* This is an introduction to the life and work of Cindy Sherman.

'"As Paul Moorhouse shows in this thorough and sensitive first biography, which concentrates on [Riley's] early years up to the age of thirty-four, it was only after many false starts, bracing shocks and firm decisions that Riley found her way as an abstract painter in the early 1960s with her eye-dazzling lines, squares, curves ... in ultra-hard-edged black-and-white". -Times Literary Supplement "In "Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person - The Early Years," Paul Moorhouse ... homes in on the period between the artist's childhood and her earliest success, and makes a surprising but compelling case for the influence of landscape on Ms Riley's distinctive style." -Wall Street Journal "An entertaining and informative text that adds greatly to our understanding of a very prominent and still highly intriguing British artist." -Hyperallergic In January 1965 the international art world converged on New York to pay homage to a brilliant new star. The glittering opening of The Responsive Eye, a major exhibition of abstract painting at the Museum of Modern Art, signalled the latest phenomenon, op art - and its centre of attention was a young painter named Bridget Riley, whose dazzling painting Current appeared on the cover of the catalogue. Riley's first solo show in New York sold out, and, following a feature in Vogue magazine, the Riley 'look' became a fashion craze. Overnight, she had become a sensation, yet only three years earlier, she was a virtual unknown. How did success arrive so suddenly? Authored by the acclaimed curator and writer Paul Moorhouse, A Very Very Person is the first biography of Bridget Riley and addresses that tantalising question. Focusing on her early years, it tells the story of a remarkable woman whose art and life were entwined in surprising ways. This intimate narrative explores Riley's wartime childhood spent in the idyllic Cornish countryside, her subsequent struggles to find her way as an artist, and the personal challenges she faced before finally arriving as one of the world's most celebrated artists in Swinging Sixties London.

Matters of Life and Death is a limited-edition publication documenting the remarkable new and recent paintings of celebrated Dallas-based British artist Richard Patterson (b.1963). An engaging introduction by Paul Moorhouse, Senior Curator at the National Portrait Gallery, London, discusses the dynamic and complex relationship between figuration and abstraction in Patterson's oeuvre. Moorhouse observes: 'Visual ambiguity defines Patterson's art, and its most conspicuous feature is the interaction between figurative painting, abstraction and photography that his recent work continues. From the outset he moved between these disparate visual languages, combining them in ways that seemed deliberately oppositional and subversive.' Patterson's latest works are as provocative as ever, and as he enters mid-career, have become increasingly accomplished, cryptic and, at times, haunting. In his illuminating essay, art historian James Cahill explores the subjects of portraiture and personae within the artist's works, asserting that 'his strategy of distancing his figures - whether through a broken veil (or enclosing frame) of abstract paint, or the gauze-like intercession of a photographic source - throws into relief the idea that selfhood is ultimately a succession of masks.' Curator and critic Jane Neal deftly navigates ideas of gender and sexuality in Patterson's practice, taking us into the realms of fetish and the male gaze, proposing that his painting overtly 'points towards the patriarchal and often misogynistic attitude to women's bodies still prevalent in magazines, films and social media, even in the twenty-first century. Patterson sets us up to confront the darkness that often underlies the male gaze, even affording it physical form.' Featuring a selection of works executed between 2013 and 2016, many of which are published here for the first time, the cloth-covered book is presented in a specially printed hard slipcase and has been published in an edition of just 500 copies. Born in the UK in 1963, Patterson graduated from Goldsmiths College in 1986. He was included in Damien Hirst's renowned Freeze, Surrey Docks, London (1988); as well as Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection, Royal Academy of Arts, London, UK; Hamburger Bahnhof - Museum fur Gegenwart, Berlin, Germany; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York, USA (1997-00). Other notable exhibitions include The Rowan Collection: Contemporary British & Irish Art, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland (2002); Painting Pictures, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, Germany (2003); Nexus Texas, Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Texas, USA (2007) and Attention to Detail, curated by Chuck Close, the FLAG Art Foundation, New York, USA. Patterson has had solo exhibitions at Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London (1997); James Cohan Gallery, New York, USA (1999 and 2002); Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas, USA (2000), Timothy Taylor Gallery, London (2005, 2008 and 2013); the Goss-Michael Foundation, Dallas, USA (2009); and the FLAG Art Foundation, New York (2014). In February 2017 he will present new and recent works at Timothy Taylor 16x34, New York.

