In her vibrant paintings, Shirley Villavicencio Pizango (1988, Peru) uses memories, family stories, and personal encounters to create poetic portraits of friends, family, and strangers. Her figures appear in settings steeped in symbolism: lush Amazonian flora, ceramic motifs, and geometric patterns reminiscent of Inca culture. At the same time, she draws inspiration from the European painting tradition, in which colour and form acquire emotional power. Villavicencio Pizango doesn’t shy away from broader social themes either, such as gender, diversity and identity in a Western context. Publication in collaboration with Gallery Sofie Van de Velde.
International photography stars, Americans BJ and Richeille Formento form an artistic duo blending photography, cinema, and fashion aesthetics into emotionally charged, narrative-driven works. Their visual universe — glamorous, melancholic, and cinematic — transforms every image into a suspended moment between dream and reality. Richeille oversees artistic direction and styling, while BJ creates the lighting and photography, producing sophisticated images reminiscent of major motion pictures. Their visual explorations span the United States, Japan, Cuba, Mexico, India, Thailand, and France, where they examine identity, desire, nostalgia, sexuality, and social tensions.
Text in English and French.
The global porcelain scene is celebrating the 40th anniversary of the International Ceramics Fair and Seminar, which was founded by Brian Haughton and his wife, Anna, in London in 1982. That was just the beginning: further fairs and accompanying symposia on design, jewelry, and antiques in New York and Dubai were to follow, becoming important venues of exchange, not just for trade but for the academic world too.
To mark this anniversary, more than 40 renowned scholars were asked to write about selected European ceramics that had been traded in Brian Haughton’s gallery and that he had been particularly passionate about.
This publication is a wonderful kaleidoscope of unique ceramics from the 18th and 19th centuries, released as a homage to Brian Haughton, The Man with the Butterfly Tie.
Skin Fields is a visceral, contemporary photobook that imagines the body as a site of emotional, psychological, and social inscription. Rooted in Domènech’s ongoing investigation into intimacy and identity, the work presents a series of images that traverse the boundaries between vulnerability and desire, presence and absence. Emerging from a practice shaped by documentary photography and photobook storytelling, Skin Fields reflects the artist’s interest in lived experience and the traces left by time, memory, and personal transformation. With an essay from Pol Guasch, the photographs construct a visual language that merges poetics with raw immediacy, inviting viewers into deeply personal yet universally resonant spaces. The photos in this book were taken in Iran, Kyrgyzstan, Lebanon, Morocco, Spain and Syria between 2018 and 2024.
Text in English, French, Spanish, Catalan.
Phantasmagoria presents the imaginative and subversive world of Belgian artist Raymond Minnen, whose sculptural practice has, for over five decades, transformed everyday objects into uncanny, humorous, and poetic assemblages. Working at the intersection of pop culture, surrealism, and contemporary sculpture, Minnen reconfigures familiar materials into new visual narratives that question consumption, desire, and identity. His works blur the boundaries between the artificial and the organic, the absurd and the profound, inviting viewers into a world where objects gain unexpected life and meaning. Through richly illustrated pages and critical texts by historian Rik Van Braband and Karel Van Beeck, this monograph offers a comprehensive insight into Minnen’s visual language and the evolution of his sculptural imagination. Spanning a career of more than fifty years, Phantasmagoria celebrates an artist who challenges our perception of the everyday and turns the banal into something extraordinary.
Text in English and Dutch.
Blood and lust. Cardinal capes and sultry cosmetics. Fire and brimstone, warning signs, wine. Rubens’ robes, Rothko’s panels, Santa Claus’s suit. This sumptuous book explores the story of red, with an essay that traces its shifting meanings from ancient history to present day and a gallery section showcasing the color in all its forms and shades. A beautiful gift for art lovers, designers and anyone who wants to understand how their favorite color came to be.
