The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure edited by Ekow Eshun celebrates flourishing Black artists whose work illuminates the richness, beauty and complexity of Black life. ---------- "There is never a time in the future in which we will work out our salvation. The challenge is in the moment, the time is always now." - James Baldwin ---------- The Time is Always Now: Artists Reframe the Black Figure assembles contemporary African diasporic artists working in the UK and US whose practice foregrounds the Black figure. Edited and with texts by Ekow Eshun, and original essays by Bernardine Evaristo, Esi Edugyan and Dorothy Price. Published to coincide with the exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery, London, this publication explores and celebrates contemporary Black artists internationally who work within Black figuration. This visual and beautifully produced book examines contemporary figurative artworks against a backdrop of heightened cultural visibility. Within this context, its collected paintings, drawings and sculptures take on a dual role as the accomplished work of individual artists and as a collective assertion of Black presence. Through a three-part structure containing detailed artist profiles and stunningly reproduced artworks, the publication examines Black figuration as a means to address the absence and distortion of Black presence within Western art history. Profiled artists include Hurvin Anderson, Michael Armitage, Jordan Casteel, Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Noah Davis, Godfried Donkor, Kimathi Donkor, Denzil Forrester, Lubaina Himid, Claudette Johnson, Titus Kaphar, Kerry James Marshall, Toyin Ojih Odutola, Chris Ofili, Jennifer Packer, Thomas J. Price, Nathaniel Mary Quinn, Lorna Simpson, Amy Sherald, Henry Taylor and Barbara Walker.

What happened in 1920s Cologne 'after Dada'? Whilst most standard accounts of Cologne Dada simply stop with Max Ernst's departure from the city for a new life as a surrealist in Paris, this book reveals the untold stories of the Cologne avant-garde that prospered after Dada but whose legacies have been largely forgotten or neglected. It focuses on the little-known Magical Realist painter Marta Hegemann (1894-1970). By re-inserting her into the histories of avant-garde modernism, a fuller picture of the gendered networks of artistic and cultural exchange within Weimar Germany can be revealed. This book embeds her activities as an artist within a gendered network of artistic exchange and influence in which Ernst continues to play a vital role amongst many others including his first wife, art critic Lou Straus-Ernst; photographers August Sander and Hannes Flach; artists Angelika Fick, Heinrich Hoerle, Willy Fick and the Cologne Progressives and visitors such as Kurt Schwitters and Katherine Dreier. The book offers a significant addition to research on Weimar visual culture and will be invaluable to students and specialists in the field. -- .

Ka the Kollwitz, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Gabriele Mu nter and Marianne Werefkin are among the exceptional artists associated with the emergence of Expressionism in Germany in the early decades of the 20th century. Each challenged prevailing ideals of feminine identity at a time of great societal change. As women, they were expected to marry and raise a family; some chose to, some did not. As ambitious artists, they wanted to work. As they rose to these challenges, their art further undermined conventions. Their portraits of children symbolise joy, hope and innocence but also melancholy, tension, curiosity, the passing of time and unfulfilled desire. Their radical depictions of the nude wrest the female body away from the male gaze towards a newfound role, expressive of powerful maternity and female subjectivity. These dramatic modernist compositions, with their fluid brushwork and bright hues, push at the boundaries of form, colour and spiritual meaning.

This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today. -- .

A feast of colour and texture, Chila Burman's first major monograph celebrates one of Britain's most exciting contemporary artists and her extraordinary body of work from across four decades. Chila Burman is a British Asian artist known for her radical feminist practice, her joyful neon light installations and her use of kaleidoscopic colours. Since the mid 1980s her work has explored the experiences and aesthetics of Asian femininity and female empowerment, and the impact of imperialism, colonialism, race and class. Informed by popular culture, Indian mythology and Bollywood, fashion and found objects, her work has consistently strived to challenge stereotypes and to champion equality. This book, the first major monograph on the artist, will bring together Burman’s extraordinary body of work from across four decades. Featuring paintings and installations, photography and prints, video and film works, and a range of diverse voices, it explores the ideas central to Burman’s practice, as well as her unique style.

