The visionary art of Portuguese artist Joma Sipe is all about light: not the ordinary light of day but the light of spiritual illumination, which brilliantly radiates from the over 100 full-colour images in this book.

The recent work of Belgian abstract artist Yves Zurstrassen is explored in depth in this handsome volume, designed in close collaboration with the artist himself The decade of work produced between 2010 and 2019 by Belgian abstract painter Yves Zurstrassen (b. 1956) is the focus of this beautifully designed and illustrated book. Although he originally studied graphic art, Zurstrassen was inspired by Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to pursue painting. The book's essays delve into the artist's process and offer a critical analysis of the work. Also included are a detailed biography and insightful, informal conversations with the artist. Featuring full-page illustrations of Zurstrassen's recent work, the book situates the artist both within abstract art and the broader context of contemporary painting. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (September 1-December 31, 2019)

28 Paradises is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple's creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 28 Paradises captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts-visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss's brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano. Zehrfuss's paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. The reader enters this shared realm in an experience less like paging through a book and more like slipping into a shared world. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem, or a lover-perhaps they are not so different-relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, "The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem." A pure example of ekphrastic writing-poetry inspired by paintings- this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience. First published by Editions de l'Olivier/ Le Seuil in 2005

Since the late 1980s, Renee Green's multifaceted practice has imagined and expanded the ways in which art can surface and give form to underwritten histories, collective memory, and circuits of cultural exchange. Her writing, installations, films, digital media, and sound works continue to trace and interrogate the power of cultural institutions and their relationships to language, knowledge, and constitutions of selfhood, while at the same time, indicating other ways of being and becoming. Green's work came to prominence and circulated within the social and political flows between the world and the Americas, a concept that includes the United States, Central and South America, as well as the Caribbean. Her practice continues to investigate the distribution and relay of art and ideas, and how these are braided with histories of migration and legacies of displacement, and the aesthetic forms and poetics that stem from these. In one of most comprehensive catalogues of her work since 2010, Inevitable Distances presents recent writing on Green's work with some of Green's early texts and influences. Indicating the encounters and distances travelled in a life's journey, both this publication and the exhibition it catalogues puts her artistic production into a speculative and, at times, fictional constellation. This book is co-published by DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Program, Berlin; Hatje Cantz; and KW Institute for Contemporary Art.

Tony Birks was a prolific writer on art, particularly in British studio ceramics. This is the first publication to bring together his writings in a single volume. During the 1970s studio ceramic grew dramatically as a force on the international art scene. In Britain and America particularly, but also across Europe, practice flourished and powerful thinkers sought to define and describe what was happening. It was a dynamic and a controversial time, in which the nature of pottery showed itself capable of radical change. In the decades that followed this outburst, ceramic consolidated into a complex aesthetic and cultural discourse. Tony Birks was at the heart of this new wave of activity. A consummate writer and an artist himself, he supported what had happened in previous decades to generate a Modern ceramic art, and he championed the new generation blossoming around him. His publications provided crucial support to a discipline barely served by mainstream art history and criticism. He wrote monographs on major established figures, but he also had an extraordinarily perceptive eye for new talent, which served to bring attention to vibrant young artists. A number of these went on to become leading forces on the international scene. This book gathers together for the first time a comprehensive selection of Tony Birks's writing. A number of the essays are about the nature of ceramic practice, but the majority are about individual practitioners, among them are Bernard Leach, Lucie Rie, Hans Coper, Claudi Casanovas, Tony Hepburn, Andrew Lord, Ruth Duckworth and Takeshi Yasuda. Taken as a whole, the book is a window on the world of ceramic art at a crucial time in its growth - the issues and the personalities - opened for us by one of its most significant critical voices. The book also includes a catalogue of the ceramic works owned by Tony Birks that were gifted to the Sainsbury Centre at the University of East Anglia.

The Cambridge Art Book contains a unique collection of contemporary images of this most beautiful city, from the grand architecture of its historic university to its more intimate corners. Alongside the drama of its fine buildings, the tranquillity of its green spaces, the city's artists uncover the quirks that make it an unending delight.

