Fulfilling a need for an accessible, affordable introduction to a subject of sustained and growing significance in contemporary culture, this volume in the World of Art series redefines contemporary Chinese art in the last forty years since the end of China’s Cultural Revolution, placing it in the context of unprecedented cultural, political and urban transformation. This book offers neither an art historian’s chronological review of Chinese art in post-Mao China, nor does it join the debate of previous terminologies coined by art critics; instead, it provides the most up-to-date understanding of contemporary Chinese art through original research and informed curatorial perspectives on the selected representative work, including painting, printmaking, sculpture, photography, installation, video, performance and participatory art. It is about art, but it is also about China; and thus is not about the past, but also about the present - the truly ‘contemporary’. With 154 illustrations in colour

This book celebrates and seeks to understand the overlooked appearances of hybrid forms in visual culture; artefacts and practices that meld or interweave incongruous elements in innovative ways. And with an emphasis on the material aspects of such entities, the book adopts the term 'mixed form' for them. Focusing on key phenomena in the last half millennium such as the cabinet of curiosities, the broadside ballad and the chapbook as early forms of image-text, the scrapbook, assemblage, and, in digital times, so-called 'mixed reality,' the book argues that while the quality of inconsistency is traditionally dismissed, its expression nevertheless plays a vital role in social life. Crucially, Mixed Forms of Visual Culture relates its phenomena to the emergence of the division of labour under capitalism and addresses the shifting relationships between art and life, when singularity and uniformity are variously valued and dismissed in the two arenas, and at different points in history. Two of the book's chapters take the form of visual essays, with one comprising an anthology of found scrapbook pages and the other offering an analysis of artists' scrapbooks. The book is richly illustrated throughout.

This seventh volume in the beautiful Strokes of Genius series celebrates creative drawing with more than 140 diverse pieces by today's best artists in charcoal, pencil, pastel, colored pencil, scratchboard, pen+ink and more. * Drawing is an essential skill that all artists use no matter what their primary medium * 100+ of the best artists showcased from 1000s of entrant * Oversized book has coffee-table appeal and is great for collectors * Inspiring captions let readers uncover the secret processes of contemporary masters.

Using a restrained palette of pencil and colored pencil on paper, Greek artist Christiana Soulou (born 1961) draws figures that embody a ceaseless formation and fragmentation of the self. Soulou's wide range of characters includes the mysterious figures of the Tarot, the fantastical beasts of Borges' "Book of Imaginary Beings" and a series of awkward ballet dancers. The richness of Soulou's imagery and storytelling is at the core of her exploration of identity. Part of the "2000 Words" series, conceived and commissioned by Massimiliano Gioni, and published by the Deste Foundation for Contemporary Art, "2000 Words: Christiana Soulou" presents the entirety of the artist's works in the Dakis Joannou Collection and includes an essay by Claire Gilman examining the tension between the material and immaterial in Soulou's work.

Every day we are inundated with faces. Images of celebrities, acquaintances, and friends--in the news, on social networking sites, on the street--are constantly changing. Portraits, on the other hand, slow us down. They capture the artist's carefully conceived approach to the subject, whether a friend, a loved one, or a self-portrait. For this book and exhibition, the second in an ongoing series, the National Portrait Gallery held an open competition, asking artists throughout the United States to submit likenesses of people close to them. From more than 3,300 entries from every state, a jury of experts chose forty-nine works of art in a variety of media, including painting, sculpture, drawing, video and new media, and photography. They are as diverse as America and represent many stylistic approaches. The grand prize winner--Dave Woody, for his photograph, Laura--received a $25,000 award and will be given a commission to create a portrait of a notable living American for the Portrait Gallery's permanent collection. --The artists shown here use portraiture or self-portraiture to explore complex issues of identity, while they also test the boundaries of figurative art. These faces compel our curiosity and document the dynamic relationship between artist and subject. Ranging from quietly pensive to wildly expressive, these creative approaches to the art of portraiture assert the power of human connections.

