The most famous 18th-century copper engraver, Giovanni Battista Piranesi (1720-1778) made his name with etchings of ancient Rome. His startling, chiaroscuro images imbued the city's archaeological ruins with drama and romance and became favorite souvenirs for the Grand Tourists who traveled Italy in pursuit of classical culture and education. Today, Piranesi is renowned not just for shaping the European imagination of Rome, but also for his elaborate series of fanciful prisons, Carceri, which have influenced generations of creatives since, from the Surrealists to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Franz Kafka. Loosely based on contemporary stage sets rather than the actual dingy dungeons of Piranesi's day, these intricate images defy architectural reality to play instead with perspective, lighting, and scale. Staircases exist on two planes simultaneously; vast, vaulted ceilings seem to soar up to the heavens; interior and exterior distinctions collapse. With a low viewpoint and small, fragile figures, the prison scenes become monstrous megacities of incarceration, celebrated to this day as masterworks of existentialist drama.

Circle: "God is a circle whose center is everywhere but whose circumference is nowhere." Circle means perfection, cyclicity, superiority of the divinity, but also instability and movement. In nature soap bubbles are spherical and internal trees' rings are circular; the legend tells that Giotto drew a perfect O, while perfection is tangible on Michelangelo's Tondo Doni and Botticelli's Vergine col Bambino. King Arthur's knights were pairs around a round table, and nowadays people sit in circle to make a decision or watch a show. Bruno Munari selects and describes in this little, extraordinary encyclopedia, several uses of this fascinating and mysterious form, unstable and hieratic at the same time. Square: Square has much importance in man's life: a lot of churches, monuments, games (like chess), and fonts are square-based. But man seems not to realise it... one more time Bruno Munari amazes us with an historical, anthropological, scientific square book. Triangle: From the vegetable structure of the coconut to the diagram of human settlements by Le Corbusier, one can frequently find the shape of the equilateral triangle in many different occurrences, both in a natural environment and in artificial works. Along with the circle and the square, the equilateral triangle is one of the three basic forms, and is suitable to be combined in modular frameworks to generate a structured field in which endless other combinatorial forms may be constructed. From classical Arab and Japanese decorations to the contemporary architecture of Buckminster Fuller and Wright, the familiarity with the equilateral triangle, in all its formal and structural resources, generates curious and fascinating experimentations. After the books of the same collection dedicated to the circle and the square, a new reprint by Bruno Munari about the many uses of this evocative shape throughout the centuries. These studies were originally published in 1976 in the series Quaderni di design, curated by Munari himself for Zanichelli.

With a few notable exceptions, the fundamental role that women played in the development of abstract art has long been underestimated, and their work has not received the same critical attention as that of their male counterparts. Now, at last, the tide is turning. The latest historiographical advances illustrated by numerous recent publications, monographs and thematic exhibitions make it possible to reassess the importance of the contribution of women artists to the different currents of abstraction, while at the same time questioning the patterns of the past. Edited by Christine Macel, this catalogue and the exhibition it accompanies highlights the contributions of a hundred or so women artists to abstraction up to the 1980s, with a few unprecedented forays into the 19th century. By focusing on the careers of artists so often unjustly eclipsed, the book questions the established canons and offers an alternative history of abstraction, from the symbolist abstraction of Hilma Af Klint, to the sensual abstraction of Huguette Caland, to the purist non-objective approach of Verena Von Loewensberg. Essays by noted scholars explore the techniques, concerns and legacies of these women, shedding light on their unique experiences and offering keen new reflections on their work and the movement as a whole. With 350 illustrations

Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Beatrix Potter's birth, this magnificent collection celebrates the artist behind The Tale of Peter Rabbit and numerous other beloved children's books. Brimming with famous images and rarely seen gems-ranging from character sketches and notebook pages to watercolour landscapes and natural history illustrations-this monograph explores Potter's artistic process and reveals the places that inspired her timeless work. Organised geographically and featuring more than 200 images from the artist's oeuvre, The Art of Beatrix Potter includes illuminating essays by Potter scholar Linda Lear, illustration historian Steven Heller, and children's book illustrator Eleanor Taylor. A definitive volume on one of the world's most influential authors, a woman whose artistry deserves to be fully celebrated.