Gerhard Richter is one of the most famous painters of our time, worldwide. His fascinating visual spheres are characterized by a unique originality and quality, in which the abstract and the figural intertwine and permeate each other. This extensive volume of pictures concentrates entirely upon the theme of landscape in Richter's oeuvre. Through this genre, to which Richter has remained loyal for more than sixty years, it is possible to see more than a development in the artist's painting style. There is also a perceptible, genuine independence in many of the works, which makes him one of the most remarkable artists of our day. This book adds to the understanding of the significance and pictorial essence of Richter's art, opening up current insights into the theme of nature and landscape in the twenty-first century.

This volume is dedicated to the international artist Kata Legrady's graphic work, through a selection of drawings, sketches and preparatory studies published on the occasion of the exhibition at Fondazione Mudima in Milan. Through the graphic work gathered in this volume, we discover her creative praxis which, according to Arturo Schwarz, "is determined, to a great extent, by her unconscious; the work has a playful dimension; she observes the world with a gaze that has conserved the innocence, curiosity and inventiveness of childhood". Finally, an essay by Bazon Brock brings a deep insight on the importance of drawing in the practice of contemporary art.

The beautiful companion volume to Lee Ufan's largest site-specific outdoor sculpture project in the U.S. In fall 2019, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden debuted 10 new specially commissioned outdoor sculptures from celebrated Korean artist Lee Ufan. This book accompanies the expansive installation, which features sculptures from the artist's signature and continuing "Relatum" series and marks the first exhibition of Lee's work in the nation's capital. For the first time in the Hirshhorn Museum's 44-year history, its 4.3-acre outdoor plaza will be devoted entirely to the work of a single artist, and this book is a beautiful commemoration or keepsake of that event. Lee is a founder of the late 1960s artistic movement Mono-ha, or "School of Things," so his artwork represents an encounter between the viewer, the materials, and the site. The sculptures in this installation and book reflect this: all of the sculptures respond to the museum's unique architecture and continue Lee's iconic practice of placing contrasting materials, such as stainless steel plates and boulders, in dialogue with one another to heighten awareness of the world. The book features more than 100 color illustrations, including preliminary sketches, photographs of the artist selecting materials for the work, images of the installation process, shots of installed sculptures, details of installed sculptures, and more. Accompanying these powerful images are a foreword, essays, artist interview, and short captions that highlight how the works are rooted in contemplation and sensation rather than static representation. Lee Ufan: Open Dimension offers readers an intimate look at the work, artistic process, and impact of one of the pioneering figures of postwar art.

Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 features artists Lauren Fensterstock, Timothy Horn, Debora Moore, and Rowland Ricketts. Nature provides a way for these invited artists to ask what it means to be human in a world increasingly chaotic and divorced from our physical landscape. Representing craft media from fiber to mosaic to glass and metals, these artists approach the long history of art's engagement with the natural world through unconventional and highly personal perspectives. Forces of Nature: Renwick Invitational 2020 is the ninth installment of the Renwick Invitational. Established in 2000, this biennial showcase highlights midcareer and emerging makers who are deserving of wider national recognition.The featured artists work in a wide variety of media, from Lauren Fensterstock, who creates detailed, large-scale installations using intensive modes of making drawn from the decorative arts, including paper quilling and mosaic, and from whom SAAM has commissioned a site-specific work--inspired in part by the illustrated renaissance German manuscript The Book of Miracles ---that will transform an entire gallery at the Renwick, to Timothy Horn, who creates exaggerated adornments that combine natural and constructed worlds, taking inspiration from objects as varied as baroque jewellery patterns and Victorian era detailed studies of lichen, coral, and seaweed, from bronze and glass, as well as unusual materials like crystalized rock sugar, to evoke the extravagant Amber Room in the Catherine the Great's palace of Tsarskoye Selo; and from Debora Moore, known for her exquisitely detailed glass renderings of orchids, and who is represented in this volume in her new series, Arboria (2018), in which Moore focuses less on realism and more on capturing an intensely personal experience of beauty and wonder, to Rowland Ricketts who creates immersive installations using handwoven and hand-dyed cloth, starting on his farm, where he cultivates the indigo plants he uses to colour his artwork, fully linking his material and process with the finished product. Participatory engagement from non-artists, forms a major part of Rickett's work, emphasizing the relationship between nature, culture, the passage of time, and everyday life.

