Manchester Art Gallery 2003
96 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0901673617
17.5 x 23 cm English text. Softcover
Free Trade is an ambitious project by two artists well known for their inventive practice, Neil Cummings and Marysia Lewandowska. Free Trade explores - via one of Manchester Art Gallery's largest donated collections, the Beatson Blair Bequest - a complex web of relationships between a private passion for collecting art, public museum culture and deregulated economic expansion. In this moment in Victorian Manchester the project locates the origin of the awesome forces at play in our contemporary 'global economy'. Free Trade features previously unpublished archive material, photographs of the gallery installation; rare lectures previously delivered in Manchester by John Ruskin (1857) and William Morris (1883).
Includes essays by Julian Stallabrass, Dan Smith and Toby Nangle. Price: £9.95
Fondazione Prada 2002
Two vols. 156 & 320 pages Colour reproductions throughout. ISBN 8887029245
24 x 31 cm English/Italian text. Slipcase
The two volumes of this lavishly illustrated publication are comprised of an artists' book devised by Friedman and a catalogue to accompany his show at Fondazione Prada.
Essays by Germano Celant, Tom Friedman and Mario Perniola Price: £85.00
Thames & Hudson 2003
252 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0500542724
26 x 28 cm English text. Hardcover
This is the most complete volume available on one of the outstanding representatives of new German photography.
Ever since embarking on her first photographic projects in the early 1970s, Candida Höfer has been primarily interested in what could best be termed public space – interiors, such as libraries, foyers, museums, club houses or, more rarely, urban scenarios such as public squares, streets or zoos.
Candida Höfer’s relationship to architecture is fully in keeping with the New Objectivity tradition. Her photographs of public spaces are almost sober and ascetic in feel – especially as she forgoes any spectacular staging of the locations. The emptiness is imbued with substance with a subtle attention to colour, and the prevailing silence instilled with a metaphysical quality. Even when Höfer’s photographs present significant works of renowned architects or designers, her incorruptible and consistently laconic approach means that the architectural mind in question takes a back seat to the photographer.
Candida Höfer was born in 1944. She was a student at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and studied film under Ole John before going on to study photography under Bernd Becher. She has taken part in many group exhibitions and has held countless solo shows, most recently at Documenta XI, where her Zwölf–Twelve cycle was displayed. She is one of the greats of the international photographic and art community. Price: £48.00
Reaktion 2003
208 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1861891520
21 x 28 cm English text. Softcover
Over the past 40 years, sculptor and installation artist Jannis Kounellis has established himself as a unique presence in the world of contemporary art. His work, whether included in temporary exhibitions or placed in semi-permanent installations, invariably lingers in the memory because of its forceful character and its ability to transform its immediate environment. Stephen Bann refers to Kounellis’s working practice as a process of ‘making strange’. In all his installations, the material impact of the work sets off a trail of associations. Potent examples include his 1969 installation of twelve tethered live horses in a gallery in Rome, the city where the prototypes of the equestrian monuments of Antiquity can still be seen, or his 1975 Civil Tragedy installation in which a hat-stand with black hat and coat against a gold-leaf background lit by a small lamp recalled the café society of Central Europe against a wall of Byzantine splendour.
As an artist, Kounellis has found his special location in Rome. At the age of 20, he made the journey there from Piraeus, the ancient port of Athens, and began his career. His works continue to bear the hallmarks of his Eastern Mediterranean origin, as well as testifying to his concern with the links between Russian Modernism and the Byzantine tradition.
Stephen Bann has not set out to write a conventional monograph about the artist. Rather, he looks at the underlying mechanisms in Kounellis’s practice, suggesting the ways in which they are important in the broader context of late modernist art. He outlines the distinctive way in which Kounellis takes account of space as a necessary preliminary to working within it, and discusses the historical and cultural dimension to which Kounellis lays claim. Price: £25.00
Black Dog 2004
128 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1901033732
19 x 24 cm English text. Softcover
This is the first book on the young, upcoming British artist David Cotterrell. Cotterrell plays with the tradition of eccentric inventions, incorporating customised technology in humorous and political site specific works. Since the mid 90s Cotterrell has exhibited internationally both in and outside conventional gallery spaces, invading the public arena in unexpected ways, as with his man-made geyser, which spurts water high into the air from the middle of a suburban park every day at an allocated time. Cotterrell was selected for the Becks Futures Awards at the ICA, London, 2002 and is working on a number of public commissions in the UK and internationally. The Impossible Project includes texts by writer and curator Caryn Faure Walker as well as responses to Cotterrell’s work from the fields of science, technology, history and politics. Price: £16.95
Camden Arts Centre 2004
64 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1900470322
27 x 22.5 cm English text. Hardcover
Wonderful World is the title of Alexis Rockman's recent suite of five large paintings, and also of the catalogue to the 41-year-old New Yorker's biggest show in the UK to date, much of the work the result of a two-year research residency based at the gallery.