One of the most visible, popular, and significant artists of his generation, William Hogarth (1697-1764) is best known for his acerbic, strongly moralising works, which were mass-produced and widely disseminated as prints during his lifetime. This volume is a fascinating look into the notorious English satirical artist's life, presenting Anecdotes of William Hogarth, Written by Himself-a collection of autobiographical vignettes supplemented with short texts and essays written by his contemporaries, first published in 1785.

Creative Infrastructures is a new collection of connected essays that examines the relationships between art, innovation, entrepreneurship and money. Essig uses her extensive knowledge of the field of arts entrepreneurship and puts it to broader practical use and greater impact by offering a theory for arts entrepreneurship that places more emphasis on means over ends. Essig uses illustrative case studies to show how her theoretical framework explains a number of innovative efforts in culturally and racially diverse communities. The Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, is a visual metaphor deployed by Essig in the opening essay to shift commonly held perspectives on, especially, the relationship between art and money. Art is the head; money is the tail, feeding and nourishing the head in a cycle that enables the organism to not only survive but also thrive. Between the art and the money is the body: innovation and entrepreneurship. Innovation is understood to be a novel idea that is implemented and has impact on a domain. For that is what the artist does: create something new and unique that has impact. Entrepreneurship is conceived of as the discovery or creation of a mediating structure that can convert the artistic innovation into capital (financial and other types) that can be re-invested in the artist and the making of more art. This book endeavours to untie the knotty relationships between artists and entrepreneurship in order to answer the question 'How can artists make work and thrive in our late-capitalist society?' Other essays in the collection consider a range of topics including how aesthetic and cultural value are transmitted from the artist to the audience; the complexity of the tension between what art fundamentally is and the reproduction of that work and the recent foregrounding of the idea that art can produce positive social change - through current and late-twentieth-century trends in 'social impact art' or 'art for change'. As in sports, business and other sectors, the star artists, the top 1 per cent, have disproportionately influenced the public expectations for what 'a successful artist' means. It isn't necessary to retell the stories of the one per cent of arts entrepreneurs; instead Essig looks instead at the quotidian artist, at what they do and why, not what they make. All too often, artists who are attentive to the 'business' of their creative practice are accused of 'selling out'. But for many working artists, that attention to business is what enables an artist to not just survive, but to thrive. When artists follow their mission, Essig contends that they don't sell out, they spiral up by keeping mission at the forefront. The closing essay is a work of speculative fiction, based in all that comes before, both in the preceding essays and in Essig's work as an artist, arts advocate and scholar of cultural policy. Returning to the symbol of the Ouroboros, it connects the head (art) to the tail (not money specifically, but resources), and back again. It is a 'future imaginary', in which she profiles three fictional artists in the year 2050. The field of arts entrepreneurship is growing - thanks in large part to the work of Linda Essig. The case studies in the book are US-based, but the issues addressed are universal. This book is ideal for use in training programmes for arts administrators and advocates; policy analysts and business schools that are looking to add in arts programmes. It will be of great interest and significance to people working in the cultural industries in the United Kingdom and Europe, especially Germany, where there has also been some recent research interest on similar topics. It is also relevant to the many artists who participate in training and professional development programmes in their community, as well as those who are just starting out.

A new survey of the best works by the elusive and spectacular Spanish Impressionist Joaquin Sorolla. Often compared to his contemporary, the American artist John Singer Sargent, Joaquin Sorolla (1863-1923) was a master draftsman and painter of landscapes, formal portraits, and monumental, historically themed canvases. Highly influenced by French Impressionism, the Valencian artist was a master plein-air painter known for his luminous seaside scenes of frolicking youths and for vivid depictions of Spanish rural life and its pleasures and customs. This beautifully designed and produced volume brings together one hundred of Sorolla's major paintings, selected by his great-granddaughter Blanca Pons-Sorolla, the foremost authority on the artist. Benefiting from close proximity to the artist and his personal archives, she presents an in-depth essay that explores Sorolla's life, work, and remarkable international legacy. With virtually all of the artist's previous publications now out of print, this much-anticipated volume is an important addition to the literature on this great Spanish master.

