Search results for ""skira""

A sumptuous and original European Tour through the palaces and the works of art belonging to royal and princely figures who have marked the histories of theur dynasties and countries. Published on the occasion of an exhibition of the same name at the Grimaldi Forum Monaco, this book allows us to enter 20 European courts for the first time, from palace to palace, and to meet great imperial, royal and princely figures, who have marked the histories of their dynasties and countries. Four centuries of history (XVI-XXth centuries) become animated through a sumptuous and original European Tour which sheds light on its sovereigns and their splendour: from Augustus the Strong, Elector of Saxony and King of Poland to the Emperor Franz Josef and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, including Tsar Alexander II of Russia and also Leopold I, first King of the Belgians… To illustrate this ambitious undertaking, seven hundred exceptional works of art – portraits, sculptures, furniture, porcelain, silver and gold, costumes and jewellery – taken from royal collections and prestigious institutions, enable the reader to discover the lives, roles, and passions of these individuals and couples, as well as their time and accomplishments in the fields of the arts, history and science.

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An illustrated study of African traditional figurative arts that reflects the continent’s rich artistic and cultural heritage. We often know the “Western life” of African art, such as the names of collectors and owners, but we almost always ignore the circumstances of their creation, the formal innovations introduced by the creators of the works and even of the makers’ existence. The marvellous achievements of African artists over thousands of years are revealed in this book. Sculpture is the chief means through which African artists expressed themselves. The human figure, evocative of real or symbolic key people in the community or entities facilitating contact with the supernatural, is the almost exclusive subject of their creations. This vast world of African sculpture is the result of a evolutionary process, based on a rich history and diversity deriving from contacts, migrations, wars and alliances. During the last century, the African continent has experienced radical transformations in the field of social and political organisation, economy and religion. Inevitably, new expressive forms are being established hand in hand with the globalisation process and the creation of works for the art market, which retain less and less ties with those of the past.

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The development of Soviet realist painting over fifty years through a selection of works from Russia’s leading museums. Socialist Realism was and remains an exceptional phenomenon in twentieth century art. It bore the challenge of promoting realist figuration on a scale without parallel in the rest of the world, employing the talents of thousands of artists over decades and spreading over an immense and varied empire. By glorifying the social role of art, affirming the primary value of content as opposed to form and restoring the central role of traditional practices, socialist Realism was the declared opponent of the modern movement, and in fact represented the only completely alternative artistic system. Created by the great Russian artists (Deineka, Malevic, Adlivankin, Laktionov, Plastov, Brodskij, Korzhev) the works present a multiplicity of questions, themes and formal approaches to art spanning from the last phases of the civil war to the beginnings of the Brezhnev era, stopping at the early 1970s when trends in official Soviet art took on varied and inconsistent directions such that the cultural supremacy of the socialist-realist current faded definitively. A non-monolithic view emerges, in which the movement does not originate exclusively as the product of totalitarian control and political pressures but as an evolving organism that reflected internal issues and echoed the great historic events of the twentieth century.

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This is a guide to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation of Villa Favorita in Lugano. The Foundation's collection includes masterpieces of 19th- and 20th-century American painting and European and Soviet Avantgardes. Works range from the Hudson River School (Bierstadt, Church, Cole) to the major American Expressionists (Hawthorne, Hassam, Wadsworth, Thomson), to the periods of Cubism (Leger), German Expressionism (Nolde, Schmidt-Rortluff, Schiele), the Russian avant-garde (Larionov, Malevich), the Dada and Surrealist movements (Man Ray, Ernst), up to Action Painting (Pollock) and Hyper-realism (Estes). This brief guidebook displays the new installation of the Foundation and features a section devoted to the sculpture and old master paintings belonging to this collection, as well as an essay on the history of the Villa Favorita and its gardens on the shores of Lake Lugano.

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The art of the up-and-coming South African artist Candice Breitz draws on contemporary mass culture, devising new systems for understanding reality. Published in association with the Castello di Rivoli, this book documents Breitz's new work "Mother + Father". Exploding the terrain of representation, Candice Breitz employs a variety of darkly humorous and often disturbing tactics to strike out at stereotypes and visual conventions as presented and accepted in the media and popular culture. Breitz appropriates photographs and visual fragments and recontextualises these in bold, sometimes tasteless-seeming images, which radically challenge conventional wisdom and question currently accepted assumptions. Considering herself a "symptom" of her own time, Breitz has articulated her artistic practice by acting directly inside pop culture, opening up, unhinging, and fragmenting its apparent solidity, and devising a sort of creative intervention that transforms her from mute spectator into an active, critical voice. Conceived specifically for Castello di Rivoli, "Mother + Father", 2005, represents one of the artist's most complex projects to date. The work is developed in two distinct installations. The protagonists in the first installation, entitled "Mother", are Hollywood actresses Faye Dunaway, Susan Sarandon, Meryl Streep, Diane Keaton, Julia Roberts, and Shirley MacLaine. In "Father" the six father figures have the well-known faces of actors who include Tony Danza, Dustin Hoffman, Harvey Keitel, Steve Martin, Donald Sutherland, and Jon Voight. Suspended in a void made up only of words, facial expressions, and body language, the new interactions of these actors and actresses give rise to the theatrical space of Breitz's work. Digital simulacra, the mothers and fathers devised by the artist are hostages, trapped within a specific emotional repertoire that questions the canons according to which the media - television and Hollywood - have taken over the role of parenting, training the public to experience, through the screen, circumstances that, instead, pertain to real life. Candice Breitz has participated in numerous exhibitions including Re-animations, Modern Art Museum, Oxford, Remix: Contemporary Art and Pop, Tate Liverpool. She has been invited to participate in the exhibition Experience of Art at this year's Venice Biennale.

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Trompe-l'oeil, a French term meaning to trick, the eye, describes a painting that deceives the spectator into thinking that the objects in it are real, not merely represented. To successfully fool the eye of the viewer, trompe-l'oeil artists choose objects, situations and compositional devices using as little depth as possible. A heightened form of illusionism, the art of trompe-l'oeil flourished from the Renaissance onward. The discovery of perspective in fifteenth-century Italy and advancements in the science of optics in the seventeenth-century Netherlands enabled artists to render objects and spaces with eye-fooling exactitude. Both witty and serious, trompe-l'oeil is a game artists play with spectators to raise questions about the nature of art and perception.

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This is the first chapter in a triennial project that centres on the relationship of the artist with him or herself in the screen-based age. All the works were created after 11 September 2001, a date impressed in the memory of everyone and that marked epoch-making changes. With Timer01, questions are asked on the internal space of the new social context created since the attack on the Twin Towers. One hundred artists from all over the world – many of whom are already well known on an international scale – are the protagonists of this project. This is the structure of the three chapters: Timer01: the individual in relation to him or herself; Timer02: the individual in relation to others; Timer03: the individual in relation to the architectural environment.

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