The singular paintings of British artist Gillian Carnegie (b.1971) have been exhibited and discussed extensively for nearly two decades but this is the first substantial publication on her work. Carnegie's work is explicitly analytical, systematic yet oblique in its reexamination of traditional painting genres such as still life, landscape, portraits, and the nude - all of them 'genres without a subject', as they have sometimes been called. Yet she makes clear that her impulse to resuscitate these categories is not simply an exercise in formalism, historicism, academic reverence, postmodern pastiche, or nostalgia. And far from being without a subject, far from having no story to tell, Carnegie's paintings insistently suggest that there is a subject, that there is a story, but that the painting exists not to communicate it but to conceal it, to hold it incommunicado. In contemporary painting Gillian Carnegie's work stands apart, quietly, calmly and insistently uncanny, with an emotional tenor unlike anything else in art today.

Whether as a reaction to our technological present or as a manifestation of fears concerning our environmental future, depictions of the natural world in painting have never seemed more pertinent or urgent. Some of the most ambitious, crucial and intellectually vibrant paintings being created in this century involve the landscape - from a more traditional, perceptual based approach for rendering vistas to a looser, topography-inspired gestural abstraction that blurs the line between form and space, to many other modes in between. Surprisingly, there has not been an ambitious and wide-reaching publication on the subject - until now. The result of several years' worth of research, Landscape Painting Now is the first book to explore the very best contemporary landscape painting. Featuring artists from nearly twenty-five countries born over seven decades, it includes some of the brightest stars of the contemporary art world. It is introduced by an essay from Barry Schwabsky, who discusses the history of landscape painting, exploring how the genre developed through the 20th century to today, and how it has become increasingly relevant to art now. He also explores the notion of what is actually called a landscape painting today, and looks to expand beyond commonly held preconceptions concerning the genre.

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 indispensable guide to the most exciting painters of recent years, chosen by leading arts professionals – now in paperback

Despite its long history, painting continues to evolve and excite, with new generations taking it in unexpected directions. A central pillar of artistic practice, painting also has enduring appeal for collectors and still dominates the art market. Vitamin P3 takes the conversation forward, spotlighting more than 100 outstanding artists who are pushing the boundaries of the medium of paint. In its new paperback format, it’s sure to inspire a wider-than-ever audience.

The first comprehensive monograph on the work of Brazilian painter Lucas Arruda elucidates the artist's intricate, meditative compositions. Arruda has gained critical acclaim for atmospheric paintings that fluctuate between abstraction and figuration, imagination and reality. This monograph presents three groups of works loosely characterized as seascapes, jungles, and monochromes. Collectively titled Deserto-Modelo, they have an ephemeral, transient quality. Arruda's intimately sized paintings of seascapes and junglescapes are characterized by their subtle rendition of light. Painted from memory, they are devoid of specific reference points, instead achieving their variety through the depiction of atmospheric conditions. Verging on abstraction, the compositions are grounded by an ever-present, if sometimes faint, horizon line that offers a perception of distance. They appear at once familiar and imaginary. Through his often evocative and textured brushstrokes, Arruda foregrounds the materiality and physicality of paint, while also recalling his genres' historical associations with the notion of the romantic sublime. Alongside meticulous color plates and powerful details, author Will Chancellor offers a close reading of the work, raising questions about artifice, thresholds, and perception. Critic Barry Schwabsky unpacks the challenges posed by Arruda's mysterious painted surfaces. As a whole, this book provides a detailed introduction to the work of a uniquely thoughtful and inventive artist.

An ambitious new video/sound installation work by the artist Sophy Rickett. In the project, provisionally entitled 'To the River', she continues to develop her interest in photography and film's role as a mediator between people and the natural world. The starting point and inspiration is the Severn bore, the tidal wave that famously runs along the River Severn during the moon's equinox.

The idea of contemporary art sometimes allows us to pretend we have made a clean break with the past. In The Perpetual Guest, poet and critic Barry Schwabsky demonstrates that any robust understanding of art's present must also account for the ongoing life and changing fortunes of its past. In surveying the art world of this past decade, Schwabsky attends not only to its most significant newer faces-among them, Kara Walker, Thomas Hirschhorn, Ai Weiwei, Chris Ofili, and Lorna Simpson-but their forebears, both recent (Jeff Wall, Nancy Spero, Dan Graham, Cindy Sherman) and more distant (Velaquez, Manet, Matisse, and the portraitists of the Renaissance). "The art critic," Schwabsky writes, "formalizes and deliberately exemplifies the role of the spectator who realizes the artist's work, not by leaving it just as it is, but by adding something to it, making a personal contribution." Despite the hysterical pronouncements of criticism's demise, Schwabsky's rich and subtle considerations of art's complexly intertwined traditions are an indispensable contribution to understanding our present moment.

Thanks to almost complete absence of figurativee elements, Eberhard Havekost's recent works mark a visible caesura. He questions the authenticity of pictures, broaching the issue within the medium of the painting. This is where means that were developed earlier get connected: reflective or matte areas of projection, frontal views and changes in perspective, or the examinations of culturally standarized design. Eberhard Havekost was born in Dresden in 1967. Today he is one of the most important artists of his generation. In October 2010, he began his tenure as professor at Kunstakademie Dusseldorf.

