Search results for ""Five Continents Editions""

This catalogue for the 5th Art Brut Biennial at the Collection de l’Art Brut in Lausanne highlights the museum’s holdings with a focus on the subject of belief. In a wide range of mediums, the show reveals the particular link between Art Brut and Outsider artists, religion, and the occult. The subjects of these works include deities, saints, religious figures, as well as abstract compositions, symbolist paintings, and ritual objects. With their diverse and original representations of belief, these artists transcend the often difficult conditions of their lives.

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“As an artist, I look for beauty in things, and appreciate the unusual.” - Ceil Pulitzer Ceil Pulitzer started her journey as a collector of African art more than 30 years ago. Her artistic spirit has drawn her to all forms of culture and human expression. As a dedicated painter, she has relentlessly exercised her eye in the study of art and art history. As a collector of modern art first, she understood that African art shaped the trajectory of 20th-century art. Later, in Paris, she met the venerable expert and legendary dealer of African art, Charles Ratton. In one brief meeting, he said to her: “You have a good eye.” This encounter distilled her passion and pursuit of excellence in classical African art. The Ceil and Michael Pulitzer Foundation has developed and supported a number of philanthropic endeavours in Africa, and in major institutions that promote the art of Africa and humanitarian efforts there.

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Giada Ripa’s photos form an itinerary of landscapes traversing Italy, North to South, focusing on five regions: Friuli, Lombardy, Tuscany, Abruzzo, and Sicily. This account is not limited to a photographic album; rather, it calls upon champions from each area who, through engaging interviews, describe the positive impact on its territory of the commitment of an important local business. Concrete examples of this cooperation are the environmental revival carried out in the Prealpi Giulie Nature Reserve in Friuli, the conservation of local species of flowers carried out with the cooperation of the Botanical Gardens in Palermo, and stretches of land made available and leased free of charge. Thus, The Thin Line represents a hope, but also an awareness of the territory and of those who not only inhabit it now, but will come to inhabit it in the future. Text in English and Italian

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Secrecy is the common feature of the so-called allo kafii gida Qur'anic writing boards used by the Hausa of northern Nigeria. While on the one hand their owners share a barely concealed reluctance to reveal the auspicious epigrams decorating these artefacts, on the other they exhibit a clear desire to avoid displaying images of animals and human beings that might cause repercussions in an iconoclastic Islamic context. One need only consider that even today possessing an allo kafii gida incurs severe punishment by the most fervent Moslems, sometimes extending to the death penalty. Every board in this book would have been destroyed by Islamic fundamentalists if it had not somehow been saved at some time in the past. Those who made the decorations embellishing these Qur'anic tablets were not simply illustrators; they were nothing short of troubadours, painting on wooden panels the tales depicting the cosmic connections of the society in which they lived. Over the years, the cosmic ideas of distant foreign lands were incorporated in the Hausas' system of thought and these allo kafii gida have thus turned into cosmological time capsules impressed on wooden panels. In view of this challenging cultural context, the owners of these artworks can be described as 'curators' of these secret boards, which, in spite of serving the Islamic religion, actually record Hausa cosmology. The artefacts adorning the book are truly unique in the field of extra-European art and come from a private collection built over a period of twenty years of painstaking research.

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This gorgeous book highlights seventy works from an important private collection built over more than four decades with discipline, curiosity, and passion. It is one of the finest private collections of African art from West and Central Africa, through South Africa and Madagascar. Conceived around four main themes - Governance and transmission, Protection and caring, Coming together (celebrating, partying, judging and praising), Serving and beautifying - this selection offers a capacious general introduction to the topic of African art and furthers our understanding of the artworks' source cultures. The beautiful photographs of the seventy works in the first part of the publication are followed by a whole chapter dedicated to some important avant-garde photography masterpieces showing the narrow relationship between this movement and nine fascinating African art works belonging to the collection. The objects are shown side by side with renown works from Alfred Stieglitz, Man Ray, Lajos Kassák, Hannah Höch, Erwin Blumenfeld, Maurice Tabard, Karl Blossfeldt and Robert Doisneau. Striking a balance between often published and lesser-known masterpieces from the collection, the present volume unveils to the public a selection of seven contemporary artist-photographers (Jean Marc Tingaud, Louis Tirilly, Nicolas Bruant, Roger Ballen, Groupe Street Collodion Art, Coco Fronsac, and Frédéric Vidal) who have been asked to represent, in a contemporary and personal style, for the first time, nine renowned works. Text in English and French.