An exploration of the art and writing of Louise Bourgeois through the lens of her relationship with Freudian psychoanalysis From 1952 to 1985, Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) underwent extensive Freudian analysis that probed her family history, marriage, motherhood, and artistic ambition-and generated inspiration for her artwork. Examining the impact of psychoanalysis on Bourgeois's work, this volume offers insight into her creative process. Philip Larratt-Smith, Bourgeois's literary archivist, provides an overview of the artist's life and work and the ways in which the psychoanalytic process informed her artistic practice. An essay by Juliet Mitchell offers a cutting-edge feminist psychoanalyst's viewpoint on the artist's long and complex relationship with therapy. In addition, a short text written by Bourgeois (first published in 1991) addresses Freud's own relationship to art and artists. Featuring excerpts from Bourgeois's copious diaries, rarely seen notebook pages, and archival family photographs, Louise Bourgeois, Freud's Daughter opens exciting new avenues for understanding an innovative, influential, and groundbreaking artist whose wide-ranging work includes not only renowned large-scale sculptures but also a plethora of paintings and prints. Published in association with the Jewish Museum, New York Exhibition Schedule: Jewish Museum, New York (May 21-September 26, 2021)

Winner of the 2019 Outstanding Academic Titles award in Choice, a publishing unit of the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Why Look at Plants? proposes a thought-provoking and fascinating look into the emerging cultural politics of plant-presence in contemporary art. Through the original contributions of artists, scholars, and curators who have creatively engaged with the ultimate otherness of plants in their work, this volume maps and problematizes new intra-active, agential interconnectedness involving human-non-human biosystems central to artistic and philosophical discourses of the Anthropocene. Plant's fixity, perceived passivity, and resilient silence have relegated the vegetal world to the cultural background of human civilization. However, the recent emergence of plants in the gallery space constitutes a wake-up-call to reappraise this relationship at a time of deep ecological and ontological crisis. Why Look at Plants? challenges readers' pre-established notions through a diverse gathering of insights, stories, experiences, perspectives, and arguments encompassing multiple disciplines, media, and methodologies.

Zofia Kulik's rich artistic career has a dual nature. Between 1970 and 1987, she worked alongside Przemyslaw Kwiek as a member of the duo KwieKulik, after which she began to develop a successful individual career. While KwieKulik's work has been well established as central to the East European neo-avant-garde art lexicon of the 1970's and '80s, Kulik's solo work has yet to be examined in depth. The first publication devoted solely to her work, this monograph analyzes the themes of her rich and complex oeuvre, addressing the (post)communist condition, artistic labor, intermediality, and the conditions of working as a female artist. The book forms a portrait of Kulik as an artist whose work is both deeply focused and rich in variations that reflect the socio-political shifts in her native Poland. With contributions from leading art historians, including Edit Andras, Angela Dimitrakaki, Ewa Lajer-Burcharth, Suzana Milevska, and Tomasz Zaluski.

Contemporary art has never been so popular - but the art world is changing. In a landscape of increasing globalization there is growing interest in questions over the nature of contemporary art today, and the identity of who is controlling its future. In the midst of this, contemporary art continues to be a realm of freedom where artists shock, break taboos, flout generally received ideas, and switch between confronting viewers with works of great emotional profundity and jaw-dropping triviality. In this Very Short Introduction Julian Stallabrass gives a clear view on the diverse and rapidly moving scene of contemporary art. Exploring art's striking globalisation from the 1990s onwards, he analyses how new regions and nations, such as China, have leapt into astonishing prominence, over-turning the old Euro-American dominance on aesthetics. Showing how contemporary art has drawn closer to fashion and the luxury goods market as artists have become accomplished marketers of their work, Stallabrass discusses the reinvention of artists as brands. This new edition also considers how once powerful art criticism has mutated into a critical and performative writing at which many artists excel. Above all, behind the insistent rhetoric of freedom and ambiguity in art, Stallabrass explores how big business and the super-rich have replaced the state as the primary movers of the contemporary art scene, especially since the financial crisis, and become a powerful new influence over the art world. 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.

Here in his own words, is why artist Ed Bartram paints with the geological exactitude and passion that have made his artwork famous.
Ed Bartram, printmaker, photographer and painter, has a special vision of Georgian Bay that has captivated his imagination for over half a century. Since the early 1970s he has transformed this vision into a series of graphic images that reflect the land and particularly the rock face of this region of Canada's Precambrian Shield; works that are powerfully and often luxuriously physical, but have an abstract dimension with richly coloured and textured surfaces. In finding his own interpretation of the "Thirty Thousand Island" landscape made iconic by the Group of Seven, he has had to display great ingenuity in finding a new theme in the old. His work reminds us, in a forceful way, of the unique power of the area, even before it was held up for serious consideration in a work of art.
Bartram writes of his own work: "Rather than using the traditional landscape composition of the Group of Seven, I often take a more intimate viewpoint where the rock surface itself becomes the subject of the work of art. Within the structure of the rock, I find patterns which become abstract landscapes themselves and capture the essence of the windswept north."

