“Prepare to be inspired at National Galleries Scotland: Modern One, as Everlyn Nicodemus opens her first retrospective this Saturday” — The NEN
“Experience Everlyn’s joyful, defiant and searingly honest artworks, with over 80 drawings, collages, paintings and textiles from over 40 years of her career, from 1980 through to the present day.” — Art Daily
This is the first major publication on the artist Everlyn Nicodemus and accompanies the first ever retrospective of her 40-year career. It offers a fascinating introduction to her life, career and art.

This book introduces readers to Nicodemus’s practice – from the very first work she painted to newly commissioned oil paintings. Many of Nicodemus’s drawings, collages, paintings and textiles are published here for the first time.

Nicodemus engages with complex subject matters, unflinchingly addressing human suffering and societal responsibility. While her works convey and process traumatic experiences, they are ultimately hopeful, focusing on healing and the power of creativity. This publication will reveal the scope and ambition of this astonishing artist’s practice.

Expert contributors offer new insights into Nicodemus’s practice, including a new interview with the artist. Exhibition curator Stephanie Straine explains and contextualises the rich pages of artworks, drawing on extensive primary research with the artist and her archives.

The art of Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), mysterious and spiritual as it was, depended on an intense engagement with nature. On the long hikes that he took through his native north Germany, and further south in the Bohemian mountains, he drew landscapes, buildings, people and, most intently of all perhaps, trees. Half of Friedrich’s surviving drawings come from the sketchbooks that he compiled on his journeys and referred to during the whole of his career. A handful of these sketchbooks survive intact. The one known as The Oslo Sketchbook of 1807 was used for just two months, from April to June of that year. Its 23 pages of drawings record, with almost hallucinatory simplicity and clarity, trees that Friedrich would use in his paintings for years to come.

The Galleria Borghese not only houses an extraordinary collection of ancient and modern sculpture, but also one of the most extraordinary collections of paintings in the world, with masterpieces by the most important European painters, including Giovanni Bellini, Correggio, Dosso Dossi, Parmigianino, Raphael, Titian, Caravaggio and Rubens.

In two volumes – the first is presented here divided into two tomes and dedicated to works created between the 15th and 16th centuries – the intention is to continue the work begun with the catalogue raisonné of modern sculpture, also published by Officina Libraria (2022), thanks to updates, discoveries, archive research and analysis of works.

The entries in this volume, preceded by introductory essays illustrating the main nuclei of paintings produced between the Renaissance and Mannerism periods in the museum, have been entrusted to scholars specialising in the productions of individual artists or regional schools, experts in the history of the gallery and a large group of younger experts in 15th and 16th century painting. The individual texts present a significant degree of in-depth study both chronologically and in terms of attribution, with notes on restorations and archival documents. 

Text in Italian.

This elegant survey of more than 60 works of art chronicles the nascent liberation when women began to walk freely by themselves in public.
At the close of the eighteenth century, women began to discover a new sense of freedom, adventure, and self-determination, simply by walking in public unaccompanied. Previously, solitary walks by women were considered unseemly. An unaccompanied hike in the country was beyond imagination; to promenade by oneself on city boulevards was unthinkable.
This book features evocative paintings of women doing just that, by a range of artists, from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth century, among them British portraitist Thomas Gainsborough, the scandalous Gustave Courbet, Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte, American masters Winslow Homer and John Singer Sargent, and Nabi artist Félix Vallotton.
With paintings as her guide, Karin Sagner takes us on a visual journey through this vital yet oft-overlooked aspect of women’s emancipation, from the promenades of the nobility to everyday walks in the city, on gentle strolls in the country or hikes up mountain summits. Quotes by luminaries like the Marquise de Sévigné, Jane Austen, and Simone de Beauvoir gracefully support her points.
A thoughtful gift for graduates, teachers, or Mother’s Day, this subtle but profound book is not only an illuminating history but a beautiful art historical survey and an inspirational guide.

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.

The use of pictures to communicate a story has a long tradition in Japanese culture that dates back more than a thousand years. Such narrative illustrations draw on Buddhist texts, classic literature, poetry, and theatrical scenes to create rich visual imagery realised in a wide range of media and format. Quotations from and allusions to heroic epics and romances were disseminated through exquisite paintings, woodblock prints, and in pieces of applied arts such as lacquer ware or ceramics, thus becoming anchored in the collective consciousness. As story-telling art found expression in a variety of materialities, it became an integral part of daily life. A fascinating narrative space evolved that combined artistic excellence and aesthetic pleasure.

Love, Fight, Feast features some one hundred paintings, woodblock prints, illustrated woodblock-printed books, as well as lacquer and metal objects, porcelain, and textiles from the 13th to the 20th century, alongside scholarly essays on a range of aspects of Japanese narrative art. Published in conjunction with an exhibition at the renowned Museum Rietberg in Zurich, the book offers a unique survey of the multifaceted, colourful, and imaginative world of Japanese narrative art across eight centuries.

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.

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.

The unique selection of almost 300 paintings and drawings collected in The Realism of It shows the evolution of artist Rik Vermeersch and unveils an amazing coherence throughout his work. His earlier gestural paintings later make room for more objective work, the so-called ‘digital paintings’, nudes in particular. With texts by Paul Depondt and Matthijs Van Dijk.