With a career spanning more than five decades, Ian McKeever is one of Britain’s most senior artists working on the international stage. This publication documents the Henge paintings – a series started in 2017 and completed over the course of five years, inspired by prehistoric standing stones in the county of Wiltshire, England, and continuing the artist’s long-standing investigation into the languages and possibilities of abstract painting. Comprising thirty paintings along with numerous works on paper, the genesis of the series was a visit by McKeever to the world-famous neolithic site in the village of Avebury in 2016, where he took black and white photographs of the large stones that form three discrete circles: two smaller ones contained within the largest. Erected some 4500 years ago, Avebury is the largest stone circle in Britain, and forms part of what English Heritage asserts to be ‘a set of neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial sites that seemingly formed a vast sacred landscape.’ Art historian and curator Paul Moorhouse, in his essay commissioned for the publication, describes how McKeever ‘framed each megalith in close-up, their edges visible at the extremity of the resulting images,’ explaining how ‘the experience of moving around Avebury and responding to the huge stones’ monumental presence made an abiding impression that resonated with deep-seated preoccupations.’ McKeever’s resulting body of work is an earnest and considered exploration into how paint can convey universal forces and properties such as mass, gravity and time, and how colour, texture and abstraction can converse with three-dimensional space, form and materiality. The relationship between painting and sculpture in McKeever’s work is discussed by means of an in-conversation between the artist and Dr Jon Wood. ‘My interest in alluding to early megalithic sites in titling the group of paintings Henge paintings,’ says McKeever, ‘was in touching that deeper sense of time, time’s weight, so to speak. How to imbue a painting with its own weight of time, forsake the immediacy of the here and now.’ Designed and produced by Tim Harvey, the publication has been printed by Narayana Press in Odder, Denmark. It is published by Anomie, London, with support from Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Copenhagen, and Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Connecticut. The publication accompanies exhibitions of selected works from the Henge paintings at both galleries in 2022. Ian McKeever was born 1946, Withernsea, Yorkshire, UK. He lives and works in Hartgrove, Dorset. McKeever has received numerous awards including the prestigious DAAD scholarship in Berlin 1989/90 and was elected a Royal Academician in 2003. He has held several teaching positions including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton. He has also published many texts on painting. Recent public solo exhibitions include Ian McKeever / Tony Cragg – Painting and Sculpture, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2020); Paintings 1992–2018, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK (2018); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunstmuseet i Tønder, Denmark (2015); Between Darkness and Light, National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands (2015); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln, Cologne, Germany (2014); and Hartgrove. Malerei und Fotografie, Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany (2012). McKeever’s work is represented in leading international public collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok), Vienna; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

This volume focuses on Bridget Riley's energetic 'curvilinear' works from a 2006 exhibition by Bridget Riley. The paintings incorporate complex layers of flowing forms that interlock and move with one another, reflecting the artist's exploration of curves to create paintings of great energy and movement. Using a patch of colour that is similar to a brush mark, Riley's forms interrupt and threaten to break out from the picture plane, overhanging the frame to jostle and animate the visual field. Refining and developing this form in recent paintings, the artist's work offers an incredible melding of form and colour. Featuring over 20 full-colour illustrations, this publication includes an in-depth essay by Paul Moorhouse examining the changes within Riley's work throughout her multi-decade career.

This is a boxed set of Anthony Caro: Drawing in Space, Anthony Caro: Interior and Exterior, Anthony Caro: Figurative and Narrative Sculpture, Anthony Caro: Small Sculptures and Anthony Caro: Presence. The box has been specially designed by Anthony Caro. Anthony Caro restlessly explored an unpredictable range of sculptural possibilities, testing limits and positing new ideas about the nature of eloquent three-dimensional objects. Through his expansion and transformation of the legacy of construction in metal pioneered by Julio Gonzalez and Pablo Picasso, and further developed by David Smith in the USA, Caro created a new, multivalent language of three-dimensional abstraction. The Caro pendulum swung between extremes of linearity and robustness, abstractness and allusion. He countered his mastery of line and transparency with investigations of our responses to mass and perceptions of interior and exterior, even experimenting with literally enterable sculptures. He made rigorously abstract constructions that resemble nothing but themselves, intimate table-based pieces, monumental constructions like metaphorical architecture, and complex multi-part cycles of narrative works that pulse in and out of explicit illusionism. And more. The range and variety of Caro's sculpture notwithstanding, there are also common threads that run through all of his work. The five volumes in this set, each by a different critic, examine the various aspects of Caro's evolution individually, tracing the permutations of different themes - narrative, volume and mass, line and openness - throughout his work, over time. Each volume is independent and explores different territory, but cumulatively, by tracing these dominant themes, they provide new insight into the achievement of one of the undisputed giants of Modernist art.