Now available in paperback, this book remains the definitive survey of the life and work of Surrealist artist Leonora Carrington (1917-2011). Carrington burst onto the Surrealist scene in 1936, when, as a precocious nineteen-year-old debutante, she escaped the stultifying demands of her wealthy English family by running away to Paris with her lover Max Ernst. She was immediately championed by Andre Breton, who responded enthusiastically to her fantastical, dark and satirical writing style and her interest in fairy tales and the occult. Her stories were included in Surrealist publications, and her paintings in the Surrealists' exhibitions. After the dramas and tragic separations of the Second World War, Carrington ended up in the 1940s as part of the circle of Surrealist European emigres living in Mexico City. Close friends with Luis Bunuel, Benjamin Peret, Octavio Paz and a host of both expatriate Surrealists and Mexican modernists, Carrington was at the centre of Mexican cultural life, while still maintaining her European connections. Leonora Carrington: Surrealism, Alchemy and Art provides a fascinating overview of this intriguing artist's rich body of work. The author considers Carrington's preoccupation with alchemy and the occult, and explores the influence of indigenous Mexican culture and beliefs on her production.

Modern art begins with Goya. He was the first to create works of art for their own sake, and he lived in a time of incredible cultural and social dynamism when the old concepts of social hierarchy were being shaken by the new concept of equality for all. He saw his world ripped apart by Napoleon's armies and then suffered the reactionary backlash as the old order was restored. Against this epic canvas, Goya painted his own observations of humanity, transforming his youthful images of gaily dancing peasants into his mature penetrating studies of human suffering, despair, perseverance and redemption. Goya's art rises above the chaos of his times, and signals the real revolution of personal expression and independent spirit that would be the generative force behind the modernist movement in art.

Explore Kerby Rosanes's intricate and vibrant world in this striking jigsaw puzzle. Piece together shape-shifting creatures as they morph into a magnificent tiger in the night, featured in his bestselling book, Animorphia.

Forbes' "The Best Graphic Novels of 2022" list Cartoonist Zoe Thorogood records 6 months of her own life as it falls apart in a desperate attempt to put it back together again in the only way she knows how. IT'S LONELY AT THE CENTRE OF THE EARTH is an intimate and metanarrative look into the life of a selfish artist who must create for her own survival.

The Art of Eliza Ivanova is an evocative, edgy, and beautiful book filled with the work of this exciting artist.

A graduate of the California Institute of Arts, Bulgarian-born Eliza now lives in San Francisco where she created much of the art on these pages. She produces effortless movement with her sketched lines and animation-influenced dynamic touches. Well known for her portraits and figures of women and children, Eliza’s style is distinctive and rich in detail. In addition to a gallery filled with a mix of old favorites, new creations and bespoke commissions for this book, you will be invited into Eliza’s world. Enter her studio to discover her workspace and favorite tools. Eliza also shares techniques with us in step-by-step workshops to help us capture some of that dynamic movement that infuses her work.

Both aspiring and established artists will benefit from Eliza’s technical tips and words of wisdom about life, work, and more.

Do you desire to show your art in a gallery, yet do not know where to begin? Gallery Ready shares best practices for visual artists, from emerging to midcareer, so they can experience optimum results in making, showing and selling their art. As an artist, you will learn what you can do to attract the attention of a gallery director. Gallery Owner, Franceska Alexander shows artists: How to make their art stand out from the crowd How to be fully prepared to meet with a important gallery decision makers How to keep their artwork fresh and collectors excited about the art Gallery Ready, A Creative Blueprint for Visual Artists, clearly illustrates what artists can do to make their art, gallery ready!

The first and highly-anticipated monograph on one of the most successful, collected, and exciting painters today Swiss-born Nicolas Party, one of the most successful and critically acclaimed artists working today, is known for his color-saturated paintings of everyday objects, with distinctly personal yet very accessible and recognizable imagery - bright, graphic patterns applied to canvases, ceramics, furniture, floors, ceilings, doorways, and walls. He captures the essence of his subjects in surprising ways, heightening their physical and emotional resonance. Fascinated by the power of paint to alter our perception of the built environment and, within a gallery context, how we experience art, Party regularly paints murals, either as stand-alone works or as carefully orchestrated settings for his practice. This is the first book dedicated to his practice and the first to examine in totality his career to date - it will be a must-read for collectors and followers of the contemporary art scene.

At the age of 38, Dora Carrington (1893-1932) committed suicide, unable to contemplate living without her companion, Lytton Strachey, who had died a few weeks before. The association with Lytton and his Bloomsbury friends, combined with her own modesty have tended to overshadow Carrington's contribution to modern British painting. This book aims to redress the balance by looking at the immense range of her work: portraits, landscapes, glass paintings, letter illustrations and decorative work.

