Search results for ""author kelly grovier""
Thames & Hudson Ltd The Art of Colour: The History of Art in 39 Pigments
A unique approach to the history of art told through the story of colour and pigments. Did you know that the ultramarine that shimmers at the centre of Vermeer’s Milkmaid connects that masterpiece with 6th-century Zoroastrian paintings found on the walls of cave temples in Bamiyan, Afghanistan? Or that the surging waves that crest and curl in Hokusai’s perilous Great Wave off Kanagawa owe their absorbing blue lustre to an alchemist who was born in Frankenstein’s Castle in 1673? And were the Pre-Raphaelites really obsessed with a murky brown hue derived from the pulverized remains of ancient mummies? (Spoiler: they were.) Invented by prehistoric cave-dwellers and medieval conjurers, cunning conmen and savvy scientists, the colours of art tell a riveting tale all their own. Over ten scintillating chapters, acclaimed author Kelly Grovier helps bring that tale vividly to life, revealing the astonishing backstories of the pigments that define the greatest works in the history of art. Interwoven between these chapters is a series of features focusing on key moments in the evolution of colour theory – from the revelations of the Enlightenment to the radicalism of the Bauhaus – while reproductions of carefully selected artworks help illuminate the narrative’s twists and turns. The history of colour is an epic saga of human ingenuity and insatiable desire. Read this book and you will never look at a work of art in quite the same way.
£27.00
Hatje Cantz Endangered Sky: Sean Scully & Kelly Grovier
An Ode to Vanishing Beauty It is estimated that, as a result of climate change, illegal trade, and habitat loss from the encroachments of technology and industrialization, as many as one in eight species of birds is heading towards extinction. Created in close collaboration between Sean Scully and Kelly Grovier, each pairing of poem and drawing is devoted to the beauty and mystery of an individual species of bird. Scully’s visual language, at once measured and impassioned, geometric and free-flowing, captures the essence of creatures that are, themselves, on the brink of becoming mere abstractions. Though his first series of iPhone drawings are consistent with his signature style, they reveal a fresh intimacy, playfulness, and exhilaration of gesture, color, and form that is in accord with the wonder of feathered flight. Created on a digital device, the drawings are, as Scully remarked, the ironic embodiment of “technology which is ruining nature turned inside out to protest its demise.” Yet taken together, these duets aim to offer something uplifting in the face of an accelerating tragedy. “Hope” is, after all as Emily Dickinson famously wrote, “the thing with feathers / That perches in the soul.”
£16.20
Thames & Hudson Ltd A New Way of Seeing: The History of Art in 57 Works
A new way of appreciating art that puts the artwork front and centre, brought to us by one of the freshest and most exciting voices in cultural criticism. What makes great art great? Why do some works pulse in the imagination, generation after generation, century after century? From Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Picasso’s Guernica, some paintings and sculptures have become so famous, so much a part of who we are, that we no longer really look at them. We take their greatness for granted; our eyes have become near-obsolete. We need a new way of seeing. Unsatisfied with traditional interpretations of masterpieces, which are so often interested only in learning about art, and not from it, Kelly Grovier combed the surface of revered works from the Terracotta Army to Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, in a quest to find the key to their lasting power to move and delight us. He discovered that every truly great work is hardwired with an underappreciated detail that ignites it from deep within. Stepping away from biography, style and the chronology of ‘isms’ that preoccupies most art history, Grovier tells a new story in which we learn from the artworks, not just about them.
£20.00
Thames & Hudson Ltd Art Since 1989
The years since 1989 have seen a complete untethering of what art can be, who makes it and where it can be found, which has been matched by a reassessment of art's appropriate place in society and the financial value that should be attached to it. In this new book in the World of Art series, Kelly Grovier surveys the dynamic developments in art practice worldwide since 1989, going in search of those artists who have undertaken to shape a fresh visual vocabulary and whose work reflects on these turbulent years. The book’s ten chapters examine the key themes in contemporary art, from portraiture in the age of face transplants and facial recognition software, to political activism, science and religion. Artists discussed include Jeff Koons, Louise Bourgeois, Damien Hirst, George Condo, Marlene Dumas, Sean Scully, Cindy Sherman, Banksy, Ai Weiwei, Antony Gormley, Christo and Jean-Claude, Jenny Holzer, Chuck Close and Cornelia Parker. The final chapter, a timeline, traces the evolution of art practice in this period by looking closely at one key artwork from each year.
£12.95
John Murray Press The Gaol
For over 800 years Newgate was the grimy axle around which British society slowly twisted. This is where such legendary outlaws as Robin Hood and Captain Kidd met their fates, where the rapier-wielding playwrights Ben Jonson and Christopher Marlowe sharpened their quills, and where flamboyant highwaymen like Claude Duval and James Maclaine made legions of women swoon. While London's theatres came and went, the gaol endured as Londons unofficial stage. From the Peasants Revolt to the Great Fire, it was at Newgate that England's greatest dramas unfolded. By piecing together the lives of forgotten figures as well as re-examining the prison's links with more famous individuals, from Dick Whittington to Charles Dickens, this thrilling history goes in search of a ghostly place, erased by time, which has inspired more poems and plays, paintings and novels, than any other structure in British history.
£12.99
Thames & Hudson Ltd Colour in Art
A wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the place and power of colour in life and art by John Gage, author of the award-winning Colour and Culture. The complex phenomenon of colour has received detailed attention from the perspectives of physics, chemistry, physiology, psychology, linguistics and philosophy. However, the people who work most closely with colour – artists – have rarely been canvassed for their opinions on this mysterious subject. John Gage sets out to address this omission by focusing on the thoughts and practices of artists. Colour in Art is concerned with the history of colour, but is not itself a history; instead each chapter develops a theme from a different scientific discipline, as seen from the viewpoint of such diverse artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Vincent van Gogh, Sonia Delaunay, Bridget Riley and Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri. Drawing on examples through the ages, from ancient times to the present, the many topics covered include flags, synaesthesia, Theosophy, theatre design, film, chromotherapy and chromophobia. Featuring a new foreword by art writer Kelly Grovier outlining contemporary developments in the study of colour, and an updated bibliography, this new edition of this classic text offers a wide-ranging and engaging introduction to the place and power of colour in life and art.
£15.29
Lisson Gallery Sean Scully: The 12 / Dark Windows
£27.00