Born in New York in 1941, Joel Shapiro is one of the most significant artists of his generation. Since the first public showing of his work in 1969 as part of the landmark Anti-Illusion: Procedures/Materials exhibiton at the Whitney Museum of American Art, he has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world. Most renowned for having developed in the 1980s and '90s a distinctive language of dynamic sculpture that blurs the lines between abstraction and figuration, Shapiro became known through his earliest 1970s New York shows for introducing common forms of often diminutive size. Since then he has continued to push the material and conceptual boundaries of sculpture by working in a number of materials and employing various working methods. Joel Shapiro: Sculpture and Works on Paper 1969-2019 is the first book in over twenty years to survey the artist's entire working career. In an extensive essay, art historian Richard Shiff provides a fresh and incisive examination of Shapiro's oeuvre and working process. With more than two hundred striking full-colour illustrations, this is a long-anticipated and much-needed survey of this vital and essential American artist.

Library is a collection of paintings by two of Canada s most influential contemporary artists, Michael Dumontier and Neil Farber. From the simple premise of the book title comes a series of images that are laugh-out-loud funny. A collection of book covers adorned with titles painted in simple handwritten fonts are displayed on brightly coloured hardboard. Each book forms part of an ongoing series Dumontier and Farber started in 2009. In Dumontier and Farber s Library, titles like I Lost the Human Race, Change Your Relationship to Your Unchangeable Past, and I Have a Medical Condition That Makes It So I Don t Have to Talk to You offer surprising and astute observations, all in the duo s characteristic deadpan style. The simplicity of the shapes and text evokes an immediate but lasting profundity, with each piece causing one to wonder about the thoughts that roam their consciousness, and the books that take up residence on their and our shelves. Dumontier and Farber are founding members of the influential art collective the Royal Art Lodge, and have been collaborating on art projects for more than fifteen years, exhibiting internationally. Library is playful and insightful as it pokes and prods at the human condition.

"Imagining Science "brings together internationally recognized artists, scientists, and social commentators to feature a body of original artwork and essays which explores the complex legal, ethical, and social concerns about advances in biotechnology, such as stem cell research, cloning, and genetic testing. Many important questions and themes emerge from this exchange, highlighting the linkages between scientific and creative research. This collaboration also stresses the vital role art can play in critiquing these biomedical technologies, particularly as advancements in science begin to challenge our ethical boundaries.

In this book, contributors identify and explore a range of iconic works - "Mistress-Pieces" - that have been made by feminists and gender activists since the 1970s. The first volume for which the defining of iconic feminist art is the raison d'etre, its contributors interpret a "Mistress-Piece" as a work that has proved influential in a particular context because of its distinctiveness and relevance. Reinterpreting iconic art by Alice Neel, Hannah Wilke and Ana Mendieta, the authors also offer important insights about works that may be less well known - those by Natalia LL, Tanja Ostojic, Swoon, Clara Meneres, Diane Victor, Usha Seejarim, Ilse Fuskova, Phaptawan Suwannakudt and Tracey Moffatt, among others. While in some instances revealing cross influences between artists working in different frameworks, the publication simultaneously makes evident how social and political factors specific to particular countries had significant impact on the making and reception of art focused on gender. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, visual studies and gender studies.

FAUXLOSOPHY by Ron English, is a compelling collection of the artist's sayings with his accompanying iconic images. It is a light read with indelible images bringing to life wit and wisdom to live by through art, humor and ironic inspiration. Ron English is one of the most prolific and recognisable American artists alive today. Considered the Godfather of Street Art, he has appeared in movies such as Exit through the Gift Shop and Supersize Me and as a character of himself in the Simpsons. One of the most prolific and recognizable artists alive today, Ron English has bombed the global landscape with unforgettable images, on the street, in museums, in movies, books and television. English coined the term POPaganda to describe his signature mash-up of high and low cultural touchstones.

Transnational Perspecives on Feminism and Art, 1960-1985 is a collection of essential essays that bring transnational feminist praxis into conversation with histories of feminist art in the 1960s, 1970s, and early 1980s. The artistic practices and processes examined within these pages all centre on gender and sexual politics as they variously intersect with race, class, sovereignty, Indigeneity, citizenship, and migration at particular historical moments and within specific geopolitical contexts. The book's central premise is that reconsidering this period from transnational feminist perspectives will enable new thinking about the critical commonalities and differences across heterogeneous and geographically dispersed practices that have contributed to the complex and multifaceted relationship between feminism and art today. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, cultural studies, visual culture, material culture, and gender studies.

