Search results for ""skira""

A photographer of the so-called Düsseldorf School, Axel Hütte trained under Bernd Becher with Thomas Struth, Thomas Ruff, Candida Hofer and Andreas Gursky. This volume presents two series of photographs. The first illustrates the author’s journey from Germany to Italy, a sort of retracing of the nineteenth-century Grand Tour: from Alpine passes surrounded by snowy summits to Apennine peaks. The second explores Venice and the interiors of some of its best-known palazzi through colour and black-and-white photographs, offering an austere and intimate picture of the lagoon city.

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Visual artist, choreographer, writer and director, Jan Fabre has been one of the most influential figures on the European scene for over twenty years. His provocative forays into all different art forms are aimed at breaking down the artistic and moral barriers of his times. Published on the occasion of the exhibition of Fabre’s works at the MAXXI in Rome, the monograph brings together, for the first time, the action art and performances of the Belgian artist from the 70s to the present: drawings, “thinking models”, collages, films, photos and other documentation that lay the groundwork for a rediscovery of dozens of Fabre’s performances and interventions, both public and private, held in Belgium and abroad. The extreme, even brazen exploration of the human body, which frequently scandalizes viewers, is linked to the idea of metamorphosis, which Fabre may have derived from that passion for the sciences he inherited from his great-grandfather, the esteemed entomologist Jean-Henri Fabre. Jan Fabre has devoted much of his career to studying the human body and its transfiguration, central themes in his work; the artist considers performance art a “per-for-a(c)tion” of the body with respect to the outer world: a way to explore its limits, actions and reactions, both inside and out.

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Through a selection of thirty works created in a twenty-year time span (1972–92), including some unpublished and never before exhibited canvases from Italian private collections, this volume offers a perspective on the expressive outcomes that marked Alberto Burri’s practice after the 1950s and 1960s, at a time in which he had already gained international critical acclaim. Cellotex, which the artist had long used as a support for his compositions, became the “work” itself. Through a gradual process of stripping down, Burri reached the basic underlying element, i.e. the material that had previously been approached in view of something else. As is the case with his more iconic cycles (such as Sacchi, Legni and Combustioni plastiche), matter here continues to be the undisputed protagonist, capable of setting the rules and fixing compositional balances.

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Taking up a book on Mohamed El Baz means attempting to better understand how an artist observes the world and learning from this. It is a question of actually breaking into the reality that is explored by an exceptional intelligence and artistic sensibility. The reader allows himself to be swept away with El Baz beyond representation into an adventure involving both the mind and the eye. This artistic process is obsessively poetic and has something of Mallarmé about it that descends into an abyss of complexity only to emerge immediately into the light and a new clarity. This oeuvre marked by tension, in refusing to submit to traditionally accepted ideas, makes accessible to the viewer the need to go beyond the narrative and fully enter that rich area of experience between social reality and emotional intuition, which enables us to produce a thought, and whose mechanisms and aesthetic issues Nadine Descendre reveals in this book. Mohamed El Baz was born in 1967 at El Ksiba, Morocco. He lives in Lille, France.

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Eleonora Abbagnato is the prima ballerina at the Opéra de Paris. This original volume reveals her artistic versatility through the photographs of four celebrated ballets. The book opens with an original interview by Valeria Crippa, journalist and ballet critic. Comprehensible to all, the ballerina’s answers outline the technical aspects of choreography, the difficulty of interpreting the score and the way in which she studies her role in each case and prepares to offer a unique and unrepeatable performance. This is the ideal gift for aspiring dancers and those who always dreamed of taking up this career.

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A masterpiece by Canaletto leads a young art historian on the trail of an unsolved mystery. A young art historian pursuing academic success. A painting by the most famous eighteenth-century painter of vedute, Canaletto. A gondola once possibly belonging to the poet Robert Browning – and who else before him? These are the key elements of the novel. When Jeremy Allyn is assigned Canaletto’s Vedute by his teacher as the topic for his dissertation – a subject many have already written about – he realizes he must find an original perspective. He therefore decides to focus on Canaletto’s figures, a secondary feature of his celebrated architectural scenes. This marks the beginning of an adventure with unexpected turns that will lead Jeremy to make some astonishing discoveries and to uncover a crime which had remained buried for centuries.

