The years since 1989 have seen a complete untethering of what art can be, who makes it and where it can be found, which has been matched by a reassessment of art's appropriate place in society and the financial value that should be attached to it. In this new book in the World of Art series, Kelly Grovier surveys the dynamic developments in art practice worldwide since 1989, going in search of those artists who have undertaken to shape a fresh visual vocabulary and whose work reflects on these turbulent years. The book's ten chapters examine the key themes in contemporary art, from portraiture in the age of face transplants and facial recognition software, to political activism, science and religion. Artists discussed include Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, George Condo, Marlene Dumas, Sean Scully, Cindy Sherman, Banksy, Ai Weiwei, Antony Gormley, Christo and Jean-Claude, Jenny Holzer, Chuck Close and Cornelia Parker. The final chapter, a timeline, traces the evolution of art practice in this period by looking closely at one key artwork from each year.

Mahmoud Obaidi's work encompasses sculpture, conceptual objects, film and painting; a series of politically-charged fragments which are brought together within this publication. Born in Iraq in 1966, Mahmoud Obaidi's artistic career is marked by transition, conflict, fragmentation and exile. Encompassing sculpture, conceptual objects, film and painting, his work is a series of politically-charged fragments which are herewith brought together within this publication and exhibition. This book captures the multiple elements that constitute Obaidi's work. In addition to literature, film, music and installation, he has also embarked on architectural projects, such as the Al Jazeera headquarters in Doha where he produced drawings and worked with civil engineers to design this structure. War, terrorism, pollution and ecology are just some of the topics that are filtered through his work. The central display structure of the exhibition - the rope - evokes Duchamp's Twine (1942), which is here re-purposed into the precarious connecting device that holds each element together. As is always present within Obaidi's work, however, connection and unity has the potential to be broken through war and its capacity to segregate and isolate. The taut rope holding everything together is quickly broken with the cut of a knife.

Art, History, and Postwar Fiction explores the ways in which novelists responded to the visual arts from the aftermath of the Second World War to the present day. If art had long served as a foil to enable novelists to reflect on their craft, this book argues that in the postwar period, novelists turned to the visual arts to develop new ways of conceptualizing the relationship between literature and history. The sense that the novel was becalmed in the end of history was pervasive in the postwar decades. In seeming to bring modernism to a climax whilst repeating its foundational gestures, visual art also raised questions about the relationship between continuity and change in the development of art. In chapters on Samuel Beckett, William Gaddis, John Berger, and W. G. Sebald, and shorter discussions of writers like Doris Lessing, Kathy Acker, and Teju Cole, this book shows that writing about art was often a means of commenting on historical developments of the period: the Cold War, the New Left, the legacy of the Holocaust. Furthermore, it argues that forms of postwar visual art, from abstraction to the readymade, offered novelists ways of thinking about the relationship between form and history that went beyond models of reflection or determination. By doing so, this book also argues that attention to interactions between literature and art can provide critics with new ways to think about the relationship between literature and history beyond reductive oppositions between formalism and historicism, autonomy and context.

Glitch Art in Theory and Practice: Critical Failures and Post-Digital Aesthetics explores the concept of "glitch" alongside contemporary digital political economy to develop a general theory of critical media using glitch as a case study and model, focusing specifically on examples of digital art and aesthetics. While prior literature on glitch practice in visual arts has been divided between historical discussions and social-political analyses, this work provides a rigorous, contemporary theoretical foundation and framework.

