German artist Martin Bruno Schmid (b. 1970) works at the intersection of art and architecture; his tools are drills, saws, and sandpaper, his process includes hammering, shredding, and cutting. Material is extracted, and rarely applied. Schmid addresses the very subject of construction itself with his minimalistic and exceptionally radical interventions in public spaces. In doing so he pushes the frontiers of what is feasible and makes visible what we take for granted. His interventions are a celebration of all the technologies of civilisation that enable us to spend our lives protected and safe, but they are also a test of our certitude. This latest monograph on his work provides a comprehensive insight into Schmid's widely varied oeuvre and opens a gateway to the Stuttgart artist's creative world. Text in English and German.

In every generation of artists, there are a few who propose a new set of ques- tions and alter the way we understand art. Peter Doig is such an artist. This handsome monograph considers the painter's entire career, beginning with the early work produced in the 1990s when Doig's enigmatic but wholly new conception of painting was first introduced to audiences. Doig was born to Scottish parents, spent several years as a child in Trinidad, later settling in Canada for his formative early teen years. He found his voice while at art school in London, albeit one that was out of step with the work of the time (much of it installation-based and dripping with neo-conceptualist leanings). He had developed a small following of fellow artists and critics when the rest of the art world caught up and took notice. In 2002, he left London for Trinidad, where he has remained. The small Caribbean island-with its own distinctive light and landscape-has deeply influenced his recent work. This volume was designed in close collaboration with the artist, with a cover and various interior elements created especially by the artist.

A free open access ebook is available upon publication. Learn more at www.luminosoa.org. From fashion sketches of smartly dressed Shanghai dandies in the 1920s, to multipanel drawings of refugee urbanites during the war against Japan, to panoramic pictures of anti-American propaganda rallies in the early 1950s, the polymorphic cartoon-style art known as manhua helped define China's modern experience. Manhua Modernity offers a richly illustrated, deeply contextualized analysis of these illustrations across the lively pages of popular pictorial magazines that entertained, informed, and mobilized a nation through a half century of political and cultural transformation. In this compelling media history, John Crespi argues that manhua must be understood in the context of the pictorial magazines that hosted them, and in turn these magazines must be seen as important mediators of the modern urban experience. Even as times changed-from interwar-era consumerism to war-time mobilization to Mao-style propaganda-the art form adapted to stay on the cutting edge of both politics and style.

An essential reference that provides new understanding of the thought processes of one of the most radical artists of the late twentieth century. Gordon Matta-Clark (1943-1978) has never been an easy artist to categorize or to explain. Although trained as an architect, he has been described as a sculptor, a photographer, an organizer of performances, and a writer of manifestos, but he is best known for un-building abandoned structures. In the brief span of his career, from 1968 to his early death in 1978, he created an oeuvre that has made him an enduring cult figure. In 2002, when Gordon Matta-Clark's widow, Jane Crawford, put his archive on deposit at the Canadian Centre for Architecture in Montreal, it revealed a new voice in the ongoing discussion of artist/architect Matta-Clark's work: his own. Gwendolyn Owens and Philip Ursprung's careful selection and ordering of letters, interviews, statements, and the now-famous art cards from the CCA as well as other sources deepens our understanding of one of the most original thinkers of his generation. Gordon Matta-Clark: An Archival Sourcebook creates a multidimensional portrait that provides an opportunity for readers to explore and enjoy the complexity and contradiction that was Gordon Matta-Clark.

An inspired collection of the authors' own work spanning 30 years into the 'Visual Art Language'. Demonstrates a variety of mediums including oil paint, etching and drawing. Will appeal to readers with an interest in Fine Art, practitioners or those with an interest in the development of a visual language. This is a book of original art works comprising 49 colour and 62 black and white images, most are at full page size. The book is divided into six sections which look at different aspects of visual language in terms of either subject matter or media. It contains works from memory, etchings, still life, portrait, figure drawings and student work which form these six sections. Readers are able to see the development of a language which has evolved from early student work to current work. There are brief introductions to each section which aim to explain how the ideas came about, providing some detail about the artistic process, the inspiration behind the work and the challenges encountered along the way. Complementing the visual art are short and concise introductions to each section. A biography of the author is included at the end.

