London-based artist Stephen Willats is a pioneer of conceptual art and has made work examining the function and meaning of art in society since the late 1950s. His first South London Gallery exhibition in 1998, entitled Changing Everything, brought together a body of work made in partnership with local residents over a two-year period. Aiming to create a cultural model of how art might relate to society, the work invited visitors to make their own contributions to it, shifting the way the art institution relates to the world around it. For his latest SLG show, Surfing with the Attractor, Willats re-presents material from Changing Everything alongside a new installation featuring a huge 'data stream' spanning 15 metres and made in collaboration with 14 London-based artists. Comprising hundreds of carefully ordered images in various media, the data stream documents two contrasting streets of London: Rye Lane in Peckham and Regent Street in the West End.Extending beyond the gallery space, the show also includes films from the data stream shown on monitors in shops on Peckham Road and Camberwell Church Street, and graphic stickers will be widely distributed.

Digital artist Zheng Wei Gu (AKA Guweiz) shares his anime-inspired world in this beautifully produced and insightful book, leading you through his fantasy world with a portfolio packed with gritty detail and a surreal vibe. Guweiz began drawing when he was 17, inspired by an anime art tutorial on YouTube. Discovering a natural talent, he carried on drawing and quickly amassed a fan-base for his edgy illustration style. Throughout this book, readers will discover his artistic journey from the very beginning, with behind-the-scenes details about how some of his most popular pieces were created. He reveals his secrets for turning influences into truly original digital art, including that all-important narrative that takes drawing and painting beyond the purely visual. Step-by-step tutorials share techniques and tips to help you create these sorts of effects in your art, resulting in images with the depth of detail and intrigue that Guweiz has made his trademark. The artist's unique urban take on the popular manga/anime style is gripping right from the first page, from the surreal take on Japanese lifestyle to the urban fantasy he creates.

Sigmund Freud was already internationally acclaimed as the principal founder of psychoanalysis when he turned his attention to the life of Leonardo da Vinci. It remained Freud's favourite composition. Compressing many of his insights into a few pages, the result is a fascinating picture of some of Freud's fundamental ideas, including human sexuality, dreams, and repression. It is an equally compelling - and controversial - portrait of Leonardo and the creative forces that according to Freud lie behind some of his great works, including the Mona Lisa. With a new foreword by Maria Walsh.

A complete retrospective of the paper engineer and artist Matthew Shlian, documenting a decade of unrivalled and unexpected creativity. Paper engineer and artist Matthew Shlian has always recognized the material's potential for experimentation. Folded, tessellated, compressed, extrapolated, two-dimensional paper becomes three-dimensional sculpture in beautiful and unexpected ways. 'My process is extremely varied from piece to piece. Often I start without a clear goal in mind, working within a series of limitations. For example on one piece I'll only use curved folds, or make my lines this length or that angle, etc. Other times I begin with an idea for movement and try to achieve that shape or form somehow.' Unfolding is Shlian's first comprehensive monograph. A journey into the new possibilities of folding technology, the intricate complexities of Islamic patterns, and the sheer potential offered by a sheet of white paper, it celebrates a humble material, on the edge of its existence, elevated to timeless form and possibility.

