Search results for ""ridinghouse""
Ridinghouse These Mad Hybrids
In 1994 painter John Hoyland made an unruly group of ceramic sculptures. Loaded with colour, humour and creatureliness, he dubbed them these mad little hybrids'. They now appear remarkably contemporary, in sync with a broad range of recent and current sculpture. These Mad Hybrids: John Hoyland and Contemporary Sculpture presents the ceramics in dialogue with sculpture by Caroline Achaintre, Eric Bainbridge, Phyllida Barlow, Olivia Bax, Hew Locke, Anna Reading, Jessi Reaves, Andrew Sabin, John Summers and Chiffon Thomas.Essays by co-curators Olivia Bax and Sam Cornish situate the ceramics within contemporary sculptural discourse and in relation to Hoyland's deep personal engagement with sculpture. How and why could a sculpture be funny? How did sculpture help an abstract painter rethink his relationship with the High Modernist tradition and find a new relationship with the wider world? James Fisher considers hybridity in the guise of an imaginary dialogu
£25.20
Ridinghouse Ai Weiwei: The Liberty of Doubt
Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, exhibition catalogue on the internationally renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) in which new and existing work will be shown alongside historic Chinese objects. The exhibition will explore notions of truth, authenticity and value, as well as globalisation, the coronavirus pandemic and the current geopolitical crisis. Ai Weiwei will reflect upon the liberty in the West, in contrast to China and other authoritarian regimes, to question truth and authority, express doubt and seek transparency in political matters. However, in relation to art appreciation, the Chinese have a long tradition of a more fluid and less fixed view in relation to authenticity than is the case in the West, often valuing the act of copying.
£18.00
Ridinghouse Eliseo Mattiacci: Sculpture in Action in Rome
Eliseo Mattiacci: Sculpture in Action in Rome is a fresh examination of the developments in Mattiacci’s sculpture from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, dates that embrace the two decades he spent living and working in Italy's vibrant capital. New research by the contributors to this book reveal how the exceptional constellation of studios, galleries and institutional spaces as well as the architectural and landscape settings Rome offered were the crucial factor in Mattiacci's rapid sophistication as an artist. In the mid-1960s the city was already a major centre for art, literature, theatre and cinema, and the setting for numerous avant-garde performative 'actions' and 'happenings'. The Piazza del Popolo district was crowded with bars and galleries, and Mattiacci soon became warmly acquainted with various gallerists and artists, including the Arte Povera practitioners Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali. In this challenging and competitive environment Mattiacci sought to establish his own distinctive exploratory style, investigating materials, forms, sounds, presentations and actions in endlessly novel and inventive ways. The extraordinary Tubo, the long flexible yellow coil of metallic tubing that could be endlessly rearranged and even carried out of a gallery into the streets by files of admirers, was first exhibited in 1967, and made his name. The following year he staged Lavori in corso, a trio of very popular performances, in the Circo Massimo, which involved spinning huge umbrellas in imitation of the Earth's rotations and revolutions. Percorso, in 1969, was Mattiacci again in action, this time driving a noisy roadroller into and around a gallery. In the 1970s – a difficult decade of political violence in Italy – Mattiacci continued to explore both outwardly and inwardly. He was increasingly fascinated by archaeology, antique alphabets and non-literate cultures, notably the USA's First Peoples, and he created actions and presentations that ranged from exhibitions of x-rays of his own inner organs to appearances encased in 'bandaging' and plaster. In 1981 he first showed the admired Roma, a collection of 50 large sinuous metal shapes inspired by the volutes of classical and Baroque architecture, once again an artwork that is endlessly rearrangeable, indoors or out. Sculpture in Action is the beautifully illustrated account of Mattiacci's artistic creativity in those decades.
£31.50
Ridinghouse DIALECTICAL MATERIALISMBRITISH SCU.. PB
£15.47
Ridinghouse Stones, Clouds, Miles: A Richard Long Reader
Charting Richard Long’s critical reception, this anthology of writings explores the artist’s radical rethinking of the relationship between art and landscape. Widely considered as one of the most influential British artists of his generation, Long’s practice stems from his deep love of nature and the experience of making solitary walks. He first came to prominence in the late 1960s and is part of a generation of international artists that extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials and methods. This volume includes a coherent span of over 30 essays and reviews on the artist from the late 1960s to the present, drawn together here for the first time. Featuring the writings of renowned art historians and critics Germano Celant, Richard Cork and Charles Harrison; Nicholas Serota, chair of Arts Council England; and award-winning nature writer Robert Macfarlane, among many others. The texts are accompanied by a selection of the artist’s own statements, key interviews, as well as an introductory essay by Clarrie Wallis that examines Long’s unique position within postwar art history.
