South African artist William Kentridge's drawings, films, books, installations, and collaborations with opera and theater companies have established him as a world-class star in contemporary art, media, and theater. In 2010, and again in 2013, he staged Dmitri Shostakovich's The Nose at the Metropolitan Opera; after the premiere, the New York Times noted that "Kentridge, who directed this production, helped design the sets and created the videos that animate the staging, received the heartiest bravos." In this book, Jane Taylor, Kentridge's friend and frequent collaborator, invites us to take an extraordinary behind-the-scenes look at his work for the show. Kentridge has long been admired for his unconventional use of conventional media to produce art that is stunning, evocative, and narratively powerful and how he works is as important as what he creates. This book is more than just a simple record of The Nose. The opera serves as a springboard into a bracing conversation about how Kentridge's methods serve his unique mode of expression as a narrative and political artist. Taylor draws on his etchings, sculptures, and drawings to render visible the communication that occurs between his mind and hand as he thinks through the activity of making. Beautifully illustrated in color, William Kentridge offers striking insights about one of the most innovative artists of our present moment.

Malileh Afnan's work appears 'as a relic of an older civilization or an archaeological excavation into the collective psyche. The delicacy of Persian miniatures and manuscripts, which she remembers from childhood, is mirrored in her love for intimate scale and the refined beauty of muted colour'. Calligraphy plays an important role: images appear that suggest the written word. Works on paper and tablets of painted plaster are reminiscent of ancient, almost obliterated texts, and like palimpsests, retain only some vestige of literal meaning and an impression of human contact. Afnan has absorbed both Middle Eastern and Western influences. She has looked towards such artists as Pollock, Rothko, Dubuffet and Klee, and shares an affinity with the American artist Mark Tobey, who helped arrange the first European exhibition of her work in 1971.

For more than ten years, the internationally oriented Daimler Art Collection has committed itself to presenting and promoting South African artists. Highly regarded both in South Africa and beyond, its Mercedes-Benz Award has been awarded to authors, musicians, artists, architects, and fashion designers whose works have been prominently displayed in galleries and at biennials worldwide, including Germany's Documenta exhibition--widely regarded as one of the most important gatherings in contemporary art.
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Ampersand" presents more than fifty works of contemporary South African photography, sculpture, video art, and installation pieces side by side with selected works from the Daimler Art Collection, bringing together a startling array of talent, including established artists like Robert Filliou, Jan Henderikse, Sue Williamson, and Willem Boshoff as well as promising representatives of the younger generation.

This comprehensive monograph offers a detailed examination of the paintings of the acclaimed German painter Neo Rauch (b.1960). Rauch's paintings deftly blend the iconography of Socialist Realism from his upbringing and art-school training in GDR-era Leipzig with the stylistic mannerisms of the Baroque and Romantic past, conjuring heavily populated sites of great commotion and complexity, remarkably without recourse to preliminary drawing. His compositions and their enigmatic figures are rich with reference and allusion, but the stories they tell are indistinct and somehow out of time. They have an ancient modernity - or the freshness of renewed antiquity. Michael Glover discloses Rauch's working methods, revealing how the artist approaches the making of his work, how his images come into being, and the importance of words and their etymology to the creation or disruption of an artwork. These are works that interrogate the very meaning of the artistic impulse; ruminations in the guise of history painting that in fact question what a painter could and should be creating at this particular historical moment.

Best known and celebrated for his painting, Glenn Brown's new etchings are an exciting change in medium that further establish his fascination with surface texture and mark-making. The artist's first ever group of etchings offers a striking approach to the portrait and its history, drawing upon portraiture of the past by repeated layering of single or multiple portraits by Urs Graf, Rembrandt and Lucien Freud. Engaging with concepts of duplication and appropriation, the beautifully layered portraits are at once recognisable and completely unfamiliar. An essay by John-Paul Stonard accompanies reproductions of the twenty-one black and white prints.