A highly-illustrated monograph on the life and work of Arthur Singer, an American wildlife artist specializing in birds. His work in reference books and U.S. stamps is internationally acclaimed. Arthur B. Singer was an American wildlife artist specializing in bird illustration. In a career spanning five decades, he illustrated more than 20 books, including his masterpiece, Birds of the World, as well as classic bird guides: Birds of North America, Birds of Europe, and The Hamlyn Guide to Birds of Britain and Europe. Singer joined the U.S. Army in 1942 and was assigned to Company C of the 603rd Camouflage Engineers.As a member of unit, known as the "Ghost Army," Singer along with other artists, created camouflage and other forms of deception on the battlefields of Europe. Upon his return to the U.S., he worked briefly in an advertising agency and became a full-time illustrator and artist in 1955. During the 1980s, assisted by his son, Alan, Singer's paintings of state birds were seen by millions when the U.S. Postal Service issued the State Birds & Flowerspostage stamps. The stamps became one of the largest selling commemoratives in U.S. Postal history. He received the Hal Borland Award in 1985 from the National Audubon Society. His paintings are represented in several public and private collections in the United States and Europe. Since his death in 1990, retrospectives of Singer's artwork have been presented in several museums and art galleries across the U.S. PAUL SINGER has focused on designs for zoos, museums, and botanic gardens. He has worked as an interpretive sign designer for the National Park Service and his illustrations are included inThe Knopf Nature Guide series for Audubon, The Audubon MasterGuides to Birding, The Knopf Collector Guides to American Antiques and other publications. ALAN SINGER is a graduate of The Cooper Union School of Art and worked with his father, Arthur, on painting revisions to both of Singer's field guides to birds, and helped illustrate the State Bird & Flower Stamps for the U.S. Postal Service. Since 1989, he has been a tenured professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology. A prolific printmaker, painter, andauthor, he has had 27 solo exhibits.

Featuring a handsome new package redesigned by the author himself, this edition is a must-have for fans and collectors of Luigi Serafini s art. First published in 1981 in Milan by F.M. Ricci, the book has been hailed as one of the most unusual yet beautiful art books ever made. A visual encyclopaedia of an unknown world written in an unknown language, it has fuelled much debate over its meaning. Written for the information age and addressing the import of coding and decoding in genetics, literary criticism, and computer science, it has now fascinated and enchanted two generations. While its message may be unclear, its appeal is obvious: it is a most exquisite artifact, blurring the line between art book and art object. This edition presents it in a new, unparalleled light complete with 15 new illustrations by the author. With the advent of new forms of communication, continuous streams of information, and social media, the Codex is more relevant and timely than ever. A limited numbered deluxe edition, bound in real cloth and presented in a handsome slipcase, is also available. It includes a signed print of a new illustration made by the author to commemorate the 700th anniversary of the death in 1321 of Dante Alighieri, one of Italy s greatest writers and creator of The Divine Comedy.

This facsimile edition of a 1922 children's book features seventy-three dynamic and whimsical woodcut illustrations-the first woodcuts that the famed American craftsman Wharton Esherick produced. A high-quality replica authorized by the Wharton Esherick Museum, this book reveals the foundation of Esherick's direction as an artist. Edited by Museum director Paul Eisenhauer, it also features a foreword by Museum assistant curator Laura Heemer. The illustrations frame verses that introduce children to the principles of evolution, a highly controversial topic at the time: the book was published three years before the famous Scopes "Monkey" trial of 1925 that resulted in the inclusion of the teaching of evolution in public schools. Drawn by the excitement of the controversy, Esherick threw his passion into these illustrations. Afterward he would go on to carve over 300 woodcuts, leading to decorative carving, and ultimately, to Esherick's realization that he was a sculptor rather than a painter.

In 1950, photographer Gisele Freund embarked on a two-week trip to Mexico, but she wouldn't leave until two years later. There she met the legendary couple Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera. Welcomed into their home, she immersed herself in their private lives and the cultural and artistic diversity of the country, taking hundreds of photographs. These powerful photographs, among the last taken before Kahlo's death, bear poignant witness to Frida's beauty and talent.Showcasing more than 100 of these rare images, many of which have never been published before, the book also includes previously unpublished commentary by Gisele Freund about Frida Kahlo, texts by Kahlo's biographer Gerard de Cortanze and art historian Lorraine Audric, as well as a link to a previously unreleased colour film, shot by Freund, showing Diego Rivera at work.