£18.00
Ridinghouse Lothar Gotz: Line Drawings
Alongside over 40 colour illustrations, an essay by Charles Darwent explores Gotz's range of influences on this recent body of work.
£14.36
Ridinghouse Bob Law: Field Works 1959–1999
During Law’s stay at St Ives in the late 1950s, the artist developed a series of Field drawings that reduced elements observed in the surrounding landscape – the sun, trees and clouds – into a set of abstract signs held within a rhomboid frame. The series was, in Law’s words, ‘about the position of myself on the face of the earth and the environmental conditions around me’. Using a thickly drawn line to contain and delimit the almost-blank pictorial field, Law refined his early abstract language in subsequent monochrome works, from ‘open’ and ‘closed’ drawings to the monumental paintings of the Mister Paranoia series. Published to accompany a 2015 exhibition of the same name, this volume draws together over 20 works by leading British minimalist Bob Law (1934–2004), providing a concise overview of the artist’s career. This fully illustrated catalogue includes an essay by Douglas Fogle that includes new scholarship on the artist and focuses on his pursuit of the void’s poetic possibilities.
£15.00
Ridinghouse John Hilliard: Not Black and White
Focusing on John Hilliard’s fascination with the monochrome and visual obstruction, this career-spanning volume draws together the artist’s diverse engagement with photography. Perhaps best known for iconic ‘photo-conceptual’ works produced during the 1970s, this British artist’s work explores the limits of the photographic medium. Using new and pioneering processes, such as overlaying prints and incorporating projector screens, the artist aims to disrupt the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Hilliard’s focus on the monochrome ‘blanks out’ the picture to undermine the photograph’s usual expectations and draw the viewer’s attention to the context of its creation. Duncan Wooldridge provides a survey on Hilliard’s continuous challenge to photographic convention throughout his 40-year career, accompanied by texts by the artist and over 60 illustrations.
£22.50
Ridinghouse Paul Winstanley: Art School
Filled with photographs of unpopulated studios, Paul Winstanley’s exploration of British art schools highlights their importance at a time when the art school system’s existence is more fraught than ever. For this series, Winstanley (b.1954) photographed undergraduate studio spaces in more than 50 art colleges across the United Kingdom over the summers of 2011 and 2012. These rough-and-ready, nearly neutral spaces are photographed as found; empty in the period between school years. Collectively, the works highlight the abstraction of the interiors with their temporary white walls, paint stains, neutral floors and open spaces. Photographed in this manner, their sterile nature is juxtaposed with their intended purpose of fostering intense creativity for a future generation of artists. Over 200 full-colour illustrations – which combine images from various schools to form their own abstract space – are accompanied by writings from two professors of fine art: a text by Jon Thompson and an interview with the artist by Maria Fusco. To commemorate the publication, Winstanley created a limited-edition digital print from the Art School series. Each edition is hand-finished by the artist and contained within a custom-made slipcase containing a signed copy of the book.
£31.50
Ridinghouse John Stezaker: One on One
£17.95
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Ridinghouse The Curator's Egg: The evolution of the museum concept from the French Revolution to the present day
From the opening of The Louvre to the launch of Tate Modern and beyond, this accessible and succinct publication traces the development of the museum concept – encompassing curatorial, scholarly, political and cultural spheres – and its evolving role within society. In the first section, Schubert looks at the complex history of the museum in specific cities at critical moments, for instance New York between 1930 and 1950 as the Metropolitan Museum of Art expanded and the Museum of Modern Art was founded. The second section focuses on the success and unprecedented development of the museum in the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the United States, highlighting the need for cities and institutions to revise their programmes in response to a surge of interest in the arts. The final section looks at the museum’s predicament nearly a decade after The Curator’s Egg was originally published in 2000, exploring the museum's evolution in a post-9/11 environment.
£18.00
Ridinghouse John Stezaker: Love
Stripped of their typical narrative and commercial contexts, the fragmented collages of this collection act as visually tantalizing ciphers, reflecting the desires and imaginings of the beholder.' – Jennie Waldow, Brooklyn Rail This beautifully illustrated catalogue showcases works by British artist John Stezaker made between 1976 and 2017 and brought together in the 2018 show “Love” at The Approach, London. Stezaker is celebrated for his distinctive collage works: interruptions of, and interventions into, found images dating mostly from the mid-20th century – products of modernist culture such as film stills, press and publicity photographs, magazines and postcards. His works engage with themes such as psychological archetypes, fragmentation, identity, self and other, desire, inscrutability and enigma, glamour, fantasy, dreams and the gaze. A sense of romance pervades Stezaker’s imagery. As demonstrated most dramatically by the artist’s 'Love' series (2016), his work seduces and ensnares the viewer’s gaze, arresting their perceptual expectations. Disquieting, poetic, compelling, glamorous and strange, the anatomies of love and desire comprising 'Love' resemble a visual encyclopaedia of human consciousness. Featuring essays by Michael Bracewell and Craig Burnett.