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

Text in English and French.

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.

Raqib Shaw is one of the most extraordinary and sought-after artists working in the world today. Born in Calcutta in 1974 and raised in Kashmir, he came to London to study in 1998 and has lived there ever since. Inspired by a broad range of influences, including the old masters, Indian miniatures, Persian carpets and the Pre-Raphaelites, his paintings are infused with memories and longing for his homeland in Kashmir. His technique constitutes a completely unique kind of enamel painting. Spending months on preparatory drawings, tracings and photographic studies, he then transfers the composition onto prepared wooden panels, establishing an intricate design with acrylic liner, which leaves a slightly raised line. He adds the enamel paint using needle-fine syringes and a porcupine quill, with which he manoeuvres the paint. The finished works are intricate, magical and breathtaking in their colour and complexity. This book accompanies an exhibition of eight paintings by Raqib Shaw at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, alongside two paintings which have long obsessed him and have influenced specific works: Sir Joseph Noel Paton’s The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania, 1849 (National Gallery of Scotland) and Lucas Cranach’s An Allegory of Melancholy, 1528 (private collection). The book includes the first full-length biographical study of the artist.

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.

From the famous Lujiazui skyline to the bustling crowds, from cosy corners to vibrant streetscapes, these pages capture the Shanghai of the present. Yucheng also delves into Shanghai’s history, paying particular attention to the 1960s-1990s. Later chapters focus on Chinese culture, the contrast between megacities and remote villages, and Yucheng’s favourite animal – the horse. While this book is the perfect companion piece to Blossoms, a novel set in late-20th-century Shanghai, it will also appeal to anyone interested in Chinese culture and art.

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.

Mural Art – Studies in Paintings in Asia is a collection of 10 articles by the best scholars on murals in Afghanistan, China, Tibet, Burma, Thailand and Mongolia – from the 5th to the 18th century. Covering diverse issues including preservation and digital reconstruction of lost murals, this important new book provides information with challenging perspectives based on the latest findings and research. It also reveals murals never before published, recently rediscovered and endangered. This unique publication on murals in Asia counts as a precious testimony of a fragile and inspiring heritage.

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.

Swiss surrealist artist HR Giger (1940–2014) achieved international fame in 1979 for designing the fantastic creatures and eerie environments that terrified moviegoers in Ridley Scott’s science fiction film Alien. Yet before these iconic creations made him a celebrity and won him an Oscar for visual effects, Giger was already highly regarded in the international art world for his unique freehand painting style and biomechanical dreamscapes.

HR Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien 1961–1976, first published in 2007 and now becoming available again in a new edition, is the only book to date to document the artist’s lesser known, but no less impressive, early work. This lavishly illustrated volume traces Giger’s career from his education as an architect and industrial designer at the Zurich College of Art to the development of his ink drawing and oil painting technique and his eventual breakthrough as one of the foremost artists of the fantastic realism school. Featuring many unpublished or rarely available early paintings and drawings, and accompanied by an essay by noted art historian Beat Stutzer, this volume juxtaposes Giger’s paintings with works by his predecessors, including Ensor, Fuseli, Goya, and Piranesi.

HR Giger: The Oeuvre Before Alien illuminates the mind of a visual genius whose first artistic experiments were decades ahead of their time.

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.

James Seymour (c. 1700-1752) is one of the founders of English sporting art. A lover of the Turf, Seymour specialised in depictions of horses and their riders, particularly at Newmarket between 1722 and 1752. His wonderful paintings and drawings are some of the most important records we have of the early greats, such as Flying Childers, and of the way racing was organised at this early stage.
Richard Wills has studied Seymour for over ten years, and this book is the first ever comprehensive account and catalogue. 130 paintings and 430 drawings, including new discoveries, are included in the book, with over 500 illustrations, many never reproduced before. The introductory essay examines the life of Seymour, whose devotion to the Turf enabled him to gain an unrivalled knowledge of equine anatomy and behaviour. Considerable information about the history of racing, and its enrichment through analysis of Seymour’s paintings, is contributed by David Oldrey and Tim Cox.

This catalogue accompanies the first major exhibition in the UK dedicated to Anna Ancher (1859 – 1935), considered to be one the most innovative artists in Danish art history.

Bringing together recently discovered paintings from Anna Ancher’s home, alongside an extensive body of work made throughout the artist’s long career, the exhibition will feature more than 40 of her paintings, including the artist’s most famous masterpieces on special loan from Art Museums of Skagen. A central figure of the Skagen artist colony, based at the northernmost point of Jutland, Ancher is widely considered to be the most significant female painter in Danish art history. She is widely celebrated in her homeland yet remains relatively unknown to British audiences. 

Ancher was an influential figure of the Scandinavian ‘Modern Breakthrough’ movement that sought to capture real life, demonstrated in her intimate, observational works, which documented everyday experiences in the fishing town of Skagen. Influenced by her travels to Paris, as well as French Impressionism, the artist produced vivid interiors and evocative landscape scenes in which light becomes the central figure. The exhibition will demonstrate Ancher’s bold approach to colour and radical interpretation of everyday scenes as a truly pioneering modern painter.

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.

“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.