Born in 1899 to Russian Aristocrats, Tamara de Lempicka escaped the Bolsheviks by exchanging her body for freedom, dramatically beginning a sexual career that included most of the influential men and women she painted. Her paintings, like the artist herself, glow with beauty and sexuality. Contemporary critics, however, dismissed her gorgeously stylised portraits and condemned her scandalous lifestyle. A resurgence of interest in her work occurred in the 1980s, spurred by such celebrity collectors such as Jack Nicholson, Barbra Streisand and Madonna.

The Life and Times of Moses Jacob Ezekiel: American Sculptor, Arcadian Knight tells the remarkable story of Moses Ezekiel and his rise to international fame as an artist in late nineteenth-century Italy. Sephardic Jew, homosexual, Confederate soldier, Southern apologist, opponent of slavery, patriot, expatriate, mystic, Victorian, dandy, good Samaritan, humanist, royalist, romantic, reactionary, republican, monist, dualist, theosophist, freemason, champion of religious freedom, proto-Zionist, and proverbial Court Jew, Moses Ezekiel was a riddle of a man, a puzzle of seemingly irreconcilable parts. Knighted by three European monarchs, courted by the rich and famous, Moses Ezekiel lived the life of an aristocrat with rarely a penny to his name. Making his home in the capacious ruins of the Baths of Diocletian in Rome, he quickly distinguished himself as the consummate artist and host, winning international fame for his work and consorting with many of the lions and luminaries of the fin-de-siecle world, including Giuseppe Garibaldi, Queen Margherita, Franz Liszt, Richard Wagner, Sarah Bernhardt, Gabriele D'Annunzio, Eleonora Duse, Annie Besant, Clara Schumann, Sir Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Alphonse Daudet, Mark Twain, Emile Zola, Robert E. Lee, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, and Isaac Mayer Wise. In a city besieged with eccentrics, he, a Southern Jewish homosexual sculptor, was outstanding, an enigma to those who knew him, a man at once stubbornly original and deeply emblematic of his times. According to Stanley Chyet in his introduction to Ezekiel's memoirs, "The contemporary European struggle between liberalism and reaction, between modernity and feudalism, between the democratic and the hierarchical is rather amply refracted in Ezekiel's account of his life in Rome." Indeed so many of the contentious cultural, political, artistic, and scientific struggles of the age converged in the figure of this adroit and prepossessing Jew.

Henri Michaux is widely recognized as a major twentieth-century French poet and painter. Although his fascination with universal languages has attracted the attention of several of his critics, it has up until now been treated as a marginal concern. Henri Michaux: Poetry, Painting, and the Universal Sign argues that his ideas on what might constitute a universal language are central to an understanding of his works. It suggests that both his ambivalent articulation of his relationship to the languages and literary traditions of his native Belgium and adoptive France, and his efforts simultaneously to exacerbate and subvert the differences between words and images, are rooted in Enlightenment theories of the relationship of the self to nature and its language
Rigaud-Drayton's study makes a substantial and original contribution to the study of this complex artist, exploring the intricate relationships between word and image in his poetry and paintings, and his quest for a single, unifying language or sign.

Caravaggio was one of the most important Italian painters of the 17th century. He was, in fact, the wellspring of Baroque painting. In Hibbard's words, Caravaggio's paintings "speak to us more personally and more poignantly than any others of the time". In this study, Howard Hibbard evaluates the work of Caravaggio: notorious as a painter-assassin, hailed by many as an original interpreter of the scriptures, a man whose exploration of nature has been likened to that of Galileo.

Lali Khalid is an immigrant artist grappling with issues of identity, home, family and diaspora. In her photographs captured over a span of ten years, she illustrates complex challenges exploring new ways of retaining her identity in an environment of changing ideologies and perspectives. Khalid successfully bridges two ends of spectrum: the fading past and the vague future. The images viewed without a predetermined perception explain the evolving narrative through the veiled stories imbedded in them.

