The Art of the Dead showcases the vibrant, charismatic poster art that emerged from the streets of San Francisco in 1964 and 1966. It traces the cultural, political, and historical influences of posters as art back to Japanese wood blocks through Bell Epoque, on to the Beatniks, the Free Speech Movement, and the Acid Tests. Featuring interviews and profiles of the key artists, including Rick Griffin, Stanley Mouse Miller, Alton Kelley, Wes Wilson, and Victor Moscoso.
The book uses Grateful Dead as the vehicle to tell the story of poster art as The Dead were the band that ultimately proved to be the most substantive and engaged partner for the artists and hence featured the best art of any rock 'n' roll band ever. The book will follow a chronological evolution of the art from the band's origination in 1965 through Jerry Garcia's death in 1995.
The book is in four-color throughout, featuring iconic and rare images as well as extensive process material, including sketches, original art, blue lines, film, and printing plates that show how the art was created. It will also include essays by Greil Marcus, Peter Coyote, and Victoria Binder, as well as essays on the elements of the printing process from the original art to the final poster.
Ultimately, the Art of the Dead makes the case that poster art is truly an original form of American fine art.

This new publication explores the whole career of Winifred Nicholson with a special emphasis on her theories of colour. Using specific paintings to examine her ideas and writings about colour the book includes her late 'prismatic' pictures which have never been properly explained. Throughout her life Winifred Nicholson was interested in prisms and rainbows, but when she was given some prisms by a physicist friend in the mid 1970s her painting took on a new direction. Looking through a prism she saw objects with a rim of prismatic colour, and explored and developed these ideas, often painting pictures that verged on the abstract. Nicholson's 'prismatic' pictures were a culmination of her life's search to find "form's secret and rhythmic law". She painted them in Greece in 1979, at her home in Cumbria, and during her last painting trip to the Island of Eigg in the Hebrides in 1980, where she had an inspired period of painting and made some of her best loved pictures. Published on the occasion of the exhibition 'Liberation of Colour' at mima, Middlesbrough Institute of Modern art, the book illustrates many previously unseen paintings from private collections, as well as some of Nicholson's best known works, and draws on new research, including previously unseen archival material.

This catalog presents works of sixteen leading contemporary artists that refer to ancient pictorial forms, patterns and symbols: Adel Abdessemed, Marina Abramovic, Sanford Biggers, Louise Bourgeois, Peter Buggenhout, Nathalie Djurberg, Amar Kanwar, Bharti Kher, Sigalit Landau, Tea Makipaa, Ana Mendieta, Mariella Mosler, Kiki Smith, Nancy Spero, Philip Taaffe, and Su-Mei Tse.

With dozens of full-color illustrations! This is a retrospective of musical poetry by heavy metal guitarist and frontman, Matt Pike, which spans twenty years beginning in 1998 with the album Art of Self Defense up to the latest release, the 2019 Grammy-Award winning record, Electric Messiah. Every chapter features brand-new artistic interpretations from the minds and hearts of an incredible cast of illustrators, tattooers, printmakers, and painters Pike has been trusted since the beginning to depict his vision. The cast of artists are Arik Roper, David V. D'Andrea, Santos, Brian Mercer, Skinner, Jondix,Stash, Tim Lehi, Jordan Barlow, and Derrick Snodgrass created brand new, never before seen works specifically inspired by each album, including one large illustration to define the chapter ahead and two additional vignettes that are directly inspired by the songs. Each has their own bold and iconic style that perfectly compliments the breadth of Pike's various works. These prolific artists transport the reader further into a far-away landscape of ominous Lovecraftian entities, shrouded in wondrous and esoteric darkness. Together, they have redefined the way we perceive Underground Doom Metal these past twenty years and it is our honor to showcase them together along with the incredible written word of Pike.

British artist Michael Landy (b. 1963) is known primarily as an installation artist. His work, along with others associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), was first catapulted to the world spotlight when it was featured in the notorious Sensation exhibition (1997). His sculptural installations and performances explore political and social themes, such as the nature of consumerism and commodity. In 2009, Landy began a three-year artist residency at the National Gallery, London. He chose to focus his project on representations of saints and their accompanying stories, often gruesome, which were once part of common culture but are now largely unknown. Landy's preoccupation with recycling narratives and repurposing imagery results in Saints Alive, the subject of this book, conceived to include drawings, collages, and a series of kinetic, interactive sculptures with moving parts and sounds.