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This book is the first important monograph dedicated to the work of Pablo Reinoso, a Franco-Argentinian artist and designer, a curious and largely self-taught jack of all trades. Technically a sculptor, but actually an artist through and through, Pablo Reinoso has been exploring multifarious artistic avenues from an early age. Part-French, through his mother, he left his native Argentina in 1978 and settled in Paris, where he worked on his art. He produces his works in series - Articulations (1970-80), Water Landscapes (1981-86), The Discovery of America (1986-89), Breathing Sculptures (1995-2002) - which he chops up and rummages through as he explores new worlds and different materials, translating the permanent work in progress which is his way of thinking. An increasing maturity is evident in Ashes to Ashes (2002), a work in which he twists and splits wooden boards in an attempt to rid them of their function. Continuing in the same vein, but having in the meantime held important positions as an artistic director and designer in large companies, Reinoso began a new series in 2004 highlighting an icon of industrial design, the Thonet chair. He then turned his attention to the seemingly anonymous public benches found in all cultures throughout the world - objects that for this very reason are timeless and beyond fashion. The results are his so-called Spaghetti Benches (begun in 2006), which have multiplied and found their place in the most unlikely corners. In his very latest series, Scribbling Benches (started in 2009), Reinoso no longer takes an anonymous bench, nor an iconic chair, as his point of departure, but a steel girder. The work plays on the unexpectedness of a solid, heavy object, a key structural component in architecture, that is made to twist like a piece of wire and turn into a bench suggesting airy, transparent, contemplative spaces.

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The mysterious beauty of Punu masks and the artistic culture of Gabon are presented in a detailed and engaging book accompanied by numerous full-colour illustrations. Accompanying a major travelling exhibition, this ambitious volume showcases more than 4,000 years of Peruvian art in approximately 350 diverse, exciting works. A large selection of pre-Columbian treasures, along with masterpieces dating from the colonial era and striking modern paintings and sculptures produced during the first half of the twentieth century, offer new perspectives on the rich cultural identity of the country. In this richly illustrated reference book, more than twenty international contributors explore the mythologies and rituals of ancient Andean civilisations; their perpetuation, concealment, or hybridisation with Catholicism during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries; and the rediscovery and valorisation of Peruvian popular traditions and faiths in the twentieth century.

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The story of British design told through works selected from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Great Britain was the birthplace of the Industrial Revolution and the epicentre of the development of modern industrial design. This book - the fourth volume in the MoMA Design Series featuring works in the Museum's collection - explores this legacy, tracing the growth of British design from the eighteenth century to the Millennium Dome and beyond. In its more than two-hundred-year scope, British Design explores the Arts and Crafts Movement, the Spitfire and Hurricane fighter planes of World War II, the Mini car and Dyson vacuum cleaner, the 'Cool Britannia' cultural explosion in the late 1990s, and British designers' take on the digital devices that define entertainment and communication in the early twenty-first century. An introduction by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator of Architecture and Design at the Museum of Modern Art, provides an overview of design culture in Great Britain; an essay and timeline by Hugh Aldersey-Williams, curator, former design critic for The New Statesman, and author of World Design and New American Design, illuminates the masterpieces of modern British design superbly reproduced in the volume's plate section.

