Yale University Press 2004
208 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0300106327
25 x 30 cm English text. Hardcover
Dan Flavin (1933-1996) is considered one of the most important and innovative artists of the late twentieth century. The simplicity and systematic character of his extraordinary work, along with his relentless exploration and ingenious discovery of an art of light, established him as a progenitor and chief exponent of Minimalism. Uniquely situated outside the mediums of painting and sculpture, the majority of Flavin's work after 1963 consists of art made from light. This landmark book, the first retrospective publication of Flavin's art since 1969, includes around 45 of the artist's most important light works, beginning with a pivotal series of constructed boxes with attached incandescent or fluorescent lights, called "icons", made from 1961 to 1963. Works spanning Flavin's career are discussed in depth, including examples that integrate light with the surrounding space and show the particular characteristics of blended fluorescent light, large-scale installations, and constructed corridors. The book also includes reproductions of Flavin's drawings, which show his thought processes and working methods. New scholarship and interpretation of Flavin's work appears in the form of three Price: £30.00
Peer 2004
16 pages B&W reproductions. ISBN 0953977242
18.5 x 27 cm English text. Softcover Signed and numbered edition
David Austen has made a large body of drawings over the past few months, all executed on paper with Indian ink and using Japanese brushes. They stand as an album of intense but fleeting thoughts – the kind of images that may pass through one’s mind on the way to sleep or while waking up. Unlike the painstaking control apparent in his painting, there is a sense that these works may be the by-product of some kind of irrepressible desire.These drawings are quickly produced and the results are at times both disturbing and beautiful.
Like a dreamscape, specific themes and images recur to create disjointed narratives. Therare flowers, trees, abstractions (perhaps from nature), images of brutality, dark impulses, tenderness, love, and the artist too appears in various guises. As in Austen’s delicate watercolours the body plays a central role, but here the execution in thick black brush marks is more extreme. Singly, coupled, sometimes engaged in a sexual act, sometimes heaped in piles, sometimes a detail – these bodies inhabit an altogether harsher world. Price: £12.50
Tate Liverpool and Museum / Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien 2004
264 pages Colour reproductions ISBN 3883757985
21 x 28. 5 cm English/German text. Softcover
essays by Mike Kelley, John C. Welchman, Christoph Grunenberg Sigmund Freud described the uncanny as 'a hidden, familiar thing that has undergone repression and then emerged from it'. In The Uncanny, Mike Kelley explores memory, recollection, horror and anxiety through the juxtaposition of a highly personal collection of objects with realist figurative sculptures that embody the feeling of the uncanny through their scale and use of colour, form and material. Kelley relates these to the idea of the 'double' - the disturbingly realistic representation of the human figure suspended between life and death. Non-art objects include a variety of historical and contemporary anatomical models, wax figures, animatronic puppets and mounted (stuffed) animals. These works are complemented by the Harems: 16 groups of object types that bring together autobiographical elements with an investigation into the urge to collect and categorise, as a means of understanding and controlling the world. Published on the occasion of the exhibition. Price: £25.00
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Christoph Merian Verlag 2005
128 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3856162216
20.5 x 25.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Claudia & Julia Muller are known largely for their wall-drawings and installations with video and objects.
Their work emanates from an elaborate process of collecting photographs and objects from various cultural contexts. By drawing and combining already existing photographs they alter the contents of an original image to provoke a different approach referring to cultural background and identity.
Working with a wide range of images with an emblematic character, such as portraits of models, beauty queens, Indian Americans and advertisements they are questioning existing forms of representation without losing a direct intimacy. Price: £22.50
Phaidon 2004
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0714842737
24.5 x 26.5 cm English text. Softcover
Thomas Hirschhorn is a Swiss-born artist who emerged in the 1990s art world, and known for his giant, labour-intensive, room-sized collages of low grade materials. Tinfoil, cardboard, plywood, plastic and masking tape bring together an infinite variety of debris, including handwritten texts and images culled form popular magazines; miniature toy airplanes and trains; knick-knacks by the hundreds; armies of plastic ‘gold watches; effigies of Nietzsche and Princess Diana; household fans blowing red flags which flutter violently; monitors duct-taped into vitrines, ad infinitum.
