Search results for ""Author Marco Livingstone""

One of the most popular and influential British artists of our times, David Hockney has never ceased to change his style and ways of working, always re-energizing his art with new solutions, fresh ideas and technical mastery. Now excitedly embracing his ‘late period’, Hockney remains as engaged as ever with the questions he has always posed for himself – what to depict, how to depict it and how to persuade the spectator that he or she is an active participant rather than just a passive witness. Published to mark Hockney’s 80th birthday and in the wake of the most extensive Tate retrospective ever accorded to a living artist, this new edition includes a new preface, afterword and final chapter covering work of the past two decades. Tracing a line from the beginnings of Hockney’s career in the early 1960s, the portraits and images of Los Angeles swimming pools, his drawings and photocollages, to his highly acclaimed stage designs for the opera, video works, his iPad drawings and other novel forms of picturemaking, Marco Livingstone shows the continuing preoccupation with invention and artifice that has made this artist’s work at once popular and enduring.

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Joe Tilson RA (b.1928) is one of the great figures in post-war British art and a pivotal artist of the British Pop Art movement during the 1960s. Still working, and still evolving, he has continued to explore many new directions and a great variety of mediums since moving away from his Pop origins. Astonishingly, no general monograph documenting all these phases of Tilson’s prolific production has ever been published. This book remedies this through a series of insightful chapters, exploring each decade of the artist’s career, written by Marco Livingstone, a respected authority on British contemporary art. Featuring a lively and visually rich design, this unique work will guide the reader through the evolution of one of the most distinctive voices in contemporary British art.

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A fully updated edition of the most comprehensive illustrated survey of the life and work of Peter Blake, one of Britain’s most popular artists. Since his emergence in the early 1960s as a key member of the Pop Art movement, Peter Blake has become one of the best-known and most popular artists of his generation. Though primarily a painter, he has worked across many media, from drawings, watercolours and collages to sculpture and printmaking, as well as commercial art in the form of graphics and album covers – most notably his design for The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album in 1967. Exploring his remarkable creative output from the 1950s to the present, Peter Blake is the most comprehensive illustrated survey available of the life and work of the artist. Marco Livingstone grounds Blake’s art firmly in his working-class origins, identifying a yearning for the innocence of childhood in his bittersweet paintings of the early to mid-1950s that depict children reading comics or going to the Saturday matinee at the cinema. From that moment, while studying at the Royal College of Art in London, Blake concerned himself with popular entertainments as subject matter, and as the source of formal solutions, for his paintings. The directness with which Blake gave expression to his enthusiasms for mass culture during the 1950s brought him to the forefront of the Pop Art movement before it had even been named, and independently of the investigations into similar areas by other British, American and European artists. The radical nature of his collage paintings of 1959–62, in particular, in which he combined existing imagery from popular culture with unapologetically bold and bright colours, made him a singularly influential figure within British Pop. This fully updated edition includes a new chapter on what the artist has jokingly styled his ‘Late Period’, in which Blake has continued to mine the many strands of his art with undiminished energy and completed some of his most ambitious long-standing projects. As well as the sheer scale of Blake’s production, what becomes clear is the kaleidoscopic variety of subject matter, form and medium to be found in his work, its humour and friendly appeal, and, above all, its celebration of life and humanity.

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Revised and expanded final edition of the authoritative monograph on this modern master.

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Jim Dine's vivid, candid and detailed reminiscences about his friendship and working relationship with Aldo Crommelynck, the printer of Matisse and Picasso, over a period now of more than 30 years are full of affection, humour and layer upon layer of information. In conversations with the art historian Marco Livingstone, Dine, one of the greatest post-war American artists, charts the extent to which his experience of working with a man who was not only a great printer, but also a skilled draughtsman, an aesthete, dandy and bon viveur, coloured and enriched his experience of France on every level, from an appreciation of its art and culture, its city life and countryside, to its food and its specialist shops - especially those in which to find the best tools and musical instruments.Dine's ruminations take some unexpected but illuminating detours, even into the making of bespoke bicycles, that prove deeply revealing of the specific nature of his love for France and of his many debts to an esteemed colleague, fellow traveller and much loved friend.