The color of lush forests, spring growth, and renewal, green has also long been associated with envy, sickness, and decay. Once considered one of the most unpredictable pigments by artists, its meanings have always been complex and contradictory. This beautifully illustrated book explores the story of green through an essay tracing its significance in nature, art, religion, and culture from the ancient world to today, followed by a gallery celebrating the color in all its forms and shades.
From sacred pigments and royal robes to blue jeans and the endless sky, this beautifully illustrated book explores the history of the world’s favorite color. An engaging essay traces blue’s changing meanings across art, religion, science, and popular culture, from the ancient world to today, followed by a gallery celebrating the color in all its forms and shades. A perfect gift for anyone curious about the stories hidden within color.
The grotesques that adorn the Gallery of Statues and Paintings, the original name for the Uffizi’s corridors, belong to different periods. The most imaginative and most artistically admirable, however, are the earliest ones, contrasting with the classical severity of the antique statues in the Medici collection there displayed. Commissioned by Francesco I de’ Medici in 1581, they occupy the 46 bays of the eastern corridor (about 150 meters), then a simple loggia, but closed the following year probably to protect the new frescoes.
The cycle celebrates the marriage between Francesco I and Bianca Cappello, which took place in 1579. The celebration of the Grand Ducal couple and the wish for offsprings explains the abundance of erotic themes, often depicted through ingenious iconography. The playful aspect, the pursuit of the marvelous and the monstrous prevail. The figurations move between great fantasy and allusiveness, originality and licentiousness, according to typical grotesque canons.
Soho, Streets of Light collects the best of John Ingledew’s pictures of London’s Soho. Since the late 1970s, photographer John Ingledew has documented the changing face of Soho, picturing its people and the nightclubs, music venues, pubs, dives and stores, the market, the restaurants, cafes, clip joints and strip clubs that have made it the capital’s most famous and infamous neighborhood. These pages present a visual record of Soho, in black-and-white and vivid color, capturing the highs and lows of this irrepressible locale as it rolled with the punches through the late 20th century and beyond. Following in the footsteps of Frank Norman and Jeffrey Bernard’s legendary book, Soho Night & Day (republished by ACC Art Books in 2024), Soho, Streets of Light strikes a celebratory tone, inviting the reader to immerse themselves in this most boisterous corner of the UK’s historic capital.
Princess – Fifty Feisty Noblewomen is not a gallery of tiaras and fairytales. It is a book about power – and the price of wearing a crown.
In fifty sharp, vividly researched portraits Dr Katharina Van Cauteren and Dr Leen Kelchtermans bring to life women who were far more than decorative consorts. Some ruled outright. Others governed through letters, lovers, wardrobes, or wombs. All of them maneuvered within systems that were never designed for them – and bent those systems to their will.
From Habsburg archduchesses to Bourbon rebels, from queens who carried empires in their dowries to widows who turned mourning into political theater, these women lived where blood, faith and strategy collided. Their bodies were battlegrounds. Their marriages were treaties. Their jewels were propaganda. Yet within the strict choreography of court ritual, they found room for audacity, wit and sheer survival instinct.
This is a book about dynasties, desire, and diplomacy – but also about loneliness, ambition, and resilience. It explores how a princess could be at once a pawn and a player, a mother and a monarch, an ornament and an architect of history.
Written with scholarly precision and narrative flair, Princess dismantles the myth of passive royalty and replaces it with something far more compelling: women of flesh and blood, who refused to dissolve into courtly foam.
Because a title was never just a title. It was a destiny.
There’s more to Washington, D.C. than politics. Beyond the suits and monuments, the nation’s capital is a playground for kids of all ages. Where else can you find a hidden slide inside a public library or rent paddle boats surrounded by iconic memorials and monuments? Fairy gardens, dinosaur parks, swings, and themed playgrounds pop up everywhere, offering adventures at every turn. Kids can also taste the world without leaving town – empanadas from Latin America, Asian-inspired ice cream, and bustling food halls.