Combining studio, classroom, library, gallery and stage, "The Possible" offered a new model of museum exhibition. Rather than presenting existing artworks, artist/curator David Wilson hosted over 100 artists and collectives--with "artist" understood in the broadest sense. The BAM/PFA galleries were transformed into studios that were used by both guest artists and museum visitors. The exhibition made itself during its four-month run, as works created in the studios were exhibited in an adjacent gallery. The catalogue is conceived in a similar vein, as one of the experiments of "The Possible" created by guest artists Luke Fischbeck and Lauren Mackler of Public Fiction, a Los Angeles-based project space and journal. Created partially onsite, it is inspired by the exhibition's spirit of improvisation and collaboration. It gathers essays, photographic documentation and printed artifacts generated in the exhibition itself.

Celebrate more than three decades of filmmaking by diving into the brilliant, twisted mind of Quentin Tarantino, and discover the artistic process of an Oscar-winning legend. Born in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1963, Quentin Tarantino spent many Saturday evenings during his childhood accompanying his mother to the movies, nourishing a love of film that was, over the course of his life, to become all-consuming. The script for his first movie took him four years to complete: My Best Friend's Birthday (1987), a seventy-minute film in which he both acted and directed. The script for his second film, Reservoir Dogs (1992), took him just under four weeks to complete. When it debuted, he was immediately hailed as one of the most exciting new directors in the industry. Known for his highly cinematic visual style, out-of-sequence storytelling, and grandiose violence, Tarantino's films have provoked both praise and criticism over the course of his career. They've also won him a host of awards--including Oscars, Golden Globes, and BAFTA awards--usually for his original screenplays. His oeuvre includes the cult classic Pulp Fiction, bloody revenge saga Kill Bill Vol. 1 and Vol. 2, and historical epics Inglorious Basterds, Django Unchained, The Hateful Eight, and Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood. Featuring an all-new chapter on the director's latest award-winning film Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood, this stunning retrospective catalogs each of Quentin Tarantino's movies in fascinating detail. The book is a tribute to a unique directing and writing talent, celebrating an uncompromising, passionate director's enthralling career at the heart of cult filmmaking.

Exploring the art and life of this important American artist whose work bridged the gaps between abstraction, feminism, and Blackness Howardena Pindell: Reclaiming Abstraction is a fascinating examination of the multifaceted career of artist, activist, curator, and writer Howardena Pindell (b. 1943). It offers a fresh perspective on her abstract practice from the late 1960s through the early 1980s-a period in which debates about Black Power, feminism, and modernist abstraction intersected in uniquely contentious yet generative ways. Sarah Louise Cowan not only asserts Pindell's rightful place within the canon but also recenters dominant historical narratives to reveal the profound and overlooked roles that Black women artists have played in shaping modernist abstraction. Pindell's career acts as a springboard for a broader study of how artists have responded during periods of heightened social activism and used abstraction to convey political urgency. With works that drew on Ghanaian textiles, administrative labor, cosmetics, and postminimalism, Pindell deployed abstraction in deeply personal ways that resonated with collective African diasporic and women's practices. In her groundbreaking analysis, Cowan argues that such work advanced Black feminist modernisms, diverse creative practices that unsettle racist and sexist logics.

This career-spanning publication features conceptual, political, formal, and technical perspectives on the work of contemporary sculptor Charles Ray For Charles Ray (born 1953), sculpture is a way of thinking that informs his work across a wide range of media-from gelatin silver prints to porcelain, fiberglass, wood, and steel. Charles Ray: Figure Ground spans the whole of the artist's fifty-year career, from his early photographs and performances through his intriguing, often unsettling sculptures, some of which are published here for the first time. The essays foreground Ray's engagement with preexisting traditions, as well as charged issues around race, gender, and sexuality (notably expressed through his explorations of Mark Twain's 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn) and investigate the modalities of touch that run through his work. In addition, a reflection by Ray himself and a conversation between the artist and Hal Foster offer further insights into his multifaceted practice. Published by The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Distributed by Yale University Press Exhibition Schedule: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (January 31-June 5, 2022)

A Kunstlerroman by British contemporary artist Sue Webster, which combines personal memoir with an exploration of the ongoing influence of youth, music, and Siouxsie and the Banshees on her life and work. Emanating from a poignant unpacking of objects and memories--which Webster has turned into a private exhibition to coincide with the publica-tion--this book positions the Banshees and the artist herself alongside visual references to everyone from David Bowie and the Sex Pistols to William Burroughs and Salvador Dali--using the Banshees and the punk scene amid which she grew up as an entry point to reflect on the cultural and personal evolutions of the last decades. More than 300 illustrations combine ephemera with artwork and reveal the connection between influence and art: objects documenting her fanaticism of the Banshees, from record covers and photographs to ticket stubs and lyrics; paraphernalia from books, artists, and cultural figures that relate to the Banshees and that world of 1970s and early 1980s post-punk; personal effects from diary pages to unseen photographs; and selected artworks by Sue Webster and longtime partner Tim Noble.

