On Charles II’s restoration to the throne in 1660, four of his supporters were provided with plots of land in a leafy suburb of London, on which to build their extravagant town palaces. The only one to survive – built for the poet and courtier Sir John Denham and now situated in the heart of Piccadilly – was to become the home of the Royal Academy of Arts, its exhibitions and its Schools. This important study charts the history of the estate through its various owners, including the 3rd Earl of Burlington, who gave the house not only its name but also its distinctive and influential architecture. In his day, the house was host to leading scholars and celebrities, who met within Burlington’s cutting-edge creation, which remains an unparalleled examplar of the Palladian style in England. Former Director of Collections at the RA, Nicholas Savage examines 350 years of social and architectural history, as well as revealing the next phase in the life of the estate, as the Royal Academy opens up Burlington House as never before in an exciting redevelopment led by Sir David Chipperfield CBE RA to celebrate the institution’s 250th anniversary.
All across Switzerland, in smaller towns like Schaffhausen or Biel as well as in larger villages such as Altdorf or Buchs, there are local public theatres, restaurants with a stage, or multi-purpose halls. This part of the country is second home to Beat Schlatter, actor-comedian, playwright, and the person behind one of Switzerland’s most famous faces. For some thirty years, he has travelled Switzerland in every direction to perform his own programmes and to appear in shows, and he has rested, changed, and made-up his face in hundreds of these places that offer some form of a back-stage.
When on tour, Schlatter takes photographs of these usually dull transitional spaces where A, B, and C celebrities and local stars and starlets await their appearance. This new book, featuring around 300 of Schlatter’s images, is a testimonial to the moderate tristesse and the well-intended fruit bowl inherent to all these spaces, no matter how conventional or hilariously extravagant they may seem.
Text in English and German.
While completing the Almannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian scholar Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. Departing from the ways in which Zumthor’s pavilions frame the barely visible traces of the industrial exploitation of zinc in the 1890s, the conversation took unexpected turns.
In meandering, impressionistic style and drawing on Zumthor’s favourite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Vladimir Nabokov, and T.S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time and temporalities reverberate across the famous architect’s oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his continuous attempts of emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of Los Angeles’ LACMA on a grand urban scale.
This small, beautifully designed new book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, illustrated with photographs by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer Hélène Binet.
Over the period of twelve months, between May 2017 and 2018, Polish-born curator and critic Anda Rottenberg wrote a series of fictitious letters to legendary curator and writer Harald Szeemann (1933-2005). In these pieces, Rottenberg analyses the art and nature of curating and reveals references and relations in the history of art. She questions female artistic positions both in the Eastern and Western Europe and so encourages new individual readings of them. Her letters express a unique rhetoric that take up questions and polemic judgements to amalgamate individual opinion and objective knowledge into a personal history.
This is the first publication of the much acclaimed new Muzeum Susch, an initiative of the Polish entrepreneur and art collector Grazyna Kulczyk and her Art Stations Foundation CH.
Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and ’90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist’s entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro’s oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.
Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and ’90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist’s entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro’s oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist. Text in French.
In May of 1832 Swiss artist Karl Bodmer (1809-93) set out with Maximilian, Prince of Wied, on a twenty-eight-month expedition along the Ohio and Missouri Rivers. Along the way, Bodmer produced more than four hundred watercolours and sketches of Native American people, landscapes, animals, and plants. Engravings of many of the images were subsequently used to illustrate Travels in the Interiors of North America, Prince Maximilian’s well-known historical account. Paying homage to the great painter who captured for the rest of the world so many important natural details of early America, Karl Bodmer presents all eighty-one engravings used to illustrate Maximilian’s book, as well as the original watercolours, sketches, and photographs collected during the passage. Bodmer’s detailed work is among the most important documents of Native American culture of the nineteenth century, and this richly illustrated volume brings to life a monumental event in both art history and the history of early America.
Text in English and German.
Swiss artist, architect, designer, typographer, and theorist Max Bill (1908-94) was one of the most important exponents of concrete and constructive art and a key figure in the history of 20th-century European applied arts and design. Educated by such eminent teachers as Paul Klee, Wassily Kandinsky, and Walter Gropius at the Bauhaus in Dessau, Bill immediately displayed a genius for work in fields as diverse as painting, sculpture, architecture, typography and design from the outset of his career in the 1930s. In the 1950s, he teamed up with Inge Scholl and Otl Aicher to found the legendary Ulm College of Design in Ulm, of which he became the first director. In his work, Max Bill carried on the Bauhaus legacy, both as an artist and a teacher, and made a decisive and lasting contribution to 20th-century cultural life.
The new edition of this authoritative and much sought-after monograph displays Bill’s wide-ranging work and sets him in the context of his cultural milieu by featuring works by his contemporaries, such as Kurt Schwitters, Wassily Kandinsky, and Donald Judd. Accompanying essays investigate Bill’s influence on other artists and the lasting importance of his oeuvre in the present.
Text in English and German.