'The avant-garde' is perhaps the most important and influential concept in the history of modern culture. For over a hundred years it has governed critical and historical assessment of the quality and significance of an artist or a work of art, in any medium-if these have been judged to be 'avant-garde', then they have been worthy of consideration. If not, then by and large they have not, and neither critics nor historians have paid them much attention. In short, modern art is and has been whatever the 'avant-garde' has made, or has said it is. But very little attempt has been made to explore why 'the avant-garde' carries so much authority, or how it came to do so. What is more, the term remains a difficult one to define, and is often used in a variety of ways. What is the relation between 'the avant-garde' - that is, the social entity (the 'club') - and 'avant-garde' qualities in a work of art (or design, or architecture, or any other cultural product)? What does 'avant-gardism mean? Moreover, now that contemporary art seems to have broken all taboos and is at the centre of a billion-pound art market, is there still an 'avant-garde'? If so, what is the point of it and who are the artists concerned? In this Very Short Introduction, David Cottington explores the concept of the 'avant-garde' and examines its wider context through the development of western modernity, capitalist culture, and the global impact of both. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

A study of two exhibitions that took place five years apart in the same building in Brussels city-centre Full House explores two exhibitions that took place five years apart in the same building in Brussels and featured over 300 contemporary art works from the renowned collection of Frederic de Goldschmidt. The first show, Not Really Really, was organized in 2016 in a building that had only been vacated a few months before by a mental health clinic. The works were mostly sculptures made with everyday objects and played with the ambiguity of what the last occupants could have left and what the artists purposefully created. The building then underwent a long renovation, with photos included illustrating this process. The second show, Inaspettatamente (Unexpectedly), then engaged with themes such as order and disorder, time, classification, the artist's process or his/her position in world conflicts using the prism of the famous Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti. Curatorial texts and images of the works both in context and in studio allow the reader to discover and appreciate both exhibitions. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Cloud Seven , Quai du commerce 7 (November 11, 2021-January 30, 2022)

Tearing, cutting, shredding in order to reassemble the elements and create something new: strip by strip the Austrian artist Monika Fioreschy applies lengths of torn paper to her canvases, thereby creating large-format abstract works filled with a harmonious formal language and offering an unexpected wealth of detail when observed more closely. Paper is the main medium used in the new cycles of works by Monika Fioreschy, whereby the strength of her works lies in the reduction of materials and forms. Line by line our eyes follow the course of the collages; the observer is seduced into reading her art. The strict regularity of the works is interrupted by changes in colour, the arrangement of the folds, gaps and overpasting, whereby the real wealth of detail only becomes evident through intensive study. In his essay accompanying the full-page reproductions of the works, art theorist Bazon Brock explains how Fioreschy's training in classic weaving skills can be rediscovered in these works and the role they play in the artist's oeuvre as a whole.

Beverly Barkat s painting is rooted in a profound and ongoing dialogue with art history. Her study and observation of the figurative and realistic tradition in Western art has resulted in her accumulating a body of knowledge that she draws on directly in her artistic practice. To achieve her aim of capturing the essence of the body in motion, Barkat has begun working on a large scale, using broad gestures that recall action painting. The best of her production, together with her latest works (large-scale painted PVC sheets), is illustrated in this book, her first.

The work of the prize winning Peruvian American light artist Grimanesa Amoros is characterised by organic forms and an instinctive approach. The basis of her fascinating sculptures lies, however, in the natural sciences, social history and critical theory. Research and feeling establish a form of communication in her works. The expansive sculptures and video installations of Grimanesa Amoros have already been shown all over the world: from Mexico to Tel Aviv and from Beijing to Times Square in New York. She presented her latest works, "OCUPANTE" and "GOLDEN SECRET ROOM", In the Ludwig Museum Koblenz. The artist creat es playful light installations which are so enigmatic that they permit interpretations on different levels. Together with an overview of her work, this volume reproduces the works in large format illustrations, thereby reproducing their fluidity and luminosity.

Andrea Bischof is one of Austria's most important contemporary artists and has made a name for herself through the subtleness of the coloration and exceptional harmony of her compositions. She achieves this through weeks of patiently juxtaposing dazzling tones that. The alluring interplay between surface and depth literally makes the pictures begin to breathe and pulsate. Bischof has always felt a strong affinity with French art and, in her work, continues in the footsteps of the Impressionists, Nabis and Fauves. Like the Abstract Expressionist artists Bischof has also made a close study of the fulminant late work of the great French master Claude Monet. This volume portrays Bischof's development form the monochrome works of her early period and the arcane depths of her Reflections, over the experimental works on paper to the strongly colored, expressive large-formats of the magnificent Pulsations series. An interview with the artist and a lavishly illustrated biography complete this overview.