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David Hockney’s continuing belief in the importance of the portrait and his virtuoso skill in creating a sense of close communication between artist, sitter and viewer has resulted in some of the best-loved works of the postwar era. From the 1950s on, Hockney’s most persistent subject matter, in paintings, drawings, collages and photoworks, has been of people usually very close to him, as well as of himself. These works are narratives of autobiographical relationships: they reflect the intimate and often intense stories of this artist’s life. They also explore different formal ways of representing the passage of time and at the same time the unavoidable but marvellous stillness of portraits. The works include fascinating sequences as he paints his mother or Henry Geldzahler or Celia Birtwell on and off for decades; the special qualities attached to depictions of lovers; and the range of celebrities, writers and artists – Billy Wilder, Armistead Maupin, W.H. Auden, Henry Moore, Christopher Isherwood – who have been part of a very full life. The text by a distinguished European critic and curator reinforces the point that this hugely popular English-born artist, who made America his second home, has become a figure of worldwide appeal.

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Uncertain Swimmer is the second monograph on the work of British artist Jonathan Wateridge (b. 1972, Lusaka, Zambia), presenting around eighty paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022. Following on from the bodies of work Enclave and Expatria (2016–18), Uncertain Swimmer develops the artist’s interest in modes of representation and the legacies of twentieth-century modernist painting through a visual and social exploration of the motif of the pool, depicting swimmers and sunbathers, often by night. Far from being an escapist environment of aspiration and privilege, Wateridge imbues the pool with a disquieting atmosphere, creating a cumulative feeling of unease and ennui among those present, now seemingly unsure of their world.The publication charts a marked evolution in the artist’s style from the realism of his earlier paintings with complex multi-figure compositions to more solitary, gestural and expressive works. His masterly application of paint takes new forms in the beautiful, curious and often haunting paintings and works on paper showcased here. Art historian and curator Marco Livingstone’s essay considers the change from Wateridge’s naturalistic paintings to the flattened, reduced shapes, forms and lines of the modernism- and abstraction-infused pieces he is making today. Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch and Paul Cézanne are among numerous art historical influences cited by Livingstone, who ruminates on the identity of the people in Wateridge’s portraits and the mercurial spaces they occupy, examining how Wateridge’s current critical preoccupations have transitioned from the autobiographical to more formal concerns.In the featured conversation between Wateridge and fellow painter Caroline Walker, the two artists discuss their overlapping experiences studying painting at Glasgow, as well as Wateridge’s fourteen-year break from painting until 2005. He eventually returned to the medium when he realised it excited him more than anything else. Wateridge elaborates on his fascinating painting process, staging shoots in studios with hired actors and using elements from the photographs in the paintings, often over a period of years. On his canvases, he will scrape back the paint and reapply it, frequently taking pictures of the paintings in their various stages; he will then print the photographs and draw over them to continue working out what he will do with the final paintings. For Wateridge, a painting works when it stops failing, and he embraces unforeseen conclusions.Jonathan Wateridge has recently exhibited with the Hayward Gallery, London; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, New York and Brussels; TJ Boulting, London; Galerie Haas, Zurich; Pace Gallery and HENI, London. Wateridge's art is in the collections of institutions worldwide, including Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; Pinault Foundation, Venice; the Saatchi Collection, London; the Rennie Collection, Vancouver; and Simmons & Simmons, London. He has been featured in publications such as The Sunday Times, The Independent, Fad Magazine, Artforum and Artnet. Wateridge is represented by Nino Mier Gallery.

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Providing a thematic overview of the multifarious work produced by Derek Boshier (b.1937) from the post-war period to the digital age, this fascinating publication reveals how Boshier’s deceptively playful imagery offers analytical commentaries on societal issues and the fragility and fragmentation of human identity. Among contemporaries such as Peter Blake, Pauline Boty and Peter Phillips, Boshier was a central figure in the British Pop Art movement. Embracing Pop sensibilities, his early work juxtaposed figurative painting and imagery to call attention to nuclear anxieties and the growing consumerism of 1960s Britain. Yet this is just one aspect of Boshier's remarkable artistic journey, which has drawn in painting, drawing, sculpture, film, graphic design and printmaking. The book's broad sweep includes recent paintings and drawings created in America at the height of the #MeToo and Black Lives Matter movements, and features commentaries by artists, academics, curators and writers who explore how Boshier's ground-breaking activity interrogates truth and logic, fantasy and reality in the modern age. With contributions by James Cahill, Philip Colbert, Eddie Chambers, Susan Compo, Rachele Dini, Inga Fraser, Jann Haworth, Leslie Jones, Emily Langridge, Gregory Salter, Penny Slinger and John Stezaker.

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