While completing the Almannajuvet Zinc Mine Museum in southern Norway in 2016, celebrated Swiss architect Peter Zumthor asked Norwegian scholar Mari Lending to engage in a dialogue about the project. Departing from the ways in which Zumthor’s pavilions frame the barely visible traces of the industrial exploitation of zinc in the 1890s, the conversation took unexpected turns.
In meandering, impressionistic style and drawing on Zumthor’s favourite writers, such as Johann Peter Hebel, Stendhal, Vladimir Nabokov, or T.S. Eliot, their exchanges explore how history, time and temporalities reverberate across the famous architect’s oeuvre. Looking back, Zumthor ponders on how a feeling of history has informed his continuous attempts of emotional reconstruction by means of building, from architectural interventions in dramatic landscapes to his design for the redevelopment of Los Angeles’ LACMA on a grand urban scale.
This small, beautifully designed new book records the conversation between Zumthor and Lending, illustrated with photographs by the renowned Swiss architectural photographer Hélène Binet.
Text in French.
From the Palazzo Vecchio to the Forte Belvedere, through the Uffizi, the Vasari Corridor, the Pitti Palace, and the Boboli Gardens, Florence is honeycombed with a series of public art collections that is unparalleled in Europe for its size and for the variety and value of its holdings. Taken all together, the museums of Florence are one of the wonders of the world, for the spiritual values that they embody as much as for the works they contain.
The painting collections in the state museums of Florence are unequalled for their quality, historical significance, and for the sheer number of works; never before have they been presented in a publication of such splendid technical quality. Thus the reader can trace the various phases and great moments of Florentine painting, including lesser known works of the seventeenth century; can appreciate the presence of masterpieces from other, perhaps unknown, schools; and can examine details different from the standard ones consecrated by tradition.
Text in English and Italian.
Africa, telling A World proposes the works of 33 artists from the principal cultural areas of Sub-Saharan Africa. Contemporary African art – fuelled by the relations between pre-existing populations and immigrants of various origins, by the blend of religions, cultures, urban tribes, genres, ethnic groups and by the close relationship between nature, traditions and rituals – mirrors the depth of its own roots. Today it exhibits a strong impetus for research, knowledge and the phenomenological understanding of the core historical-religious and ethnical-anthropological problems that the continent faces. Text in English and Italian.
Alain Grosajt explores the question of trace and writing as an insatiable archaeologist. Writing, collage, scratching, dripping, engraving, drawing, painting, are all plastic means experienced for try to make this trace visible. His work runs in series, each dealing with a country, a religion, of a work or of a time, trying to trace the contours of a presence by through the variations obtained.
Text in English and French.
The first previously unpublished series of photographs – Residents of New York – was produced in the artist’s hometown in 2014 and the second – Denizens of Brussels – in March 2015 in close cooperation with the Musées Royaux des Beaux-Arts during preparations for Serrano’s retrospective in Brussels, when he walked the streets of the capital for ten nights to encounter the most marginal of its inhabitants. With his unique vision, making no judgements and conveying no political message (a point he insists on), he presents men and women generally invisible to passersby, forcing us by the sheer power of his photographs to see these urban residents. The text is by Michel Draguet, and Andres Serrano himself talks about his approach, the two series and the specific qualities of each. Text in English, French and Dutch.
Painters and alchemists alike strive to transform reality into its highest expression. Thus Andy Warhol can truly be seen as a modern alchemist – capable, by means of his art, of transforming matter into shape as it meets colour and surface, only to merge with light and supreme beauty. This volume retraces the creative universe of the Father of Pop Art through 140 works of art: masterpieces ranging from his most famous icons – Jackie and John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe – to a critical observation of contemporary society via the serial reproduction of consumer products and the analysis of other aspects of daily life such as
music or the sexual revolution.
Text in English and Italian.
The book tells the story of Arredoluce. The company produced lamps and furnishing accessories which, in the post-war industrial boom, helped to write the history of Made in Italy .
Arredoluce was born in 1943 in Monza, and was heavily influenced by the entrepreneur and designer Angelo Lelii. Arredoluce’s curiosity for innovations from abroad, combined with a love for traditional materials – above all, glass – and a maniacal attention to detail marked the production line of the company, producing modern and sought-after specimens.
Arredoluce is best remembered for his numerous participations at the Triennale di Milano, his quotes on Domus, and collaborations with designers such as Gio Ponti and Ettore Sottsass Jr. He also enjoyed great success abroad, with orders from luxury hotels the world over. The company, however, underwent generational changes, and this combined with the new economic scenarios, led to its closure in the 1990s.
This volume offers an important contribution to perpetuating the name of this glorious company, and ensuring it has its rightful place in the history of Italian industry.
Text in English and Italian.