When Marcel Duchamp shipped Constantin Brancusi's sculpture Bird in Space to Edward Steichen in 1926, New York customs officials refused to accept that it was a work of art, instead levying the standard import tariff for a manufactured object. A legal battle ensued, with the courts eventually declaring Bird in Space an artwork and therefore exempt from the tariff. Seventy-eight years later, visitors to Simon Starling's exhibition at New York's Casey Kaplan Gallery were confronted with Staling's own Bird in Space (2004): a two-ton slab of steel from Romania (Brancusi's country of origin) leaning against the gallery wall and propped up on three inflatable cushions. The United States had recently introduced a new import tax of twenty per cent on foreign metals, which Starling circumvented by labelling this unaltered chunk of European steel a work of art. Its plinth of cushioned air not only introduced a second, more representational valance to the work but also brought to bear the traditional sculptural parameters of weight, gravity and balance. Starling's art frequently traffics in deception. It also traffics in traffic, meaning the circulation of goods, knowledge and people (usually the artist himself). Many of his works circle back on themselves, taking an idea on a journey that ends at its point of origin. Wilhelm Noack oHG (2006), for example, is an elaborate helical steel structure designed to loop a thirty-five-millimetre film of the workshop in which it was fabricated. The circuitous path that the film takes through the towering metal structure is the perfect visual metaphor for the work's own circular logic, a self-regulating system that adds up to much more than the sum of its parts. Starling is a key figure in one of contemporary art's most significant recent developments: the linking of artistic practice and knowledge production. Although this tendency flourished with Conceptual art in the 1960s and 1970s, in recent years it has taken on a new intensity. Unlike the Conceptual artists, however, many of whom strove for a language-based dematerialized art, for Starling the object is always at the work's heart. Economies, ecologies, coincidences and convergences are all simply means to an end - although 'simply' may be the wrong word to describe the transformation of thousands of miles of travel and hundreds of years of history into a single sculpture, film or photograph. Starling's other predecessors are the Land artists, such as Robert Smithson, with whom he shares a fascination with entropy and other natural forces. But he is truly an artist of the current age, setting out to understand and illustrate the complex processes through which the natural and human-made realms interact. The five platinum/palladium prints that constitute One Ton (2005) show a single view of a South African platinum mine. Together the five prints contain the precise amount of platinum salts that can be derived from one ton of ore, succinctly illustrating the enormous amount of energy required in the extraction of precious metals. Born in England in 1967 and now living in Denmark, Starling has been the subject of solo exhibitions at museums around the world, including the Hiroshima City Museum of Art (2011), Kunstmuseum Basel (2005) and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Sydney (2002), and his work has been featured in major international group shows, such as the Venice Biennale (2009), the Moscow Biennial (2007) and the Sao Paulo Biennial (2005). Awards include the Turner Prize (2005), the Blinky Palermo Prize (1999) and the Paul Hamlyn Foundation Award for Artists (1999). In the Survey, Dieter Roelstraete presents a comprehensive overview of Starling's work, examining circularity and serendipity and the their relationship to historical research. For the Interview, Francesco Manacorda and the artist discuss the central role of time in his work. Janet Harbord's Focus scrutinizes Wilhelm Noack oHG (2006) as an example of material cinema. Artist's Choice is a extract from Flann O'Brien's 1996 novel The Third Policeman, a fantastical conversation about bicycles swapping atoms with their riders. Artists Writings include five project statements, all of which consist, in varying proportions, of history, science and speculative fiction.