Nicholas Krushenick is a key figure in the history of late 20th-century American art. Juxtaposing broad black lines with bold, flat Liquitex colors, Krushenick created hard-edged abstractions that fill his canvases from corner to corner. His energetic forms used experiments in cut paper collage as a springboard, creating an aesthetic all his own that earned him the title "father of Pop abstraction." This book offers a mix of archival writings and interviews with new perspectives on the artist who is largely considered a precursor to Pop Art. Preparatory drawings, early collages, and scenes of Krushenick in his studio offer insight into the artist's creative process, while newly commissioned essays take a fresh look at a remarkable oeuvre.

The paintings of Anna Leonhardt take time. Little by little, an astonishing light emerges giving the roughly applied, expressive paint clarity and definition. Her pictures are very direct, but based on experience. The ambiences and sensations unfolded by lines and paint carry Anna Leonhardt's painting. Mere surfaces become broad, atmospheric spaces, while individual colours begin to vibrate reciprocally and enthral us as viewers. The book presents her painterly work for the first time. Text in English and German.

The hypersensitivity Usle describes is a kind of visionary state, but it is one that is painful - and memorable precisely because it is painful. When we see certain paintings of Usle's that use bright, intense, searing colours, shouldn't we think of this early encounter with one of those states of being that suddenly and dramatically remove us from our everyday mode of perception - one of those events that teach us that everything we perceive might be perceived entirely differently, given even a small modification of the perceptual apparatus we normally take for granted? There are certain paintings by Usle, very complicated ones, that might well remind us of the experience of peering into a kaleidoscope, and while this is not to say that we are therefore to imagine that we should also find the sight of these paintings painful - far from it! no more than, not having suffered sunstroke, we would find looking through a kaleidoscope painful - it is helpful to be reminded that such experiences, in which there is a visual clamour beyond what we are used to being subject to, may not be easy or comfortable ones, and therefore they are only a step away, albeit a crucial step, from being painful. They are a little too much, and therefore they put pressure on our aesthetic expectations. This is Usle's pictorial equivalent of Rimbaud's famous "dereglement de tous les sens."

The definitive book on a creative force who continues to influence sculpture and installation art.

Jessica Stockholder has long broken down the boundaries between painting, sculpture, and architecture to explore the body in social and cultural space - using found objects intertwined with profusions of vivid colours. This revised, updated edition spotlights the extraordinary evolution of her career, and examines the pivotal role she has played in shaping some of the most fundamental ideas around which contemporary sculpture and painting revolve today.

This first monograph introduces one of the most promising Italian artists of the post-Cattelan generation. Roccasalva mixes conceptual rigor with hallucinatory extravaganza--always ending in a complex installation where the different elements act like characters performing an erratic script that probes art historical, philosophical, musical and literary references.

In this collection of critical essays, Barry Schwabsky re-examines the art produced since the 1960s, demonstrating how the achievements of 'high modernism' remain consequential to it, through tensions between representation, abstraction, and pictorial language. Offering close readings of works produced by several generations of European and American artists, he begins with an analysis of the late period of two Abstract Expressionists, Philip Guston and Mark Rothko, who saw their own success as a failure of reception and who came to question radically their own work. With the core of the book focused on Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mel Bochner, major figures of arte povera and conceptual art whose works in a variety of media demonstrate a continuing critical engagement with modernism, Schwabsky also studies the work of artists, such as L. C. Armstrong and Rainer Ganahl, who also continued to examine modernism's legacies.

Los Angeles-based Mexican painter Yishai Jusidman is known for conceptually playful works that implicate the viewer, often by depicting an idealized gallery space and fictional viewers within the frame of the canvas. This book is a retrospective of the 11 series of works that he has produced from 1987 to the present.

Poetry. Barry Schwabsky was born in Paterson, New Jersey, and presently lives in London. His previous collection is OPERA: POEMS 1981-2002 (Meritage Press).

In the paintings that constitute the heart of this book, Suzanne McClelland uses colorful spirals and collage elements to devise portraits of women known for their words and actions (rather than their appearance): Oprah Winfrey, Hillary Clinton, Martha Stewart, Condoleeza Rice, Missy Elliott, Margaret Cho, Roseanne Barr and Mary Kelly.

"Tapies from Within" presents about 100 works from the artist's studio and from the Fundacio Antoni Tapies collection. Accompanying a major touring exhibition in Europe, it guides us through Tapies' entire career, from the first Surrealist-inspired paintings of the 1940s, produced during his participation in the Dau al Set group, to works made shortly before his death in 2011. Thanks to the collaboration of the Tapies family, "Tapies from Within" offers the most intimate portrait yet published of the painter's working environs, reproducing for the first time works that had remained virtually unseen or even unknown. As this volume makes plain, from almost the outset Tapies was committed to a materialist vision of materials and forms, which in the 1950s led him to make the celebrated "matter" paintings that earned him his international reputation. Rubble, mud, oil stains and graffiti all made their way onto Tapies' canvases, which proposed abstraction as a "concretion" of the world rather than a transcendence of it (his signature crosses being "crossings-out" and not religious symbols): "choosing the earth over the vagaries of the spirit," as he writes in an accompanying essay here. Full of superbly reproduced color plates, "Tapies from Within" offers an important overview of this major force in postwar abstraction.