While recent studies in neuroscience and psychology have shed light on our sensory and perceptual experiences of art, they have yet to explain how contemporary art downplays perceptual responses and, instead, encourages conceptual thought. The Psychology of Contemporary Art brings together the most important developments in recent scientific research on visual perception and cognition and applies the results of empirical experiments to analyses of contemporary artworks not normally addressed by psychological studies. The author explains, in simple terms, how neuroaesthetics, embodiment, metaphor, conceptual blending, situated cognition and extended mind offer fresh perspectives on specific contemporary artworks - including those of Marina Abramovic, Francis Alys, Martin Creed, Tracey Emin, Felix Gonzales-Torres, Marcus Harvey, Mona Hatoum, Thomas Hirschorn, Gabriel Orozco, Marc Quinn and Cindy Sherman. This book will appeal to psychologists, cognitive scientists, artists and art historians, as well as those interested in a deeper understanding of contemporary art.

A revised and expanded edition of one the most popular titles in the Contemporary Artists Series Born in Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid-1970s. Through performance, video, sculpture, and installation, she creates architectonic spaces that relate to the body, language, and the condition of exile as well as transforming everyday, domestic objects into things foreign, threatening, and dangerous. Often exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum's works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial, and otherness.

Ayse Gungoer investigates art practices between art and anthropology in Turkey, as well as the implications of contemporary art for those disciplines. She discusses various approaches based on anthropological theories on the forms of relation and theories of artistic practices on socio-political issues. Based on long-term research with contemporary artists such as Nil Yalter, Gulsun Karamustafa, Esra Ersen, Kutlug Ataman, Tayfun Serttas, Koeken Ergun, Dilek Winchester and Artikisler Collective, this book analyzes the objectives of art and anthropology in order to determine new possibilities and divergences arising from this interdisciplinary confluence.

John Coatsworth has produced some of the most instantly recognisable images of Tyneside over the last 12 years. This beautiful book includes many of the famous Newcastle landmarks including the Quayside, the Tyne Bridge, Grey Street and St James' Park have all been depicted in his unique 'bendy' style. This dramatic and distinctive style is in great demand.

David Lynch is internationally renowned as a filmmaker, but it is less known that he began his creative life as a visual artist and has maintained a devoted studio practice, developing an extensive body of painting, prints, photography, and drawing. Featuring work from all periods of Lynch's career, this book documents Lynch's first major museum exhibition in the United States, bringing together works held in American and European collections and from the artist's studio. Much like his movies, many of Lynch's artworks revolve around suggestions of violence, dark humor, and mystery, conveying an air of the uncanny. This is often conveyed through the addition of text, wildly distorted forms, and disturbances in the paint fields that surround or envelop his figures. While a few relate to his film projects, most are independent works of art that reveal a parallel trajectory. Organized in close collaboration with the artist, David Lynch: The Unified Field brings together ninety-five paintings, drawings, and prints from 1965 to the present, often unified by the recurring motif of the home as a site of violence, memories, and passion. Other works explore the odd, tender, and mincing aspects of relationships. Highlighting many works that have rarely been seen in public, including early work from his critical years in Philadelphia (1965 70), this catalog offers a substantial response to dealer Leo Castelli's comment when he enthusiastically viewed Lynch's work in 1987, I would like to know how he got to this point; he cannot be born out of the head of Zeus." Published in association with the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.

A leading figure of photorealist painting, Franz Gertsch (born 1930, Switzerland) has created monumental portraits of charismatic youths and meditative depictions of nature in vivid and pains- taking detail for over fifty years. Polyfocal Allover surveys Gertsch's paintings from 1970 to 1982 and woodcut prints from 1979 to 2019, reflecting a vision in which all that lies within the frame is accorded equal value. The essays, interviews, and conversations in this publication bring further definition to the lives and landscapes Gertsch renders with such virtuosic, eerie precision.

The first, intimate visual documentation of artists who have influenced and transformed the Chinese art scene over the last two decades German photographer Thomas Fuesser has been following artists in China since 1993, when he was first invited by renowned Dutch curator Hans van Dijk (1946-2002) to join a group of foreign journalists and photographers to visit the up-and-coming members of the then fledgling Beijing and Shanghai art scenes. Reports on this visit, by New York Times art critic Andrew Solomon and several others, later played a major role in the making of prominent artists, such as Fang Lijun, Wang Guangyi, and Yue Minjun. Over many years, Fusser has developed close and enduring professional relationships with the artistic community in China. His striking portraits tell their stories and depict their work and personalities in an entirely distinct style, documenting a part of contemporary history and an immensely dynamic time in China. Recording the lives and thought processes of leading artists, such as Ai Weiwei, Cai Guo-Qiang, Zeng Fanzhi, Zhang Peili, Feng Mengbo, Wu Shanzhuan, and Zhou Tiehai, `SHORT CUTS', inspired by Robert Altman's concept of multiple parallel destinies that interact, provides a fascinating visual insight into the heart and soul of Chinese society.