Japanese Sumi-e brush painting combines the techniques of calligraphy and ink painting to produce compositions of rare beauty. This art has its roots in the Zen Buddhist practices of mindfulness and meditation--serving as a means not just for describing wonders of nature, but as a method for training our minds to view the world in its essential grace and simplicity. This book is the product of many years of study with Ukai Uchiyama--a master Japanese calligrapher and artist. Kay Morrissey Thompson shares the knowledge she gained from this association, presenting a thorough discussion of the artist's work along with a series of practical lessons based on Mr. Uchiyama's instruction. The informative text is accompanied by over fifty illustrations, many in color, reproducing works by Ukai Uchiyama and enabling aspiring artists to understand how each painting was created. With a smaller size and new cover, this timeless Tuttle Classic (originally published in 1960), has been reformatted for a new generation of readers.

Chicago is home to more intact African American street murals from the 1970s and 1980s than any other U.S. city. Among Chicago's greatest muralists is the legendary William "Bill" Walker (1927-2011), compared by art historians to Diego Rivera. Francis O'Connor, America's foremost mural historian, called Walker the most accomplished contemporary practitioner of the classical mural tradition that runs from Giotto to Rivera. Though his art could not have been more public, Walker maintained a low profile during his working life and virtually withdrew from the public eye after his retirement in 1989. Author Jeff W. Huebner met Walker in 1990 and embarked on a series of insightful interviews in 2008. Those meetings form the basis of Walls of Prophecy and Protest, the story of Walker's remarkable life and the movement that he inspired. Featuring thirty-five color images of Walker's work, this handsome edition reveals the artist who was the primary figure behind Chicago's famed Wall of Respect and who created numerous murals that depicted African American historical figures; protested social injustice; and centered imagination, love, respect, and community accountability.

The official art book for the animated movie The Amazing Maurice, based on the Carnegie Medal-winning Discworld novel by Terry Pratchett Maurice is a streetwise talking tomcat who comes up with a money-making scam by befriending a group of talking rats and finding a dumb-looking kid who plays a pipe. When Maurice and company reach the stricken town of Bad Blintz, they meet a bookworm called Malicia and their scheme soon goes down the drain. The Art of the Film is a coffee table hardback celebration of the creative process of bringing The Amazing Maurice to life, including exclusive concept designs, character sketches, storyboards and production art, alongside insight from the artists, filmmakers and directors.

Featuring dozens of compelling images, this transformative reading of borderland and Mexican cultural production-from body art to theater, photography, and architecture-draws on extensive primary research to trace more than two decades of social and political response in the aftermath of NAFTA. Honorable Mention, Humanities Book Prize, Mexico Section of the Latin American Studies Association, 2018 Honorable Mention, Arvey Foundation Book Award, Association for Latin American Art, 2019 REMEX presents the first comprehensive examination of artistic responses and contributions to an era defined by the North American Free Trade Agreement (1994-2008). Marshaling over a decade's worth of archival research, interviews, and participant observation in Mexico City and the Mexico-US borderlands, Amy Sara Carroll considers individual and collective art practices, recasting NAFTA as the most fantastical inter-American allegory of the turn of the millennium. Carroll organizes her interpretations of performance, installation, documentary film, built environment, and body, conceptual, and Internet art around three key coordinates-City, Woman, and Border. She links the rise of 1990s Mexico City art in the global market to the period's consolidation of Mexico-US border art as a genre. She then interrupts this transnational art history with a sustained analysis of chilanga and Chicana artists' remapping of the figure of Mexico as Woman. A tour de force that depicts a feedback loop of art and public policy-what Carroll terms the "allegorical performative"-REMEX adds context to the long-term effects of the post-1968 intersection of D.F. performance and conceptualism, centralizes women artists' embodied critiques of national and global master narratives, and tracks post-1984 border art's "undocumentation" of racialized and sexualized reconfigurations of North American labor pools. The book's featured artwork becomes the lens through which Carroll rereads a range of events and phenomenon from California's Proposition 187 to Zapatismo, US immigration policy, 9/11 (1973/2001), femicide in Ciudad Juarez, and Mexico's war on drugs.