In the east end of the inner city of Johannesburg, a former textiles factory undergoes a dramatic transformation to become, over the next several years, one of the city’s foremost artists’ studios. When the sale of the building seems imminent, not only must the artists face the daunting prospect of relocation, but a remarkable chapter in the complex narrative of contemporary South African art seems about to close. Sensing the importance of this moment, Kim Gurney, herself a former tenant of the atelier, follows the stories of several of the August House denizens through some of the artworks that came to life in their studios. The result is a fascinating study of the role of the atelier and its artists in South Africa’s fractious art world, and a consideration of the relationship between art and the ever-changing city of Johannesburg.

With the eye of an urbanist, artist and resident, Kim Gurney [constructs] a compelling assemblage of individual, visual and urban narratives brilliantly illuminates the complex life of a building, August House, located in inner city Johannesburg. Her cast of characters—artists, workers, neighbours, August House and the city—lend poignant contours to the ebbs and flows of daily life,the pressures of gentrification, the ruthlessness of poverty, the radicality of the imagination and the ghosts of history.

Denis Wirth-Miller and Dicky Chopping were a couple at the heart of the mid-twentieth century art world, with the visitors' book of the Essex townhouse they shared from 1945 until 2008 painting them as Zeligs of British society. The names recorded inside make up an astonishing supporting cast - from Francis Bacon to Lucian Freud to Randolph Churchill to John Minton. Successful artists, although not household names themselves, writing Dicky and Denis off as just footnotes in history would be a mistake. After Denis's death in 2010, Jon Lys-Turner, one of two executors of the couple's estate, came into possession of an extraordinary archive of letters, works of art and symbolically loaded ephemera the two had collected since they met in the 1930s. It is no exaggeration to state that this archive represents a missing link in British art history - the wealth of new biographical information disclosed about Francis Bacon, for example, is truly staggering. The Visitors' Book is both an extraordinary insight into the minutiae of Dicky and Denis's life together and what it meant to be gay in pre-Wolfenden Britain, as well as a pocket social history of the era and a unique perspective into mid-twentieth century art. With reams of previously unseen material, this is a fascinating and unique opportunity to delve into post-war Britain.

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)

After the example of Noah, who saved the animal species in his ark for posterity, this volume, an "Illustrated Animal Bible by Artists from all over the World," aspires to rescue and house the animals among us today. Recruiting over 200 artists, illustrators and designers from every corner of the globe, each of whom was invited to select a creature (animal or species) to represent their birthplace, and add it to the Ark, the project has resulted in an amazing illustration bible that mixes styles and techniques, showing how astonishing nature is and why we should take better care of the planet and the species on it. At once fun, graphically charming and ecologically intelligent, "Ark "wil immediately appeal to children and design audiences. The final parade of animals is astonishing: the burrowing owl for Canada, the capybara for Uruguay, the Carey turtle for Colombia, the Caribean manatee for Puerto Rico, the nene goose for Maui, the spectacled bear for Peru... "Ark "also supplies a section of "Nature Facts," an illustrated tale of Noah and a list of all the artists involved--among them Allan Deas, Gustav Dejert, Drew Funk, Chris Garbutt, Kronk, Cecy Meade, Meomi, Noper, Shen Plum and Roland Tamayo.

This book is about the aesthetics and politics of contemporary artists' moving image installations, and the ways that they use temporal and spatial relationships in the gallery to connect with geopolitical issues. Displaced from the cinema, moving images increasingly address themes of movement and change in the world today. Digital technology has facilitated an explosion of work of this kind, and the expansion of contemporary art museums, biennales and large-scale exhibitions all over the world has created venues and audiences for it. Despite its 20th century precursors, this is a new and distinct artistic form, with an emerging body of thematic concerns and aesthetics strategies. Through detailed analysis of a range of important 21st century works, the book explores how this spatio-temporal form has been used to address major issues of our time, including post-colonialism, migration and conflict. Paying close attention to the ways in which moving images interact with the specific spaces and sites of exhibition, the book explores the mobile viewer's experiences in these immersive and transitory works.

