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Books > Arts & Architecture > Art forms, treatments & subjects > Art treatments & subjects > Individual artists
Get Your Shit Together is the first book that exclusively features
recent artwork in color by beloved British artist David Shrigley.
This volume celebrates Shrigley's absurd, deadpan sensibility
through both his signature drawing style and accompanying text.
Organized by chapters with titles such as Stupid, Nonsense, Dirt,
Fear, Paranoia, Love, and Self Delusion, this collection is sure to
delight die-hard Shrigley fans and new ones alike. This is the
largest-format book to date on Shrigley's prolific work, and
features design details such as a ribbon marker with one of his
mordant sayings printed on it, as well as hand-written, humorous
essays throughout.
Figure to Ground publishes a collection of studies from the nodel
made between 2010 and 2014. These include works in pencil and
watercolour, and oil on canvas of positions taken between five and
fifteen minutes. They come to represent a conversation between
artist and sitter, confirming the easy and natural grace of the
human figure in focus.
More popular than ever, the work of Eric Ravilious (1903-42) is
rooted in the landscape of pre-war and early wartime England. This
best-selling book by Alan Powers, the established authority on
Ravilious, provides the most comprehensive overview to date of the
artist's work in all media - watercolour, illustration,
printmaking, graphic design, textiles and ceramics - and firmly
positions Ravilious as a major figure in the history of early
20th-century British art. Now available in paperback, the
accessible and engaging text, copiously illustrated with
reproductions of work drawn from a range of sources, discusses the
part Ravilious' work played in creating an English style,
positioned between tradition and modernism, and borrowing from
naive and popular art of the past. The book analyses Ravilious'
different spheres of activity in turn, covering his education and
formative influences, his mural painting, his printmaking and
illustration, his work as leader in forming a new style of
watercolour painting between the wars and his final period as an
official War Artist. In a career curtailed by an early death,
Ravilious also played a significant role as a designer; Powers
argues that Ravilious showed how decoration and historical
reference could find a place in the reform of the applied arts
whilst simultaneously renewing a sense of national identity. Eric
Ravilious will be welcomed by all those with an interest in an
artist whose imagination was backed by great skill and a sharp eye
for the unusual.
William Blake and the Body re-evaluates Blake's central image: the human form. In Blake's designs, transparent-skinned bodies passionately contort; in his verse, metamorphic bodies burst from each other in gory, gender-bending births. The culmination is an ideal body uniting form and freedom. Connolly explores romantic-era contexts like anatomical art, embryology, miscarriage, and 20th century theorists like those of Kristeva, Douglas, and Girard to provide an innovative new analysis of Blake's transformations of body and identity.
As one of the people who defined punk's protest art in the 1970s
and 1980s, Gee Vaucher (b. 1945) deserves to be much better-known.
She produced confrontational album covers for the legendary
anarchist band Crass and later went on to do the same for Northern
indie legends the Charlatans, among others. More recently, her work
was recognised the day after Donald Trump's 2016 election victory,
when the front page of the Daily Mirror ran her 1989 painting Oh
America, which shows the Statue of Liberty, head in hands. This is
the first book to critically assess an extensive range of Vaucher's
work. It examines her unique position connecting avant-garde art
movements, counterculture, punk and even contemporary street art.
While Vaucher rejects all 'isms', her work offers a unique take on
the history of feminist art. -- .
Handsome and collectible, the books are produced to the highest
standards. Each volume contains full-page reproductions printed in
superb duotone, together with a critical introduction and a full
bibliography. Now back in print, the series was awarded the first
annual prize for distinguished photographic books by the
International Center of Photography. Elliott Erwitt (b. 1928), an
American by adoption, has a humorous outlook that is reflected in
his always elegant work. His photographs take advantage of the
sudden coincidence, the fortuitous conjunction of objects and
events, to reveal the ridiculous or comical sides of everyday life.
Dogs are a favorite subject for Erwitt, often serving as a witty
metaphor for human foibles.
