Joachim Capdevila (b. 1944) is a master of the art of goldsmithing, whose understanding of how to meld traditional handcraft with contemporary avant-garde jewellery is second to none. At the same time, his roots, which lie in painting, are unmistakable. Yet Capdevila does not just paint metal; his one-off jewellery pieces are rather the materialisation of a creative process in which metal and colour combine to become a completely new entity. The Barcelona-based jewellery artist has created a unique oeuvre in some fifty years, which is now being presented in a 175-piece-strong review for the very first time. In addition, Pilar Velez explores Capdevila's artistic development and his role as a pioneer and a major proponent of New Jewellery in Europe. Joaquim Capdevila is represented in numerous museums, including the Schmuckmuseum Pforzheim (DE), Museum fur Kunst und Gewerbe Hamburg (DE), MAK Museum of Applied Arts / Contemporary Art, Vienna (AT), Musee Olympique, Lausanne (CH), Royal Museums of Scotland, Edinburgh (GB), Collection de la Ville de Cagnes-sur-Mer (FR), Col.- leccio d Art de l Avui, Barcelona (ES), Museu de Montserrat (ES), Museu del Disseny de Barcelona (ES), Dallas Museum of Art, Rose-Asenbaum Collection (US).

The Architectural Guide Chechnya and the North Caucasus represents the first pioneering work of its type to shed light on a little-known mountainous region split between Europe and Asia, one of the few places on Earth that can claim a varied amalgam of ethnic cities, languages, cultures, a remarkable architectural legacy, and human puzzles. This ground-breaking and comprehensive vademecum, collecting unreleased materials and more than 130 buildings scattered throughout seven geographical and ethno-cultural areas of the North Caucasus, is a unique piece of literature to anyone interested in the culture, the history and, of course, the captivating architectural heritage of this mysterious patch of Earth. Sochi:Holidays in the USSR The Ancient Land of the Circassians Spas, Sanatoriums, and Drinking Galleries Magas and Ingushetia's Stone Towers Vladikavkaz: Ruler of the Caucasus Grozny and the Chechen Highlands Dagestan: Mountain Hamlets and Modernist Shapes Soviet Monumental Art: Memorials and Mosaics

Jun Kaneko, born in Nagoya, Japan, in 1942 and based in Omaha, Nebraska, since 1986, is revered for his role in establishing modern ceramic art, yet he has been equally prolific in a range of other media. This book offers an entirely new and detailed survey and analysis of nearly six decades of Kaneko's work in ceramics, drawing, painting, installation art, and opera design. Tracing the career of this dynamic artist from his early training and subsequent association with the pivotal California Clay Movement to his important public commissions and philanthropic concerns of the present, it focuses in particular on the past 20 years, which have previously not been the subject of a comprehensive volume. Drawing extensively on interviews he has conducted with Jun Kaneko since 2002, Glen R. Brown reflects on the principal concepts that have shaped Kaneko's art, situating them in the space between a Japanese Shinto ethos and the aesthetic tenets of Western Art Informel and Post-Painterly Abstraction. He discusses in-depth Kaneko's art, from the colossal glazed-ceramic Dangos to the sensitive colouristic stage and costume designs for operas. The book provides fascinating insights into Kaneko's unique, relentlessly self-sustaining creative process and the multiple conceptions of space that inform it. Featuring more than 200 colour illustrations and substantial information not previously available in published form, this book offers an up-to-date definitive critical survey of this important artist's life and work.