The final installment in the critically-acclaimed trilogy on globalization and art explores the growing dominance of Asian centers of art This book takes readers on a fascinating journey around five Asian centers of contemporary art and its myriad institutions, agents, forms, materials, and languages, while posing vital questions about the political economy of culture and the power of visual art in a multi-polar world. He analyzes the financial powerhouse of Art Basel Hong Kong, new media art in South Korea, the place of the Kochi Biennale within contemporary art in India, transnational art and art education in China, and the geo-politics of art patronage in Palestine, and he develops a highly original synthesis of theoretical perspectives and empirical research. Drawing on detailed case studies and personal insights gained from his extensive experience of the contemporary art scene in Asia, Professor Harris examines the evolving relationship between the western centers of art practice, collection, and validation and the emerging "peripheries" of Asian Tiger societies with burgeoning art centers. And he arrives at the somewhat controversial conclusion that dominance of the art world is rapidly slipping away from Europe and North America. The Global Contemporary Art World is essential reading for undergraduates and postgraduate students in modern and contemporary art, art history, art theory and criticism, cultural studies, the sociology of culture, and globalization studies. It is also a vital resource for research students, academics, and professionals in the art world.

For over twenty years Liliane Tomasko has explored the themes of dreams, sleep, and the unconscious. This book follows the development of her work as a painter. It begins with figurative works in oil on canvas in which she captures the material qualities of unmade beds, piles of clothes, and other melancholy still lifes and somber interiors. It then traces the gradual dissolution of these initial motifs and the emergence of her abstract paintings in which intertwined lines and layers of color are woven into visual structures and materialized as emotions that allow us to look deep into our innermost being.

Builders have never been so prolific as they are today. And never have there been so many technical and design-related options available to architects. Yet contemporary architecture often creates a sense of unease. In their book, Sergei Tchoban and Wladimir Sedow show how the balance between prominent buildings and the buildings around them in the background has been lost in the modern era. Every building strives to assert itself over others - to drown out its peers. At the same time, contemporary architects are capable of developing "a sense of harmony full of contrasts". They have a wealth of options at their disposal to this end. After prowling through 2,500 years of architectural history, the authors arrive at what makes modern buildings so particular. They show what contemporary architects must consider in order to create buildings with a satisfactory, harmonious appearance in a new way. "Sergei Tchoban and Wladimir Sedow do not write about beauty in this essay - certainly not in the sense of defining the term or putting forth a conceptual history. Rather, they write about the relationship between prominent buildings and the nameless buildings around them - the buildings in the background. Or to put it another way, they write about the relationship between architectural monuments and ordinary buildings." (from the preface by Bernhard Schulz)

Brings together, for the first time, Lucian Freud's oil on copper paintings, including his lost portrait of Francis Bacon and two works that have never been reproduced before In the early 1950s, Lucian Freud produced several works in oil paint on copper, a technique favored by 17th-century artists such as Rembrandt and Frans Hals, but unusual for a 20th-century painter. Originally thought to be only a handful, Freud in fact painted more than a dozen copper works-all small-scale, enamel-smooth and astonishingly intense. Based on a decade of research, this book, for the first time, brings together all of Freud's "coppers," including two works that have never been reproduced before. Among these paintings is Freud's famous portrait of Francis Bacon, labeled by Nicholas Serota as "the most important portrait of the 20th century." The work was stolen in 1988-its whereabouts still unknown-but during research for the book a rare photograph was discovered that shows the work just minutes before the theft, and it is published here for the first time. Distributed for Less Publishing

The work of Slovak sculptor Maria Bartuszova (1936-96) was first presented to international audiences in Kassel in 2007. Although her art has appeared in influential exhibitions and been included in prestigious contemporary art collections, up until now, she has yet to receive the widespread recognition she deserves. Dziewanska's book offers distinct perspectives on Bartuszova's work from renowned international critics in an effort to increase our awareness of her sculptures. Working alone behind the Iron Curtain, Bartuszova was one of a number of female artists who not only experimented formally and embarked intuitively on new themes, but who, because they were at odds with mainstream modernist trends, remained in isolation or in a marginalized position. Revealing her dynamic treatment of plaster-a material that, from a sculptor's point of view, is both primitive and common-the book deftly reveals how Bartuszova experimented with materials, never hesitating to treat tradition, accepted norms, and trusted techniques as simply transitory and provisional. Offering a much-needed history of a vibrant body of work, Maria Bartuszova: Provisional Forms is an important contribution to the literature on great female artists.