31 May 2015 would have been Bernhard Schultze's one-hundredth birthday. On the occasion of this anniversary the publication featuring approximately eighty works of art honours the extensive oeuvre of one of the most important Art Informel artists. As a co-founder of the QUADRIGA artists' group Bernhard Schultze made an important contribution to the establishment of Art Informel in Germany. This art movement rejected both realistic figuration and "formulaic" geometric abstraction, drawing instead on intuitive creative powers. The book presents delicately coloured and black-and-white drawings and boldly colourful oil paintings as well as Schultze's important reliefs and sculptures. Texts by art historians, authors, psychoanalysts and fellow artists and texts and poems by Bernhard Schultze himself paint a multifaceted picture of this important post-war artist's oeuvre

The most recent installation by the internationally acclaimed artist Alicja Kwade (b. 1979), who comes from Katowice, explores the French physicist Leon Foucault's (1819-1868) proof that the world rotates and develops the experiment further. The present volume illustrates the playful exploration of space and time using recent pictures from the Schirn rotunda. The Berlin-based artist Alicja Kwade's scientificlooking experimental setups are reminiscent of surreal and phantasmagorical constellations and objects. The fascination of her work, which cannot be explained by reason alone, is rooted in the skilful superimposition and sometimes paradoxical nature of scientific and social realities. Things that are generally taken to be established facts are called into question and disproved. Here the artist explores the true movement of time, which will have an immediate effect on both space and the viewer.

Laura Brouwers--widely known as Instagram sensation @Cyarine--has created her first book to share with her fans and aspiring artists. In Expedition Sketchbook: Inspiration and Skills for Your Artistic Journey, Laura takes readers through techniques that build better a better artist. In a fun and easy-to-follow manner, each page is full of inspiration to help every reader improve their own art. Expedition Sketchbook includes: - All forms of sketches, drawings, and doodles - Practice drills to sharpen technique - Projects and challenges to hone skills - Tips to cultivate your own personal style - Guides for use of materials Laura's personal story is one of triumph and perseverance. At a young age, she was diagnosed with Asperger's and autism, and told she would likely never be able to live on her own or find success in a professional career. Years of hard work, determination, and dedication to her craft has proven the opposite. In Expedition Sketchbook, Laura shares her challenges and all she has overcome to become the influencer and artistic phenomenon she is today.

This collection of rare, abstract Tantra drawings was conceived when the French poet Franck Andre Jamme stumbled on a small catalogue of Tantric art at a Paris bookseller's stall. The volume included writings by Octavio Paz and Henri Michaux, and Jamme became fascinated by the images' affinity with modern art and poetry. He read voraciously and even journeyed to India, searching in vain for Tantric practitioners, until a bus accident on the road to Jaipur sent him home to France with serious injuries. When he returned a few years later, he met a soothsayer who proclaimed that Jamme had now paid sufficient tribute to the goddess Shakti and required him to take a vow: he must visit the "tantrikas" alone or only in the company of a loved one. Since then, Jamme has gained extraordinary access to very private communities of adepts and their intensely beautiful works. These contemporary, anonymous drawings from Rajasthan are unlike the more familiar strands of Tantric art--the geometric yantras, or erotic illustrations of the "Kama Sutra." The progeny of seventeenth-century illustrated religious treatises, these drawings have evolved into a distinct visual lexicon designed to awaken heightened states of consciousness and are imbued with specific spiritual meanings (e.g. spirals and arrows for energy, an inverted triangle for Shakti). A revelatory volume on this occluded genre of Indian art, "Tantra Song" is a convergence of east and west, the spiritual and the aesthetic, the ancient and the modern.
Franck Andre Jamme is the author of more than a dozen volumes of poetry. His translated workds (by John Ashbery, Charles Borkuis, David Kelley and others) include "New Exercises," "Another Silent Attack," "The Recitation of Forgetting" and "Extracts of the Life of a Beetle." He has collaborated on books with a number of artists including Philippe Favier, Suzan Frecon, Acharya Vyakul and Hanns Schimansk. A specialist in Art Brut, Tantric and tribal art of India, he has participated in exhibitions at Centre Pompidou, Beaux-Art de Paris and The Drawing Center, among others.

