes, reveals a generous portion of humor while exploring the darkest depths of society. Studio images and photographs from Eiler’s everyday life shed light on his creative process. This visual journey is accompanied by interviews with the artist, brief explanatory texts, and the notes that in many cases served as the starting points for the works depicted here.

Text in English and German.

Using new techniques and new materials, Bernhard Huber creates abstract paintings in glass in large formats that shift on multiple planes between transparency, reflection and opacity. His colours are vibrant and clear. Rarely does he indulge in an opulent riot of colour but instead mainly produces stringent creations notable for their cool colour tones. The effects achieved are precisely calculated yet never overwhelmingly so. In this respect, Huber’s affinities with Concrete art, with which he also shares some of the formal qualities of his works, are revealed. Glass is for Huber a pivotal working material yet is not his sole medium. He has made the light-forming properties of glass the core of his artistic agenda, which goes beyond glass as a medium to encompass working in the fields of painting, sculpture and architecture. Colour and light have become his media of choice, with which he forms surfaces and spaces. He reacts sensitively to available architectural situations; his works are ‘site-specific’ to the utmost yet also stunningly configure the space surrounding them. He never simply makes stained-glass windows – he always forms several visual planes so that the ‘window principle’ is always extended into the interior space. Thus the glass surface becomes light sculpture and this in turn forms light space.

Text in English and German.

Renaissance Children puts child portrait painting from the 15th and 16th century in the spotlight and tells the historical, pedagogical and artistic story of the most remarkable paintings.

In the 15th and 16th century, the House of Habsburg ruled over a large part of Europe, and would turn into one of the most important European royal families in world history. In that time, Mechelen was the centre of education, where many Habsburg princes and princesses spent a large part of their youth, among whom Margaret of Austria and Charles V. Other powerful families also sent their children to Mechelen – the most famous of whom is perhaps Anne Boleyn, who would later become queen of England. Renaissance Children goes back to that Belgian city, where many portrait paintings of children originated. The book specifically focusses on child portraits of top artists, such as Jan Gossart, Bernard van Orley and Juan de Flandes. Includes unique paintings by Flemish Masters, such as Jan Gossart, Bernard van Orley and Juan de Flandes Insight into educational values and techniques from the 15th and 16th century The first publication about art and education at one the most important royal houses in European history

“Silence is a message. The title of this book is anything but accidental. Silence rules in Hans Vandekerckhove’s paintings: a deafening but salutary stillness, as salutary as their intense colours and undulating, almost fluid shapes.” — Eric Rinckhout

In his work, Hans Vandekerckhove (b. 1957) embraces the complexity of life in a unique and compelling way. His art is a harmonious synthesis of personal impressions, art historical references and a deep, intimate connection with nature, architecture and his environment. Vandekerckhove’s distinctive approach combines early Renaissance fresco techniques with the refined glazing of the Flemish Primitives. The result is a poetic visual language that hovers between tangible wonder and a world full of vulnerability.

With contributions by Eric Rinckhout, Christophe Vekeman, Peter Verhelst and Els Wuyts.

Text in English and Dutch.

Peter Paul Rubens (1577-1640) is the most important painter of sketches in the history of European art. His Italian and Flemish predecessors had for the most part prepared their paintings by using drawings. Rubens transformed this process by systematically making sketches in colour, with oil paint, and nearly always on panel supports. Rubens’s oil sketches were essentially a new form of painting. They brought together the design and colour stages of preliminary work. Because their purpose was to advance another work of art, oil sketches demanded less effort and time than the final products, and this translated into a less polished finish and smaller size. Rubens’s sketches invite us to indulge in his art. They are powerful, vivid renditions of a variety of themes, from ancient history and mythology to religion, still life and portraits. They combine seriousness of purpose and a zest for life, transmitted through a masterly lightness of touch. Their small size and appearance of incompleteness draw us in and entice us to look closely. Their sheer quality is a great source of pleasure and learning. This catalogue presents detailed studies and superb illustrations of eighty-two of Rubens’s most eloquent oil sketches, and two essays explaining the historical context from which they emerged, their salient features and how they were viewed by contemporaries.

In a spectacular move, the Albertina presents Sean Scully from a hitherto unfamiliar side with a series of large figurative paintings of his son Oisín playing on the beach of Eleuthera, an island in the Bahamas. Scully’s inimitable pictures used to rely solely on paint – applied with a strong, but above all abstract gesture – the new series however appears like a surprising point of reversal. Yet, the new paintings are a return to his earliest beginnings, as, in the 1950s, Scully embarked along the Fauves and German Expressionism from realism into the realm of pure colour. Even today, abstraction, as he sees it, is still infused with memories of figurative sources. This richly illustrated catalogue brings together all Oisín-Paintings, enriched by graphic works from Albertina’s collection, extensive material from Scully’s private archive, as well as in-depth essays by Werner Spies and Elisabeth Dutz elaborating on this newly obtained painterly freedom.