Bioart, art that uses either living materials (such as bacteria or transgenic organisms) or more traditional materials to comment on, or even transform, biotechnological practice, now receives enormous media attention. Yet despite this attention, bioart is frequently misunderstood. Bioart and the Vitality of Media is the first comprehensive theoretical account of the art form, situating it in the contexts of art history, laboratory practice, and media theory.--Mitchell begins by sketching a brief history of bioart in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, describing the artistic, scientific, and social preconditions that made it conceptually and technologically possible. He illustrates how bioartists employ technologies and practices from the medical and life sciences in an effort to transform relationships among science, medicine, corporate interests, and the public. By illustrating the ways in which bioart links a biological understanding of media-that is, "media" understood as the elements of an environment that facilitate the growth and development of living entities-with communicational media, Bioart and the Vitality of Media demonstrates how art and biotechnology together change our conceptions and practices of mediation. Reading bioart through a range of resources-from Immanuel Kant's discussion of disgust to Gilles Deleuze's theory of affect to Gilbert Simondon's concept of "individuation"-provides readers with a new theoretical approach for understanding bioart and its relationships to both new media and scientific institutions.--Bioart and the Vitality of Media is a precise and rigorous exploration of the conceptual underpinnings of an art form that has at times been both troubling and controversial. It will appeal to art historians, artists, media theorists, and readers interested in new media, the cultural study of biology, and the philosophy of technology.--Robert Mitchell is associate professor English at Duke University. He is the author, with Catherine Waldby, of Tissue Economies: Blood, Organs, and Cell Lines in Late Capitalism and, with Phillip Thurtle, Data Made Flesh: Embodying Information and Semiotic Flesh: Information and the Human Body.--"A sustained meditation on bioart as an art practice that stitches together concepts of life and concepts of affect, concepts of vitalism, and concepts of mediation." -Eugene Thacker, author of After Life--"Well-written, lucid, unpretentious, and admirably concise in format and presentation, this book is an original and innovative contribution to the fields of comparative media studies and science and culture studies." -Cary Wolfe, Rice University-

Richard Hambleton (1954 2017) was a Canadian artist known for his pioneering street art. He was a surviving member of a group that emerged from the New York City art scene during the booming art market of the 1980s, which also included his close friends Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. As a conceptual artist, Hambleton s early work instal-lations titled Image Mass Murder from 1976 1979 were secretly placed onto streets in over 15 cities, depicting chalk-body outlines and blood-splattered crime scenes of what appeared to be victims. This theme of a prevailing violence, fear, and morbid curiosity elicited surprise and anxiety from its unsuspecting viewers. In the early 1980s, Hambleton created his most iconic Shadow Man works artfully splattered ominous shadowy figures on unexpected street corners, walls, and alleys that startled viewers into a visceral awareness that the city was still a dangerous place. This book features over 200 images including his early Shadow Man canvas paintings, as well as photographs of his in situ street work, a selection of his Marlboro rodeo horse silhouettes, and his Beautiful Paintings series of landscapes and seascapes, alongside other works on paper; behind-the-scenes studio shots; personal, unseen photographs of the artist; and inspirational imagery. Hambleton was renowned for influencing artists such as Banksy, Blek le Rat, and Shepard Fairey. This arresting, one-of-a-kind book will appeal to those interested in visual arts, street art, graffiti, and art history.

Cai Guo-Qiang, a Chinese artist known throughout the world for his exciting performances with fire, presents in this volume the works created in Naples as part of the project 'In the Volcano'. With these works, resulting from his 'explosion workshop', the artist created a short circuit between our present and the memories of ancient Rome. Cai Guo-Qiang, as a modern Prometheus, plays with his mastery in dominating the fire, and drawing on the powerful and suggestive traditions of the oriental world he crafts pyrotechnic works and performances with which he invites us to rediscover the inescapable bonds between the classical past and the modern sensibility, and in particular between the explosion that in 79 A.D. destroyed Pompei - paradoxically preserving it for us - and artistic creation.

