The Lives of Chinese Objectsis a fascinating book. It is the result of excellent historical research as well as curatorial expertise. The reader is taken on an amazing journey starting with the startling discovery of the image of five Chinese bronzes on display as part of the Great Exhibition in 1851...The stories uncovered are riveting, a mix of curatorial detail and description, historical research and theoretical analysis. This book is beautifully written - clear, detailed and informative. The author is ever present in the text and the book is as much a story of her journey, as it is a story of the lives of the 'Putuo Five'. I just wanted to keep reading." . Suzanne MacLeod, University of Leicester

This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo - China's most important pilgrimage island - to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers' and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the 'Mongolian race' and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown.

As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed.

In the 1950s and 60s, Martin Heidegger turned to sculpture to rethink the relationship between bodies and space and the role of art in our lives. In his texts on the subject—a catalog contribution for an Ernst Barlach exhibition, a speech at a gallery opening for Bernhard Heiliger, a lecture on bas-relief depictions of Athena, and a collaboration with Eduardo Chillida—he formulates his later aesthetic theory, a thinking of relationality. Against a traditional view of space as an empty container for discrete bodies, these writings understand the body as already beyond itself in a world of relations and conceive of space as a material medium of relational contact. Sculpture shows us how we belong to the world, a world in the midst of a technological process of uprooting and homelessness. Heidegger suggests how we can still find room to dwell therein. Filled with illustrations of works that Heidegger encountered or considered, Heidegger Among the Sculptors makes a singular contribution to the philosophy of sculpture.

The first true monograph on the work of celebrated French conceptual artist and sculptor Bernar Venet Bernar Venet is one of France's most celebrated living artists. Having emerged from the late 1960s avant-garde scene in New York, Venet developed a personal aesthetic based on an innovative use of mathematics and science, where control, chance, and chaos converge to form a fine equilibrium while investigating their relationship with the environment. Conversant in many media, Venet is mostly known for his monumental outdoor sculptures in major cities worldwide and, in fall 19, his Arc Majeur is due for completion at a site in Belgium - at almost 200 feet in height (60 metres), Venet's sculpture will be taller than New York's Statue of Liberty.

The 607 paintings and one sculpture documented in Volume 4 of The Andy Warhol Catalogue Raisonne were produced during a period of less than three years, from late 1974 through early 1977. In September 1974, Warhol changed studios, moving across Union Square from the sixth floor of 33 Union Square West to the third floor of 860 West Broadway. Like Volumes 2 and 3, Volume 4 is identified with a new studio, where Warhol continued to work for a decade, until he moved into his last studio at 22 East 33rd Street on December 3, 1984. Volume 4 may be seen as the first in a series of books associated with one studio that will document an enormously productive ten-year period in Warhol's oeuvre from the mid seventies to the mid eighties.

This fascinating volume showcases the work of British artist, poet and performer Liz Finch and presents a series of 25 sculptures created between 1975 and 2016. The gentle figures are strangely familiar, built using found and made objects that might otherwise be discarded. Knitted limbs and faces with stitched or collaged features are affixed to torsos made from cardboard boxes that are plastered with papier-mâché and painted. The fragile bodies are then suspended on pieces of frayed string and twisted wire from the shoulders or sometimes by the neck. Finch subverts the ordinary and engages with the uncanny; a strange and anxious feeling created by familiar objects in unfamiliar contexts. Featuring full reproductions of each artwork alongside close details that reveal their composition, the book is threaded with poetic texts by Finch that blur the lines between personal memories, surreal dreams and everyday reality.

A new look at the interrelationship of architecture and sculpture during one of the richest periods of American modern design Alloys looks at a unique period of synergy and exchange in the postwar United States, when sculpture profoundly shaped architecture, and vice versa. Leading architects such as Gordon Bunshaft and Eero Saarinen turned to sculptors including Harry Bertoia, Alexander Calder, Richard Lippold, and Isamu Noguchi to produce site-determined, large-scale sculptures tailored for their buildings' highly visible and well-traversed threshold spaces. The parameters of these spaces-atriums, lobbies, plazas, and entryways-led to various designs like sculptural walls, ceilings, and screens that not only embraced new industrial materials and processes, but also demonstrated art's ability to merge with lived architectural spaces. Marin Sullivan argues that these sculptural commissions represent an alternate history of midcentury American art. Rather than singular masterworks by lone geniuses, some of the era's most notable spaces-Philip Johnson's Four Seasons Restaurant in Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building, Max Abramovitz's Philharmonic Hall at Lincoln Center, and Pietro Belluschi and Walter Gropius's Pan Am Building-would be diminished without the collaborative efforts of architects and artists. At the same time, the artistic creations within these spaces could not exist anywhere else. Sullivan shows that the principle of synergy provides an ideal framework to assess this pronounced relationship between sculpture and architecture. She also explores the afterlives of these postwar commissions in the decades since their construction. A fresh consideration of sculpture's relationship to architectural design and functionality following World War II, Alloys highlights the affinities between the two fields and the ways their connections remain with us today.