Architecture is a constant presence in the study of human interaction-acting as both the ground on which human social behavior is performed and a means of shaping subjectivity itself. Proxemics was an attempt to visualize and instrumentalize these dynamics, appealing to both the social sciences and the emerging field of environmental design. Founded by anthropologist Edward T. Hall and taking shape between the departments of architecture and anthropology at the Illinois Institute of Technology, proxemics developed amidst cold war political tensions and intense social and civil unrest. Proxemics and the Architecture of Social Interaction presents selections from Hall's extensive archive of visual materials alongside a critical analysis that traces transformations in the fields of design and science. Together these materials illuminate a moment in American history when new spatial practices arose to challenge the environmental conditions of cultural, political, and racial identity.

This is the most comprehensive monograph to-date on the innovative abstract site-related installations of German artist Katharina Grosse (b.1961). Grosse's daring move from the canvas into both architectural space and the landscape, with her signature colourful spray paintings, has resulted in a deeply compelling body of work. From a Toronto airport to a decrepit beach structure on the New York coast and the spaces of major museums worldwide, Grosse's works present thorough, yet temporary, carnivalesque transformations of extant places and situations. Author Gregory Volk has known Katharina Grosse and written about her work since the very outset of her career, and has witnessed her journey from unique talent to radical visionary. As he suggests here, Grosse's continually developing practice, simultaneously ungainly and exhilarating, bewildering and liberating, radically extends the possibilities for contemporary abstract painting.

Since its Tokyo debut in 1995, Gunther von Hagens' 'Body Worlds' exhibition has been visited by more than 25 million people at museums and science centers across North America, Europe, and Asia. Preserved through von Hagens' unique process of plastination, the bodies shown in the controversial exhibit are posed to mimic life and art, from a striking re-creation of Rodin's ""The Thinker"" to a preserved horse and its human rider, a basketball player, and a reclining pregnant woman - complete with fetus in its eighth month. This interdisciplinary volume analyzes ""Body Worlds"" from a number of perspectives, describing the legal, ethical, sociological, and religious concerns which seem to accompany the exhibition as it travels the world.Section One focuses on the ways in which von Hagens' exhibit is designed to elicit a constrained and manipulated viewer response, investigating rhetorical persuasion embedded in the 'Body Worlds' exhibition and literature along with the linguistic trickery of donor consent forms. Section Two examines the historical antecedents of 'Body Worlds', focusing on how Victorian anatomical museums and freak shows have shaped and informed the contemporary exhibit.Section Three describes the exhibition's engagement with European historical contexts, including the motif of bodily degradation and the rise of abstractionist art. Section Four focuses on queer or gendered readings of 'Body Worlds', while Section Five addresses concerns about the exhibit's bio-ethical, religious, and spiritual controversies, including arguments that it commodifies the human body and depoliticizes the dead. The book includes photographs of plastinated cadavers and Ron Mueck's hyper-realist sculptures, along with several anatomical drawings and facsimiles of Victorian anatomical museum catalogs.

Monterrey means mountain king, a name befitting its location surrounded by the Sierra Madre in north-eastern Mexico. It was founded in 1596 near the natural springs of Santa Lucia, a luscious oasis in an otherwise arid landscape. Its colonial beginnings are still visible in the architecture of the Barrio Antiguo district in the city centre. In the late 19th century, industrial development transformed the modest town into a flourishing, modern city. Its foundries and breweries reflect its industry, while its skyscrapers, universities, churches, and monuments designed by celebrated Mexican modernist architects like Mario Pani, Enrique de la Mora, Pedro Ramirez Vazquez, and Luis Barragan reflect its modernity. Today, Monterrey is an important cultural, educational, medical, and business metropolis with buildings by Ricardo Legorreta, Nicholas Grimshaw, and Tadao Ando. Its fast growing residential, corporate, and commercial developments feature designs by Norman Foster, Cesar Pelli, Zaha Hadid , and Alejandro Aravena. This book presents the role of architecture in the continuous transformation of this city.