In viewing the Great War through the portraits of those involved, Paul Moorhouse looks at the bitter-sweet nature of a conflict in which valour and selfless endeavour were qualified by disaster and suffering, and examines the notion of identity - how various individuals associated with the war were represented and perceived. The narrative is structured chronologically, with thematic sections devoted to conflicting pairs - `Royalty and the Assassin', `Leaders and Followers', `The Valiant and the Damned' - which reveal the radical differences between those caught up in the conflict in terms of their respective roles, aspirations, experiences, and, ultimately, their destinies. `Leaders and Followers', for example, examines the dichotomy between the representation of senior military leaders such as Blumer, Foch, Haig and Hindenburg, who were responsible for directing the war, and that of the ordinary soldiers charged with executing it. While portraits of the generals emphasise their personal profile, gallantry and the trappings of military power, paintings of the rank and file are characterised by a tendency to anonymity, in which individual identity was subsumed with the impression of `types'. Claude Rogers's imposing painting Gassed, for instance, presented the individual soldier as a kind of cipher, a depersonalised embodiment of common, degraded experience. Illustrated throughout with images both well known and less familiar, the book concludes with a section entitled `Tradition and the Avant-Garde', which focuses on the struggle artists faced in finding an appropriate language in which to depict those who had experienced the unimaginable horror at the front: either by resorting to the steadying hand of tradition or a radical visual language of expressive distortion.

This beautifully illustrated book takes readers inside Samuel and Gabrielle Lurie's dynamic private collection of contemporary British art, an intended gift to the Yale Center for British Art. Spanning the past four decades, the collection includes major works by Ian Stephenson, Patrick Caulfield, and John Walker, as well as important prints by Howard Hodgkin and R. B. Kitaj. At its core are 52 paintings and drawings by John Hoyland, widely considered one of Britain's foremost abstract painters. The Independent Eye features an interview with the Luries, as well as essays by leading critics and writers, some of whom were and are personally acquainted with the artists represented. These experts assess individual artists and works, explore their inspirations and methods, and define their shared experiences and values. They also address subjects such as the overall importance of the collection and postwar art in Britain. Distributed for the Yale Center for British Art Exhibition Schedule: Yale Center for British Art (09/16/10-01/02/11)

Hans Hofmann (1880-1966) was a pivotal figure in Abstract Expressionism and stands as one of the most important characters of post-war American art. This ground-breaking catalogue raisonne of paintings, which has been painstakingly researched over sixteen years, is both an invaluable scholarly resource and a celebration of Hofmann's remarkable artistic achievements. Hofmann's long and productive career began in Paris in 1904 where the young artist absorbed the manifold influences of the city's avant-garde. Drawn back to Germany due to war, Hofmann, exempt from military service, opened an innovative school for art in Munich. The school's reputation spread internationally and, as the political situation in Germany deteriorated during the 1930s, Hofmann re-located his school to New York. The city, a center for emerging artistic talent, was the perfect environment for Hofmann to continue his teaching practice, which he did until 1958, when he devoted himself entirely to painting. Throughout his American years, Hofmann enlarged the expressive language of abstraction, through his innovative use of color, materiality and structure. This impressive three-volumed catalogue marks a milestone in the scholarship and understanding of Hofmann's huge contribution to twentieth-century art. Through insightful essays, meticulous catalogue entries and supporting academic apparatus, it is shown how Hofmann's exceptional body of work often defies categorization - his was a highly personal visual language with which he endlessly explored pictorial structures and chromatic relationships. Both visually stunning and academically robust, this publication is an essential purchase for all those with a keen interest in one of the twentieth century's most significant and original artists.