Since the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, questions of identity have dominated the culture not only of Russia, but of all the countries of the former Soviet bloc. This timely collection examines the ways in which cultural activities such as fiction, TV, cinema, architecture and exhibitions have addressed these questions and also describes other cultural flashpoints, from attitudes to language to the use of passports. It discusses definitions of political and cultural nationalism, as well as the myths, institutions and practices that moulded and expressed national identity. From post-Soviet recollections of food shortages to the attempts by officials to control popular religion, it analyses a variety of unexpected and compelling topics to offer fresh insights about this key area of world culture. Illustrated with numerous photographs, it presents the results of recent research in an accessible and lively way.

The Rat Bastard Protective Association was an inflammatory, close-knit community of artists who lived and worked in a building they dubbed Painterland in the Fillmore neighborhood of midcentury San Francisco. The artists who counted themselves among the Rat Bastards-which included Joan Brown, Bruce Conner, Jay DeFeo, Wally Hedrick, Michael McClure, and Manuel Neri - exhibited a unique fusion of radicalism, provocation, and community. Geographically isolated from a viable art market and refusing to conform to institutional expectations, they animated broader social and artistic discussions through their work and became a transformative part of American culture over time. Anastasia Aukeman presents new and little-known archival material in this authorized account of these artists and their circle, a colorful cultural milieu that intersected with the broader Beat scene.

This catalogue for an exhibition at MAXXI Museum in Rome brings together 50 contemporary artists from ex-Yugoslavia whose work explores the history of the region through the action of contemporary heroes, and reflects on issues of acceptance and peaceful coexistence. In thematic sections (Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, Hope, Risk, the Individual, Otherness, Metamorphosis), the show asks if the legacy of Socialism can help to recover the concept of "common good" in a complex region which has recently endured the tragedy of a civil war and the rise of Nationalism. Text in English and Italian.

A fabulous selection of twenty removable and framable artworks from Kerby Rosane's bestselling ANIMORPHIA. An amazing coloring challenge featuring the strange and super-detailed images of artist Kerby Rosanes. Fans will be transported back to the beginning, with selections from Kerby's first extreme coloring book challenge, ANIMORPHIA. With this wondrous and intricate selection of animals from the oceans and skies, fans and newcomers alike have the chance to encounter birds, bats, fish, whales, and other creatures, all rendered in Kerby's signature, dazzling style. Kerby works in intricately detailed black and white line to create creatures, characters, patterns, and tiny elements to form massive compositions of mind-boggling complexity.

American artist Walter De Maria is associated with Minimal, conceptual, installation, and land art. He is best known for The Lightning Field, 1977, a long-term installation in western New Mexico made up of four hundred pointed stainless steel poles arranged in a grid over an area measuring one mile by one kilometer. Despite the role he has played in contemporary art over the past fifty years, few books have been dedicated to the artist. Featuring new paintings and sculptures and never before published texts, this volume explores in detail the works in the artist's first major museum exhibition in the United States: "Walter De Maria: Trilogies" at the Menil Collection. In the expansive new work the Bel Air Trilogy, 2000-11, De Maria has combined exacting geometry with the entirely unexpected element of three impeccably restored 1955 Chevrolet Bel Air two-tone hardtops. Each car is pierced by a twelve-foot-long stainless steel rod in the shape of a circle, square, or triangle that runs through the front and rear windshields. The Bel Air Trilogy is joined by De Maria's austere tripartite sculpture with moveable spheres, the Channel Series, 1972, and The Statement Series, 1968/2011. Building upon his large-scale 1968 canvas The Color Men Choose When They Attack The Earth, for The Statement Series, the artist created two additional monochrome paintings with engraved stainless steel plates that complement the original piece. The works in this volume are a testament to De Maria's ongoing investigation of the conceptual, the dramatic, the monumental, the minimal, and the real. Together these three trilogies challenge and broaden our understanding of the artist's work. Distributed for The Menil Collection Exhibition Schedule: The Menil Collection(09/16/11-01/08/12)

The allusive paintings of Verne Dawson (b.1961) suggest an artist fascinated with storytelling. Seeking to contextualise Dawson's imagery, John Hutchinson's survey of the artist's work to date provides fascinating insight into a complex body of work. Dawson's idiosyncratic paintings defy contemporary art-world trends and eschew categorisation, revealing an artist attuned to ideas and values that stimulate an original artistic vision. Informed by a range of interests and influences, from fairy tales to 19th-century American landscape painting, Dawson's eerie and diverse canvases are intriguing and thought-provoking. Highly individual, Verne Dawson's visionary body of work will make an important addition to the Contemporary Painters Series and to contemporary-art libraries in general.

