Lesley Dill is an American artist working at the intersection of language and fine art in printmaking, sculpture, installation and performance, exploring the power of words to cloak and reveal the psyche. Dill transforms the emotions of the writings of Emily Dickinson, Salvador Espriu, Tom Sleigh, Franz Kafka, and Rainer Maria Rilke, among others, into works of paper, wire, horsehair, foil, bronze and music — works that awaken the viewer to the physical intimacy and power of language itself. Lesley Dill – Wilderness: Light Sizzles Around Me features a uniquely inspired group of sculptures and two-dimensional works more than a decade in the making. It is testimony of Dill’s ongoing investigation into the significant voices and personas of America’s past. For the artist, the American voice grew from early America’s obsessions with divinity and deviltry, on fears of the wilderness out there and wilderness inside us. The plates, in colour throughout, are supplemented with essays by Lesley Dill, Brooklyn-based writer Nancy Princenthal, Figge Art Museum’s curator Andrew Wallace, and researcher and tribal historian Juaquin Hamilton-Youngbird. The book also features a literary text by writer by Tom Sleigh and a poem by author and poet Ray Young Bear.

Featuring a wide array of iconic rock posters, period photographs, music memorabilia and light shows, "out-of-this-world" clothing, and avant-garde films, this catalogue celebrates San Francisco's rebellious and colorful counterculture that blossomed in the years surrounding the 1967 Summer of Love. This book explores, through essays and a succession of thematic plates, the visual and material cultures of a generation searching for personal fulfillment and social change. Presenting key cultural artifacts of the time, Summer of Love introduces and explores the events and experiences that today define this dynamic era. With essays by Victoria Binder, Dennis McNally, and Joel Selvin. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. Exhibition dates: de Young, San Francisco: April 8-August 20, 2017

Hack Wit is a playful and complex body of work developed between 2013 and 2015, using cliches or proverbs and watercolor. For each work, the artist made two watercolors of a different proverb, cut them apart and then combined them into one. The Canadian poet Anne Carson wrote the text Hack Gloss in response to the "Hack Wit" drawings.

Nathalie has been creating ceramics, textiles, illustrations and other artwork for numerous brands - most notably Anthropologie, Astier de Villatte, Uniqlo, Issey Miyake and Godiva - for the past 20 years. She is one of the most commercially successful French artists working today, whose aesthetic has captured the imagination of people from all over the world - her kitchenware, wallpapers, fabrics, furniture, fashion accessories and sculptures are coveted items in countries like Japan, United States, England, Germany and France, among others.

John Marx's watercolours, first published in the Architectural Review, are a captivating example of an architect's way of thinking. Subtle and quiet they are nonetheless compelling works in how they tackle a sense of place, of inhabiting space and time all the while resonating with the core of one's inner being. There is an existential quality to these watercolours that is rare to be found in this medium. Something akin to the psychologically piercing observational quality of artists like De Chirico or Hopper. As architects strive to communicate their ideas, it is interesting to explore the world of Marx's watercolours as an example of a humane approach to conveying emotional meaning in relation to our environment. Marx's subject matter read like"built landscape" heightening the role of the manmade yet wholly in balance with the natural world. This is a message and sentiment that is perhaps more important than ever to relay to audiences.

This fascinating volume showcases the work of British artist, poet and performer Liz Finch and presents a series of 25 sculptures created between 1975 and 2016. The gentle figures are strangely familiar, built using found and made objects that might otherwise be discarded. Knitted limbs and faces with stitched or collaged features are affixed to torsos made from cardboard boxes that are plastered with papier-mâché and painted. The fragile bodies are then suspended on pieces of frayed string and twisted wire from the shoulders or sometimes by the neck. Finch subverts the ordinary and engages with the uncanny; a strange and anxious feeling created by familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts. Featuring full reproductions of each artwork alongside close details that reveal their composition, the book is threaded with poetic texts by Finch that blur the lines between personal memories, surreal dreams and everyday reality.

From award-winning artist and author Cristoph Niemann comes a collection of witty illustrations and whimsical views on working creatively. This survey of Niemann's work will be done in his signature style, combining photography and illustration in surprising and humourous ways. Taking its title from his New York Times column Abstract Sunday, this book covers Niemann's entire career and showcases brilliant observations of contemporary life through sketches, travel journals and popular newspaper features. The narrative guides readers through Christoph's creative process, how he built his career, and how he overcomes the internal and external obstacles that creative people face--all presented with disarming wit and intellect. Enhanced with nearly 350 original images, this book is a tremendous inspirational and aspirational resource.