During the Festival of Nouveau Réalisme (New Realism) in Milan in November 1970, Christo removed the white cloth in which he had wrapped the Monument to Vittorio Emanuele II in the Piazza del Duomo and placed it over the Monument to Leonardo da Vinci in the Piazza della Scala. This is viewed today as a key event in the contemporary art scene in Milan, a moment that Luigi and Peppino Agrati experienced live. They immediately contacted the artist and commissioned him to create works for the garden of their villa. Wealthy entrepreneurs, the Agrati brothers shared subtle and sensitive insights into art that fostered a deep understanding of the images that shaped their era. This show is the first time their collection is being revealed to the public, through a representative selection of Italian and American works of art donated with generosity and foresight by Luigi Agrati to the Intesa Sanpaolo. From a nucleus of sculptures by Melotti to masterpieces by Fontana, Burri, and Klein, the exhibition provides an in-depth examination of Italian ‘Nuova Figurazione’ painting (‘New Figurative Painting’), working its way to the roots of the new ‘Arte Povera’ (‘Poor Art’). The discovery of American art coincides with the Agratis’ acquisition of works by the principal exponents of Pop Art – including the iconic Andy Warhol and his monumental Triple Elvis – and by the Minimalists, of which Dan Flavin’s large neon work dedicated to Peppino Agrati is emblematic. In a kind of multiple constellation side by side with examples of Italian art, the collection reveals extraordinary works by Robert Rauschenberg (acquired in large numbers from the end of the 1960s to the 1980s), Cy Twombly (the original mediator between American and Italian art), and conceptual artists like Bruce Nauman and Joseph Kosuth, whose experiments with language are displayed in a dialogue with those by Alighiero Boetti and Vincenzo Agnetti.
Through frames, documents, publicity materials, texts, original screenplays, extracts from interviews, letters and declarations, this book traces the fundamental stages of Neorealism and puts the spotlight back on that unrepeatable moment which still fascinates and moves us today, capturing the reflection of what we were and the presage of what we were to become. Text in English and Italian.
The Corbella company, ‘the first Italian manufacturer of jewellery and weapons for the theatre’, was founded in the heart of Milan in 1865. Through reproductions of weapons, jewels and accessories, it soon became one of the first official suppliers of the Teatro alla Scala, as well as signing contracts with prestigious institutions including La Fenice di Venezia, the Costanzi in Rome and the Colón of Buenos Aires. The industrious Milan after the Unification of Italy, of the National and International Expositions, of the years between the two world wars and of the economic boom has seen the owners of Corbella always acting as protagonists, first in the theatrical sector, with specific supplies to the great lyrical interpreters, from Margherita Carosio to Renata Tebaldi, then in the field of the great Italian producers of costume jewellery, up to the production changes due to the globalisation of the 21st century.
Text in English and Italian.
The texts and interview included in this catalogue shed new light on Cybèle Varela’s contribution to Latin American and international artistic discourses, including Pop Art, Narrative Figuration and Video Art. Questions of identity, social and political issues and transnational experiences are central to Varela’s multifaceted production, from the 1960s to the present day. Text in English, German and Portuguese.
The works presented – Italian, but also European and American, dating from the end of the First World War to 1929 – are the expression of well-known artists who marked the history of Italian ceramics at the beginning of the century, and are of absolute international importance. Domenico Rambelli, Francesco Nonni, Pietro Melandri, Riccardo Gatti, Giovanni Guerrini, to mention some of the best-known names. Text in English and Italian.
This book, dedicated to the history of design from the mid-nineteenth century to the present, is committed to drawing guidelines for the development of this discipline, offering a synthetic vision of the subject and, at the same time, highlighting elements for future investigations.
If it’s true that the history of artefacts and objects has always accompanied that of man, punctuated by turns occurring with the acquisition of technological innovations, it is in the mid-nineteenth century that we can retrace historically the professional figure of the designer, thus marking the birth of modern and contemporary design.
The subject is branched and composite, embracing many disciplines: in addition to the field of furniture – which often exemplifies the broadest lines of design research in an excellent way – other sectors are considered here, from technical objects to graphics, from fashion to car design. Particular attention is reserved for the influence of the art world, with all its array of thought references that has constantly permeated the birth of design projects.
Dia Al-Azzawi’s work, long celebrated for its vibrant 13 colour and vivacious style, came in on the tail winds of the early Pioneers movement in Iraq that arose in the mid-twentieth century and flourished in the 1940s-1960s. Al-Azzawi, some decades younger than the Pioneers and the related Baghdad Group for Modern Art, followed in their impressive and ground-breaking footsteps, emerging as a significant artist in his own right in the 1960s. The last quarter of the twentieth century and the works of the next generation of artists that developed, especially in the era of the international embargo against Iraq and the US-UK war of 2003 and its aftermath, were heavily represented in Al-Azzawi’s work, and his persistent references to the Mesopotamian past. In these works, and in his practices, this past had a tenacious continuity that he saw as part of the Iraqi present, co-existing with it rather than merely quoted and referenced within a separate modern world of art. In Al-Azzawi’s recent work, the utilisation of the past becomes a strong political statement against war and occupation, against the destruction of his ancient land.
Frédéric Borel graduated from the Special School of Architecture in 1982, and afterwards became laureate of the PAN XIII, of Albums de la jeune architecture and the villa Medici horsles-murs. Established in Paris since 1985, Frédéric Borel has developed a new approach to the urban question, through some emblematic buildings of a new architectural expressiveness.
Text in English and French.