Celebrated for his classically styled paintings that depict African American men in heroic poses, Kehinde Wiley is among the expanding ranks of prominent black artists - such as Mickalene Thomas, Yinka Shonibare, Kerry James Marshall and Sanford Biggers - who are reworking art history and questioning its depictions of people of colour. This volume surveys Wiley's career from 2001 to the present. It includes early portraits of the men Wiley observed on Harlem's streets, and which laid the foundation for his acclaimed reworkings of Old Master paintings by Titian, van Dyke, Manet and others, in which he replaces historical subjects with young African American men in contemporary attire: puffy jackets, sneakers, hoodies and baseball caps. Also included is a generous selection from Wiley's ongoing World Stage project; several of his enormous Down paintings; striking male portrait busts in bronze; and examples from the artist's new series of stained-glass windows. Accompanying the illustrations are essays that introduce readers to the arc of Wiley's career, its critical reception, and ongoing evolution. Published in association with the Brooklyn Museum, New York.

Since 1945, the globalization of education and the professionalization of architects and engineers, as well as the conceptualization and production of space, can be seen as a product of battles of legitimacy that were played out in the context of the Cold War and what came after. In this book James Steele provides an informative and compelling analysis of one of Egypt's foremost contemporary architects, Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim, and his work during a period of Egypt's attempts at constructing an identity and cultural legitimacy within the post-Second World War world order. Born in 1941 in the small town of Sornaga just south of Cairo, Abdelhalim received his architectural training in Egypt and the United States, and is the designer of over one hundred cultural, institutional, and rehabilitation projects, including the Cultural Park for Children in Cairo, the American University in Cairo campus in New Cairo, the Egyptian Embassy in Amman, and the Uthman Ibn Affan Mosque in Qatar. The first comprehensive study of the work and career of Abdelhalim and his office, the Community Design Collaborative (CDC), which he established in Cairo in 1978, Abdelhalim Ibrahim Abdelhalim: An Architecture of Collective Memory is inspired by Abdelhalim's deep belief in the power of rituals as a guiding force behind various human behaviors and the spaces in which they are enacted and designed to play out. Each chapter is consequently dedicated to one of these rituals and the ways in which some of Abdelhalim's primary commissions have, at all levels of scale, revealed and expressed that ritual. In the sequence presented these are: the rituals of possession, reverence, order, the transmission of knowledge, procession, human institutions, geometry, light, the sense of place, materiality, and finally, the ritual of color.

In a gorgeously illustrated exploration of the art of Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas, Mischief Making disproves any notion that play is frivolous. Deploying mischievous tactics, Yahgulanaas shines a spotlight on serious topics. As he investigates Indigenous and other worldviews, the politics of land, cultural heritage, and global ecology, his distinctive style stretches, twists, and flips the formlines of classic Haida art to create imagery that resonates with the graphic vitality of Asian manga. This engaging and beautiful book delineates the philosophical underpinnings and evolution of the artist's visual practice, revealing his deep understanding of the seriousness of play.

Villa Rica, Georgia, December 5, 1957: This small Southern town was taken unaware and unprepared when a sudden, violent blast of a gas explosion ripped through the downtown business district killing twelve and injuring thirty-four. When the Associated Press picked up the news, the eyes and hearts of the world were focused on the survival of the town and its people.

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.

The book provides a comparison of contemporary art by analyzing female aesthetic subjectivity within a global context. The starting point is a comparison between the work of Tracey Karima Emin and He Chengyao. Kwan Kiu Leung demonstrates why their work constitutes not only the self, but they practice an ontological identification relationship between subjectivity and artwork that exhibits three aspects of their subjectivity: performativity, visibility, and univocity. Furthermore, it reveals an ontological and ethical self within their naked self-portraits.