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This project grew out of the artist's fervent desire to live in close contact with the sea. To this end, Pradelli chose to move to these islands off the Sicilian coast (Lipari, Vulcano, Salina, Filicudi, Alicudi, Panarea, Stromboli) during the winter, when the light is brighter and clearer. These are not the summer Eolians, but islands shrouded in an atmosphere of profound, silent calm, with only the hiss of the sea and the unsettling rumble of the volcanoes. The project was not to produce a photographic record of the islands, but to register a personal visual journey, in which Pradelli identifies with the places themselves, feeling their pulse and portraying them in their changing moods. Pradelli has included only two human figures in his portraits of the islands: Turi the fisherman and Angela, whose simple gestures manage to encapsulate the very essence of life itself. He has chosen to work in black-and-white so as to be able to stress the powerful geometry of the landscape and the faces and in order to highlight the contrast between the white of the sky and the fire and the black of the sea and the land.

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Antonio (1431/1432-1498) and Piero (1441/1442-after 1485) del Pollaiuolo have always enjoyed a certain notoriety and, together with Verrocchio, Botticelli, and Ghirlandaio, occupy a central place in all books about Florentine art at the time of Lorenzo the Magnificent. However, the image we now have of these two bold artists, the sons of a chicken vendor in the old market of Florence, is rather misty. It is generally thought that Piero, ten years younger than his brother, was merely an assistant to the multi-talented Antonio, who excelled in disciplines as various as painting, sculpture, silver and gold work, and architecture.This view is attributable to Vasari but fails to correspond to the respect in which both artists were held at the time and probably deserves to be reconsidered. The almost total disappearance of brooches, necklaces, cups, bowls, candlesticks, crosses, incense-burners, chalices, and reliquaries made of gold, silver, enamel, and precious stones created by Antonio has greatly harmed the reputation of this highly talented artist. These objects are all documented, but they were all at some stage melted down and their precious materials reused (a common fate for many pieces of gold and silver plate). The visionary and dramatic imagination of the man Florence proudly remembered at his death, calling him 'our citizen, a famous sculptor of unrivalled skill in his art,' is displayed especially by the two bronze tombs of Pope Sixtus IV and Pope Innocent VIII in St. Peter's and by a wonderful body of drawings. In these autograph sheets, Antonio's sure line, precise as a scalpel, gives birth to a race of fabulous heroes with superhuman build, chests expanded to the utmost, lithe and elastic arms and legs: gladiators, archers, musclemen, martyrs. The two funerary monuments in the Vatican, which amazed the artist's contemporaries, mark the highpoint of Antonio's career. One of his most impressive works is the highly original tomb designed for Sixtus IV, a great bronze creation covered with panels containing allegorical figures that was designed to fit into the chapel the Pope himself had built for the purpose, decorating it with ancient porphyry columns and frescoes by Perugino. It is no surprise that such a masterpiece of bombastic commemorative intent should have been commissioned by the dead Pope's nephew, Giuliano della Rovere, who as Pope Julius II in turn engaged Michelangelo to design a tomb for him that would surpass even his uncle's in inventive magnificence.

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These previously unpublished images of New York's waterfront are presented here as part of a unique editorial project: the iconographic perspective is analysed and discussed in Pauline Vermare’s interview with Sophie Fenwick, and finds further literary development in the photographer’s poetry, on which she started working during the pandemic and is used here to accompany the visual narrative. The language of photography is used here — in a series of black and white and colour shots — to retrace the memory of a transformation and to express the urgency of documentation that in these pages evolves from personal to universal. The invitation to travel voiced by Fenwick is visual poetry articulated in a series of pictures, each of which possesses the potential to become a true icon. Text in English and French.

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The volume Nicolas Party | L’Heure Mauve collects a vast visual epic in which Party plays a variety of roles, sometimes impersonating the artist, others the scenographer, the conservator, or the sculptor. His work, and the title of the show, are inspired by L’Heure Mauve, a piece created in 1921 by the Canadian painter Ozlas Leduc that highlights the different interpretations given to the relationship between man and nature throughout the history of art. The result is a constantly changing natural environment: it can be a place full of danger and catastrophe, a territory to be conquered, an expanse disseminated with ancient ruins, or even silences where there are no traces of human presence. Nature finally becomes the theatre for the Anthropocene, its connection with humanity by now inextricable, and the passing of time and the finiteness of existence make way for a feeling of melancholy. Our artist interrogates the world’s image, and he does so by dialoguing very concretely with the spaces and the works belonging to the collection of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. The present volume reflects this personal evolution by employing a unique graphic framework and a packaging that is as precious as its contents. Text in English and French.