£18.00
Ridinghouse Olga Jevrić
This first ever monograph in English on Olga Jevrić offers a unique opportunity to discover the work of a remarkable Serbian artist whose long and distinguished career established her as the most significant modernist sculptor from the former Yugoslavia. Despite gaining widespread acclaim from her contemporaries both in Europe and the USA, economic, social and geopolitical upheavals meant that her work has been little seen outside Serbia in the past four decades. As a witness to the Second World War and its aftermath, Jevrić sought to give voice to the spiritual roots, cultural foundation and social conditions of the war-torn environment in which her work developed. Through her materials – primarily a mixture of cement, iron oxide, rods and nails – she created distinctive forms that communicate the relationship between matter and void; weight and weightlessness; containment and release. Though many of her works are modest in scale, they have an immensely powerful presence. This collection of texts and images provides a range of perspectives on, and a thorough contextual overview of, Jevrić’s work from some of the UK’s most influential sculptors, alongside prominent art historians from the former Yugoslavia. It was produced in celebration of Jevrić's exhibitions at London art platforms PEER (28 June–14 September 2019) and Handel Street Projects (28 June–13 December 2019), along with the acquisition of nine of her sculptures by Tate Modern.
£18.00
Ridinghouse Bridget Riley: Eight Studies 1969-1972
£15.00
Ridinghouse Unconcealed: The International Network of Conceptual Artists, 1967–77: Dealers, Exhibitions and Public Collections
"The book is an impressive work of scholarship" – Studio International "Richard set about to produce a study of distribution networks, and achieved this through immaculate and thorough research. It is no criticism of the book to say that there are many questions left unexplored ... As scholars of the future think through these and other questions, they will remain grateful to Richard’s extraordinary and meticulous scholarship." – Mark Godfrey, Frieze Emerging in the late 1960s, conceptual art was spurred by a network of artists, dealers, curators and critics. These little-known connections are detailed for the first time in this highly significant volume. By focusing on 15 artists – including Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, Hanne Darboven and Daniel Buren – and a specific network of dealer-galleries, private and public institutions and collectors around them, author Sophie Richard documents the role of art dealers in the development of conceptual art – which ultimately led to the structure of today's art world. We learn how conceptual artworks entered private collections and public institutions, how value was conferred to them, and the distribution networks that drove these artists' success. A detailed account of artistic activity in the decade 1967–77 is accompanied by extensive and previously unpublished data, charting the exhibitions and sales of conceptual works. The relationships, support structures and strategies of dealer-galleries – such as Konrad Fischer, Wide White Space and Lisson Gallery – are revealed and make fascinating reading. Including numerous interviews with key figures of the period, 'Unconcealed' exposes the new dealing, curatorial, collecting and teaching methods formed in this decade that continue to be critical to today’s art world.
£40.50
Ridinghouse Patio and Pavilion: The Place of Sculpture in Modern Architecture
This volume examines the relationship between modern sculpture and architecture in the mid-twentieth century, an interplay that has laid the ground for the semisculptural or semiarchitectural works by architects such as Frank Gehry and artists such as Dan Graham. The first half of the book explores how the addition of sculpture enhanced several architectural projects, including Mies van der Rohe's Barcelona Pavilion (1929) and Eliel Saarinen's Cranbrook Campus (1934). The second half of the book uses several additional case studies, including Philip Johnson's sculpture court for New York's Museum of Modern Art (1953), to explore what architectural spaces can add to the sculpture they are designed to contain. The author argues that it was in the middle of the twentieth century – before sculptural and architectural forms began to converge – that the complementary nature of the two practices began clearly to emerge: figurative sculpture highlighting the modernist architectural experience, and the abstract qualities of that architecture imparting to sculpture a heightened role.
£17.95
Ridinghouse Cecily Brown The Triumph of Death
£28.80
Ridinghouse Frank Bowling: Sculpture
Frank Bowling (b.1934, Bartica, Guyana) is attracting ever-growing international recognition as an abstract painter. This is the first publication to examine Bowling’s art and ideas in relation to sculpture. Lavishly illustrated, it features an extended essay by curator Sam Cornish charting Bowling’s interactions with sculpture since the 1960s. The book asks how seeing Bowling’s sculpture, and thinking about sculpture more broadly, may extend our understanding of his pictorial language. Considering this relationship also highlights the importance of sculpture to High Modernism, from within which Bowling’s mature art emerged. Also included are an in-conversation between Allie Biswas and sculptor Thomas J. Price, and a poem dedicated to Bowling by sculptor and author Barbara Chase-Riboud.
