Search results for ""Author Kirsty Bell""

Elizabeth Peyton s work has been acclaimed since the early 1990s, when she began exhibiting her intimate portraits of artists, musicians, historical figures, and friends. This new volume, prepared by the artist in collaboration with designer Brendan Dugan, founder of Karma bookstore and gallery, presents a concentrated view of a period bookended by two exhibitions in Brussels, one in 2009 and the second in 2014, a time of introspection, and the development of a more personal painterly language. This phase of Peyton s work is about a new realism and a considered situating of her interests and passions in relation to her own working practice. We see her range expand to take in lush still lifes composed of books, flowers, and fragmentary interiors; expressive, blood-drenched scenes drawn from Richard Wagner s operas; and many magnificent and subtle portraits of peers and mentors, historical or present-day. From David Bowie to celebrated tenor Jonas Kaufmann; from Delacroix and Giorgione to Peyton s artist peers such as Matthew Barney and Klara Liden; from Friday Night Lights star Taylor Kitsch to tattoo artist Scott Campbell, as well as numerous self-portraits, her work is about narrowing the distance between the self and the object of fascination. They are people expressing what it is to be human. Most art that s any good is trying to do that trying to put a voice to feeling. And in particular, the feeling of their time, writes Peyton.

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The Undercurrents: A Story of Berlin is a dazzling work of biography, memoir and cultural criticism told from a precise vantage point: a stately nineteenth-century house on Berlin’s Landwehr Canal, a site at the centre of great historical changes, but also smaller domestic ones. When her marriage breaks down, Kirsty Bell – a British-American writer, in her mid-forties, adrift – becomes fixated on the history of her building and of her adoptive city. Taking the view from her apartment window as her starting point, she turns to the lives of the house’s various inhabitants, to accounts penned by Walter Benjamin, Rosa Luxemburg and Gabriele Tergit, and to the female protagonists in the works of Theodor Fontane, Irmgard Keun and Rainer Werner Fassbinder. A new cultural topography of Berlin emerges, one which taps into energetic undercurrents to recover untold or forgotten stories beneath the city’s familiar narratives. Humane, thought-provoking and moving, The Undercurrents is a hybrid literary portrait of a place that makes the case for radical close readings: of ourselves, our cities and our histories.

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Nature or culture? Nature and culture? The Swedish artist Henrik Håkansson walks a tightrope between these two poles. He brings them together, allows them to intermingle, collide with each other, and yet remain distinct. His latest work represents a kind of culmination of this process. This book follows and extends an exhibition at KODE Art Museum and Composer Homes in Bergen in Norway, where a tree has been dried out and dissected into 101 parts, to be put on display like a forest of sculptures. The natural entity becomes a work of art as a shared, fragmented environment. The publication captures a special atmosphere of meditative calm and vibrant diversity of meaning, and connects the Bergen piece to a selection of earlier works.

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A revealing exploration of Edward Hopper’s inspired relationship to New York City through his paintings, drawings, prints, and never-before-published archival materials This engaging book delves into the iconic relationship between Edward Hopper (1882–1967) and New York City. This comprehensive look at an essential aspect of the revered American artist’s life reveals how Hopper’s experience of New York’s spaces, sensations, and architecture shaped his vision and served as a backdrop for his distillations of the urban experience. During sidewalk strolls and elevated train rides, Hopper sketched the city’s many windowed facades. Exterior views gave way to interior lives, forging one of Hopper’s defining preoccupations: the convergence of public and private. These permeable walls allowed Hopper to evoke the perplexing awareness of being alone in a crowd that is synonymous with modern urban life. Drawing on the vast resources of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the largest repository of Hopper’s work, and the recently acquired gift of the Sanborn Hopper Archive, this book features more than 300 illustrations and fresh insight from authoritative and emerging scholars.Distributed for the Whitney Museum of American ArtExhibition Schedule:Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (October 19, 2022–March 5, 2023)

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The title seems to announce a comprehensive encyclopedia: from A to Z, each and every object or material has the potential to become an element in one of Alexandra Bircken’s charged objects and installations. Whether it’s packaging materials, machine parts, or bones, everything finds a use—the organic as well as the inorganic, raw materials and industrially produced goods. The constant reference point in her artistic explorations is the human body and its contradictory relationship to the environment, as defenselessly at its mercy as it is dependent on it. This catalogue is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of Bircken’s sculptural practice from all creative periods, which here enter into a dialogue that explores the artist's multi-layered statements on surface, body, movement, shell, and skin.

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The title seems to announce a comprehensive encyclopedia: from A to Z, each and every object or material has the potential to become an element in one of Alexandra Bircken’s charged objects and installations. Whether it’s packaging materials, machine parts, or bones, everything finds a use—the organic as well as the inorganic, raw materials and industrially produced goods. The constant reference point in her artistic explorations is the human body and its contradictory relationship to the environment, as defenselessly at its mercy as it is dependent on it. This catalogue is the first to provide a comprehensive overview of Bircken’s sculptural practice from all creative periods, which here enter into a dialogue that explores the artist's multi-layered statements on surface, body, movement, shell, and skin.

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