A fully updated edition of the most comprehensive illustrated survey of the life and work of Peter Blake, one of Britain's most popular artists. Since his emergence in the early 1960s as a key member of the Pop Art movement, Peter Blake has become one of the best-known and most popular artists of his generation. Though primarily a painter, he has worked across many media, from drawings, watercolours and collages to sculpture and printmaking, as well as commercial art in the form of graphics and album covers - most notably his design for The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper album in 1967. Exploring his remarkable creative output from the 1950s to the present, Peter Blake is the most comprehensive illustrated survey available of the life and work of the artist. Marco Livingstone grounds Blake's art firmly in his working-class origins, identifying a yearning for the innocence of childhood in his bittersweet paintings of the early to mid-1950s that depict children reading comics or going to the Saturday matinee at the cinema. From that moment, while studying at the Royal College of Art in London, Blake concerned himself with popular entertainments as subject matter, and as the source of formal solutions, for his paintings. The directness with which Blake gave expression to his enthusiasms for mass culture during the 1950s brought him to the forefront of the Pop Art movement before it had even been named, and independently of the investigations into similar areas by other British, American and European artists. The radical nature of his collage paintings of 1959-62, in particular, in which he combined existing imagery from popular culture with unapologetically bold and bright colours, made him a singularly influential figure within British Pop. This fully updated edition includes a new chapter on what the artist has jokingly styled his 'Late Period', in which Blake has continued to mine the many strands of his art with undiminished energy and completed some of his most ambitious long-standing projects. As well as the sheer scale of Blake's production, what becomes clear is the kaleidoscopic variety of subject matter, form and medium to be found in his work, its humour and friendly appeal, and, above all, its celebration of life and humanity.

Although Anselm Kiefer's work is routinely compared with the Gesamtkunstwerk, the "total work of art" pioneered by Richard Wagner, Disorders at the Borders represents the first time this relationship has been thoroughly investigated. But it is a relationship that involves much more than just aesthetics. Furthermore, it is a highly ambivalent one. The Gesamtkunstwerk was an embodiment of a certain view of nationhood, and nationhood is a concept that Kiefer has spent much of his career rendering thoroughly problematic. But Wagner's innovative, inclusive art form was intended above all as a counter to the individualism that the composer was far from alone in identifying as the besetting sin of modernity, and that was widely thought at the time to be most evident in America. It can thus be contextualized within the long German tradition of counter-Americanism - as, to a large extent, can Kiefer. For whilst he owes his spectacular success in no small degree to the positive reception of his work in America, he has throughout his career displayed a resistance to the artistic influence of that country. Moreover, he and Wagner take a mutual stance regarding a series of questions: can art be separated from society, or the individual arts from each other? Is painting purely visual, and music purely sonic? Do things, in short, ever really exist or operate in isolation? That they answer in the negative to all of these is what, ultimately, connects Kiefer with Wagner.

Paula Rego is an artist of astonishing power with a unique and unforgettable aesthetic. Taking its cues from the artist, this fascinating study invites us to reflect on the complexities of storytelling on which Rego's work draws, emphasizing both the stories the pictures tell, and how it is that they are told. Deryn Rees-Jones sets interpretations of the pictures in the context of Rego's personal and artistic development across sixty years. We see how Rego's art intersects with the work of both the literary and the visual, and come to understand her rich and textured layering of reference: her use of the Old Masters; fiction, fairy tales and poems; the folk traditions of Rego's native Portugal; and her wider engagement with politics, feminism and more. The result is a highly original work that addresses urgent and topical questions of gender, subject and object, self and other.

What is a moving image, and how does it move us? In Thinking In Film, celebrated theorist Mieke Bal engages in an exploration - part dialogue, part voyage - with the video installations of Finnish artist Eija-Liisa Ahtila to understand movement as artistic practice and as affect. Through fifteen years of Ahtila's practice, including such seminal works as The Annunciation, Where Is Where? and The House, Bal searches for the places where theoretical and artistic practices intersect, to create radical spaces in which genuinely democratic acts are performed. Bringing together different understandings of 'figure' from form to character, Bal examines the syntax of the exhibition and its ability to bring together installations, the work itself, the physical and ontological thresholds of the installation space and the use of narrative and genre. The double meaning of 'movement', in Bal's unique thought, catalyses anunderstanding of video installation work as inherently plural, heterogenous and possessed of revolutionary political potential. The video image as an art form illuminates the question of what an image is, and the installation binds viewers to their own interactions with the space. In this context Bal argues that the intersection between movement and space creates an openness to difference and doubt. By 'thinking in' art, we find ideas not illustrated by but actualized in artworks. Bal practices this theory in action to demonstrate how the video installation can move us to think beyond ordinary boundaries and venture into new spaces. There is no act more radical than figuring a vision of the 'other' as film allows artto do. Thinking In Film is Mieke Bal ather incisive, innovative best as she opens up the miraculous political potential of the condensed art of the moving image.