The first major survey of the artist's work Highlights include Evolution (1992), his first mural-sized painting, and Manifest Destiny (2003-04), an ambitious large-scale work commissioned by the Brooklyn Museum of Art Rockman's ability to cross the boundary between fact and fiction appeals to both scientists and art critics Accompanies an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., November 19, 2010 - May 8, 2011 Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow traces the artist's career from Pond's Edge (1986) to The Reef (2009), with its timely reminder of the perils of off-shore oil drilling. Superficially easy viewing, Rockman's paintings subvert the optimism of the American dream with their mix of scientific precision and environmental degradation. This vividly illustrated volume highlights the attention to detail and striking use of color which give Rockman's work an almost cinematic impact that is seldom seen in contemporary art. His compelling mix of intensely colored realism, scientific detail and strong polemic, result in art that is both a demand for action and an elegy over what has been lost. Author Joanna Marsh worked closely with Rockman on the painting selection and convincingly links the various themes of the artist's work over three decades with the history of America's environmental movement. Contents: Foreword by Elizabeth Broun, director of the Smithsonian American Art Museum Acknowledgments Alexis Rockman: A Fable for Tomorrow by Joanna Marsh Plates Panoramas of the Post-Apocalypse: Rockman's Triptych, American Landscape, and Landscape Theater by Kevin J. Avery From Chameleons in the Curtains to Manifest Destiny by Thomas Lovejoy Accompanies an exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, November 19th, 2010 - May 8th, 2011. Joanna Marsh is The James Dicke Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington D.C. Kevin J. Avery is associate curator in the Department of American Paintings and Sculpture at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Thomas Lovejoy is a leading biologist and Biodiversity Chair, The Heinz Center for Science, Economics, and the Environment.

Chiura Obata (1885-1975) was one of the most significant Japanese American artists working on the West Coast in the last century. Born in Okayama, Japan, Obata emigrated to the United States in 1903 and embarked on a seven-decade career that saw the enactment of anti-immigration laws and the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans during World War II. But Obata emerged as a leading figure in the Northern California artistic communities, serving not only as an influential art professor at UC Berkeley for nearly twenty years, but also as a founding director of art schools in the internment camps. With a prodigious and expansive oeuvre, Obata's seemingly effortless mastery of, and productive engagement with, diverse techniques, styles, and traditions defy the dichotomous categorizations of American/European and Japanese/Asian art. His faith in the power of art, his devotion to preserving the myriad grandeur of what he called "Great Nature," and his compelling personal story as an immigrant and an American are all as relevant to our contemporary moment as ever. This catalogue is the first book surveying Chiura Obata's rich and varied body of work that include over 100 beautiful images, many of which have never been published. It also showcases a selection of Obata's writings and a rare 1965 interview with the artist. The scholarly essays by ShiPu Wang and the other contributors illuminate the intense and productive cross-cultural negotiations that Obata's life and work exemplify, in the context of both American modernism and the early twentieth-century U.S. racio-ethnic relations-a still-understudied area in American art historical scholarship. Published in association with the Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara. Exhibition dates: Art, Design and Architecture Museum, UC Santa Barbara: January 13-April 29, 2018 Utah Museum of Fine Arts, Salt Lake City: May 25-September 2, 2018 Okayama Prefectural Museum of Art, Okayama, Japan: January 18-March 10, 2019 Crocker Art Museum, Sacramento: June 23-September 29, 2019

Dusseldorf-based artist Mischa Kuball (born 1959) spent over a year photographing and interviewing 100 immigrants from 100 different nations in Germany's Ruhr region. Together, the individual stories of these immigrants offer a cross-generational perspective on the area and the cultural and industrial transformations that are helping to define Western Germany as the "New Pott" or new melting pot.

This innovative new history examines in-depth how the growing popularity of large-scale international survey exhibitions, or 'biennials', has influenced global contemporary art since the 1950s. * Provides a comprehensive global history of biennialization from the rise of the European star-curator in the 1970s to the emergence of mega-exhibitions in Asia in the 1990s * Introduces a global array of case studies to illustrate the trajectory of biennials and their growing influence on artistic expression, from the Biennale de la Mediterranee in Alexandria, Egypt in 1955, the second Havana Biennial of 1986, New York s Whitney Biennial in 1993, and the 2002 Documenta11 in Kassel, to the Gwangju Biennale of 2014 * Explores the evolving curatorial approaches to biennials, including analysis of the roles of sponsors, philanthropists and biennial directors and their re-shaping of the contemporary art scene * Uses the history of biennials as a means of illustrating and inciting further discussions of globalization in contemporary art

The most recent work of renowned Austrian sculptor and photographer Werner Feiersinger is an artistic intervention at the Belvedere 21, Austria's national museum for contemporary art, located in the former Austrian Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World's Fair that had been transferred to Vienna in 1962. For this extensive sculptural work, Feiersinger took cues from the building's history and architectural details. As is characteristic of his work, the Belvedere 21 intervention combined the artist's deep and broad knowledge of design and architectural history with a laconic, minimalist formal vocabulary. Werner Feiersinger. Overturn documents this ambitious project with drawings and photographs, essays, and an insightful interview with the artist. Together, they shed light on the ways in which the Belvedere 21 intervention reimagines the Pavilion as an autonomous object that nonetheless speaks to fundamental questions about sculpture. In doing so, it undermines conventional ways of seeing. Text in English and German.