Museums aren’t just for grown-ups either: create at the Hirshhorn’s art carts or join a scavenger hunt at the National Portrait Gallery. Families can hike Civil War-era trails, cheer at Nationals Park, or step inside a mansion with 80 secret doors once visited by Rosa Parks. Washington, D.C., is a place where kids can discover history, science, art, and more – all while having a blast and making lasting memories. Explore these 111 kid-friendly spots and uncover a city that’s fun, surprising, and unforgettable.
Van Hemessen & Father brings a forgotten family of artistic pioneers back into the spotlight, thereby rewriting the story of the Antwerp Renaissance from a surprising perspective: that of a painter’s studio where father and children worked together, experimented, and left their mark on art history. The book serves as the catalog for the exhibition of the same name at the Snijders&Rockoxhuis in Antwerp, which, in a modified form, will have a second venue at the National Gallery in London. The focus is on daughter Catharina van Hemessen, the earliest Southern Netherlandish Renaissance painter of whom signed works have survived. She painted as a woman in a man’s world, signed her work with self-assurance and garnered international admiration from art connoisseurs even in her own time. Her work bears witness to artistic finesse and intellectual independence. Her father, Jan Sanders van Hemessen, is regarded as a key figure in the artistic transition from Quinten Massijs to Pieter Bruegel the Elder, with an artistic output that hovered somewhere between medieval mysticism and humanist realism. In the bustling Antwerp of the 16th century, he developed into an influential master with a thriving studio.
Photographs taken during Grierson’s wanderings in Mexico and Guatemala in the late Eighties, and Nineties. While continuing his preoccupations, from where he’d left off several years earlier (his RCA work), Grierson was now met with a different reality, and a fresh challenge. Would the post modernist, formalist playfulness, in his earlier work, continue within this new third world environment? We are always ultimately shaped by our environment, but within the work, the environment is also shaped by both the photographer’s own subjectivity and the medium itself. ‘Grierson indeed is a particular kind of witness and his work is as much about the medium as the world’, (Gerry Badger).
Putting away his flash gun (which had characterized much of his earlier work), in respect for the indigenous people, he wanders through Central America, recording his interactions on b/w film. The resulting emotive images, have a strong sence of humanity, but they are never sentimental, and their power still owes much to Grierson’s formalist eye, and the subtle, yet visceral connections between the objects and people, within each frame.
In the 1910s and 1920s the unique landscape of the chalk downs of southern England began to exert a new fascination on writers, historians, archaeologists and artists. Modernists such as Paul and John Nash, Eric Ravilious and William Nicholson immersed themselves in exploring these enigmatic, ancient places. The stark, rolling forms of the downs suited the modern aesthetic, offering a place where prehistory and modernity could converge.
With the growing political tensions of the 1930s, this modern engagement with ancient landscape took on a symbolism that still resonates. Images of Britain evolved as the downs became both symbols of wartime vulnerability and resilience and the site of machine gun emplacements and crashed aeroplanes.
Art of the Chalk Downs investigates this extraordinary collision of ancient and modern, idea and place, and the network of artists who worked and lived there. Seventy-five plates of paintings, watercolors, prints and photographs are accompanied by texts written by leading art historians James Russell and Stephens.
Miró – Loeb. Correspondence 1926–1936 reveals the exceptional relationship between Joan Miró and Pierre Loeb, his gallerist and close friend in Paris. Through previously unpublished letters, richly illustrated with Miró’s works and facsimiles, the book traces a decade of exchanges during which exhibitions, collaborations, and new visions of modern art took shape. This vivid and illuminating correspondence captures the daily life of an artist and a dealer at the heart of the cultural ferment of the interwar years. It offers a glimpse into the realities of the gallery world, the networks of friendship, and the evolving dialogue between artistic creation and its dissemination in a time of profound transformation. The volume is accompanied by texts by Albert and Sonia Loeb, which place these exchanges within their human and historical context, offering a sensitive perspective on a relationship that proved decisive for both modern art and the life of Parisian galleries in the twentieth century.
Text in English and French.
