Sandra Blow (1925-2006) is among the most important British artists of the later twentieth century. During a time of rapid change in the art world, her commitment to abstract painting resulted in a large and diverse body of work of distinctive power and subtlety. Michael Bird's fascinating survey of Sandra Blow's life and art is now available for the first time in a handsome paperback edition. Compiled in collaboration with the artist during the last years of her life, it provides a definitive overview of her career. The book is lavishly illustrated throughout with a fully representative selection of Blow's work. In this highly readable account, Michael Bird looks in depth at Blow's evolving studio practice and the personal nature of her abstract vision. He places Blow's achievement firmly within the wider context of British and international art movements of the post-war period and late twentieth century. He also casts new light on the role played in her life by Alberto Burri and Roger Hilton, two influences she acknowledged to be crucial to her art. Through close attention to Blow's working methods, this book provides a unique insight into her creative process. It reveals the intensity of emotional engagement and technical experimentation that lie behind the apparent spontaneity of her vivid handling of materials, colour and form.

Often hard to describe, the term modern' changes according to context or relationship. It is a sensibility that is recognised as being progressive or forward thinking, pushing the limits of style. Nowhere is this as easily grasped as in the visual arts. In design, modern patterns are formed by geometric shapes, graphic figures, and abstract imagery; coming together in a deliberate formation of lines, colours, shapes, and symbols. Featuring hundreds of images of fresh, bold, and innovative pattern work, Modern Patterns is sure to inspire. Includes a CD-ROM.'

The paintings are grouped under various headings to take the reader through specific visual experiences beginning with some of the artist's tools, colour palettes and showing the development of texture. Seascapes and shorelines are the first stop, going through to the moors,hills and beyond.

Nina Möntmann's timely book extends the decolonisation debate to the institutions of contemporary art. In a thoughtfully articulated text, illustrated with pertinent examples of best practice, she argues that to play a crucial role within increasingly diverse societies museums and galleries of contemporary art have a responsibility to 'decentre' their institutions, removing from their collections, exhibition policies and infrastructures a deeply embedded Euro-centric cultural focus with roots in the history of colonialism. In this, she argues, they can learn from the example both of anthropological museums (such as the Rautenstrauch-Joest-Museum in Cologne), which are engaged in debates about the colonial histories of their collections, about trauma and repair, and of small-scale art spaces (such as La Colonie, Paris, ANO, Institute of Arts and Knowledge, Accra or Savvy Contemporary, Berlin), which have the flexibility, based on informal infrastructures, to initiate different kinds of conversation and collective knowledge production in collaboration with indigenous or local diasporic communities from the Global South.  For the first time, this book identifies the influence that anthropological museums and small art spaces can exert on museums of contemporary art to initiate a process of decentring.