So you've graduated. What now? Where do you live? Can you afford to live? How can you make money doing design? How do you get a job? Who do you want to work for and are you good enough? This book is a comprehensive and insightful guide to anything and everything that is of use to those looking to break into the creative industries, sharing experiences, ideas, advice, criticism, and encouragement. With sections covering education, portfolios, jobs/freelancing, working process, and personal development, this straight-talking, funny, and frequently irreverent guide is a must-read for all creative arts students.

Colour is at the core of our perception, the very essence of how we see and understand the world, but the question to ask is: how does one interpret it? Six well-known British artists - David Batchelor, Ian Davenport, Lothar Goetz, Jim Lambie, Annie Morris, Fiona Rae - have interpreted in different ways, the relationship of colour within space. Colour is the main protagonist of their works: it can be found in Batchelor's sculptures assembled with found objects, in the coloured trails of Davenport's paintings, in Fiona Rae's delicate, floating marks on white surfaces, and in Annie Morris' sculptures that powerfully define the environment. Finally, the colour comes out of the paintings to invade the walls and the floor of the Gallery itself, with two site-specific creations: an entire wall painted by Lothar Goetz, and Zobop, the floor made of vinyl by Jim Lambie. Text in English and Italian.

Pierre Culot (1938-2011) was a Belgian ceramist and sculptor who was trained by Antoine de Vinck and English master potter Bernard Leach. He is one of the ceramists of the 1950s who transformed their craft into an art form. In his work, Pierre Culot passionately expresses his desire to be in the world, to be on earth and to be in nature the sole generator of life and beauty. The clay that he molds into slabs, scratches and enamels becomes containers for daily use with majestic presence. Over his career Culot aimed at mastery of his practice, shaping his pieces in terms of size and in surface effect, by combining the raw earth in each item with luxuriant enamels that had unique variations.   All of Culot’s life he remained faithful to his initial experience as a potter, evolving his ceramic works from basic forms (bowls, plates, jugs) to more daring shapes (cruciform vases, gourds, compound pots, inkwells), and even into the landscape space by sculpting garden walls. This book offers a complete overview of his unique and multi-faceted career in pottery, sculpture and landscaping.   Distributed for Mercatorfonds

This book investigates how British contemporary artists who work with clay have managed, in the space of a single generation, to take ceramics from niche-interest craft to the pristine territories of the contemporary art gallery. This development has been accompanied (and perhaps propelled) by the kind of critical discussion usually reserved for the 'higher' discipline of sculpture. Ceramics is now encountering and colliding with sculpture, both formally and intellectually. Laura Gray examines what this means for the old hierarchies between art and craft, the identity of the potter, and the character of a discipline tied to a specific material but wanting to participate in critical discussions that extend far beyond clay.

Award-winning chocolate artist Patrick Roger (Meilleur Ouvrier de France chocolatier 2000) has pursued a parallel body of longer-lasting work, creating sculptures in a variety of materials, including bronze, aluminium, silicone, marble, and concrete. He begins with chocolate as a base, working this malleable material quickly with techniques he has perfected over many years, before casting it. This book, the second volume of his sculpted works (Volume 1 was published in 2018), features 177 new creations that are described in detail and beautifully photographed. Further insight into Roger’s work is found in a notebook of contemporary inspirations and a reproduction of his personal sketchbook. Text in French.