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An exquisite volume devoted to a distinguished collection of masterpieces from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Collection. This full-colour catalogue accompanies an international tour that features 70 twentieth-century paintings and sculptures from the Albright-Knox Art Gallery Collection, including masterpieces by Salvador Dalí, Edgar Degas, Paul Gauguin, Vincent Van Gogh, Frida Kahlo and many others. Rich in illustrations the volume emphasizes the remarkable vitality, salience, and subversiveness of the twentieth-century’s best art. Insightful essays by leading scholars of twentieth-century art are illustrated with archival imagery and superb works from other areas of the Albright-Knox collection.

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The first monograph on Kata Legrady’s works presenting a collection of drawings, photographs, sculptures and video-installations. Kata Legrady (Hungary 1974) belongs to that long line of artists for whom an object offers the stimulus for artistic thought. Her approach takes the form of a symbolic encounter between weapons of war and confectionery. The Smarties are used to decorate weapons so that in her hands machine guns, grenades and knives become strange and colourful, almost beautiful and appealing. The series Bombs and Candies began in 2008 and forms a corpus of great formal and conceptual coherence. At first sight there is no precise message, no hidden aspect. We are not dealing with complex and stratified arrangements of images or objects but with restrained, frontal and simplified compositions. They are carriers that, as Jeff Koons put it so well, are there “to stimulate and activate the viewer’s mental and physical state”.

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The sculptural journey of a 20th-century master whose career began in Venice in the mid-1930s. Emilio Vedova’s artistic career began in Venice in the mid-1930s. He immediately felt the deep allure of grand Venetian painting and sculpture and, guided by the restless agitation and dynamic mobility of the baroque, was soon plunged into total and extreme three-dimensional involvement. The Emilio Vedova Scultore work originates precisely from his feeling of being a living and breathing part of the beloved spaces he encountered along his way, inexhaustible sources of stimuli and incitement, which he transformed into volumetric works of sculpture, architecture, opera and theatre.

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The past, present, and future of macro-architecture and how it constructs our landscape and ways of living and interacts with new urban spaces. Back in 1999 the Xunta de Galicia called an International Architecture Competition to build the City of Culture of Galicia on Mount Gaiás in Santiago de Compostela. Twelve proposals by renowned national and international architects' studios were initially submitted to this competition for ideas. Out of all these ideas, the final project to be selected for development was the design by Eisenman Architects, as – to quote the Jury – it was, “unique both in concept and plasticity, and exceptionally in tune with the site's location”. After ten years of intensive debate within Galician society and a meticulous building process, the City of Culture of Galicia is now becoming a reality.

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So the exciting publishing adventure on this leading team on the Italian soccer scene continues. From that magical evening at the San Siro celebrating the Centenary to that heart-racing game under the pouring rain in Parma that resulted in the awarding to Inter of the 16th scudetto. Then the arrival of Mourinho and the triumph in the UEFA Super Cup thanks to a penalty, to the exciting race that ended with the winning of the fourth consecutive scudetto, the 17th in the team’s history. All this and more besides is in the official volume 101 Inter, with an abundance of extraordinary photos accompanied by texts by writers who are all great Inter fans.

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Gurholt, born 1965 in Oslo where he lives and works, studied at the Norwegian National Academy of Fine Art and at the New York University/Film School SCE. With a background in the film industry—he works as a film and music video director in addition to his artistic practice—Gurholt works with professional specialists in relevant fields, including models, lighting technicians, stylists and special-effects technicians. Gurholt is renowned for his Live Photos, site-specific photography projects that challenge the boundaries between fiction and reality. His complex, staged scenes are strongly imbued with art historical, philosophical and sociological references. In his performances, subtle narratives slowly emerge that balance a fine line between fantasy and reality

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The book analyzes the design and production of museum complexes all over the world in the last decade, and gives a critical interpretation of one of the most challenging subjects in the recent architectural panorama.

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Poetic photographs of landscapes, cityscapes, monuments and ruins together with a great diversity of people and costumes offer the reader a compelling insight into this fascinating country. A visual travelogue and a cultural portrait of a changing China. Features Beijing, Shanghai, the Yangtse River, Dali, Shangri-la, Sechuaun, Leshan and the Yellow River.

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