£31.50
Ridinghouse Phillip Lai
This first monograph on Phillip Lai (b.1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) charts the artist’s sculptural development over the course of the last two decades. From a basement soy-sauce factory to the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, the publication surveys several of the artist’s exhibitions across London, Wakefield, Turin, Berlin and Hong Kong. The nine chapters explore an evolving oeuvre that finds form in materials like aluminium, pewter, concrete, resin, rice, cooking pots, textiles and film. It is through these technologies that Lai broaches the material limits of the everyday world, often working with casting processes that see the abstraction and changing stability of materials as they transition from fluid to solid. What comes into focus is a fascination with how objects can relieve or modulate primal human urges to food and water and how, by extension, a material world might be re-envisioned around concerns of depletion and survival. This publication includes an essay by critic and writer Jan Verwoert, with bilingual text in English and Chinese throughout.
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Ridinghouse Neil Gall: Drawing
This publication brings together over 60 works on paper created from 2005 to the present day by London-based artist Neil Gall (born 1967, Aberdeen), whose works balance the profound with the absurd. In works that buzz with art historical reference, Gall has consistently explored matters of perception and mimesis through the visual language of household detritus. He translates the visceral and psychological interactions between materials and their surfaces – corrugated cardboard and pressed tinfoil, ping-pong balls enshrouded in black tape – to an unsettling, surreal and sometimes erotic effect. Essays by art historian Lexi Lee Sullivan and artist Alexander Ross are augmented by thoughtful insights from gallerist George Newall and an introduction from Gall's dealers David Nolan and Aurel Scheibler.
£27.00
Ridinghouse The Crossing of Innumerable Paths: Essays on Art
Celebrated art critic and curator Guy Brett made a unique contribution to art criticism and exhibition making through his championing of experimental artists from across the world, writing seminal monographic essays on artists such as Susan Hiller, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, David Medalla, Rose English, Mona Hatoum, Takis and others. The 14 essays in this book bring together a unique gathering of artists, tracing their diversity and singularity. Many of these artists make works which arise out of their responses to the situation or the environment in which they find themselves, a process that draws on the countless interactions people have and the many ways that they connect. Brett’s writing has a unique tone – lucid and widely researched, free of a narrow academicism. He has published widely in the art press, addressing topics such as the relationship between art and life, ideas about the participation of the spectator, and the importance of a kind of visual wit to both artists and writers.
£22.50
Ridinghouse Bridget Riley: Studies 1984–95
During the mid-1980s, Riley introduced a new pictorial device, the rhomboid, to her then predominantly vertical stripes, developing her exploration of interplaying tones of green, yellow and orange. This allowed the artist to construct new visual relationships between divergent colours and forms, creating what she terms a ‘harmony of contrasts’ that animates the entire visual field. Tracking a transitional period in Riley’s career, the works on paper in this volume – studies produced between 1984 and 1995 – shift from a focus on the vertical stripe to increasingly complex diagonal compositions. Illustrated in full colour, the works are accompanied by a historic interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka and a text by Riley’s archivists Natalia Naish and Alexandra Tommasini, situating these studies in relation to major paintings produced during this period.
£18.00
Ridinghouse Stockwell Depot: 1967–79
Founded in 1967, Stockwell Depot heralded the emergence of the London artists’ studio movement and gained international recognition as a centre for abstraction in Britain. For over 25 years, this disused former brewery in south London functioned as a cooperative studio and exhibition space. Artists associated with the Depot – Roland Brener, Jennifer Durrant, David Evison, Katherine Gili, Peter Hide and Roelof Louw, among many others – held differing and often competing attitudes towards art. The ambitious work made and shown at the Depot tells the story of late modernism in Britain, tracing a period full of formal experimentation and critical debate. Incorporating interviews with 10 artists alongside a major essay by Sam Cornish, this volume is the first to examine the artists’ activities within a historical context and to track their development through the Depot’s pivotal annual exhibitions. Published to coincide with the exhibition Stockwell Depot, 1967–79 at University of Greenwich Galleries, London, 24 July–12 September 2015.