Cezanne's painting The Eternal Feminine, painted in 1878, has been
given considerable attention in the literature on this artist,
though it has generally embarrassed scholars because it suggests
aspects of the artist's personality that many connoisseurs in the
past would rather have repressed. The painting has been known by a
variety of titles and, as Wayne Andersen has discovered, has also
been altered. He traced these alterations to an art dealer who made
them in an effort to render the painting more marketable. This
volume is the first to interrogate the original state of The
Eternal Feminine and to resolve its mysterious importance to
Cezanne and, more broadly, the history of art. Devoting a separate
chapter to each of the titles by which the picture has been known,
Andersen resolves its hidden meaning while providing a fresh look
at Cezanne's artistic process.
This is the first comprehensive overview of the career to date of
British artist Hurvin Anderson (b.1965). Anderson is known for
painting loosely rendered 'observations' of scenes and spaces
loaded with personal or communal meaning. Anderson's painting style
is notable for the ease with which he slips between figuration and
abstraction, playing with the tropes of earlier landscape
traditions and 20th-century abstraction. His paintings of
barbershop interiors, country tennis clubs and tropical roadsides
teem with rich brushwork and multitudes of decorative patterns or
architectural features, at once obscuring and adding to underlying
ruminations on identity and place. Drawing on interviews with the
artist, Michael J. Prokopow offers a critical assessment of Hurvin
Anderson's painting practice to date that will be enlightening for
all students, dealers and collectors of contemporary painting.
Along with his extensive activity as a sculptor over the past two
decades, in which he uses materials such as glass and brick to
create architectural spaces and other pieces both small and large,
the Spanish artist Jaume Plensa has also been exploring art through
writing and theory. This monograph includes both visual
documentation and a large selection of his writings.
No single living artist has created as many myths, rumors and
legends as Banksy. In his home town of Bristol almost everyone
seems to have a Banksy story. Many of the tales in this book are
from Bristol and some are from further afield. What they share is
that they are all told with the wide-eyed wonder which Banksy
inspires. Compiled between 2009 and 2011, some of these stories are
quite old and have been told so many times they have become the
stuff of legend, while others are more questionable and best
described as myths.
Some are laugh out loud bollocks and some are simply gossip.
You be the judge. These stories illustrate the incredible audacity,
originality and sheer bloody mindedness of Banksy, who obviously
will be best remembered for his art and exposing the hypocrisy and
idiocy of our modern lives. The myths will be viewed as a
distraction to some or part of the appeal for others. One thing is
certain, the art and the myths are both larger than life.
And the Dawn Came Up Like Thunder is the experience of an ordinary
soldier captured by the Japanese at Singapore in February 1942. Leo
Rawlings' story is told in his own pictures and his own words; a
world that is uncompromising, vivid and raw. He pulls no punches.
For the first time the cruelty inflicted on the prisoners of war by
their own officers is depicted as well as shocking images of POW
life. This is truly a view of the River Kwai experience for a 21st
Century audience.The new edition includes pictures never before
published as well as an extensive new commentary by Dr Nigel
Stanley, an expert on Rawlings and the medical problems faced on
the Burma Railway. More than just a commentary on the history and
terrible facts behind Rawlings' work, it stands on its own as a
guide to the hidden lives of the prisoners.Most of the pictures are
printed for the first time in colour as the artist intended,
bringing new detail and insight to conditions faced by the POWs as
they built the infamous death railway, and faced starvation,
disease and cruelty.Pictures such as those showing the construction
of Tamarkan Bridge, now famed as the prototype for the fictional
Bridge on the River Kwai, and those showing the horrendous
suffering of the POWs such as King of the Damned have an iconic
status. Rawlings' art brings a different perspective to the
depiction of the world of the Far East prisoners. For the first
time the pictures and original texts are printed in a large format
edition, so that their full power can be experienced.The new
edition includes an account of how Rawlings' book was published in
Japan by Takashi Nagase (well known from Eric Lomax's book The
Railway Man) in the early 1980s. Rawlings visited Nagase in 1980
and at last reconciled himself to his experiences as a POW.
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