When Benedikt Taschen asked the most important portrait photographer working today, Annie Leibovitz, to collect her pictures in a SUMO-sized book, she was intrigued by the challenge. The project took several years to develop and when it was finally published in 2014, it weighed in at 26 kg (57 pounds). This incredible collection is now available in an accessible XXL book format. Leibovitz drew on more than 40 years of work, starting with the photojournalism she did for Rolling Stone magazine in the 1970s through the conceptual portraits she made for Vanity Fair and Vogue. She selected iconic images-such as John Lennon and Yoko Ono entwined in a last embrace-as well as portraits that had rarely, if ever, been seen before. The Annie Leibovitz SUMO covered political and cultural history, from Queen Elizabeth II and Richard Nixon to Laurie Anderson and Lady Gaga. "What I had thought of initially as a simple process of imagining what looked good big, what photographs would work in a large format, became something else," Leibovitz says. "The book is very personal, but the narrative is told through popular culture. It's not arranged chronologically and it's not a retrospective. It's more like a roller coaster." Fans of Leibovitz and her many celebrated subjects can now enjoy that same roller coaster ride for themselves with this unlimited edition.

Based on the blockbuster 2022 solo show in London, KAWS: New Fiction documents the groundbreaking, multi-layered exhibition that presented the artist’s new and recent works in physical and augmented reality. A unique collaboration between the acclaimed artist KAWS, the Serpentine Galleries, digital art platform Acute Art, and the online video game phenomenon Fortnite, KAWS: New Fiction bridges the gap between the physical and virtual worlds, showcasing KAWS’s artworks as they’ve never been seen before. This one-of-a-kind book chronicles the iconic KAWS figure as it journeys through viewing the exhibition’s paintings, sculptures, site-specific additional artworks revealed via augmented reality (visible at the show through a dedicated AR app), and the virtual recreation of the physical gallery simultaneously featured in Fortnite. KAWS: New Fiction is a celebration of the unprecedented exhibition, and KAWS’s creative influence, as it was experienced in physical, virtual, and augmented realities.

In JENA Dusseldorf, first published in 2011, we follow Sabine Moritz and her artistic development, which began in 1989 at Offenbach University of Art and Design and continued in 1991 at the fine arts academy Kunstakademie Du sseldorf. Following the publication of Lobeda in 2010, a collection of homogenous early drawings, the pictures featured in JENA Dusseldorf have greater diversity in terms of content and form reflecting Moritz steady progression as an artist. Moritz brings scenes to life with vibrant colours and experimental brushstrokes creating a range of textures and atmospheres in a variety of medium including oil, acrylic, charcoal and colour pencil. The repertoire of architectural motifs is expanded to include places of remembrance in the GDR, sculptures in public spaces and the typology of 'empty places'. Some of the motifs from Lobeda reappear and are altered, drawing attention to the dynamic aspect of the process of recollection. The book also features a conversation with Hans Ulrich Obrist in which Moritz talks about her personal life, her memories and makes reference to specific works. The modest and compact book, packed with over 200 colour illustrations, shows by way of example her search for an artistic position on her route from Jena to Dusseldorf.

"Once there was a nation that went to war, but after they conquered a continent their own country was destroyed by atom bombs... then the victors imposed democracy on the vanquished. For a group of apprentice architects, artists, and designers, led by a visionary, the dire situation of their country was not an obstacle but an inspiration to plan and think... although they were very different characters, the architects worked closely together to realize their dreams, staunchly supported by a super-creative bureaucracy and an activist state... after 15 years of incubation, they surprised the world with a new architecture-Metabolism-that proposed a radical makeover of the entire land... Then newspapers, magazines, and TV turned the architects into heroes: thinkers and doers, thoroughly modern men... Through sheer hard work, discipline, and the integration of all forms of creativity, their country, Japan, became a shining example... when the oil crisis initiated the end of the West, the architects of Japan spread out over the world to define the contours of a post-Western aesthetic...." -Rem Koolhaas / Hans Ulrich Obrist Between 2005 and 2011, architect Rem Koolhaas and curator Hans Ulrich Obrist interviewed the surviving members of Metabolism-the first non-Western avant-garde, launched in Tokyo in 1960, in the midst of Japan's postwar miracle. Project Japan features hundreds of never-before-seen images-master plans from Manchuria to Tokyo, intimate snapshots of the Metabolists at work and play, architectural models, magazine excerpts, and astonishing sci-fi urban visions-telling the 20th-century history of Japan through its architecture. From the tabula rasa of a colonized Manchuria in the 1930s, a devastated Japan after the war, and the establishment of Metabolism at the 1960 World Design Conference in Tokyo to the rise of Kisho Kurokawa as the first celebrity architect, the apotheosis of Metabolism at Expo '70 in Osaka, and its expansion into the Middle East and Africa in the 1970s: The result is a vivid documentary of the last moment when architecture was a public rather than a private affair. Oral history by Rem Koolhaas and Hans Ulrich Obrist Extensive interviews with Arata Isozaki, Toshiko Kato, Kiyonori Kikutake, Noboru Kawazoe, Fumihiko Maki, Kisho Kurokawa, Kenji Ekuan, Atsushi Shimokobe, and Takako and Noritaka Tange Hundreds of never-before-seen images, architectural models, and magazine excerpts Layout by award-winning Dutch designer Irma Boom Further reading