A revised and expanded edition of one the most popular titles in the Contemporary Artists Series Born in Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid-1970s. Through performance, video, sculpture, and installation, she creates architectonic spaces that relate to the body, language, and the condition of exile as well as transforming everyday, domestic objects into things foreign, threatening, and dangerous. Often exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum's works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial, and otherness.

Markus Oehlen (*1956) is one of Germany's most unmistakable painters. As an anarchic pictorial inventor, since the 1980s he has revolted against any visual convention and aesthetic convenience. Due to his integration of digital techniques and the contemporary reservoir of images, he creates stunningly hybrid paintings. Collage-like fragments of art history and popular culture interfere with each other. Abstraction and figuration swiftly blend into one another. With the utmost freedom, Oehlen expands the possibilities of today's painting in his both daring and calculated pictorial experiments.

Neither authentic nor kitsch, readymade nor traditional craft, the works of Swiss artist Valentin Carron (born 1975) play with material ambiguity--fake wood, fake concrete, fake bronze--to unpack the iconography of power and authority. "Learning from Martigny" offers photographic source material intertwined with images of his sculptures and paintings.

This book focuses on the under-explored significance of materials throughout Chinese art. Since the inventions of porcelain and gunpowder, Chinese artists have experimented with unconventional artistic materials and used conventional materials in unorthodox ways. This groundbreaking volume is the first publication to expound the trans-historical importance of materiality in Chinese art by bringing together essays from leading scholars, curators, and conservators. Essayists Anne Feng, Yuhang Li, Wei-Cheng Lin, Catherine Stuer, and Yusen Yu examine how materials including lacquer, crystal, paper, and gold stimulated advances in premodern Chinese art. Alex Burchmore, Orianna Cacchione, Nancy P. Lin, Sara Moy, and Rachel Rivenc analyze several instances of material experimentation in contemporary Chinese art in essays that consider materials as varied as gunpowder, plastic, and water. This book builds upon scholarship originally presented at the Art and Materiality Symposium, held on the occasion of the Smart Museum of Art's exhibition The Allure of Matter: Material Art from China.

documenta fifteen is no ordinary art exhibition. Envisioned under the guiding concept of lumbung, the Indonesian collective ruangrupa is less concerned with individual works than with models of collaborative practice. The Handbook offers insights and orientation to the processes that evolved in the creation of the exhibition. A comprehensive resource both for visitors of documenta in Kassel as well as people interested in collective practices, this Handbook presents all documenta fifteen collectives and artists through profiles by international authors familiar with their different artistic practices and cultural contexts. Using the pivotal question of "what is lumbung?" as a vantage point, the book is an introduction to the mindset and cultural background of documenta fifteen, featuring numerous documents and photographs that trace the collectives' working process. A chapter gathering all of the show's locations and venues in Kassel as well as a large fold-out city map and an introduction to the exhibition's "Public Program" will prove to be especially useful for all visitors.

South African-born Belgian artist Kendell Geers changed his date of birth to MAY 1968 as a performance, effectively giving birth to himself as a work of art. His artistic practice weaves together African animism, European mysticism, and socio-political activism with humor, irony, and contradiction. He uses his identity as a White African like a key to unlock and critique our understanding and reading of history, art, and language. This book, which focuses on his works created between 1988 and the present, looks at the influence of avant-garde traditions from Dada and Surrealism to Punk, intertwined with the powerful legacy of traditional African art on his work. Spiritually charged, politically poignant, and socially engaged, the work cannot be categorized as either European or African, but is rather a prolonged metaphysical dialogue between cultures, archetypal signs, and sacred symbols. Included are works in a diversity of media, including painting, sculpture, performance, photography, installation, and conceptual art. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