How leading American artists reflected on the fate of humanity in the nuclear era through monumental sculpture In the wake of the atomic bombings of Japan in 1945, artists in the United States began to question what it meant to create a work of art in a world where humanity could be rendered extinct by its own hand. The New Monuments and the End of Man examines how some of the most important artists of postwar America revived the neglected tradition of the sculptural monument as a way to grapple with the cultural and existential anxieties surrounding the threat of nuclear annihilation. Robert Slifkin looks at such iconic works as the industrially evocative welded steel sculptures of David Smith, the austere structures of Donald Judd, and the desolate yet picturesque earthworks of Robert Smithson. Transforming how we understand this crucial moment in American art, he traces the intersections of postwar sculptural practice with cybernetic theory, science-fiction cinema and literature, and the political debates surrounding nuclear warfare. Slifkin identifies previously unrecognized affinities of the sculpture of the 1940s and 1950s with the minimalism and land art of the 1960s and 1970s, and acknowledges the important contributions of postwar artists who have been marginalized until now, such as Raoul Hague, Peter Grippe, and Robert Mallary. Strikingly illustrated throughout, The New Monuments and the End of Man spans the decades from Hiroshima to the Fall of Saigon, when the atomic bomb cast its shadow over American art.

Influenced by Gaudi's Parc Guell in Barcelona, and the mannerist park of Bomarzo, Niki de Saint Phalle decided that she wanted to make something similar; a monumental sculpture park created by a woman. In 1974, she was donated some land in Garavicchio, Tuscany, about 100 km north-west of Rome along the coast. The garden, on which planning started in 1978, contains sculptures of the symbols found on Tarot cards. It opened in 1998, after more than 20 years of work. The garden was still incomplete when Niki de Saint Phalle died. With elaborate illustrations and sensitively written texts this book presents in detail the formation of the garden and the underlying ideas.

The first book to explore the fascinating career and fantasy-driven worlds created by the acclaimed Argentinean artist Adrian Villar Rojas's works concoct imaginary realms. Usually made from clay, his colossal installations are transitory and so cannot be collected, as they disappear or decay over time. His practice confronts the public with ideas of obsolescence and extinction, but also with the possibilities of humankind and its endless imagination. This is the first book to include all of Villar Rojas' most significant projects, featured in international biennials such as Venice, Documenta, Shanghai, and others.

An expanded edition of the definitive book on Ruth Asawa's fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art. The work of American artist Ruth Asawa (1926-2013) is brought into brilliant focus in this definitive book, originally published to accompany the first complete retrospective of Asawa's career, organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco in 2006. This new edition features an expanded collection of essays and a detailed illustrated chronology that explore Asawa's fascinating life and her lasting contributions to American art. Beginning with her earliest works-drawings and paintings created in the 1940s while she was studying at Black Mountain College-this beautiful volume traces Asawa's flourishing career in San Francisco and her trajectory as a pioneering modernist sculptor who is recognized internationally for her innovative wire sculptures, public commissions, and activism on behalf of public arts education. Through her lifelong experimentations with wire, especially its capacity to balance open and closed forms, Asawa invented a powerful vocabulary that contributed a unique perspective to the field of twentieth-century abstract sculpture. Working in a variety of nontraditional media, Asawa performed a series of remarkable metamorphoses, leading viewers into a deeper awareness of natural forms by revealing their structural properties. Through her art, Asawa transfigured the commonplace into metaphors for life processes themselves. The Sculpture of Ruth Asawa establishes the importance of Asawa's work within a larger cultural context of artists who redefined art as a way of thinking and acting in the world, rather than as merely a stylistic practice. This updated edition includes a new introduction and more than fifty new images, as well as original essays that reflect on the impact of American political history on Asawa's artistic vision, her experience with printmaking, and her friendship with photographer Imogen Cunningham. Contributors include Susan Ehrens, Mary Emma Harris, Karin Higa, Jacqueline Hoefer, Emily K. Doman Jennings, Paul J. Karlstrom, John Kreidler, Susan Stauter, Colleen Terry, and Sally B. Woodbridge. Published in association with the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco (FAMSF).

If mediatization has surprisingly revealed the secret life of inert matter and the 'face of things', the flipside of this has been the petrification of living organisms, an invasion of stone bodies in a state of suspended animation. Within a contemporary imaginary pervaded by new forms of animism, the paradigm of death looms large in many areas of artistic experimentation, pushing the modern body towards mineral modes of being which revive ancient myths of flesh-made-stone and the issue of the monument. Scholars in media, visual culture and the arts propose studies of bodies of stone, from actors simulating statues to the transmutation of the filmic body into a fossil; from the real treatment of the cadaver as a mineral living object to the rediscovery of materials such as wax; from the quest for a 'thermal' equivalence between stone and flesh to the transformation of the biomedical body into a living monument.