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This monograph on Susanna Bauer presents the artist''s work to an international audience for the first time in book form. The essential ingredients of Bauer''s artistic production are the ephemeral natural elements that she encounters during walks and hikes in the South-West of the UK where she lives and works. They are leaves, stones, twigs... elements that become the heart of more elaborate creations rendered with crochet - sometimes used conventionally as a decoration, other times as a sculptural means of communication. Bauer''s leaves are airy sculptures in which the artist pursues a balance between strength and fragility. Nature becomes a metaphor for humanity: the artfully interwoven threads remind us that we are all part of a vaster network and therefore generators of connections. But it also stands for life: viewing these works it is impossible not to reflect on the confluences of beauty and vulnerability, resistance and transformation.The theme of the relationship be

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When the American art world turned toward abstract art and action painting, Francis Cunningham remained focused on figurative art and the human form. His interest never waned. This book chronicles his development over an astonishing seven decades. Presented in a nonlinear order, the arc of his work is there for the discerning eye to see. Landscapes, still life, and human forms are interrelated. Cunningham’s work reveals the connection between abstraction and representation. Their coexististence is the material and subject of this book, disclosing a new understanding of American painting by a living artist. Accompanying over 180 high quality reproductions, the artist's many facets are explored in essays by art historians and art critics, including Christopher Knight, Edward Lifson, John Walsh, and Valentina De Pasca, as well through the reminiscences of one of his life models, Regina Hawkins-Balducci. Cunningham attended the Art Students League of New York, where he studied drawing and anatomy with Robert Beverly Hale and painting with Edwin Dickinson. He became an influential master instructor, cofounding the New Brooklyn School of Life Drawing, Painting and Sculpture (1977-1983) and the New York Academy of Art in 1983. At his current age of 90, he continues to paint in his studio in Manhattan and in the rural western part of Massachusetts, known as the Berkshires. This is the first monograph devoted to his work.

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One of the first people in Europe to consider the gifts which the Aztec ruler Montezuma gave to Hérnan Cortés as works of art was Albrecht Dürer: 'Nothing I have yet seen has given me such joy as the objects brought to the king from the new gold countries [...] Some pieces display an extraordinary skill; I have been astonished by the ingenuity of the inhabitants of those far distant lands,' he wrote. It was 1520 and those works had been sent to Brussels. The five centuries that have passed since the beauty of these objects was first noticed seem not to have been enough for the ancient cultures of Latin America to be fully understood. This catalogue of pre-Columbian art is a fresh attempt to examine and come to terms with artworks produced by a section of mankind that came to the attention of Europeans only after the voyages of Columbus and other explorers. It illustrates the collection of pre-Columbian art of Giancarlo and Inti Ligabue, one of the few collections of its kind in Italian hands: over 150 pieces from Mesoamerica and South America, an extraordinary corpus of objects which give testament to the excellence achieved by ancient artists. But it also tells the story of certain rare objects which belonged to the Medici Collection, one of Europe's greatest treasures. Among these are two atlatls, spear-throwers covered in gold-leaf from the Aztec or Mixtec cultures, a Taíno necklace dating from the fourteenth or fifteenth century, and a Teotihuacan stone mask. These objects are accompanied by pieces from private European collections and a number of significant artworks from the Quai Branly Museum in Paris. Essays by leading scholars and archaeologists, such as C. Phillips, C.F. Baudez, J.M. Hoppan, J.J. Leyenard, F. Kauffmann Doig, C. Cavatrunci, D. Domenica, and M. Polia, weave both scientific and humanistic interpretations of Amerindian thought. The Giancarlo and Inti Ligabue Collection of masterpieces of ancient Latin American cultures is part of a huge and broad-ranging hoard of objects gathered over a period of almost fifty years.