Georges Jouve (1910–1964) was a major postwar decorative-arts figure who liberated ceramics from academic rules. Nicknamed “Apollo,” he tirelessly explored relationships between form, material, and light, combining utility and ornament, rigor and play. His wide stylistic range—from realism to abstraction—and his signature black glaze quickly set him apart.
This illustrated book traces his career from Nyons and Dieulefit to Aix-en-Provence, highlighting iconic pieces such as cylindrical vases and his collaborations with Janette Laverrière, Étienne Noël, and Mathieu Matégot, including La Saladière and the hotel La Résidence in Saint-Louis, Senegal. Present in the major Salons of his time, Jouve emerged as an agent of modernity and, encouraged by Charlotte Perriand, joined the Steph Simon gallery. Equally at ease with small or monumental formats, he produced vases, fountains, tables, and sculptures, using zoomorphic, anthropomorphic, and abstract forms to make ceramics a vibrant, experimental, and timeless modern art, with lasting appeal worldwide today.
Text in English and French.
A real mirror of 20th century creation, Chess Design presents an exceptional documentation on chess games made by artists, designers, architects, and craftsmen: chessboards themselves, but also artist’s drawings, execution plans and photographs of archives.
By presenting nearly 300 of these chessboards chronologically, the author offers a new perspective on the history of art and its evolution. Art Nouveau, Secession, Surrealism, Fluxus, Pop Art, most of the great movements that are born and follow one another in the Fine Arts find an echo with these chessboards and the 16 pieces that animate them. These chess games also reflect the evolution of techniques and materials used during this period: wood, glass, ceramics will give way, from the 1950s, to steel, plastic and composite materials.
At the border between the plastic arts and the decorative arts, these chessboards are made by big names in the art scene, design or architecture – Alexandre Rodchenko, Jean-Michel Frank, Man Ray, Marcel Duchamp, Alexander Calder, or, more recently, Yoko Ono, Robert Filliou, Yayo Kusama, Victor Vasarely, Zaha Hadid, Frank Gehry or Damien Hirst – as by anonymous people. The synthesis offered by the author constitutes a valuable and innovative historian’s work, supported by iconography that is both rich and mostly unpublished.
Text in English and French.
In line with the works on decorators of the 1940s, ’50s, ’60s, and ’70s, this book plunges us into the world of ’80s and ’90s. These have witnessed unprecedented experiments in the world of design and architecture. Composed of a rich introduction which gives a synoptic vision and 38 monographs that describe its many faces, this book makes an exceptionally creative period, and reveals through an abundant iconography, often unpublished, its formidable aesthetic richness.
A new generation of designers stands out, among them Shiro Kuramata, Philippe Starck, Ron Arad, Bob Wilson, Elizabeth Garouste and Mattia Bonetti. All regenerate creation by refusing the elitism of their predecessors and by favoring the use of new materials. Some turn to recovery, such as the Creative Salvage group, and offer inventive and provocative furniture thanks to welding and assembly. Others, gathered in Italy around Ettore Sottsass and Memphis, combine unexpected colors and patterns to the playful use of plastic laminate. Sliding until the end of the ’90s, the achievements presented in this book mark the desire for a dialog between artistic references with a new relationship to the industrial aspect, at the dawn of the 21st century and its technological innovations.
Text in English and French.
Jean Fautrier (1989-1964) was a major 20th century artist. Trained at the Royal Academy of Arts and influenced by J.M.W. Turner, he was quickly noticed by the collector Jeanne Castel in 1923. At first, his style was figurative and played on contrasts of light. He expertly harnessed the essence of reality in order to transfigure it, redefining the genres of landscape painting, still lifes and nudes (especially in his series of dark works) during the inter-war period. A few years later, his approach underwent a radical shift and became much more abstract. He launched the “Informalist” art movement, playing with pictorial materials and combining different substances to create visions of an extraordinary material quality. Close to the great intellectual figures of his time, including Jean Paulhan, Paul Éluard, Francis Ponge, René Char and André Malraux, Fautrier never ceased producing remarkably powerful and politically resonant works, as is attested by his major series Otages (1943-1945), Objets (1947-1948) and Partisans (1956). In 1960, he was awarded the first prize for painting at the Venice Biennale. Boasting an exceptionally exhaustive iconography, this first ever comprehensive annotated catalog of Jean Fautrier’s paintings includes the technique, origin, exhibitions and bibliography for each work. It is supplemented with a detailed biography, technical analyses and authoritative scientific texts, as well as transcriptions of interviews and radio broadcasts from Fautrier’s time.