Foreword by Camden Arts Centre's Director Jenni Lomax and essays by Frances Ashcroft, Dan Cameron, and Francis Fukuyama. Price: £18.75
Phaidon 2003
160 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 0714841641
25 x 29 cm English text. Softcover
Emerging in the 1980s, Richard Prince combines the media of painting, artists books and photography to offer peculiar views into the margins of American culture.
Princes highly idiosyncratic subject matter - such as one-line jokes in the style of 1960s cartoons, Marlboro cowboys and motorcycle gangs - is central to his work. In the late 1970s Prince was working for the cutting services of Time Life publications in New York, and began to re-photograph advertisements and compose his own pictures from this highly-familiar pop imagery. Recently his work has taken an unexpected turn, and the artist has emerged as a consummate painter, producing some of the most unusual and admired works in the current painting scene. Price: £24.95
Kettle's Yard 2003
60 pages Colour and B&W reproductions. ISBN 1904561004
22 x 22 cm English text. Softcover
David Rayson (born in 1966) made his reputation with his meticulous, deadpan paintings of urban and suburban scenes, attempting to make sense of his immediate surroundings. This publication traces a transformation in his work. Increasingly he has become fascinated by the evidence of human narrative which emerges from the smallest changes to the familiar environment: new windows, a conservatory built on to the kitchen, a spanking new car and a gravel drive.
At the same time his method of working has changed. Drawing has always been at its heart, at first as a preparation for painting, but is now taking over in its own right, replacing the long labour of painting with the apparent shorthand of bold line drawing. The publication includes paintings, preparatory and finished drawings. Price: £12.50
272 pages Colour reproductions. ISBN 0714839086
25 x 29 cm English text Hardcover
Restlessly inventive, Ruscha has remained a step ahead and apart from the art trends and movements of his time. Pop Art, Conceptual Art, Surrealism, Photo-Realism, and today's renewed focus on painting resonate in a body of work that ultimately defies categorization. Born in Omaha, Nebraska, in 1937, Ruscha lived in Oklahoma City until he moved permanently to Los Angeles in 1956, where he studied at the Chouinard Art Institute until 1960. Side jobs in typography and layout, a revelatory trip to Europe, and influential encounters with Jasper Johns' art contributed to an artistic vision attuned to the prosaic look and language of popular culture. By the early 1960s Ruscha was well known for his paintings, collages and printmaking, and for his association with the Ferus Gallery group, which also included artists Robert Irwin, Edward Moses, Ken Price and Edward Kienholz. He later achieved recognition for his paintings incorporating words and phrases and for his many photographic books. This monograph is organized in thematic chapters that follow the work roughly chronologically concluding with his "mirror mountains" works (shown at the Gagosian Gallery in NY in spring 2002). This organization brings to light the surprising diversity of Ruscha's work, while at the same time showing the recurrence of themes and styles throughout his career. Rather than focusing on a long, daunting scholarly essay illustrated by the artist's painting, this book is first and foremost about the work. Rather than using the paintings to illustrate his text, Richard Marshall writes his text to illustrate the paintings. This is obvious in the design of the book, which allows the work to speak for itself in plate sections. Price: £45.00
Editions Villa Saint Clair 2003
68 pages colour reproductions. ISBN 2908964341
10 x 16 cm English/French text. Hardcover
Bag is a small pocket book containing a collection of colour photograpsh taken between 2001-2003 in London, Wales and Sete. It acts as a kind of space in which a seemingly diverse group of images can be brought together, not to create a narrative or order, more a simple accumulation.
All the images are in some way records of sculptural investigations, either quick manipulations of materials in the studio or observations of actions of time and nature on objects in the world.
The book also contains two short texts by Phyllida Barlow (in English) and Elisabeth Lebovici (in French) which are their personal responses to the images. Price: £11.99
