Search results for ""Author Michael Archer""

This accessible overview is invaluable for the way in which it makes coherent sense of the often-bewildering diversity of styles, forms, media, techniques, and agendas that proliferate in contemporary art. Extensively revised and expanded since it was first published, Michael Archer’s acclaimed book is brought fully up to date in this new edition through the addition of a new chapter on developments in contemporary art since 2000. Art Since 1960 remains an indispensable source of information on the evolution of art over the past five-and-a-half decades.

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This refreshing and clear-eyed overview of modern and contemporary art is the first to focus on how, from Impressionism forward, the principles of composition have consistently been redefined by artists in startling and exciting ways.While the concept of composition dates back to ancient Egypt and Greece, its use is continually evolving. Ideas around balance, hierarchy, and negative space developed over time to embrace the rule of thirds, linear perspective, and other means of making a piece of art visually appealing.This refreshing overview takes as its starting point a revolution in art that sent ideas around composition in completely different directions. In five beautifully illustrated chapters, one of the world’s foremost art historians shows how artists have been using new sets of tools and ideas to navigate the world—from Manet’s revolutionary brushwork and Ukiyo-e artists’ use of asymmetry and movement; to Muybridge’s experiments in motion photography and Nam June Paik’s embrace of video and electronic media.Filled with enlightening discussions of major and lesser-known artists from the optical revolution of the nineteenth century to contemporary twenty-first century concerns, this book thrillingly and precisely maps how scientific, technological and social advances have changed the way artists see reality; the way they view their subjects; and how they tell their stories.

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The rules of composition have changed. Discover the new ideas that shape the art we make today. Art has changed beyond recognition since the principles of harmonious composition were established in classical times. From the invention of photography to the digital revolution, technological and social advances have transformed the way we see the world. This new vision, influenced by changing attitudes not least towards gender roles and the West's colonial history, is reflected in the art we make.From the rejection of Western compositional orthodoxy by artists such as Édouard Manet, Vincent van Gogh and Mary Cassatt to the revolutionary practices of Jean- Michel Basquiat, Tania Bruguera, Meleko Mokgosi and many others, acclaimed art critic and writer Michael Archer reveals the ideas and intentions behind a thrillingly diverse selection of artworks, giving readers a new set of tools for understanding art today.

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Mona Hatoum creates events, videos, sculptures and installations that relate to the body, to language and to the condition of exile. Her most famous work Corps Etranger, first shown at the Tate Gallery when she was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1995, takes the viewer on a journey through the inner passages of the artist's body.Her audience is thrown into a dimension in which anything is possible, as in The Light at the End, which lures viewers down a long tunnel towards a light that will literally burn them. While her video work is often visceral and emotive, her sculptures and environments are ultra cool and minimal in their aesthetic. They often mimic domestic or institutional furniture, yet their designs and materials have a threatening edge. Exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum's works are at the same time powerful evocations of statelessness, anxiety, denial and otherness.Since Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the 1970s, she has exhibited her work around the world, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris and the Venice Biennale. This book surveys all her work, ranging from early performances, through to her videos, objects and full-scale environments.The distinguished art critic Guy Brett, author of Through Our Own Eyes: Popular Art and Modern History (1986), explores key themes around a sense of place, the body and communication that emerge from Hatoum's range of work. The artist describes a chronology of practice in conversation with Michael Archer, writer, curator and co-founder of London's Audio Arts sound archive. Director of the Kanaal Art Foundation Catherine de Zegher makes a complex and provocative analysis of Recollection, a work she commissioned for a sixteenth-century beguinage. Hatoum has chosen a text by the influential Palestinian author Edward Said as well as a statement from the noted Italian post-war sculptor and performance artist Piero Manzoni. The book also includes Hatoum's own notes, statements and interviews.

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The definitive survey of Keith Tyson's thirty-year career. British Turner Prize-winning artist Keith Tyson is known for a distinctive and diverse body of work including drawing, painting, installation and sculpture. Showing a wide range of influences, from mathematics and science through to poetry and mythology, he is interested in how art emerges from the combination of information systems and physical processes that surround us every day. For over thirty years, Tyson has probed, dissected, explored and questioned reality. Not fixed to one artistic style, Tyson sets out to challenge himself and the audience, whilst working with diverse materials – paint, clay, metal, resin – to question our knowledge of the world we perceive as real, and art’s role in representing it. With newly commissioned texts from an internationally diverse array of writers, and including a previously unpublished interview with the artist, this is the definitive survey of one of the most restless and adventurous creators working today.

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A revised and expanded edition of one the most popular titles in the Contemporary Artists Series Born in Lebanon, Palestinian artist Mona Hatoum was exiled to London, where she has lived and worked since the mid-1970s. Through performance, video, sculpture, and installation, she creates architectonic spaces that relate to the body, language, and the condition of exile as well as transforming everyday, domestic objects into things foreign, threatening, and dangerous. Often exquisitely beautiful, Hatoum’s works combine states of emotion and longing with the formal simplicity of Minimalism, creating powerful evocations of displacement, denial, and otherness.

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For most of the past 300 million years, the world's continents were interlinked as the supercontinents Pangaea and then Gondwana. Around 50 million years ago, Australia tore itself free from Antarctica to become the huge, splendidly isolated island it is today. Over time, its creatures began to evolve in ways not seen anywhere else on Earth, with tree-climbing crocodiles, gigantic venomous lizards, walking omnivorous bats and flesh-eating kangaroos roaming the continent. Prehistoric Australasia: Visions of Evolution and Extinction presents some of the most extraordinary creatures the world has ever seen – all unique to Australia, New Guinea, New Zealand and their surrounding islands.Over 100 meticulously painted panoramas by palaeoartist Peter Schouten are accompanied by descriptions of the unique environments and features of these animals, written by four of Australia's foremost palaeontologists. This book explores the nature and timing of extinction events in the Southern Hemisphere, considers whether some of these losses might be able to be reversed, and how we can use the fossil record to help save today's critically endangered species.Through stunning artwork and fascinating text, Prehistoric Australasia brings this globally unique transformation over time to glorious, colourful life.Features Offers fascinating glimpses into the prehistoric past of Australia, New Zealand and New Guinea. More than 100 paintings showcasing the changing biotas of Australasia over the last 3.6 billion years. Reveals the unique features of prehistoric animals and the environments where they lived.

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