An impressionistic and exuberant memoir by Australia's best-loved artist. Ken Done has an extraordinary place in the hearts of Australians - we've all worn or decorated our homes with his artwork. His vivid, optimistic images are part of our collective consciousness and have helped define us to the world. But what do we know about the man behind the brand? A dreamy country kid-turned-art student, Ken took off overseas for a Mad Men-esque advertising career before an epiphany at a Matisse exhibition showed him that painting was where his heart truly lay. But a return to Sydney to paint saw his art overtaken by his entrepreneurial instincts as 'Ken Done' became a sought-after global brand. However there's more to Ken Done's story than just commercial success: the sudden loss of the profits from a lifetime's hard work and a resultant stressful court case was closely followed by a shock cancer diagnosis. It was a dark time, but the powerful paintings that came out of this bleak period have brought him long-overdue acclaim as one of our great artists. From his studio on sparkling Sydney Harbour to the ochre tints of the outback or the luminous palette of tropical waters, Ken's artist's eye is ever drawn to beauty and colour. But through good times and bad, what has sustained him are the simple pleasures of life: family, home and, of course, painting.

More than any other modern artist, Pablo Picasso came to represent the idea of genius. Yet the aesthetic of genius, which governed Western thinking about art between the mid-eighteenth and mid-twentieth centuries, has also limited how we interpret Picasso's work. In Radical Picasso, C. F. B. Miller dispenses with the privatized cliches that have dominated the reception of modernism's most celebrated oeuvre. Instead, Picasso's practice emerges as an assemblage whose density and agitation, negativity and excess, cannot be contained by hero worship (or its inverse). The artworks in question are radical not least because they strike at the visual root of theory, the perceptual root of the aesthetic. Ranging across histories of art, literature, philosophy, and science, Miller critiques the Picasso myth, rethinks cubism and surrealism, and in the process transforms our understanding of European modernism.

Marc Brandenburg (* 1965) strolls through cities, photographing his impressions and then drawing them “like a human photocopier.” In this almost meditative process, he finds beauty in social conditions. His pencil drawings, reversed into negatives, capture everyday, ephemeral motifs. Brandenburg is interested in moments when inner and outer states unite, when human beings merge with their costumes, their clothing, or their dwellings. Formal and conceptual aspects of drawing, as well as a fundamental examination of representation, are more important to him than the motifs themselves. The publication Hirnsturm II accompanies the exhibition of the same name, a visual essay that combines drawings from a period of over 25 years with more recent works. Text in English and German.

When Andrew Bick goes about his painting, then it is not only in the spirit of creativity, but also in a rich actualization of art history. Influenced above all by English Constructivism and System Art, Bick has found his own style. The starting point of each work is the grid. It structures the ground upon which Bick makes his shapes dance. Some lines define boundaries in the painting process, others are painted over, and sometimes the brush completely departs from the drawing's guidelines and fills the pictorial space with the voluminous quality of its color. This creates a multifaceted interplay between order and freedom, painting and drawing, past and present. The transitions are hardly noticeable, bringing the extremes together and captivating the viewer. Languages: English and German

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.

This book examines how contemporary Scottish writers and artists revisit and reclaim nature in the political and aesthetic context of devolved Scotland. Camille Manfredi investigates the interaction of landscape aesthetics and strategies of spatial representation in Scotland's twenty-first-century literature and arts, focusing on the apparatuses designed by nature writers, poets, performers, walking artists and visual artists to physically and intellectually engage with the land and re-present it to themselves and to the world. Through a comprehensive analysis of a variety of site-specific artistic practices, artworks and publications, this book investigates the works of Scotland-based artists including Linda Cracknell, Kathleen Jamie, Thomas A. Clark, Gerry Loose, John Burnside, Alec Finlay, Hamish Fulton, Hanna Tuulikki and Roseanne Watt, with a view to exploring the ongoing re-invention of a territory-bound identity that dwells on an inclusive sense of place, as well as on a complex renegotiation with the time and space of Scotland.