On January 31, 2008, Swiss curator, critic and historian Hans Ulrich Obrist conducted a "marathon" of conversations in Beijing, after the example of his famous Serpentine Gallery marathons. This marathon called on artists, cultural producers and media practitioners to discuss the post-Olympic state of the city. Participants included internationally renowned artists Ai Weiwei and Cao Fei, writer and publisher Hung Huang, fashion designer Zhang Da and many others. Topics discussed included everyday life in contemporary Chinese society, the impact of the Olympic Games and the role of the internet in daily life.

"Wylie fearlessly tackles the thorniest topics head-on, committing her thoughts and questions about politics, religion, fame, love, history, money and nature to canvas." - Charlotte Brook, Harper's Bazaar Inspired by film, pop culture, and the history of fashion as she experienced personally, Wylie harnesses a union of high and low culture with a bold technique of mark making. Her unique practice of material overlay and erasure creates fantastic compositions. Creating conceptual tensions between formal and informal aesthetics, Wylie employs the visual elements of text as formal details in her paintings. With a beautiful swiss binding, this monograph compiles the work of four exhibitions at David Zwirner offering a full breadth of Wylie's most recent work to date. Giving insight and compassion to Wylie's feminist and rebellious impulses, Judith Bernstein writes an accompanying text on how she relates to Wylie's ambitious and playful energy. With a foreword by Nicholas Serota, this publication also features new essays by Barry Schwabsky and David Salle and an enlightening interview between the artist and Hans Ulrich Obrist.

The Richter Interviews collects together a series of conversations between Hans Ulrich Obrist and Gerhard Richter over the course of more than two decades of discussion and collaboration. Subjects range from Richter's place within art history to artists' books, architecture, religion, unrealised projects and his advice for young artists. The collection also includes a previously unpublished interview focused on Richter's much-lauded window for Cologne Cathedral, unveiled in 2007. Obrist's vast knowledge and interrogating mind coupled with his longstanding friendship with Richter make him a unique interlocutor for an artist whose work spans more than 60 years and ranges from painting to photography, glass to printmaking, watercolours to books. Obrist deftly guides the reader through a dazzling array of topics and offers an invaluable historical perspective on Richter's place within the art world of the 20th and 21st centuries. Illustrations of discussed artworks by Richter feature throughout the texts for visual reference - making this an indispensable guide to the thinking and creative processes of one of the world's most admired artists.

The first comprehensive collection of Annette Messager's drawings, including 150 works made over the last ten years, which constitute an invaluable lexicon to the mind and work of a trailblazing iconoclast. Messager redefined the role of women making art and the very nature of sculpture - accomplishments which won her the coveted Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture in 2016. Messager's subjects range from animal to human, feminist activists to devotional figures, skeletons to ghosts. She broaches the grand themes of love, life, death and the fairy tales, mythologies, superstitions and vanities that lie beneath.

The Chinese artist Liu Ye's meticulous, colorful canvases convey his love of literature in the first publication dedicated to his paintings of books. The Beijing-based artist Liu Ye is known for his precise, deftly rendered representational paintings. Drawn equally from contemporary culture and old master painting, Liu's wide-ranging visual touchstones include Piet Mondrian, Miffy the Bunny, and Prada advertisements. In this new publication devoted to his book paintings, the artist examines the book as both a physical object and cultural totem. Playing with geometry and perspective, Liu creates extraordinary and disorienting portraits of this most familiar subject. Liu's Book Painting series, begun in 2013, depicts close-up views of books that are turned open to reveal empty pages, an approach that emphasizes the object's form over its content. Rendering books' material structure-endpapers, binding, spine-in sensual detail, these paintings indicate an obsession with the book as an object and a lifelong love of literature. Liu's father was a children's book author who introduced him to Western writers at a young age, fueling his curiosity and imagination. Many of the books in Liu's father's collection were banned in Cultural Revolution-era China and the artist read them secretly throughout his childhood. This formative experience figures in his popular Banned Books series and in his book paintings in general. Published on the occasion of a solo exhibition presented at David Zwirner, New York, in 2020, this catalogue includes new writing by the acclaimed poet Zhu Zhu, who traces the evolution of the book form in Liu's work, as well as an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Hans Ulrich Obrist, the Artistic Director of the Serpentine Galleries in London, brings his curating expertise to the Instagram feeds of more than 350,000 followers, in an endeavour to revive the art of handwriting from within an ever-advancing digital age. The result is one of the most comprehensive looks at the art world from the inside; inclusive of artists, writers, designers, musicians, actors, architects and public figures. In his open-ended Instagram project, Obrist collects an abundance of thoughts for the day, dreams, drawings, musings, jokes, quotations, questions, answers, poems, and puns from some of the world’s greatest contemporary artists, handwritten on everyday Post-it notes (and other scraps). From the reassuringly philosophical to the inspiringly straightforward, the ingeniously funny to the tenderly post-humous, Remember to Dream! (a note from American artist Carrie Mae Weems) paints a picture of the art world direct from many of the most celebrated artists of the twenty-first century. The book features an introduction by Hans Ulrich Obrist and is designed by Amsterdam-based award-winning book designer Irma Boom.

On September 29, 2018, before a live audience at Navy Pier in Chicago, international curator Hans Ulrich Obrist conducted his first US Marathon interview session as part of Art Design Chicago, a yearlong celebration of Chicago's art and design legacy initiated by the Terra Foundation for American Art. Obrist, who has undertaken a life-long project of interviewing cultural figures, spoke with more than twenty of Chicago's most innovative and influential artists, designers, architects, writers, and other creatives. In their interviews, this diverse group of creatives provided insights into their artistic processes, influences, and ideas about and hopes for their shared city of Chicago. Among the participants were social-practice artist/developer Theaster Gates, architect Jeanne Gang, writer Eve Ewing, Hairy Who artists Art Green and Suellen Rocca, performance/installation artist Shani Crowe, and the city's cultural historian Tim Samuelson. Creative Chicago: An Interview Marathon serves as documentation for this event, including edited transcripts of the interviews, biographies of the participants, photos of the event, and images of the artists' work.

Since the beginning of his career in the 1960s, Russian artist Erik Bulatov has investigated the potential of painting as social commentary. A founder of the school of Moscow Conceptualism-alongside Ilya Kabakov, Collective Actions, and Komar & Melamid among others-Bulatov developed what has been described as conceptual painting, using text and image to explore spatial preoccupations that mirror his understanding of social relations. This book follows the making of the artist's largest work to date: a thirty-two-feet high monumental diptych made in his trademark graphic style, reminiscent of the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky's advertising posters from the 1920s. Introducing an innovative assessment of Bulatov's oeuvre, this richly illustrated publication includes an essay by Garage curator Snejana Krasteva exploring his use of monumental scale, an interview with the artist by Hans Ulrich Obrist, and several of Bulatov's texts spanning the period 1978-2006, which are translated into English for the first time.

Los Angeles is both background and subject in the respective oeuvres of Israel and Ellis. For Israel, the American dream, as embodied by the L.A. mythos, remains affecting and potent, and he approaches his hometown with an uncanny coupling of local familiarity and anthropological curiosity. While Ellis, who became famous for his portrait of an amoral, decadent L.A. of the 1980s in his debut novel Less Than Zero, has continued to elaborate upon his jaundiced vision of a superficial youth society over the past two decades. Now these two artists have come together to create a lively discourse on their city. At Israel s provocation, Ellis has written short texts that Israel then converted into various fonts and combined with commercial stock images. These striking images are displayed in full colour, along with double-page installation photos of the 2016 exhibition and insightful essays and interviews.

Since they were founded in 2001, Trolley Books has been highly regarded as a maverick independent publisher of photography, reportage, contemporary art and recently, literature. Trolley's founder Gigi Giannuzzi is a well-known figure in the publishing and photographic industries for his original and dynamic approach to photobook publishing as well as his unrelenting support of photographers and important but underexposed stories. In a shock to the photography and publishing worlds he was diagnosed with cancer last year and passed away on Christmas Eve. Shortly before he died work began on a new book TROLLEYOLOGY, a look at the story behind Gigi and Trolley, which also will mark our first decade in publishing.

Gerhard Richter (born 1932) is predominantly known for his paintings and drawings, which strike a playful balance between photo-realism and abstraction, while at once delving into often controversial political commentary. His works have explored a multitude of media, from photo-based, monochrome and brightly colored paintings to ink-doused papers and thin, multicolored strips of pure pattern. Beyond his artistic works, and particularly in recent years, Richter has published extensively on his vision of art and artistic values: in letters, interviews, public statements, excerpts and articles, Richter has established himself as a brilliant advocate of contemporary painting. Richter has also increasingly explored the possibilities of the book as medium in a series of extraordinary artist's books. "Gerhard Richter: Books" takes an in-depth look at his work in this medium. It features a book-length interview with the artist by internationally renowned art critic and historian Hans Ulrich Obrist, who walks us through the Richter archive and discusses the work with the artist himself, affording the reader an entirely new perspective on his works. The book also includes a new text by Kunstmuseum Winterthur director Dieter Schwarz.

This volume compiles ideas and projects from well-known artists, architects, designers, filmmakers and researchers on mountainous regions not only in Switzerland, but worldwide. It includes writings by Vito Acconci, Doug Aitken, Ron Arad, Nairy Baghramian and Jan von Brevern, as well as a discussion on architect Bruno Taut's "Crystal Chain Letters."

Memory as a dynamic process has been the underlying theme of Sabine Moritz s drawings and paintings since the early 1990s. In her work the Cologne-based artist has captured remembered images from her childhood in the GDR; drawn flower compositions; and in recent years has engaged with the motif of war. This publication presents Moritz s latest work: a collection of drawings and paintings of helicopters created between 2002 and 2013. The Helicopter series has arisen from Moritz s interest in the shift in their symbolic meaning. They are based on images of helicopters from newspapers and television that the artist transferred into her own language.The outcome is a series of beautiful drawings and paintings that range from objective depictions of helicopters to more poetic compositions. The works are accompanied by poems by Adam Zagajewski and Friedrich Holderlin, alongside a text by Hans Ulrich Obrist.

Subodh Gupta (born 1964) agglomerates everyday Indian household objects such as cooking utensils into monumental entities such as mushroom clouds or skulls, often sabotaging the fiction of intrinsic value through witty inversion and conjunction. Among the fruits of his methods are sculptural works such as bronze mangos, Hindu-swastika ceiling fans and worn-out sandals placed alongside three-dimensional Mona Lisas. Gupta's mostly found materials, which range in texture from aluminum, bronze and stainless steel to fiberglass and neon, identify themselves as Indian in origin, but are recomposed into sculptural meanings accessible to all nationalities (one implication of the title's "common man"). This monograph is published on the occasion of Gupta's first solo exhibition in London; alongside full-color reproductions, it includes an interview between Gupta and Hans Ulrich Obrist and an essay on the artist's work by Martin Herbert.

The most comprehensive book yet about the Egyptian German artist Susan Hefuna, "Pars Pro Toto" was developed in the course of a dialogue with the editor, Hans Ulrich Obrist. Hefuna has been working in the media of drawing, photography, installation, and video since the early 1990s. She uses these various techniques to intertwine levels of meaning and reflect many-layered codes, which she interprets in both concrete and abstract manners.

Susan Hefuna, born in 1962, has been widely exhibited at such venues as the Louvre, Paris; Townhouse Gallery, Cairo; the Third Line Gallery, Dubai; Sharjah Biennale; the New Museum, New York; Albion Gallery, New York; and many more.