Korea's transformation over the last thirty years has been unique in the world and this is the most comprehensive English language survey of contemporary art from Korea ever published 120 artists, museum and gallery directors, curators and collectors are represented in this lavishly illustrated book making it a vital resource for both those in the know and readers wishing to acquaint themselves with Korea's contemporary scene for the first time. As a nation prospers, so does its art. Although Korean contemporary artists take both global and local issues into account in their work, what makes Korean art unique are its diversity and its individuality, informed and enriched by rigorous experimentation and cultural exploration. In recent years, Korean contemporary art's vibrancy has been recognised in the international arena, with artists such as Do Ho Suh, Kimsooja, Michael Joo and Koo Jeong-A appearing as major figures. The book presents profiles of these internationally recognised figures as well as of such up-and-coming artists as Lee Yongbaek, Jeon Joonho, Moon Kyungwon and Nikki S. Lee. Further texts also profile influential curators, as well as the country's leading arts institutions, among them the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Korea; Leeum, Samsung Museum of Art; the Nam June Paik Art Center and the Seoul Museum of Art. The Gwangju Biennale is also highlighted.

The collected works of Julius Csotonyi, one of the world's most high profile and talented contemporary paleoartists. Csotonyi has considerable academic expertise that contributes to his stunning dynamic art.
Csotonyi represents the natural world photorealistically and has been influenced by natural history illustrators such as Peter Zallinger, Doug Henderson and Greg Paul. He uses bold patterns and colors to paint the prehistoric world both with traditional media as well as modern digital techniques.

The early 21st century has seen contemporary art make continued use of audience participation, in which the spectator becomes part of the artwork itself. In this book, Kaija Kaitavuori claims that the `participator' is a new artistic role that does not fall under the auspices of artist or spectator and in proving such she devises a four-group typology of involvement. Her classification distinguishes between different forms of engagement and identifies their specific features. The key criteria she proposes are how concepts of authorship and ownership shift in relation to collectively created work, how contracts regulating the use and production of shared work are arranged and the extent to which involvement in making art can be regarded as democratic. This highly original book thus offers students and teachers the tools with which to improve their understanding of participatory art and removes the confusing terminology that has characterized so many other discussions.

Dan Klein and Alan J. Poole began collecting in the late 1970s and over the subsequent thirty years assembled on the most comprehensive collections of modern British and Irish glass. The book includes work by over one hundred makers at the very cutting edge of their art. This dazzling collection was gifted to National Museums Scotland in 2009.

This long-awaited volume celebrates the work of Kerry James Marshall, one of America's greatest living painters. Born before the passage of the Civil Rights Act, in Birmingham, Alabama, and witness to the Watts riots in 1965, Marshall has long been an inspired and imaginative chronicler of the African American experience. Best known for large-scale interiors, landscapes, and portraits featuring powerful black figures, Marshall explores narratives of African American history from slave ships to the present and draws upon his deep knowledge of art history from the Renaissance to twentieth-century abstraction, as well as other sources such as the comic book and the muralist tradition. With luscious color and brushstrokes and highly detailed patterning, his direct and intimate scenes of black middle-class life conjure a wide range of emotions, resulting in powerful paintings that confront the position of African Americans throughout American history. Richly illustrated, this monumental book features essays by noted curators as well as the artist, and more than 100 paintings from throughout the artist's career arranged thematically by subject: history painting; beauty, as expressed through the nude, portraiture, and self-portraiture; landscape; religion; and the politics of black nationalism.

On the trail of air, wind, and breath Wind moves - both things and human thought. The wind is also a harbinger both of new beginnings and of decay, of control and chaos, and the destructive force of the wind is central to the debate on climate change. The book Wenn der Wind weht / When the Wind Blows is being published in conjunction with the exhibition of the same name at KUNST HAUS WIEN, in cooperation with the University of Applied Arts Vienna. It presents more than twenty artistic projects that render the unseen elements air, wind, and breath visible in different ways. Ernst Strouhal traces (cultural) stories of the wind in his text "Flying Robert and His Kin," while curators Verena Kaspar-Eisert and Liddy Scheffknecht look at air as a medium in contemporary art. Publication to accompany the exhibition at KUNST HAUS WIEN (12/03-28/08/2022) Works by Hoda Afshar, Olafur Eliasson, Ulay / Marina Abramovic, and others With a conversation between historian/author Philipp Blom and climate researcher Helga Kromp-Kolb

A critical examination of the work of one of the most significant and original sculptors and installation artists living today Jamaican-born Nari Ward is best known for his large-scale sculptures and installations, many of which are created from unexpected materials collected around his urban neighborhood. His incisive works frequently comment on issues surrounding race, poverty, consumerism, and diasporic identity in American culture. This book accompanies a major retrospective at the New Museum, highlighting his work from the early 1990s - including Amazing Grace (1993).