It has been more than fifty years since John Waters filmed his first short on the roof of his parents' Baltimore home. Over the following decades, Waters has developed a reputation as an uncompromising cultural force not only in cinema, but also in visual art, writing, and performance. This major retrospective examines the artist's influential career through more than 160 photographs, sculptures, soundworks, and videos he has made since the early 1990s. These works deploy Waters's renegade humor to reveal the ways that mass media and celebrity embody cultural attitudes, moral codes, and shared tragedy. Waters has broadened our understanding of American individualism, particularly as it relates to queer identity, racial equality, and freedom of expression. In bringing "bad taste" to the walls of galleries and museums, he tugs at the curtain of exclusivity that can divide art from human experience. Waters freely manipulates an image bank of less-than-sacred, low-brow references-Elizabeth Taylor's hairstyles, his own self-portraits, and pictures of individuals brought into the limelight through his films, including his counterculture muse Divine-to entice viewers to engage with his astute and provocative observations about society. This richly illustrated book explores themes including the artist's childhood and identity; Pop culture and the movie business; Waters's satirical take on the contemporary art world; and the transgressive power of images. The catalogue features essays by BMA Senior Curator of Contemporary Art Kristen Hileman; art historian and activist Jonathan David Katz; critic, curator, and artist Robert Storr; as well as an interview with Waters by photographer Wolfgang Tillmans. Published in association with the Baltimore Museum of Art. Exhibition dates: The Baltimore Museum of Art: October 7, 2018-January 6, 2019 Wexner Center for the Arts: February 2-April 28, 2019

Robert Gober rose to prominence in the mid-1980s and was quickly acknowledged as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Early in his career, he made deceptively simple sculptures of everyday objects--beginning with sinks and moving on to domestic furniture such as playpens, beds and doors. In the 1990s, his practice evolved from single works to theatrical room-sized environments. In all of his work, Gober's formal intelligence is never separate from a penetrating reading of the socio-political context of his time. His objects and installations are among the most psychologically charged artworks of the late twentieth century, reflecting the artist's sustained concerns with issues of social justice, freedom and tolerance. Published in conjunction with the first large-scale survey of the artist's career to take place in the United States, this publication presents his works in all media, including individual sculptures and immersive sculptural environments, as well as a distinctive selection of drawings, prints and photographs. Prepared in close collaboration with the artist, it traces the development of a remarkable body of work, highlighting themes and motifs that emerged in the early 1980s and continue to inform Gober's work today. An essay by Hilton Als is complemented by an in-depth chronology featuring a rich selection of images from the artist's archives, including never-before-published photographs of works in progress.
Robert Gober was born in 1954 in Wallingford, Connecticut. He has had numerous one-person exhibitions, most notably at the Dia Center for the Arts, New York; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; and Schaulager, Basel. In 2001, he represented the United States at the 49th Venice Biennale. Gober's curatorial projects have been shown at The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; The Menil Collection, Houston; Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. He lives and works in New York.

The international artist Claudia Schmitz (*1975) transcends boundaries and barriers in her broad oeuvre. In her transmediatic works, she examines identities in real and virtual spaces, designs inter- and reactivity, and experiments with synesthesia. Schmitz discusses socio-urban structures and interweaves them with the phenomenology of drawings and the act of drawing. Always on the search for boundaries, she develops mischievous pneumatic sculptures and multidimensional drawings and projects moving pictures on objects. Through taking up temporary states, discarding and reinventing herself, her work plays with the radius of medial arrangements. The book is the artist's first monograph.

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.

The Jablonka Collection is regarded as one of the highest-profile repositories of American and German art of the 1980s. In this catalogue the art dealer, gallerist and curator Rafael Jablonka (*1951) provides for the first time an insight into his wide-ranging collection, which is dedicated primarily to artists of his own generation. Rafael Jablonka has collected art for decades according to the basic principle of assembling multiple works from the different creative phases of artists. With some 120 works -paintings, works on paper, sculpture and installations -the catalogue introduces the oeuvres in question and shows a representative cross-section of the extensive Jablonka Collection, which was presented to the Albertina on permanent loan in 2019.

