|
|
Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Individual artists > General
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.
 |
Virgil Abloh: Figures of Speech
(Hardcover)
Virgil Abloh; Edited by Michael Darling; Foreword by Madeleine Grynsztejn; Text written by Samir Bantal, Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, …
|
R1,897
Discovery Miles 18 970
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
|
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.
 |
This is Goya
(Hardcover)
Wendy Bird; Illustrated by Sarah Maycock
|
R297
R177
Discovery Miles 1 770
Save R120 (40%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
|
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!
 |
Nicolas Party
(Paperback)
Stephane Aquin, Stefan Banz, Ali Subotnick
|
R863
Discovery Miles 8 630
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
|
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.
 |
Simon Starling
(Paperback, New)
Janet Harbord; Contributions by Francesco Manacorda; Dieter Roelstraete
|
R882
R756
Discovery Miles 7 560
Save R126 (14%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
|
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.
|
You may like...
Sandra Blow
Michael Bird
Paperback
R751
Discovery Miles 7 510
Nobody
Alice Oswald
Hardcover
R681
Discovery Miles 6 810
|