Volker Hermes: Hidden Portraits gathers the essential works by one of the most beguiling artists of the present era, in a very modern reinterpretation of historical privilege.

Using only elements of the original paintings, Volker Hermes masterfully alters photos of historical portraits to mask the faces of their subjects. With each figure concealed under their own ceremonial attire, these one-time elites quickly lose their individuality in a plume of decorations and accessories.

In this official collection, Hermes delivers his wry commentary on wealth, fame and social status with taut imagery, intense focus and a suitably shrewd sense of humour. His immaculately reproduced artworks are accompanied by the thoughts of German art historian Till-Holger Borchert and Professor Francesca Raimondi of Berlin’s Institute for Philosophy, as well as the artist himself.

A must-have revision of classical portraiture from a celebrated digital creator.

“Hermes’s meticulously described collages pay homage to their sources while gently ribbing the social pretensions and ambitions of the courtly classes.” – Christopher Alessandrini, metmuseum.org

All these artworks are testimony to the renewal and relevancy of Aboriginal art in contemporary times.

Text in English and French.

At the beginning of 2020, just as global Covid-19 restrictions were coming into force, the artist David Hockney was at his house, studio and garden in Normandy. From there, he witnessed the arrival of spring, and recorded the blossoming of the surrounding landscape on his iPad, a medium he has been using for over a decade. Working outdoors was an antidote to the anxiety of the moment for Hockney – ‘We need art, and I do think it can relieve stress,’ he says.
This uplifting publication – produced to accompany a major exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts – includes 116 of his new iPad paintings and shows to full effect Hockney’s singular skill in capturing the exuberance of nature.

In 1851 John Ruskin came to the defence of the young artists of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood by writing two letters to The Times, refuting widespread criticism of their paintings. Soon afterwards he published a pamphlet entitled Pre-Raphaelitism, beginning almost a decade of public support for the work of William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and their associates.
Already established as one of the leading writers on art, he took a personal risk in defending the Pre- Raphaelite cause, but saw a parallel in the hostile reaction to the paintings of his artistic idol J. M. W. Turner. In Millais especially, Ruskin hoped to nurture a worthy successor in landscape painting, arguing that the Pre-Raphaelites’ attention to truth and detail offered the opportunity to establish a “new and noble school” of British art.
This is the first compilation of all of Ruskin’s published writings relating to the Pre-Raphaelites, beginning with the celebrated passage in the first volume of Modern Painters (1843) exhorting young artists to “go to nature in all …. rejecting nothing, selecting nothing and scorning nothing,” later claimed by Hunt to have been an inspiration. As well as Pre- Raphaelitism (1851), rarely reprinted since, and the fourth of the 1853 Edinburgh lectures, it includes all the comments on paintings in the annual Academy Notes (1855-9) which pertain to Pre-Raphaelitism, underlining Ruskin’s significant contribution to the movement’s popular success and the widespread acceptance of its principles. From the period after 1860, when Ruskin was concentrating more on social issues, come the the little-known articles published in the Nineteenth Century magazine under the title The Three Colours of Pre-Raphaelitism (1878), and a number of lectures, including the last of his Slade Lectures, The Art of England (1883), delivered just a few years before his mental faculties failed.
Edited with a commentary and preface by Stephen Wildman, Director of the Ruskin Library and Research Centre, University of Lancaster, and with an introduction by Robert Hewison, one of Ruskin’s successors as Slade Professor of Art at the University of Oxford.

These extraordinary works by Cecily Brown, of wrecked ships, frantic and prone bodies, carefully illuminate the tensions between the past and the present. Taking inspiration from Delacroix’s shipwreck paintings, as well as one of the most feted paintings in the world; Géricault’s, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19. In her introduction to the book, Whitworth curator Dr Samantha Lackey writes, ‘These extraordinary works by Cecily Brown, of wrecked ships, frantic and prone bodies, carefully illuminate the tensions between the past and the present. Of course, these drawings also push to the forefront of our minds the images we see every day on our screens, of shipwrecked refugees attempting, and failing, to make their own sea voyages.’

The exhibition ‘Cecily Brown: Shipwreck Drawings’ was shown at The Whitworth (University of Manchester) from 12 November 2017 to 15 April 2018.