£27.00
Ridinghouse David Batchelor: The October Colouring-in Book
£12.00
Ridinghouse John Stezaker: Tabula Rasa
£12.95
Ridinghouse Bridget Riley: New Paintings and Gouaches
This volume focuses on Bridget Riley's energetic ‘curvilinear’ works from a 2006 exhibition by Bridget Riley. The paintings incorporate complex layers of flowing forms that interlock and move with one another, reflecting the artist's exploration of curves to create paintings of great energy and movement. Using a patch of colour that is similar to a brush mark, Riley’s forms interrupt and threaten to break out from the picture plane, overhanging the frame to jostle and animate the visual field. Refining and developing this form in recent paintings, the artist's work offers an incredible melding of form and colour. Featuring over 20 full-colour illustrations, this publication includes an in-depth essay by Paul Moorhouse examining the changes within Riley’s work throughout her multi-decade career.
£22.50
Ridinghouse Portraits by Kate Friend: As Chosen By...
As Chosen By… is a photographic series by Kate Friend shot exclusively on medium format film. In these portraits, her ‘sitters’ are flowers or plants, each one selected by a recognisable public figure or creative who is then recast through their botanical alter ego. Friend’s approach to the making of this series is a rigorous one: a single flower and vessel, chosen by an individual, is shot in natural light at their home, studio or garden. Each photograph is as much a portrait of a place as it is a portrait of a person and a flower. The coloured background for each image is selected by Friend, with the choice driven both by the aesthetic of the chosen flower and by a deeper intuitive sense of her sitter’s character. Although the methodology is concise and consistent, the resulting variety of images is testament to the array of unique personalities included in the project. Lavishly illustrated throughout, including many behind-the-scenes images taken by Friend throughout her process, the book features an introduction by writer Olivia Laing and an in-depth essay by Garden Museum Director Christopher Woodward. Sitters include: Anjelica Huston, Sir Paul Smith, Kulapat Yantrasast, Piet Oudolf, Luciano Giubbilei, Ai Weiwei, Claudia Schiffer, Tom Stuart-Smith, Yinka Ilori, Simone Rocha, Tania Compton, Georgie Hopton, Olivia Laing, Sue Stuart-Smith, Jamie Compton, Fernando Caruncho, Amanda Feilding, Ron Finley, Maggi Hambling, Polly Nicholson, Olivia Harrison, Dan Pearson, Penny Rimbaud, Margot Henderson, Duncan Grant, Cosey Fanni Tutti, Bethan Wood, Isabella Tree, Juergen Teller, Charlie McCormick, Molly Goddard, Jeremy Lee, Margaret Howell, Alys Fowler, John Pawson, Amanda Harlech.
£36.00
Ridinghouse Shilpa Gupta: Sun at Night
For its 34th Curve commission (2021), the Barbican presents the first major London solo exhibition by Mumbai-based artist Shilpa Gupta, whose celebrated practice explores physical and ideological boundaries and how, as individuals, we come to feel a sense of isolation or belonging. Gupta presents and builds on her acclaimed project For, In Your Tongue, I Cannot Fit (2017–18), an experiential sound installation of 100 microphones suspended above 100 metal spikes, each piercing a page inscribed with a fragmented verse of poetry by a writer who has been imprisoned for their work, writings or beliefs. Spanning the eighth to the 21st centuries, the soundscape alternates between languages, each microphone uttering verses of poetry, echoed by its 99 counterparts. Giving a voice to those who have been silenced, Gupta’s haunting installation highlights the fragility of personal expression while raising urgent questions of censorship and resistance. Gupta also presents new drawings and sculptures that reflect on issues of confinement and the right to free expression. The book includes a loose-insert postcard featuring a poem in Urdu and English by the revolutionary Pakistani poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz.
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Ridinghouse Cecily Brown: Shipwreck Drawings
These extraordinary works by Cecily Brown, of wrecked ships, frantic and prone bodies, carefully illuminate the tensions between the past and the present. Taking inspiration from Delacroix’s shipwreck paintings, as well as one of the most feted paintings in the world; Géricault’s, The Raft of the Medusa, 1818–19. In her introduction to the book, Whitworth curator Dr Samantha Lackey writes, 'These extraordinary works by Cecily Brown, of wrecked ships, frantic and prone bodies, carefully illuminate the tensions between the past and the present. Of course, these drawings also push to the forefront of our minds the images we see every day on our screens, of shipwrecked refugees attempting, and failing, to make their own sea voyages.' The exhibition 'Cecily Brown: Shipwreck Drawings' was shown at The Whitworth (University of Manchester) from 12 November 2017 to 15 April 2018.