This generously illustrated volume is the first comprehensive publication devoted to the powerfully expressive work of David Park (1911-60). Best known as the founder of Bay Area Figurative art, Park moved from Boston to California at the age of seventeen and spent most of his adult life in and around San Francisco. In the immediate postwar years, like many avant-garde American artists, he engaged with Abstract Expressionism and painted non-objectively. In a moment of passion in 1949, he made the radical decision to abandon nearly all of his abstract canvases at the Berkeley city dump and return to the human figure, in so doing marking the beginning of the Bay Area Figurative movement. The astonishingly powerful paintings he made in the decade that followed brought together his long-held interest in classic subjects such as portraiture, domestic interiors, musicians, rowers, and bathers with lush, gestural paint handling and an extraordinary sense of color. In 1958-59 Park reached his expressive peak, reveling in the sensuous qualities of paint to create intensely physical, psychologically charged, and deeply felt canvases. This fertile period cut short by illness in 1960, Park transferred his creative energy to other mediums when he could no longer work on canvas. In the last months of his life, bedridden, he produced an extraordinary thirty-foot-long felt-tip-pen scroll and a poignant series of gouaches. Published to accompany the first major museum exhibition of Park's work in more than thirty years, David Park: A Retrospective traces the full arc of the artist's career, from his early social realist and cubist-inspired efforts of the 1930s to his mature figurative paintings of the 1950s and his astounding final works on paper. An overview of Park's full body of work by Janet Bishop, SFMOMA's Thomas Weisel Family Curator of Painting and Sculpture, will be joined by approximately ninety full-color plates of paintings and works on paper; an essay by Tara McDowell on the figure drawing sessions held by Park, Richard Diebenkorn, Elmer Bischoff, Frank Lobdell, and others in their studios starting in 1953; short essays on Park's scroll, his gouaches, and the portraits that Imogen Cunningham and Park made of each other; and an illustrated chronology. Published in association with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Exhibition schedule: Modern Art Museum of Fort Worth: June 2-September 8, 2019 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts: December 21, 2019-March 15, 2020 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art: October 4, 2020-January 18, 2021

Austrian artist Jürgen Messensee is hard to categorize: his work in painting, drawing, and sculpture has so many facets that focusing on any one risks distorting the larger picture of his artistic achievement. This volume takes a wide-ranging view of his work, offering more than seventy color illustrations of his art in different media and forms, and supplementing them with his own words: his meditations on space and spaces and his philosophical interpretations of the marking of art. The result is both a depiction of the work of a master contemporary artist and a chance to peek into his mind as it works out the problems that lead to his creations.

Paul Z. Rotterdam is one of the most influential art scholars of his generation, combining mature scholarly comprehension with the knowledge wrought from a renowned artistic career.
For this anthology, art historian Carl Aigner brings together for the first time Rotterdam's writings: essays, interviews, and lectures, including lectures given at Harvard University's Visual Art Center and the Cooper Union School of Art, where Rotterdam teaches. In his writings, Rotterdam explores art and nature, beauty and myth, and realism and abstraction, questioning the conditions for artistic creation and making a compelling case for the necessity of tradition in art. Among the writings in this volume is Rotterdam's famous essay on Gustav Klimt's "The Kiss."