Borrowing from the languages of installation art, junk art, Pop and others, Hirschhorn’s work comments on the proliferation of consumables (‘very derived products the artist calls them) in our shopping-driven society.
Despite its overt politics, installations like Bataille Monument (Documenta 11, 2002) his temporary structure situated in a predominantly immigrant Kassel neighbourhood maintain a light, contemporary wunderkammer feel to be enjoyed by aficionados and non-initiates alike. Half-sculptural, half-architectural and fully revolutionary, some of his most elaborate installations, such as the multi-room Cavemanman (Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York, 2002), transform ordinary spaces into a labyrinthine, parallel universe of hybrid forms and fascinating accumulations. A key player in the contemporary art scene today, Hirschhorn moves beyond such recent art forms as the readymade, the ‘post-conceptualand video, to offer an important, unprecedented direction for 21st century art. Price: £24.95
Abrams 2004
192 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0810949571
26.5 x 31.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Both admired and censured for the in-your-face eroticism of her paintings of women, Lisa Yuskavage has emerged from the 1990s as one of the most important figurative artists working today. Called the "premier bad-girl artist" by The New York Times and lauded in The New Yorker as "an extravagantly deft painter," Yuskavage is known for her oil paintings, loaded with color and emotional content, featuring languid young women with outlandish body parts.
The small paintings that make up this book, the first monograph of her work, are often the place where the characters from the artist's larger works come alive. Exploratory in nature, these paintings provide us with a uniquely intimate look at Yuskavage's creative process--allowing us to see how they have been a method of working for more than 20 years. Writer and director Tamara Jenkins's introductory essay is a work of biography and psychoanalysis, offering an up-close look at the forces behind her work. At once sexist and feminist, real and surreal, unsettling. Price: £27.50
Tate 2004
128 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 1854375032
22 x 27.5 cm English text. Softcover
Luc Tuymans has been at the forefront of the re-energising of painting over the past fifteen years, creating a varied and remarkable body of work. His subject matter often engages with complex aspects of history, from Christ's Passion to the Holocaust, from child abuse to the legacy of Belgian colonialism in the Congo. A restricted palette of bleached-out colours give his paintings an apparently aged, cracked patina, imbuing everyday objects with a sense of impending cinematic narrative.
Fully illustrated throughout in colour and with insightful and accessible texts on his work, this is an essential reference of the career of one of the most important painters working in Europe today. Price: £16.99
Kunsthalle Bielefeld 2004
224 pages Colour reproductions.ISBN 3775715088
17.5 x 24.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Vanessa Beecroft, born in Genoa in 1969, is undeniably one of the brightest stars in the international art scene today. The theme of feminine perception and self-perception has been a central focus of her work since 1993. Since then, Vanessa Beecroft has presented her predominantly nude models, who are permitted neither to speak nor to move appreciably, in more than fifty cities around the world. The contemplative silence of the protagonists in her performances, photographs, and videos evokes an impression of ritual.