Writings on human life and the refugee crisis by the most important political artist of our time Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is widely known as an artist across media: sculpture, installation, photography, performance, and architecture. He is also one of the world's most important artist-activists and a powerful documentary filmmaker. His work and art call attention to attacks on democracy and free speech, abuses of human rights, and human displacement--often on an epic, international scale. This collection of quotations demonstrates the range of Ai Weiwei's thinking on humanity and mass migration, issues that have occupied him for decades. Selected from articles, interviews, and conversations, Ai Weiwei's words speak to the profound urgency of the global refugee crisis, the resilience and vulnerability of the human condition, and the role of art in providing a voice for the voiceless. Select quotations from the book: "This problem has such a long history, a human history. We are all refugees somehow, somewhere, and at some moment." "Allowing borders to determine your thinking is incompatible with the modern era." "Art is about aesthetics, about morals, about our beliefs in humanity. Without that there is simply no art." "I don't care what all people think. My work belongs to the people who have no voice."

An urban history of modern Britain, and how the built environment shaped the nation's politics Foundations is a history of twentieth-century Britain told through the rise, fall, and reinvention of six different types of urban space: the industrial estate, shopping precinct, council estate, private flats, shopping mall, and suburban office park. Sam Wetherell shows how these spaces transformed Britain's politics, economy, and society, helping forge a midcentury developmental state and shaping the rise of neoliberalism after 1980. From the mid-twentieth century, spectacular new types of urban space were created in order to help remake Britain's economy and society. Government-financed industrial estates laid down infrastructure to entice footloose capitalists to move to depressed regions of the country. Shopping precincts allowed politicians to plan precisely for postwar consumer demand. Public housing modernized domestic life and attempted to create new communities out of erstwhile strangers. In the latter part of the twentieth century many of these spaces were privatized and reimagined as their developmental aims were abandoned. Industrial estates became suburban business parks. State-owned shopping precincts became private shopping malls. The council estate was securitized and enclosed. New types of urban space were imported from American suburbia, and planners and politicians became increasingly skeptical that the built environment could remake society. With the midcentury built environment becoming obsolete, British neoliberalism emerged in tense negotiation with the awkward remains of built spaces that had to be navigated and remade. Taking readers to almost every major British city as well as to places in the United States and Britain's empire, Foundations highlights how some of the major transformations of twentieth-century British history were forged in the everyday spaces where people lived, worked, and shopped.

Edward's adventures now take him to Tuscany, Italy. Here we see our Gentleman traveling through the rolling Tuscan countryside experiencing mediaeval hill towns, beautiful landscapes and sumptuous food and Italian lifestyle. The aim of this project is to produce a series of small sketchbooks that give a real flavour of iconic places around the world through the eyes of Edward - our modern gentleman.

Encompassing black-and-white linoleum cuts made at community art centers in the 1960s and 1970s, resistance posters and other political art of the 1980s and the wide variety of subjects and techniques explored by artists in printshops over the last two decades, printmaking has been a driving force in contemporary South African artistic and political expression. "Impressions from South Africa, 1965 to Now," published to accompany an exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art, introduces the vital role of printmaking through works by more than 20 artists in the Museum's collection. The volume features prints by John Muafangejo and Dan Rakgoathe, whose vigorous, metaphoric linoleum cuts conveying social messages were cultivated at Rorke's Drift Art and Craft Centre in the 1960s and 1970s, posters produced for anti-apartheid coalitions in the 1980s, and political work by Sue Williamson, Norman Catherine and William Kentridge, representing periods of apartheid resistance. More recent projects, including traditional etchings by Diane Victor, comic books by Bitterkomix, lithographs by Joachim Schonfeldt and Claudette Schreuders and digital prints by Cameron Platter, address ongoing social issues and explore new subjects. New linoleum cut projects by a younger generation of artists--Paul Edmunds, Senzeni Marasela and Vuyile Voyiya--demonstrate the relevance of the medium in South Africa today. Judith B. Hesker, Assistant Curator of Prints and Illustrated Books at MoMA, contributes an introduction, biographies of the artists, publishers and printers, and a timeline of relevant events in South Africa.