Text in English and French.
Nestor Perkal has been multiplying his activities as an artist since the 1970s. He is indeed simultaneously a designer of furniture, objects and lightings, an interior architect, a scenographer, a curator and an art director. This book is the first monograph made about his work and aims to chart the different steps of his extraordinary career.
In 1978, Nestor Perkal left his native land, Argentina, to settle in France. He first thrived in Paris as an independent designer, creating original furniture. At the same time, he opened a gallery and was the first to represent Memphis. His creations were displayed at the exhibition Life with colours of the Cartier Foundation in 1985. Then, he moved to Limoges where he lead the Craft, a research center about the art of ceramic making.
An artistic community gathered around him. He worked with many creators, designers, artists, but also manufacturers, sponsors and collectors. Having grown as an artist through time, Nestor Perkal played and is still playing a crucial part in promoting and producing the work of contemporary designers, architects and artists.
Text in French.
In 1925 Edward Cecil Guinness, 1st Earl of Iveagh bought Kenwood, the magnificent 18th-century mansion of the 6th Earl of Mansfield on Hampstead Heath. The empty house was just what Iveagh needed to provide a gallery for the best of the art collection he had formed between 1887 and 1891 for his palatial home in Mayfair. Through the Iveagh Bequest Act of 1929 he left his collection to the nation, where it remains on display at Kenwood. This catalog reproduces in glorious full color Lord Iveagh’s bequest of paintings, discusses each work, and in addition discusses the wider collection on display at Kenwood, the spectacular white villa of Hampstead Heath.
The Medici family ruled unofficially and later as dukes the city of Florence and Tuscany, from the end of 14th to the end of the 18th century. Under their patronage the Renaissance was born.
The members of this powerful family were able to build their public image in a sophisticated cultural environment where famous artists such as Raphael, Pontormo, Bronzino, Vasari, as well as poets, men of letters, scientists, humanists, were active. Portraits played an important role in this public relations strategy. The portrait types were quite different: from State portraits to family portraits, from those depicting the young heirs of the family name to those of the women that either ruled or played important roles in the dynastic allegiances.
In this guide the marvellous works, held in Florence’s Uffizi Gallery and Palazzo Pitti, are presented in chronological order making possible to trace the main stages in the history and genealogy of the Medici family.
Over the course of a long and very successful career spanning the first half of the 20th century, Lucy Kemp-Welch established herself as one of the leading equestrian painters at work in the UK and one of the country’s best-known women artists. David Boyd Haycock’s new, extensively illustrated biography of Kemp-Welch brings this remarkable artist and her work back into sharp focus.
Born in 1869, Kemp-Welch first came to the art establishment’s attention in 1897 when her immense painting, Colt Hunting in the New Forest, caused a sensation at the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition; the work was bought for the Nation by the Chantry Bequest in the year of exhibition. In 1915, she illustrated Anna Sewell’s Black Beauty, and was commissioned to paint images for the Government during the First World War. Later, the mural Women’s Work in the Great War, was placed in the Royal Exchange in London, where it remains to this day.
Respected art writer and curator Boyd-Haycock shines new light on Kemp-Welch’s life, writing from a 21st-century perspective and reflecting on her as a female painter in a male-dominated environment. Alongside Kemp-Welch’s paintings, the book will feature exclusive period photographs of the artist herself, shown at work and in her studio.