An important dispatch from a new, multipolar order that is taking form before our eyes A vast cultural movement is emerging from outside the Western world. Truly global in its range and allure, it is the biggest challenge yet to Hollywood, McDonald's, blue jeans, and other aspects of American mass-produced popular culture. This is a book about the new arbiters of mass culture-India's Bollywood films, Turkey's soap operas, or dizi, and South Korea's pop music. Carefully packaging not always secular modernity, combined with traditional values, in urbanized settings, they have created a new global pop culture that strikes a deeper chord than the American version, especially with the many millions who are only just arriving in the modern world and still negotiating its overwhelming changes. Fatima Bhutto, an indefatigable reporter and vivid writer, profiles Shah Rukh Khan, by many measures the most popular star in the world; goes behind the scenes of Magnificent Century, Turkey's biggest dizi, watched by more than 200 million people across 43 countries; and travels to South Korea to see how K-Pop started. Bhutto's book is an important dispatch from a new, multipolar order that is taking form before our eyes. "Bhutto's razor sharp, intriguing introduction to the various pop phenomena emerging from Asia." -Tash Aw, Financial Times

After punk's arrival in 1976, many art students in the northern English city of Leeds traded their paintbrushes for guitars and synthesizers. In bands ranging from Gang of Four, Soft Cell, and Delta 5 to the Mekons, Scritti Politti, and Fad Gadget, these artists-turned-musicians challenged the limits of what was deemed possible in rock and pop music. Taking avant-garde ideas to the record-buying public, they created Situationist antirock and art punk, penned deconstructed pop ditties about Jacques Derrida, and took the aesthetics of collage and shock to dark, brooding electro-dance music. In No Machos or Pop Stars Gavin Butt tells the fascinating story of the post-punk scene in Leeds, showing how England's state-funded education policy brought together art students from different social classes to create a fertile ground for musical experimentation. Drawing on extensive interviews with band members, their associates, and teachers, Butt details the groups who wanted to dismantle both art world and music industry hierarchies by making it possible to dance to their art. Their stories reveal the subversive influence of art school in a regional music scene of lasting international significance.

2019 marked the 40th anniversary of Barbara Nanning's graduation in ceramics from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Over those forty years, Nanning (b.1957) has become an internationally respected artist with work in countless public and private collections in the Netherlands and around the world. Originally, her reputation was due mainly to her pioneering ceramics and installations, which had completely abandoned the container form that had so long dominated studio pottery. But for the last 25 years Nanning has worked chiefly in a different medium: glass, in which she has created an amazing and multi-faceted oeuvre. Each year she spends an extended period in the Czech Republic, where expert glassblowers help her to conjure up the most extraordinary and thrilling objects in that material.

Minimal Conditions explores the expansion of sculpture into phenomenal and perception-based practices in and around the Los Angeles area in the 1970s, a time when California Light and Space art played a key role in the evolution of minimal art toward dematerialization. Focusing on the contingent and embodied nature of work by such artists as Robert Irwin, James Turrell, Doug Wheeler, Larry Bell, Eric Orr, and Maria Nordman, author Dawna L. Schuld proposes a method of analysis that considers these pieces not as discrete objects, but as diverse species of experience. Schuld's compelling study identifies perceptual, philosophical, and historical common ground shared by minimal artists working on both coasts and in the desert landscape.

Natural history and art have been life-long preoccupations of the leading British painter Kurt Jackson (b.1961). For this book, Jackson has returned to zoology, the subject he studied at university, to create a beautiful bestiary: a body of work about fauna. Bestiaries date back to medieval times when religious instruction promoted the study and interpretation of animal life, often with the aid of elaborate illustrations. Later, the religious framework fell away, as artists and authors including Picasso, Toulouse Lautrec, Guillaume Apollinaire and Jorge Luis Borges used the form as a means of exploring nature, humanity and the relationship between the two. Jackson's contemporary bestiary extends this tradition, looking closely at both everyday and lesser-known species of birds, insects, mammals and fish in order to stimulate readers' connections with and appreciation of the world around them. Combining stunning imagery with commentaries and poems written by the artist, the book gives fascinating insights into the working life of one of the most popular and original artists working in Britain today, and makes a perfect companion to both Kurt Jackson (2012) and Kurt Jackson Sketchbooks (2012/2014).

“We are all inside this thing—but how?” This book explores 21st century art’s reckonings with the technosphere. Almost unimaginable in its complexity and scale, a man-made megastructure surrounds all of us, and often seems inescapable. Outlining the poetics of encryption that attend to this infrastructural condition, Samman explores dramatic motifs including confinement, capture, and burial, as well as access and exclusion from secured domains. Poetics of Encryption excavates the art of our times as it quests through caves, cables, codes, satellites, and icons. Toggling between enlightened concern and occult dreaming it surveys a counter-intuitive aesthetic of the interface: Addressing those who cannot write code, this analogy in contemporary art stages its own ‘digital’, both virtually and analogue.