Matthew Krishanu’s paintings explore topics including childhood, race, religion, art history, family, grief and love. His subjects – frequently Brown people, especially children – are realised with a shallow pictorial depth, delicate washes of colour, and with a sense of interior life. Through this, Krishanu questions the positions of his painterly subjects and depictions of landscapes in relation to the legacy of European colonialism and the art historical canon. Krishanu’s practice is heavily informed by his early childhood spent in Dhaka where his parents moved in order to work for the Church of Bangladesh. This, his first trade monograph, presents a number of series of Krishanu’s works: Another Country, Expatriates, Mission, House of God, Religious Workers and In Sickness and In Health. The paintings included have been made in oil and/or acrylic on canvas, linen or board, with the earliest produced in 2007 and most recent completed in 2022. The publication features essays by Mark Rappolt and Dorothy Price, alongside an interview with the artist by Ben Luke. Rappolt, Editor-in-Chief at ArtReview magazine, details the various worlds present within Krishanu’s paintings. He draws out key themes within Krishanu’s oeuvre such as power, religion, identity and memory, while highlighting its distance from didacticism, and at times, its carefully constructed ambivalence, through examination of key works such as Mission School (2017), Mountain Tent (Two Boys) (2020) and Playground (2020). Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at The Courtauld, writes sensitively about solitude, memory and emotion which are palpable within Krishanu’s work. In particular, the series In Sickness and In Health, which traces a life path of Uschi Gatward, the artist’s late wife, over sixteen years to her untimely death from cancer in late 2021. The series is foregrounded as a significant and intimate body of work that subtly shifts over the time period it depicts. In a new interview with Luke, a critic and editor at The Art Newspaper, Krishanu discusses his practice in relation to ideas of religion, race, global art history, photography, health and personal experiences. Krishanu’s work explores, in the artist’s own words, ‘the puzzle of painting’. The publication has been edited by Georgia Griffiths and Matt Price. It has been designed by Joe Gilmore, printed and bound by EBS, Verona, and produced by Anomie Publishing and Niru Ratnam, London. The publication has been supported by Guy Halamish; Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai; Niru Ratnam, London; Taimur Hassan; and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles. Matthew Krishanu (b.1980) was born in Bradford and is based in London. He completed an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Playground’, Niru Ratnam (2022), ‘Undercurrents’, LGDR, New York (2022), ‘Picture Plane’, Niru Ratnam, London (2020), ‘Arrow and Pulpit’, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2021), ‘Corvus’, Iniva, London (2019), ‘House of Crows’, Matt’s Gallery, London (2019), ‘A Murder of Crows’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2019), ‘The Sun Never Sets’, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, (2019) and ‘The Sun Never Sets’, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield (2018). He has recently been in the group exhibitions ‘The Kingfisher’s Wing’, GRIMM, New York (2022), ‘Prophecy’, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre (2022), ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’, Hayward Gallery, London (2021), ‘Coventry Biennial’, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Leamington Spa and Herbert Art Gallery & Museum (2021), ‘John Moores Painting Prize’, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2021), ‘Everyday Heroes’, Hayward Gallery/Southbank Centre (2020) and ‘A Rich Tapestry’, Lahore Biennale (2020).

This book presents new research on the histories and legacies of the German Expressionist group Blaue Reiter, the founding force behind modernist abstraction. For the first time Blaue Reiter is subjected to a variety of novel inter-disciplinary perspectives, ranging from a philosophical enquiry into its language and visual perception to analyses of its gender dynamics, its reception at different historical junctures throughout the twentieth century and its legacies for post-colonial aesthetic practices. The volume offers a new perspective on familiar aspects of Expressionism and abstraction, taking seriously the inheritance of modernism for the twenty-first century in ways that will help to recalibrate the field of Expressionist studies for future scholarship. Blaue Reiter still matters, the contributors argue, because the legacies of abstraction are still being debated by artists, writers, philosophers and cultural theorists today. -- .