£27.00
Ridinghouse Object Lessons: The Visualisation of Nineteenth-Century Life Sciences
"Object Lessons ... is a grand tour of the latest obsession of an indefatigable collector. For the last decade ... George Loudon has gathered some 200 extraordinary natural-history specimens, scientific models and botanical drawings from the Darwinian age. And the Boston photographer Rosamond Purcell has documented every last one of them in this thoughtfully compiled, scrapbook-style compendium." – The New York Times Style Magazine Assembling nearly 200 pieces from the collection of George Loudon, this volume encompasses a vast assortment of objects relating to nineteenth-century life sciences. Originally designed to capture the complex structures of nature, they range from books and illustrations to botanical specimens and anatomical models. Having lost most of their original pedagogical function over time, the objects are now open for contemporary reappraisal - acquiring new values that can inspire, seduce and even disorientate today’s viewer. Offering a unique perspective on the intersection of art and science, the historic curiosities in this collection reveal their creators’ remarkable capacity for artistic expression. Alongside new images by celebrated photographer Rosamond Purcell, explanatory texts on the objects by Loudon, an essay by Robert McCracken Peck, and a conversation between Loudon and art historian Lynne Cooke together offer insight into the objects’ original context and potential for new perspectives.
£31.50
Ridinghouse John Stezaker: Crossing Over
British Conceptual artist John Stezaker is renowned for his innovative approach to found photographic imagery. This artist book focuses on his 'Crossing Over' series (2005–13), which reframes image fragments from postcards to stimulate new readings. Building upon Stezaker’s corresponding 'The 3rd Person Archive' series, the image fragments in this volume span the history of postcard production. Moving from the Victorian era to the postwar period and black and white to colour imagery, Stezaker focuses on the female figure as well as notions of return and crossing back. Exploring time and memory, Crossing Over frames seemingly minor details, such as figures passing on a street corner or conversing on a park bench, as well as the marks left by the physical movement of the images themselves. Exploring time and memory, Stezaker focuses on the female figure as well as notions of return and crossing back – framing seemingly minor details such as figures passing on a street corner or conversing on a park bench, as well as the marks left by the physical movement of the images themselves. Reproduced at actual size, the 65 image fragments in this artist project are collected here for the first time.
£22.46
Ridinghouse The Space Between: Selected Writings on Art
The novelist, writer, curator and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell has written extensively for museums and galleries, along with art publications as diverse as Frieze and The Burlington Magazine, approaching visual art through its cultural context, the lens of the recent past and prolonged looking. Bracewell’s art writing focuses on detailed descriptions of works of art, expanding their interpretation to include media, politics, music, poetry and other areas of cultural production. By exploring connections between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and subcultures, while appraising the vision and ideas of individual artists, he relates their work to its broader cultural context. This collection of texts reads like a history of British art (and the UK itself) from the 1950s to the 2010s, featuring artists such as Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Gilbert & George, John Stezaker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Leigh Bowery, Glenn Brown and Damien Hirst. Each essay is accompanied by an illustration selected by Bracewell, and the publication concludes with a body of autobiographical writings.
£18.00
Ridinghouse Looking Back: Charles Harrison
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Ridinghouse John Hoyland: The Last Paintings
In the decade before his death in 2011, John Hoyland began to reckon with mortality. Confronting his own demise, he painted elegies to departed artist friends and tributes to illustrious artistic forebears. Imagery of the void looms large, but it is a void faced with defiance and vitality, less a rumination on the end than a celebration of life. This publication explores the paintings Hoyland made in this decade, including his final series, the Mysteries. Essays by Natalie Adamson, David Anfam, Matthew Collings and Mel Gooding offer a rich and multifaceted account of a complex body of work. Hoyland’s veneration of Vincent van Gogh, his connections to J.M.W. Turner, the use of black as a colour, his deployment of risk and attempts to subvert his own taste, and his development of the cosmic visual language of the Abstract Expressionists are all discussed. Richly illustrated, the book extends our understanding of Hoyland’s late work within the story of modern painting as a whole.
£31.50
Ridinghouse Christopher Le Brun: Doubles
This publication accompanied a 2018 exhibition by the British painter and printmaker Christopher Le Brun. The body of work explored here develops his long-standing interest in the ‘double’ – conceptual and embodied duality. The arresting diptychs and single paintings provide a direct continuation of his series of prints Composer (2017), which explores the musical form of distinct yet related movements and the essentially layered structure of both painting and music. Working directly on the woodcut proofs, these new oil paintings extend Le Brun’s lifelong preoccupation with colour – in his words, ‘experiencing rather than seeing a property of the world we delight in for itself’ – and represent radical experiments in the juxtaposition of colour, tone, transparency and form. The book features an essay by exhibition curator Anna Dempster exploring dualities across a number of disciplines.