A bold, compelling, and original study of nonhuman life in Warhol. Like a Little Dog examines a dimension of Andy Warhol that has never received critical attention: his lifelong personal and artistic interest in nonhuman life. With this book, Anthony E. Grudin offers an engaging new overview of the iconic artist through the lens of animal and plant studies, showing that Warhol and his collaborators wondered over the same questions that absorb these fields: What qualities do humans share with other life forms? How might the vulnerability of life and the unpredictability of desire link them together? Why has the human/animal/plant hierarchy been so rigidly, violently enforced? Nonhuman life impassioned every area of Warhol's practice, beginning with his juvenilia and an unusually close creative collaboration with his mother, Julia Warhola. The pair codeveloped a transgressive animality that permeated Warhol's prolific career, from his commercial illustration and erotica to his writing and, of course, his painting, installation, photography, and film. Grudin shows that Warhol disputed the traditional claim that culture and creativity distinguish the human from the merely animal and vegetal, instead exploring the possibility of art as an earthy and organic force, imbued with appetite and desire at every node. Ultimately, by arguing that nonhuman life is central to Warhol's work in ways that mirror and anticipate influential texts by Toni Morrison and Ocean Vuong, Like a Little Dog opens an entirely unexplored field in Warhol scholarship.

This monograph reviews Xavier Veilhan's monumental sculptures of the past ten years, works that include a buggy distorted as if seen through a rippling pool and a Cubist-style stainless-steel shark. Drawing on references ranging from classical statuary to Futurism and Op art, Veilhan has been compared to artists such as Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons.

The image of a tortured genius working in near isolation has long dominated our conceptions of the artist's studio. Examples abound: think Jackson Pollock dripping resin on a cicada carcass in his shed in the Hamptons. But times have changed; ever since Andy Warhol declared his art space a "factory," artists have begun to envision themselves as the leaders of production teams, and their sense of what it means to be in the studio has altered just as dramatically as their practices.

"The Studio Reader "pulls back the curtain from the art world to reveal the real activities behind artistic production. What does it mean to be in the studio? What is the space of the studio in the artist's practice? How do studios help artists envision their agency and, beyond that, their own lives? This forward-thinking anthology features an all-star array of contributors, ranging from Svetlana Alpers, Bruce Nauman, and Robert Storr to Daniel Buren, Carolee Schneemann, and Buzz Spector, each of whom locates the studio both spatially and conceptually--at the center of an art world that careens across institutions, markets, and disciplines. A companion for anyone engaged with the spectacular sites of art at its making, "The Studio Reader "reconsiders this crucial space as an actual way of being that illuminates our understanding of both artists and the world they inhabit.

The most wide-ranging and up-to-date volume available on the enigmatic and controversial graffiti artist, this deeply researched and highly personal tribute explores how Banksy continues to defy accepted wisdom about artistic success, growing only more famous and powerful even as he sticks to his anti-establishment platform and to his mission to give a voice to the voiceless. Accompanied by stunning full-page, full-color reproductions and photographs of works in situ-including many that have been lost to time -photographer and street art expert Alessandra Mattanza's impassioned and informed text follows Banksy's career trajectory from creator of message-laden stencils on London's city walls to a sought-after champion of human and environmental rights. She investigates many of the key images that populate Banksy's work-animals, children, historic figures, balloons, cartoon characters, police officers, and others. She shows how Banksy's oeuvre has expanded beyond graffiti and stenciling and how his art has helped support his activism in a variety of causes-from calls for peace in the Middle East to the preservation of the natural environment. Best of all she helps readers make sense of the rather unusual path Banksy has chosen-an artist who uses his global platform to raise awareness about the underserved, rather than to his own celebrity. Readers will come away with a new understanding of how Banksy helped transform an illegal act of criminal damage into a high art form, and how, by ridiculing institutionalized art, he has achieved enormous fame within those very institutions.