The first, intimate visual documentation of artists who have influenced and transformed the Chinese art scene over the last two decades German photographer Thomas Fuesser has been following artists in China since 1993, when he was first invited by renowned Dutch curator Hans van Dijk (1946-2002) to join a group of foreign journalists and photographers to visit the up-and-coming members of the then fledgling Beijing and Shanghai art scenes. Reports on this visit, by New York Times art critic Andrew Solomon and several others, later played a major role in the making of prominent artists, such as Fang Lijun, Wang Guangyi, and Yue Minjun. Over many years, Fusser has developed close and enduring professional relationships with the artistic community in China. His striking portraits tell their stories and depict their work and personalities in an entirely distinct style, documenting a part of contemporary history and an immensely dynamic time in China. Recording the lives and thought processes of leading artists, such as Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Peili, Feng Mengbo, Wu Shanzhuan, and Zhou Tiehai, `SHORT CUTS', inspired by Robert Altman's concept of multiple parallel destinies that interact, provides a fascinating visual insight into the heart and soul of Chinese society.

Before her death, the artist and writer Leonora Carrington (1917-2011) had already garnered a cult following, with numerous creative people making the pilgrimage to meet her at her home in Mexico City. Since then, her fame has only increased. Thinking across contemporary art media, this book demonstrates how Carrington has posthumously become a medium in her own right, critically haunting the creative intellectuals who met or knew her. It explores the work of a remarkable variety of individuals and organisations, including the artists Lucy Skaer, Samantha Sweeting and Lynn Lu, the actress Tilda Swinton, the novelists Chloe Aridjis and Heidi Sopinka and the ensemble Double Edge Theatre. This long-awaited study provides essential reading for both new and established members of the burgeoning Carrington fan club. -- .

Uninterrupted Fugue offers a selection of critical essays about the art of Palestinian artist Kamal Boullata, covering 40 years of his career. Written by an international constellation of critics, art historians and museum curators coming together for the first time in one book, they reveal a wide range of analytical perspectives on the unfolding of abstract art in exile. Readers interested in contemporary art beyond the Western canon, will find in this lavishly illustrated book rare insights into an aesthetic where frontiers are crossed between verbal and visual expression, between modernity and traditions rooted in Byzantine and Islamic art.

Recent events have pushed artists to visualize ideas of closeness in a new light. Kinship, published on the occasion of the National Portrait Gallery's tenth "Portraiture Now" exhibition, features the work of eight leading contemporary artists who explore familial relationships through photography, painting, sculpture, and performance. Contemporary portraiture offers a way to consider the mutable yet enduring qualities of familial relationships and the internal and external forces that affect our bonds with others. For example, interpretations of distance - whether emotional, physical, or geographical - have recently become more fraught. By recognizing the transformations that occur in the genre of portraiture and the threads that today's portraits share, we can better understand the universality and specificity of kinship. List of artists: Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Jess T. Dugan, LaToya Ruby Frazier, Jessica Todd Harper, Thomas Holton, Sedrick Huckaby, Anna Tsouhlarakis

Kris Fierens (born 1957) uses the character of a preliminary study or a sketch as an enduring thing. Or, in their possibility they imitate the character of a preliminary study. Reality and emotion reach a virtual zero point. The gestures that he makes simply become the 'objets trouves'. The object 'on his own' is never present. It's the included matter that enables him to save his dream. Traces of something that still needs to happen. Of which a disappearing memory can already behold. Text in English and Dutch.

"Although the street art is generally conveyed in a very natural matter, even his dead animal paintings seem at peace." - Streetartbio.com "Detached from the artist's identity, his detailed, illustrative animal paintings have brought him back to the world. With local species of animals as his main focus, ROA inevitably starts a dialogue about human interaction with nature and the environment, whether it is painting on the walls of a museum or in an abandoned rural factory." - Hi Fructose - The New Contemporary Magazine "One of the most influential acts of street art around the world." - The Huffington Post Fascinated by nature, the anonymous muralist and street artist ROA is inspired by the beauty of its non-human inhabitants. With great attention to detail, ROA draws over-sized black and white creatures of endemic or endangered species on buildings around the world, from Moscow to Mexico City, and from Los Angeles to London. His subjects are frequently survivors; scavengers, rodents, and unusual animals that thrive in their particular milieu.