£15.00
Ridinghouse Notes from the Playground
This new collection of Richard Flood's written work from over the past 40 years reveals an original and rigorous connection to the world of ideas and beauty and the critical and aesthetic experience of our present times. Drawing from his broad knowledge of history, cinema, literature, poetry, design and architecture, Flood’s writings combine the autobiographical with the theoretical, presenting an intimate understanding of renowned contemporary artists. Throughout many of the essays, Flood draws on personal correspondence between himself and the artist, including an annotated conversation with Paul Thek discussing his fabricated works of wax ‘raw meat’ facsimiles embedded in luxurious Plexiglas cases; four interviews with Robert Gober during the 1990s, offering vivid accounts of his sculptural and creative process; and a detailed description of a portrait sitting at Michael Landy’s studio. Flood’s significant essay on Arte Povera, co-authored with Frances Morris, is also reproduced, providing evidence of his ability to write in multiple ways.
£18.00
Ridinghouse Early Mondrian: Painting 1900–1905
This publication spotlights the celebrated modern artist Piet Mondrian’s early career, a prolific period that saw the artist focus on figurative landscape painting. Primarily made during the artist’s time in Amsterdam at the turn of the twentieth century, Mondrian's dense, small-scale paintings depict the surrounding Dutch landscape – notably irrigation ditches, canals and farm buildings. The compositions are characterised by complex interactions of light and dark planes, which the artist forms through thick, pigmented strokes of green and brown paint. Marking the last decade of the artist’s engagement with figurative painting, Mondrian's exploration of the interrelationships between colour and space during this period forms the basis for his subsequent abstract works, whilst reflecting the artist’s lifelong interest in nature.
£18.00
Ridinghouse About Bridget Riley: Selected Writings 1999-2016
£22.50
Ridinghouse Mondrian and Cubism: Paris, 1912–1914
Originally published in Dutch to accompany a 2014 exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (now Kunstmuseum Den Haag), this important survey of a pivotal period in the life of Piet Mondrian is now available in English. Drawn to the Cubist work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Mondrian spent two years in Paris, from 1912 to 1914, that led him to begin experimenting with an entirely original abstract style. Using a cubist palette of grey and ochre, the artist transformed the landscapes and architectural facades of his earlier figurative works into compositional structures of increasing complexity and abstraction. Upon his return to the Netherlands in 1914, the artist exhibited the 17 works he had painted during those two significant years in France. This volume maps Cubism’s influence on artists working in the Netherlands at that time, and demonstrates Mondrian’s central role in bridging the gap between the French Cubists and their Dutch contemporaries. Accompanying over 300 illustrations – including close details of key works – is a chronology by Mondrian expert Hans Janssen tracking the artist's development within the context of its time.
£20.66
Ridinghouse John Stezaker: Film Still
An overview of John Stezaker’s film still collages, this book showcases the evolution of the artist’s relationship with a specific material. Leading British collage and appropriation artist John Stezaker began his ongoing series of film still collages in 1979 – the result of a period that marked a crucial change in the direction of the artist’s work, which had previously been centered around a text-based ‘conceptualism’. The series moves with Stezaker’s changing interests, using stills from classic American-period Hitchcock films as raw material before shifting towards the undistinguishable mass of 1940s and early 1950s low-budget studio films. Featuring collages based on a combination of film still excisions and superimpositions, this ongoing series is catalogued comprehensively for the first time in this volume, which brings together Stezaker’s earliest film still collages with his most recent. Full-colour illustrations are accompanied by an essay by David Campany and a conversation between the critic and the artist. John Stezaker (b.1949, Worcester) is one of the leading artists in contemporary photographic collage and appropriation. Employing vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, travel postcards and other printed matter, Stezaker creates small-format collages that bear qualities of Surrealism, Dada and found art. Stezaker studied at the Slade School of Art and has taught at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. In 2012 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize following a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. His work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s and is held in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Arts Council England; and Tate.
£18.00
Ridinghouse John Stezaker: The Nude and Landscape
£17.95
Ridinghouse Cézanne at the Whitworth: The Karsten Schubert Bequest
This publication celebrates an extraordinary collection of drawings and prints by Paul Cézanne that has been gifted and placed on long-term loan to the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, by gallerist, collector, author and founder of Ridinghouse, Karsten Schubert. This important act of generosity means that the Whitworth now holds the best collection of Cézanne works on paper in the United Kingdom, including a version of every print produced by the artist. These works will significantly expand the research potential of the Whitworth’s important collection of late 19th-century French and Dutch drawings by artists including Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin and Pissarro – whose portrait of Cézanne is included in this publication. The book also draws together other artistic copies: Raimondi’s copy of Raphael’s Judgement of Paris and, bringing us to the present day, Michael Landy’s Cézanne Bathers. The publication features a lead essay by renowned Impressionist scholar Richard Thomson on the significance of the bequest, a biographical essay on Karsten Schubert by Richard Shone, an interview with Schubert by Yuval Etgar on the bequest, and an essay by Christopher Lloyd on how these works relate to Cézanne’s output as a draughtsman. It also includes a detailed catalogue section on all works in the exhibition, with contributions by Elizabeth Cowling, Rosalind McKever, Colin Wiggins and Edward Wouk.