This publication presents a retrospective survey of Vanessa Beecroft's work complied in collaboration with the artist: photographs, videos, and a large group of previously unpublished drawings devoted to the female body and the theme of loneliness. These highly appealing works feature single figures or parts of bodies, with spindly legs, crooked arms, and small, sometimes childlike heads. Fragile and alone, they float in pictorial space - lasciviously on occasion, but more often with a subtle eroticism. Price: £22.95
Royal Jelly Factory 2004
48 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 095436503
10.5 x 15 cm English text. Softcover
Gary Hume was part of a celebrated group that studied at London's Goldsmiths College in the late 1980s. The public first saw his work in the near-legendary 1988 exhibition 'Freeze', organized by fellow student Damien Hirst. The door paintings that Hume displayed in 'Freeze' captured the attention of critics and collectors alike: over the space of a couple of months he went from being an unknown student to a sought-after young artist. Since then his imagery has developed, and he has come to be seen as one of the leading artists within a new generation of painters. Price: £4.99
48 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 095436511
Gavin Turk rose to prominence in the early 1990s during the so-called 'young British artists' phenomenon: a wave of media interest provoked by an ambitious generation of artists with a flair for self-promotion. Turk's thoughtful, visually striking work gained him a reputation as an artist who questioned the nature and values of identity, pop culture, and art itself. Price: £4.99
Book Works 2004
48 pages English text. ISBN 1870699718
14.5 x 21 cm English text. Softcover
"Corpse rotting in gutter: the first words present a vivid enough picture. Looking down, I observe and record that, even in the grey light, the body can be seen to be most likely that of a young man. Its orientation is described with the aid of diagrams; he lies on his front, his neck twisted in such a way that the left side of the face is visible; the arms are straight, with only the left in view; the body is jammed hard against the kerb - I have found no evidence of obvious damage to the body, except for some grazing to the left cheek - Within a few hours, large numbers of larvae will hatch and will accelerate the process of change that has already begun within the developing environment of the body."
The Ring Mechanism is an interrogation of creative production. Neil Chapman has developed a convergence of text, presented as a fictional account of the emergence of significance from everyday banality and detail. The discussions that arise in this book are specifically aimed at a visual art audience and self-reflexively probe the categorisation of such work seemingly falling between criticism, theory and philosophical aesthetics questioning its reading as critical model of production or a process of splicing and deciphering, that may after all, end as a terminal disintegration of sense.
Neil Chapman is an artist and writer. He has recently worked as editor with Anna Best on her project, Occasional Sights, the Photographer's Gallery, London and his collaborative work made with Steve Claydon has been shown at Filmhaus Kino, Cologne, Hoxton Distillery, greengrassi and ICA, London. Price: £5.00
Migros Museum fur Gegenwartskunst Zurich 2004
160 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 3883757934
16 x 23 cm English text. Hardcover
Mark Leckey creates his works by merging, sampling, recreating and referencing material from the current pop-culture and music and its historic predecessors. His videos, collages and performances reference Saint Just, Montesqieu, Walther Pater Patrick Procter as well as Beyonce, Jeff Koons and the Spice Girls.
7 Windmill Street is the first survey catalogue of his work. Conceived as a source book of his working methods and fields of interest, it has been edited by the artist and features images of his main productions, as well as a wealth of other visual materials he has gathered through the years. In addition to original contributions by the artist, it includes reprints of texts from Michel Leiris and the 19th century writer Walter Pater, as well as song lyrics. Price: £22.00
Domaine de Kerguehennec, 2004
190 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 2906574031
22 x 29 cm English/French text. Hardcover
Overview of Closky's career to date, presented as a simulated lifestyle magazine annual. With texts by Lynne Cooke, Carole Boulbès, François Piron, Frédéric Paul, Alexandra Midal. Price: £33.00
Kunsthaus Bregenz 2004
174 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 3883757217
23 x 28.5 cm English text. Softcover with moulded PVC slipcover
This new work by Japanese artist Mori merges arts, science, performance and music. In the original installation, a 4x10x5 metre capsule allows three people to lie down inside, where hallucinatory video images, generated by the ‘biofeedback’ of the viewers’ brain waves, are projected on to the inside walls. The book retraces the concept and genesis of this unique project via first drafts, technical and 3-dimensional architectural drawings and photos showing different phases of its construction.
Includes English & German text by Mariko Mori, Jeffrey Deitch, Tom Eccles and Eckhard Schneider. Price: £54.50
Redstone Press 2004
22 postcards Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1870003985
11 x 15 cm Softcover
"They say that some rules are meant to be broken but this is just a figure of speech. Rules are made to be kept, rules are made to be guide us, as the modern world grows ever more complicated and appears to now be populated mostly by nutters. Rules have become increasingly important. Those who break the rules will be beaten with a rod of iron and then made to write out the rules one million times. Bending the rules is also forbidden. Bent rules are useless..." Price: £5.87 Including VAT at 15%