This book contains two classic series, Chi Yi and Er Gong, which document the creative process of artist Chen Duxi over the past 13 years. Chi Yi is a way to merge the observer as a subject into the object of observation by means of movement, and to observe fluid changes as a way to study ontological painting from a subject-object perspective. The artist has long had a strong interest in and sensitivity to the texture and state of movement of subtle things. The works unify line and texture by reprocessing texture details in a highly distinctive personal style. Under the artist’s brush, the water patterns take different forms, and the flowing, coiling and settling movement states form a harmonious, subtle and introverted line aesthetic, and constitute the artist’s unique visual language and its visual spectrum. The Er Gong series is an interpretation of the microscopic world of plants and animals from a de-anthropocentric perspective, exploring the relationship between individual creatures and paintings.

Text in English and Chinese.

When Joan Miró moved to Majorca in 1956 he already enjoyed an international reputation and still had twenty-five years to live, dying on the Balearic island in 1981. Confident in his capabilities and status and spurred on by a kind of creative freedom, he spent these years in his studio experimenting to the greatest degree. He developed, or rather perfected, his own inimitable style: elementary forms became a personal iconography as he placed increasing faith in the expressive power of the brushstroke and the impact of the paint itself. His work displays the most varied influences and all are strongly present: the cave paintings at Altamira, Romanesque art, Catalan landscapes, and the inventiveness of Gaudí. But he also found inspiration in the East, in the rhythms of poetry, and in action painting. They all nurtured his theme of transformations, of metamorphoses. The book, which includes over 150 illustrations of paintings, sculptures, and works on paper, many of which extremely large and previously unpublished, will be released to coincide with the Joan Miró exhibition to be held in Quebec (Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec, 30 May – 8 September 2019), an event that sees the artist’s work return to Canada after a hiatus of thirty years.

Text in French.

“An expansive retrospective at the Fondation Louis Vuitton, in Paris, shows why the visionary artist continues to turn heads.” —  W Magazine
This illustrated catalogue is published to accompany the retrospective exhibition devoted to American artist Mark Rothko, curated by Suzanne Pagé and the artist’s son, Christopher Rothko. The show will feature over one hundred works. Born Markus Rothkowitz in Latvia in the early 20th century, the man who would soon become known as Mark Rothko began painting in the 1930s. While his early works were influenced by mythology and Surrealism, his first abstract paintings emerged in the 1940s with the Multiform series, followed by his Classic Years and the Black and Gray paintings. A key figure on the New York art scene, Rothko was an uncategorisable artist who deployed an extensive palette of colour and light with a talent that consistently triggers emotion. His great sensitivity shaped a poetic, enigmatic universe that leaves no one untouched.

Text in English and French. 

In the spring of 2023, Fondation Louis Vuitton will be holding Basquiat x Warhol… Painting 4 hands, the most important exhibition ever devoted to the collaborative work of these two artists. The exhibition will feature more than 100 jointly signed paintings, in addition to individual works by Basquiat and Warhol, and works by other major artists (Keith Haring, Jenny Holzer, Kenny Scharf, etc.) in order to recreate the New York downtown art scene of the 1980s.
From 1984 to 1985, Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) and Andy Warhol (1928–1987) jointly produced about 160 paintings, some of the largest in their respective careers. A genuine artistic dialogue of style and form had developed between them that dealt equally well with crucial issues such as the integration of the African-American community into the narrative of North America, a continent where Warhol was a major manufacturer of icons.

In his lyrical figurative paintings and murals, the internationally acclaimed artist Kerry James Marshall HON RA (b. 1955) places Black faces and bodies front and centre in compositions founded on the principles of Western picture-making. He uses memories, art-historical styles and genres and contemporary culture and science fiction to comment on the past, celebrate everyday life and imagine a more optimistic future.

This book records the largest UK survey of the artist’s work to date, and includes some 70 images, among them a new series of paintings and Marshall’s commemorative sculpture Wake, which evolves every time it is exhibited.

Text in English, French and German.

Artist Daphne Wright is fascinated with the collections of the Ashmolean Museum and the history of seeing they present. Her latest project grows out of a lifetime’s engagement with this theme. Much of Wright’s existing body of work is steeped in a deep understanding of the iconography and history of Western art, as represented in the Ashmolean’s extensive collection. This book establishes connections to the Ashmolean’s rich collection of 17th century Dutch Still Life paintings. These genre paintings portray a range of subjects from arrangements of flowers to fruit, fish and game. Sometimes the paintings include a symbolic reference to the transience of life, in the form of fruit that has begun to rot or flowers that are losing petals. In Fridge Still Life, the exposed body of a fridge, containing upon its shelves a raw chicken and bundle of asparagus, is topped with a vase of wilting tulips. This is a contemporary re-telling of a still life painting, with its various familiar elements, such as a brace of hanging pheasants, a bowl of fruit and a vase of blooms, with can connote status or vanitas. Wright has explored the transitory nature of life throughout her practice. In previous work, Wright has used plants and animals, with their shorter life spans, to stand in for the human. Wright’s work also resonates strongly with the Ashmolean’s extensive and celebrated cast collection. Prominent amongst the plaster casts of Greek and Roman sculptures are the gods and heroes of Homeric legend. These idealised images of men still form the basis of our ideas of masculinity today. With Sons on Couch Wright is seeking to capture the elusive moment of transition into manhood. The athletic figures in the cast court may have been updated to social media influencers, but the pressure young men face today to achieve a perceived ideal body type remain the same.