£25.20
Ridinghouse Giosetta Fioroni: Alter Ego
Giosetta Fioroni is considered one of the most important figures in Italian painting of the postwar era. Her work is commonly associated with the Scuola di Piazza del Popolo group in Rome – which also included Mario Schifano, Tano Festa and Franco Angeli, among others – as well as with the advent of Pop art in Italy. Yet Fioroni’s practice differs from those of her immediate contemporaries and from the overarching notion of Pop as it came to be understood in the English-speaking world. The divergences are most clearly pronounced in her persistent exploration of femininity, rooted in both her personal experiences and her interpretation of the category in popular culture. ‘I have worked a lot, not on feminism but on femininity’, Fioroni once explained. ‘I would like to maintain a distinction. In a period of lively feminism, I was interested in the look, in the atmosphere tied to femininity.’ Giosetta Fioroni: Alter Ego is the first publication to focus on feminist perspectives in the work of Fioroni. It includes an exclusive interview with the artist conducted by Hans Ulrich Obrist and a scholarly essay by Anna Dumont on the subject of gendered looking in Fioroni’s portraits of women.
£22.50
Ridinghouse Queer St Ives and Other Stories
This first ever queer history of St Ives weaves together biography with art and social history to shine new light on a pivotal era in the development of British modernism. At its centre is the sculptor John Milne (1931–1978), who arrived in the town in 1952 to work as an assistant to Barbara Hepworth. Hidden behind 20-foot-high granite walls, Milne’s house, Trewyn, became a meeting point for queer figures from the arts as well as the scene of legendary parties. The large cast – both queer and otherwise – featured in Queer St Ives and Other Stories includes artists Francis Bacon, Alan Lowndes, Marlow Moss, Patrick Procktor, Mark Tobey, Keith Vaughan and Brian Wall; Whitechapel Art Gallery director Bryan Robertson; actors Keith Barron and Richard Wattis; potter Janet Leach; and writers Tony Warren and Richard Blake Brown. There is also the extraordinary Julian Nixon, a queer Everyman whose involvement in the group has been little explored until now. Based on original interviews and previously unpublished letters and diaries, Queer St Ives and Other Stories reveals a fascinating, previously undocumented history, adding vital new insights into the history of this fabled Cornish art colony. Publication supported by the Paul Mellon Centre.
£27.00
Ridinghouse The Outwardness of Art: Selected Writings of Adrian Stokes
"The Outwardness of Art is a single-volume compendium of some of the best words ever written by this most subtle and wide-ranging of aesthetic theorists." - Michael Glover, Hyperallergic Immensely influential, and long beloved by artists, writers and theorists alike, Adrian Stokes (1902–1972) was at once the last of the great British amateur art writers and – as the first art theorist to substantially synthesise aesthetics and psychoanalysis – among the first of the moderns. Since the publication of his groundbreaking books The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini in the 1930s, Stokes’s writing has enjoyed a readership across disciplines from psychoanalysis to literature and art. Contemporary admirers ranged from Ernst Gombrich to Dore Ashton, Ben Nicholson to Philip Guston, Ezra Pound to John Ashbery – reflecting the diverse milieus in which Stokes moved. And yet it has been nearly 45 years since a broad introduction to his work has been commercially available. In the wake of a recent biography, new critical studies and reprintings of individual books, this volume presents a substantial selection from Stokes’s published writings – including important posthumously published texts as well as his superb ballet writings of the 1920s – highlighting him as a pioneering thinker on art and a virtuoso of the essay form.
£25.20
Ridinghouse Artist, Authorship and Legacy: A Reader
Artistic authorship is fundamental to how we interpret and value artworks. The figure of the solitary, creative genius underpins the symbolic and monetary values we ascribe to artworks; yet artistic authorship, like ownership, is often contested and unstable. This interdisciplinary collection of essays, written from legal, art historical and art market perspectives, critically examines the construction and iteration of the artist-author both during the lifetime of the artist and beyond – when artistic authorship is stewarded by others, including artists’ estates, foundations and museums. Drawing on current cases and past legal disputes, this important anthology addresses enduring issues that have become central to the contemporary art world, such as the collision between artists’ rights and the rights of the owners of artworks, the problems of authentication and who has the final authority to determine authenticity, and the role of artists’ estates as legacy guardians.
£25.20