This work examines the fascinating life and art of the African American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988). Jean-Michel Basquiat was barely out of his teens when he rocketed to the center of New York's art scene. He was 27 when he died of a heroin overdose. Always controversial, Basquiat is now established as a major contemporary painter whose unique work continues to enthrall. Jean-Michel Basquiat: A Biography covers the artist's Brooklyn childhood, his teenage years as a homeless graffiti painter, and his rise through the art world. Along with a discussion of his life and work, including his use of Afrocentric themes, the book offers background on related contemporary art movements. Special attention is given to Basquiat's friendship with Keith Haring and collaborations with Andy Warhol. The book also explores Basquiat's difficult relations with gallery owners and other authority figures, his problems with drug use, and his early death. A final chapter covers his continuing relevance and ongoing influence.

This is the first monograph to give an overview of the entire career to date of artist Ding Yi (b. 1962), whose work, unlike most other well-known Chinese painters, is wholly abstract. Large in scale, and extraordinary in detail, Ding Yi's paintings invite a myriad of questions, not least how an intuitive artist works with recurrent patterns and symbols. Tackling this paradox, the authors discuss a range of questions pertinent to the artist, primary of which is how China has shaped his work, both culturally and environmentally, over the past thirty years. Based on extensive interviews with the artist, Ding Yi presents a definitive portrait of an important contemporary painter, who holds a unique position in Chinese art history. As such, it is essential reading for fans and the uninitiated alike.

For someone who shuns the limelight so completely that he conceals his name, never shows his face and gives interviews only by email, Banksy is remarkably famous. From his beginnings as a Bristol graffiti artist, his artwork is now sold at auction for six-figure sums and hangs on celebrities' walls. The appearance of a new Banksy is national news, his documentary Exit Through the Gift Shop was Oscar-nominated and people queue for hours to see his latest exhibition. Now more National Treasure than edgy outsider, who is Banksy and how did he become what he is today? In the first attempt to tell the full story of Banksy's life and career, Will Ellsworth-Jones pieces together a picture of his world and unpicks its contradictions. Whether art or vandalism, anti-establishment or sell-out, Banksy and his work have become a cultural phenomenon and the question 'Who is Banksy?' is as much about his career as it is 'the man behind the wall'. 'Britain's unlikeliest national treasure' Independent 'A fascinating portrait that elicits admiration for a man who, despite his increasingly unconvincing efforts to retain some shred of his vandal status, has had an undeniable impact on art' The Times

Ten new paintings by Alfredo Arreguin are included in this new edition of the highly regarded book first published in 2002. Arreguin's palpitations of color and light and arrested movement awaken our sublimated vision. His paintings seem to force our entire being to experience its livingness as an insatiable yearning and questing of the eyes. - from the Foreword by Tess Gallagher. decades, Alfredo Arreguin has long been recognized as a major force in pattern painting. His canvases are tapestries that mingle diverse and interpenetrating influences and images: the traditional crafts of his native Michoacan; the lush rainforests of his homeland and of the Pacific Northwest; Japanese ukiyo-e prints; sacred and endangered animals; gods and totemic figures; icons like Frida Kahlo and Cesar Chavez; and motifs including masks, eyes, and abstractly patterned tiles. But Arreguin's paintings, for all the apparent flatness of their surfaces, conceal an astonishing depth of perspective. superimposed planes, and below the surface of each completed painting are many others, transformed by the artist's strategic occlusions and erasures. The result is an exuberant, phosphorescent visual interplay in which images combine to form other images, yielding a potent narrative power and pointing up the profound, ambiguous symbiosis between human beings and nature, fiction and reality, and the natural and supernatural worlds. Lauro Flores reveals Alfredo Arreguin as a genuinely American painter, in the real, hemispheric sense of this term - an artist of magic, mystery, and revelation whose place in the history of North American art has already been secured.