The elements of Astrid Lowack's (*1969) photographic-artistic transcendence are light, movement and water. As the driving forces of life they relentlessly bring about change and reflect our innermost being -our feelings and experiences. Her snapshots remain thereby constant imaginative challenges to human perception. Astrid Lowack's photographs are experimental mirrors of the emotional world. They visualise consciousness and unconsciousness, abysses and metamorphoses. Our fears and apocalyptic chaos appear in a new perspective, and so does paradisiacal equilibrium. The artist explores unknown ways of thinking and worlds of feeling and immerses herself through her photographic works in the individual experiences of humankind.

George Lois is an American icon in graphic design. This book showcases his logos with his own comments on why they work. A bonus in the book is a chapter of world logos made by others with George Lois's comments on why they are so good. George Lois continues to prove that a memorable brand name interacting with a strong visual symbol to communicate a humanistic idea is the ultimate art form in popular graphic communication. His Big Idea branding and logo design, developed with a built-in, conceptual, "catchy" brand name, can visually impart information in a nanosecond, delivering a specific ethos with a penetrating promise of power that immediately sears a product's virtues into a viewers' brain-and has the potential of bringing instantaneous success. Lois boldly states, "My goal, with the vast majority of the brands I have named and logos I have designed, is to create 'humanistic' symbols, driven by a pregnant idea, visualizing some recognizable aspect of the human experience, and magically relating it to a unique selling proposition that empowers great advertising and promotion." If anyone wants to experience the creation of Big Idea Branding, this astounding compilation of the work of George Lois is the ultimate form of clear, precise, eye-popping communication.

Through my work I return to my native roots, my youth, and the transitory world of innocence...The role of memory in art is a recognised fact, but in my case, as a painter living in a foreign city for so many years, my memories are doubly potent in sustaining my creative life." - Sakti Burman Legends, family, and Indian gods meet and mingle in Sakti Burman's private, kaleidoscopic universe. Sakti Burman is one of India's pioneering painters, who was born in 1935 in Kolkata and grew up in what is now Bangladesh. This monograph is the definitive publication illustrating the evolution of Sakti Burman's prolific paintings, drawings, and watercolors, contextualizing his lifelong exploration into alternative ways of seeing. Burman's colorful figures hark back to a kind of ancient "lost paradise," but also sustain a fresh and irrepressible faith in the beauty and sensibilities of Mother Nature alongside a hopeful human spirit.

The unbelievable true story of artist Thomas Kinkade, self-described Painter of Light, and the dramatic rise -- and fall -- of his billion-dollar gallery and licensing business.

A selection of fifteen well-established artists from across the Maghreb, Levant, and Gulf in conversations moderated by experts on contemporary Middle Eastern art. Historically, artists have been known for their ability to understand emerging trends of thought and emotions before they become clear to the society at large. Yet, outside the art world, artists have rarely enjoyed opportunity to share their ideas. As revolutionary movements challenge decades of authoritarian rule across Arab countries, Conversations with Contemporary Arab Artists is the first book to give voice to artists from across the region and makes their thoughts accessible to a wide audience. Its purpose is to record for future generations these artists' thoughts as they bear witness to revolutionary currents sparking deep transformations in their political and social landscapes. Rather than providing a comprehensive analysis of the "Arab Spring," this book simply aims to provide readers with snap shots of the states of mind of intellectually engaged Arab artists. It is aimed at curators, art historians, artists, sociologists, political scientists, citizens of the Arab world and students of art, art history, and the Middle East.

Flanagan's last finished work, is an extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death from cystic fibrosis at the age of forty-three. Los Angeles writer and artist Bob Flanagan created performances with Sheree Rose that shocked and inspired audiences. He combined text, video, and live performance to create a highly personal but universal exploration of childhood, sex, illness, and mortality. The Pain Journal, Flanagan's last finished work, is an extraordinary chronicle of the final year of his life before his death from cystic fibrosis at the age of forty-three.

The first monograph on young Swiss artist Denis Savary (born 1981), this book spans a wide range of media, from drawing to video, performing arts to sculpture. Savary's fantastical works fictionalize fragments of art and literature, from Oskar Kokoschka to Lautreamont.