What can an abstract image be? Starting with this question, Clara Brörmann (*1982) develops paintings in different formats – canvas as landscape, as symbol, as figure. Her works are not two-dimensional, but have a body and can be viewed from various perspectives. The catalogue Kopfbilder begins with her relatively recent series of head paintings. Brörmann’s painting is characterised by her processual work method and a vivid materiality.

Text in English and German.

Reprinted for the first time since 1889, this is the first biography and considered appraisal of one of England’s most prodigiously talented painters. Sir John Everett Millais, P. R. A. (1829-1896) was the most precociously talented artist England has ever produced. His astonishing facility gained him entry as the Royal Academy’s youngest ever pupil. At just 19 he founded with six other painters the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which revolutionised the English art world with a visionary intensity of both subject matter and style. Millais was its most creative member; as Jason Rosenfeld says in the introduction to this volume, “the sheer quality and distinctness of each of Millais’s paintings of the 1850s is unmatched by any Western artist of the period.” Yet there is much more to Millais’ career than Pre-Raphaelitism. Some of the most emotive narrative paintings of the Victorian era, its greatest portraits, and especially some of its most beautiful, if neglected, landscapes, came from his brush – as did some of its most notoriously successful paintings, like Bubbles, the “fancy picture” that was made into an advertisement for Pears’ Soap. This volume includes not only Millais’s only published work of art criticism, the pithy “Thoughts on Our Art of Today,” but also the first extended biography and appraisal of his work by the important critic M. H. Spielmann. This hugely engaging “Sketch” gives both a warm and personal picture of the man and a level-headed evaluation of the qualities – and defects – of his work as they appeared to contemporaries. Neither essay has been in print for more than a century.

This publication accompanied a 2018 exhibition by the British painter and printmaker Christopher Le Brun. The body of work explored here develops his long-standing interest in the ‘double’ – conceptual and embodied duality. The arresting diptychs and single paintings provide a direct continuation of his series of prints Composer (2017), which explores the musical form of distinct yet related movements and the essentially layered structure of both painting and music.

Working directly on the woodcut proofs, these new oil paintings extend Le Brun’s lifelong preoccupation with colour – in his words, ‘experiencing rather than seeing a property of the world we delight in for itself’ – and represent radical experiments in the juxtaposition of colour, tone, transparency and form.

The book features an essay by exhibition curator Anna Dempster exploring dualities across a number of disciplines.

Megan Rooney: Echoes and Hours is the first monograph to explore the work of one of the most exciting emerging painters of her generation.

Rooney’s sensuous and compelling paintings reinvigorate the power of abstraction. They embody a sense of boundless energy and life, whilst reflecting the artist’s deep knowledge of painting and the potential of each viewer’s encounter. Vibrant colour and gesture combine in dense, apparently infinite layers. Each canvas captures the ebb and flow of Rooney’s process, from repetitive overpainting to the use of abrasives to remove pigment.

This major new book accompanies Rooney’s first solo exhibition in the UK. It explores the variations in her painting practice across a series of new works made for the exhibition. The book illustrates these works including a temporary mural at Kettle’s Yard painted directly on the gallery walls, as well as documenting earlier, formative paintings. Three newly commissioned essays and an interview with the artist in her studio explore Rooney’s practice and the resonances of her hugely captivating work.  

Apart from a handful of art historians no one has ever heard of the Brussels painter Hendrick De Clerck (1560-1630). Nevertheless, De Clerck was a contemporary of Peter Paul Rubens, the latter having gone down in history as an artistic trailblazer and painting powerhouse, while Hendrick De Clerck has quietly faded into oblivion. Yet the subtly coded, vibrantly coloured pictures that De Clerck painted for Archduke Albert of Austria and his wife Isabella are political propaganda of the highest order. In creating a mode of archducal representation that could help to gain an empire, the sky is quite literally the limit. De Clerck represents Isabella as wise Minerva, chaste Diana, the Virgin Mary. And that’s nothing compared to her husband, for in De Clerck’s paintings Albert is transformed into the sun god Apollo or even into Jesus Christ himself. Hendrick De Clerck’s mastery of ingenious pictorial strategy made him a leading player in one of the most ambitious projects history has ever seen. For those who know how to read them, his paintings tell a story of power, political promises, and grandiose ambition. Most of all, they are supreme examples of image-building; for as the Archdukes were well aware, even as a monarch you’re only as important as you make yourself. Text in English and Dutch.