The recent work of Belgian abstract artist Yves Zurstrassen is explored in depth in this handsome volume, designed in close collaboration with the artist himself The decade of work produced between 2010 and 2019 by Belgian abstract painter Yves Zurstrassen (b. 1956) is the focus of this beautifully designed and illustrated book. Although he originally studied graphic art, Zurstrassen was inspired by Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning to pursue painting. The book's essays delve into the artist's process and offer a critical analysis of the work. Also included are a detailed biography and insightful, informal conversations with the artist. Featuring full-page illustrations of Zurstrassen's recent work, the book situates the artist both within abstract art and the broader context of contemporary painting. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Centre for Fine Arts, Brussels (September 1-December 31, 2019)

Something strange is going on in the photographs by Frank Kunert (*1963 in Frankfurt am Main): the table set for two has been so cleverly built around a corner that neither of the diners has to see the other, yet they can both watch their own television. Or a desk has a built-in bed for the much-desired office nap. And the outdoor toilet is located further away than one might hope for in an emergency-namely, on the moon. Kunert, a model builder and photographer, creates images of this kind in weeks of painstaking attention to detail, lending expression to the grotesque outgrowths of civilized life that is as humorous and exhilarating as it is profound. The ambivalence between tragedy and humor piques the artist time and again and permeates his surreal-looking visual worlds in an inexhaustible variety of ways. Melancholy and skewed wit are closely related in this wonderland of absurdities-surprising and thought provoking.

In this book, artwork consists of everything from jewellery and watches to light fixtures. Welcome to the world of Steampunk: a unique fantasy version of nineteenth century Victorian England imbued with today's technology, resulting in devices and contraptions that seem to have sprung from the mind of a mad twenty-first century scientist. In this book, you'll discover the captivating and dynamic world of this emerging genre through the creative vision of today's leading Steampunk artists, all featured in the world's first museum exhibit of Steampunk, held at The Museum of the History of Science at Oxford University in England. No longer satisfied with the plastic design of today's mass-produced products, these artists are crafting a romantic new standard for modern goods by applying the characteristics of Steampunk. This expanded edition has added artist profiles and a look at what is happening in the world of Steampunk since the exposition.

"Critical Messages" examines the key environmental issues that face our region and the many ways contemporary Northwest artists are responding to those issues in their artwork. Environmental art is a new kind of mirror, a reflection of our past and a crystal ball holding visions of the future.

In their approach to environmental concerns, some contemporary artists face critical issues head on: growth management as seen in urban/rural conflict; the connection of transportation and urban sprawl; contested sources of energy; mass production and consumption; toxic management of land, watersheds, and waters; and dramatic climate change. Others accent environmental values such as preservation of wilderness and wetlands, sustainability, and biodiversity; some even work this interest interst out through the strategy of artist and nature as co-agents. Finally, some artists have chosen to enhance the impact of current conditions and challenges by capturing their apocalyptic vision through poignant and dramatic renderings. This book reveals the overlapping causes and effects of these issues in the artworks themselves and in the resounding voices of the artistic messengers.

Sarah Clark-Langager is director of the Western Gallery and curator of the Outdoor Sculpture Collection and William Dietrich is assistant professor of environmental studies at Huxley College, both at Western Washington University in Bellingham.

A collection of essays by art historians, anthropologists and commentators on contemporary visual culture on the theme of 'Location'.
Explores the theme of 'Location', including transatlantic exchanges and global connections, and the nature of hospitality that arises in acknowledging migration and diaspora
Questions how important location is in producing, understanding and curating art.
Contributors consider such topics as site-specificity, examinations of the trans-national/trans-cultural, how images/visual forms migrate, and the repositioning of ownership