"Everything is art. Everything is politics," says internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei. His statement informs this comprehensive book that features sculptural installations, photographs, and videos from every aspect of the artist's forty- year career and touches on many contemporary social issues. The works featured in the book include Straight, Ai's gigantic installation made from 150 tons of rebar salvaged from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which comments on governmental corruption and negligence, and Sunflower Seeds for which the artist filled the enormous Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern with 100,000,000 porcelain seeds, each made by Chinese craftspeople. Also highlighted are his most recent works addressing the refugee crisis, such as Laundromat and Life Cycle; his provocative ventures into social media; and several early works. Wide-ranging and penetrating, this collection of Ai's most important work to date illustrates the depth of his conviction that art is most powerful when it raises awareness and incites change.

Using collage and montage as a medium and always in connection with his own biography, Marcel Odenbach investigates politically and culturally relevant topics of his time, such as for example the process of coming to terms with Nazi crimes, remembrance culture, the effects and after-effects of European colonialism in Africa, racism and time and time again the relationship between the individual and society. The artist Marcel Odenbach (*1953) lives in Cologne, Berlin and intermittently in Ghana. Since 1976 he has worked with video. His filmic collages and installations have contributed to the fact that today video art is a central medium in contemporary international art. Parallel to this he has created a wide-ranging graphic oeuvre. In the joint consideration of his video and paper works it becomes clear that Odenbach regards art and culture under a socio-political perspective and at the same time relies on the strength of the sensuous-aesthetical experience of images.

In endless odes to the female form, Amedeo Modigliani (1884-1920) traced elongated bodies, almond eyes, and his own name into art history. His languid female subjects are as instantly recognizable as they are startling, sensual, and swan-necked. Modigliani's unique figuration corresponded to his own personal idea of beauty, but drew upon a rich variety of visual influences, including contemporary Cubism, African carvings, Cambodian sculptures, and 13th-century painting from his native Italy. Although most renowned for his nude females, he applied similar stylistic techniques to portraits of male artistic contemporaries such as Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, and Chaim Soutine. With key works from his highly individualistic repertoire, this book introduces Modigliani's brief but revered career at the heart of Paris's early modernist hotbed. About the series Born back in 1985, the Basic Art Series has evolved into the best-selling art book collection ever published. Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions