People often feel the presence of someone when no one is there. This may be a way of embodying the fear of the unknown, the ghost under the bed. It may be a near-palpable memory of an absent person, triggered by an article of clothing, a photograph, a scent, an old recording. And it can at rare times be a feeling of immanence, of being close to spirit or divinity. Regardless of the source, the sense of presence-in-absence reinforces a need - which seems hard-wired into the psyche - to experience a human essence outside the body. The exhibition and its accompanying catalog include artworks that indicate such presences through surrogates: shadows, imprints, or masks; objects as memento mori, or as other matter or energy. The title is derived from the phenomenon known as the phantom limb syndrome. Those experiencing this have lost some part of their bodies but feel it to be still present. While it is a source of sensation and frequently pain, the phantom limb here symbolizes the weight of absence, the longing to fill the spaces that accrue through life. Phantom Bodies includes works by artists who create the perception of a human aura through the use of material traces, shadow and light, or the sublimation of the body into other forms of matter and energy. Palpably felt yet invisible, the phantom limb of the title is here an analogy for absent persons whose vestiges link memory, consciousness, and the concept of the soul. Artists in the exhibition include Magdalena Abakanowicz, Barry X Ball, Christian Boltanski, Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller, Adam Fuss, Ken Gonzalez-Day, Alicia Henry, Damien Hirst, Shirazeh Houshiary, Anish Kapoor, Elizabeth King, Deborah Luster, Sally Mann, Teresa Margolles, Ana Mendieta, Shirin Neshat, Gerhard Richter, Doris Salcedo, Annelies Å trba, and Bill Viola. The catalog contains color plates accompanied by illustrated essays by Martha Buskirk, Lisa Saltzman, and Eleanor Heartney; an introduction by Mark W. Scala; and a foreword by Susan H. Edwards.

In "Paint Made Flesh," expressive figuration is considered as a reflection of artists' responses to such topics as identity, sexuality, and mortality, and as a symptom of a broader spectrum of social and political attitudes shaping Western culture since World War II. It features art from the United States, Great Britain, and Germany, countries that have since the 1950s produced many artists who use paint as a metaphor for flesh in all its aspects. It will also consider contemporary artists whose works move from a national to a global stage in terms of meaning and style.

The book has been developed to accompany an early 2009 exhibition at the Frist Center for the Visual Arts, which will include paintings by artists like Francis Bacon, Willem de Kooning, Lucian Freud, Pablo Picasso, and Julian Schnabel from private collections and museums around the world. "Paint Made Flesh" will feature approximately forty color plates and approximately fifty other illustrations, and four essays by major art historians.

Susan Edwards's essay "The Influence of Anxiety" considers works by American artists active from the 1950 to the 1970s, including Willem de Kooning, Leon Golub, Philip Guston, and Alice Neel, as responses to social conditions and the expressive limitations of late Modernism. Emily Braun's "Skinning the Paint" looks at the work of British painters Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud, and Frank Auerbach, and its legacy in the painting of Jenny Saville and Cecily Brown. The title refers to the way these artists use a knife both to strip the skin or surface of the figure and to build up new layers of epidermis, comprising a metaphor for the dialectic between psychological and physical aspects of being.

Richard Shiff's "Drawn on the Body" discusses German artists such as Georg Baselitz, Markus Lupertz, and Albert Oehlen, whose gestural paint application is seen as both an extension and critique of the notion of a national heritage distinctly tied to Expressionism. The final essay, Mark Scala's "Fragmentation and Reconstitution: Painterly Figuration Since 1980," examines ways that artists like Wangechi Mutu, Daniel Richter, and John Currin posit a transmutation of identity-personal, cultural, and sexual-that is today mirrored in images of the body. Instead of asking the question of the traditional figure painter: "Who are we?" these artists are more concerned with the question "Who will we become?"

A resident of Nashville whose work has been exhibited and collected internationally, Jack Spencer alters the surfaces of his photographs with techniques suggestive of painting - rich patinas and luminous colours, softly-focused or veiled forms, and traces of the artist's hand: imperfections, marks, and painterly textures. The exhibition catalog consists of an essay by Susan Edwards and 70 full-page colour plates selected from such series as ""Native Soil,"" ""Apariciones,"" ""This Land,"" and ""Portraits and Gestures"" to exemplify the relationship between these compelling surfaces and Spencer's interest in myth, mystery, and the ephemeral nature of existence that is implied by and beyond the surface. Each of six sections includes works from various series in which the language of photography is expanded to convey narratives inspired by other art forms, especially literature and painting. ""Portraits and Figures"" reveals Spencer's capacity to define the psychological complexity of the people he photographs, who often occupy the periphery of society. Further exploring the theme of hidden narratives, but as suggested by the altered face, ""Disguise/Perform"" includes photographs - primarily taken in Mexico - featuring masked and painted figures often associated with ancient rituals and alternative life styles. ""Beautiful Lies"" includes new work in which the exposed skin of subjects has been painted or otherwise altered by the artist and then photographed with luminous props and mysterious settings to underscore the sense of artifice, as if the body itself is shown to be an imaginative construction. ""Day into Night"" continues Spencer's consideration of transitions from one state of being to another, this time through the use of ephemeral plays of light and shadow, often suggesting dawn or dusk as signifiers of change. The final two sections focus on the symbolic meaning and phenomenological experiences of the landscape. Inspired by such regionalist painters as Grant Wood, ""This Land"" includes works that convey dreamlike views of rural and small-town America. ""Colour as Light"" features landscapes in which the limpid atmosphere merges land, trees, animals, and sky into a palpable gestalt - landscapes of the mind's eye that evoke the limitless quality of Mark Rothko's colour-saturated canvases.

"Creation Story" explores parallels and intersections in the works of Dial and his fellow Alabamians, the remarkable quilters of Gee's Bend. In the tradition of African American cemetery constructions and yard art, these artists harness the tactile properties and symbolic associations of cast-off materials in creating an art of profound beauty and evocative power. Produced against a backdrop of poverty and racism, these artworks have an appeal that crosses aesthetic, social, and geographical boundaries, earning them wide recognition as being among the most compelling art of our time.

The quilters of Gee's Bend, a small rural community near Selma, Alabama, use salvaged fabric in orchestrations of strong colors, dynamic patterns, and eccentric geometric shapes. While drawing from classic traditions of American quilt making, their sensitivity to the evocative power of materials and fine balance of optical tension and harmony marks their quilts as truly original. The "New York Times" has called them "some of the most miraculous works of modern art America has produced."

Going beyond the beauty and tactile richness of the Gee's Bend quilts, the densely layered assemblages of Thornton Dial are, in his words, "about ideas, and about life, and the experiences of the world." A keen observer and interpreter of his times, Dial uses the technique of bricolage--the aesthetic reconfiguring of found objects--to reflect on personal memories, insights into root causes of racism and poverty, and news events and programs he sees on television. The "Wall Street Journal" has called Dial's works "tough, beautiful, disturbing, seductive, improvisatory, unignorable, fierce, exhilarating, ambiguous--and much more." While Dial's social symbolism contrasts with the inherent abstraction of the Gee's Bend quilts, the two are linked by an appreciation for the poetic and evidentiary power of raw materials, which they transform into expressions of beauty and truth.

The artworks reproduced in this exhibition catalog are drawn from the extensive collection of the Souls Grown Deep Foundation in Atlanta, Georgia. The 43 color plates are accompanied by illustrated essays by curators Paul Arnett and Joanne Cubbs.

This catalog explores the psychological and social implications contained in the hybrid creatures and fantastic scenarios created by contemporary artists whose works will appear in the exhibition "Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination, " which opens at Nashville's Frist Center for the Visual Arts in February 2012. Curator Mark Scala's introductory essay focuses on anthropomorphism in the mythology, folklore, and art of many cultures as it contrasts with the dominant Western view of human exceptionalism. Scala also provides an art historical context, linking the visual fabulists of today to artists of the Romantic, Symbolist, and Surrealist periods who sought to transcend oppositions such as rationality and intuition, fear and desire, the physical and the spiritual.

Discussing how artists adapt traditional stories to give mythic form to the very real dilemmas of contemporary life, Jack Zipes's "Fairy-Tale Collisions" centers on Paula Rego, Kiki Smith, and Cindy Sherman. From a generation of women who have attained prominence since the 1980s, these artists alter fairy-tale imagery to subvert or rewrite social roles and codes.

In "Metamorphosis of the Monstrous," Marina Warner discusses works in the exhibition in the context of historical conceptions of monsters as expressions of alterity, bestiality, or sinfulness. Her reminder that contemporary monster images offer "a promise and a warning about the variety, heterogeneity, and possible combinations and recombinations in the order of things" sets the stage for Suzanne Anker's essay, punningly titled "The Extant Vamp (or the) Ire of It All: Fairy Tales and Genetic Engineering." Considering representations of hybrid bodies by Patricia Piccinini, Janaina Tschape, Saya Woolfalk, and others, which evoke imagined beings of the past as a way to envision the recombinant creatures that may lie in the future, Anker shows how artists explore the social, ethical, and future implications of biological design and enhanced evolution.

Accompanying an exhibition of contemporary art in which depictions of marvelous creatures and fantastic narratives provide both chills and delights, the essays in "Fairy Tales, Monsters, and the Genetic Imagination" explore the meaning of this fabulist revival through the lenses of social and art history, literature, feminism, animal studies, and science.