Exploring over 25 works by Alison Wilding - one of Britain's most noted sculptors - this publication draws on the artist's ambitious display at the Duveen Galleries, Tate Britain. Wilding is known for her inventive approach to both form and materials. Each of the five major works on display at the Tate brings together contrasting materials - from copper and alabaster to rubber and PVC - while testing the relationship between scale and weight. The exhibition also served to celebrate the Tate's acquisition of her 2004 work 'Vanish & Detail'. This volume contextualises those works within Wilding's oeuvre. Alongside 70 illustrations and an interview between the artist and curator Carmen Julia, a survey text by Anna Moszynska groups the works in relation to the sculptures made by Wilding throughout the nearly four decades of her career.

Since the early years of the 20th century, Western abstract art has fascinated, outraged and bewildered audiences. Its path to acceptance within the artistic mainstream was slow. Anna Moszynska traces the origins and evolution of abstract art, placing it in broad cultural context. She examines the pioneering work of Kandinsky, Malevich and Mondrian alongside the Russian Constructivists, the De Stijl group and the Bauhaus artists, contrasting European geometric abstraction in the 1930s and 40s with the emphasis on personal expression after the Second World War. Op, Kinetic and Minimal art of the postwar period is discussed and illustrated in detail, and new chapters bring the account up to date, exploring the crisis in abstraction of the 1980s and its revival - in paint, fabric, sculpture and installation - in recent decades. The first edition of this book, published in 1990, was acclaimed by reviewers; now in full colour and comprehensively revised, it will serve as the best introduction to abstract art for a new generation.