The book is a study on Dutch painting, drawing and printmaking of the 17th century, focused on interlocking its descriptive realism with the visual strategy of illusion. The author analyzes this relationship as a conjunction rather than an opposition. Illusionistic compositional devices were current not only in mythological, biblical and allegorical images but also in proper realistic representations of the world. At the same time, many visual inventions, which included illusionistic concepts, were presented with persuasive realism of the forms. Thus, different seventeenth-century Dutch artists - such as Hendrick Goltzius, Hendrick Vroom, Rembrandt, Vermeer - attempted to produce "open images" and to conduct a visual game with their beholders.

Steve Gerber (1947-2008) is among the most significant comics writers of the modern era. Best known for his magnum opus Howard the Duck, he also wrote influential series such as Man-Thing, Omega the Unknown, The Phantom Zone, and Hard Time, expressing a combination of intelligence and empathy rare in American comics. Gerber rose to prominence during the 1970s. His work for Marvel Comics during that era helped revitalize several increasingly cliched generic conventions of superhero, horror, and funny animal comics by inserting satire, psychological complexity, and existential absurdism. Gerber's scripts were also often socially conscious, confronting, among other things, capitalism, environmentalism, political corruption, and censorship. His critique also extended into the personal sphere, addressing such taboo topics as domestic violence, racism, inequality, and poverty. This volume follows Gerber's career through a range of interviews, beginning with his height during the 1970s and ending with an interview with Michael Eury just before Gerber's death in 2008. Among the pieces featured is a 1976 interview with Mark Lerer, originally published in the low-circulation fanzine Pittsburgh Fan Forum, where Gerber looks back on his work for Marvel during the early to mid-1970s, his most prolific period. This volume concludes with selections from Gerber's dialogue with his readers and admirers in online forums and a Gerber-based Yahoo Group, wherein he candidly discusses his many projects over the years. Gerber's unique voice in comics has established his legacy. Indeed, his contribution earned him a posthumous induction into the Will Eisner Comic Book Hall of Fame.

The extraordinary sculptures of Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon The first half of Belgian artist Jean-Michel Folon's (1934-2005) career was devoted to posters, illustrations, and television animations that brought him international acclaim for their diversity and virtuosity; his illustrations appeared in magazines including The New Yorker, Fortune, and Esquire. In the 1990s, he pivoted to sculpture, focusing on statuary and working with both direct carving and modeling, which he then translated to bronze or stone. This is the first publication to explore the entirety of Folon's sculptural work. Drawing inspiration from the Cyclades, the Etruscans, from African masks and Indian totems, Folon's sculptures are characterized by their frontality and corporality. Distributed for Mercatorfonds Exhibition Schedule: Villers-la-Ville, Brussels (October 24, 2020-February 21, 2021)

In a century that was dominated by science and technology, the wide-ranging artwork of Michael Ayrton (1921-75) is truly a tribute to the enduring power of Greek myth. Theorists often discuss the link between myth and creativity, but rarely does one see this connection manifested so provocatively over the course of an artist's career. Fittingly, this British sculptor, painter, author, filmmaker, and maze designer was inspired by the story of the archetypal craftsman Daedalus -- father of Icarus and maker of the labyrinth that imprisoned the Minotaur -- and produced over 800 works that in turn enhance the myth's significance. Highlighting the interaction between myth and artist, word and image, Jacob Nyenhuis here presents a catalogue of these works, one that will enlighten Ayrton's British following while introducing him to an American audience.

A nonconformist who challenged Picasso's reign over the art world, Ayrton found in Daedalus a richly complex story of captivity and escape, ingenuity and creativity, flight and fall, success and failure. Ayrton's own journey into the labyrinth set him on a torturous path through life and into the psyche: he came to identify himself not only with the craftsman but also with the Minotaur, representative of the bestial nature hidden within all of us. He ultimately created a new visual syntax that expanded the meaning of the labyrinth in disturbing ways for the twentieth century. The intensity of Ayrton's journey is conveyed in this beautifully produced volume comprising biography, critical analysis, historical context, and an annotated catalogue of the works, many appearing in color.