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Who is Samantha McEwen?Who is this Anglo-American artist born in 1960 in London, about whom Keith Haring declares in one of his interviews: When I arrived in New York, I spent my time at school (School of Visual Arts). Everything was new and exciting. I was 20 years old. In my drawing class, I was immediately drawn to a girl named Samantha McEwen. Samantha remembers: He sat in front of me and said: Can I draw you?'Who is this artist, still relatively unknown to this day, who also models for Francesco Clemente and Alex Katz? In the 1980s, Samantha McEwen was one of the few women to exhibit twice in the famous Tony Shafrazi Gallery. She also participates in numerous group exhibitions alongside the leading artists of that flamboyant decade. However, very few texts exist about her work; art critics are mainly men who write about men. In the numerous articles of the art press on these exhibitions, her name is merely mentioned and rarely accompanied by a few lines. A revealing

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This volume is one of three companion catalogues to an exhibition taking place simultaneously at three venues in Rome on the large-scale projects of Pier Paolo Pasolini. They explore a theme dear to Pasolini — sacredness — with a multidisciplinary approach that will shed a light on his main characteristics as a poet, writer, director, and artist and on the cultural influence he wielded. This catalogue for the exhibition at the Palazzo Barberini connects a selection of paintings from the Gallerie Nazionali as well as other national and international museums to photographs, audio samples, and texts linked to Pasolini. It investigates what we may call “Pasolinian imagery” by focusing on a series of questions, such as: What is Pasolini’s influence on today’s visual culture? To what extent are our observations of past works, their interpretation, and the impressions they elicit indebted to a manner of seeing, an “optical subconscious” of sorts, that Pasolini’s aesthetics and ideology contributed to shaping? Text in English and Italian.

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Italian artist Ugo Rondinone was invited by the Musee d'Art et d'Histoire (MAH) in Geneva to curate a show that invites a dialogue between his work and the works in the permanent collection. The show he created centres around two emblematic figures of 19th and 20th century Swiss art Felix Vallotton and Ferdinand Hodler - and considers the importance of love and desire in our relationship with art and creation. This book documents the museum's halls and the exhibition, which includes works by Rondinone and art from the MAH Collection.Text in English and French.

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The volume Singular Spaces II completes the comprehensive and groundbreaking study of art environments created by self-taught artists from across Spain, documented by Jo Farb Hernández, director emerita of the world’s most important archives on these monumental sites. It introduces and examines 99 artists and their intriguing and idiosyncratic sculptures, homes, and gardens, most of which have never been thoroughly documented or previously published; the author has cast a wide net to ensure all regions of Spain are represented, as are all kinds of spaces assembled with all kinds of materials. These sites are developed organically, without formal architectural or engineering plans: they are at once evolving and complete. Often highly fanciful and quixotic, the work is frequently characterised by incongruous juxtapositions, the result of a dynamic approach to creation that may appear impulsive and spontaneous. But these artists and their works have much to teach us about the process of creation and also about the confidence to undertake a path radically different from the one they had followed during the prime of their working lives. Hernández combines detailed case studies of the artists and their work with contextualised historical and theoretical references to a broad range of interlocking fields, including art, art history, anthropology, vernacular architecture, Spanish area studies, and folklore, complemented with compelling visuals of each of the artists and their artworks. Breaking down the standard compartmentalisation of genres, she reveals how most creators of art environments, building within their own personal spaces, fuse their creations with their daily life in a way generally unmatched in any other circumstances of making art, thus in the process providing an open self-reflection of their life and concerns. The universality of the need to create, and the issues that are confronted when one does so in a public and non-sanctioned way, are relevant to art and artists worldwide.

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This volume is one of three companion catalogues to an exhibition taking place simultaneously at three venues in Rome on the large-scale projects of Pier Paolo Pasolini. They explore a theme dear to Pasolini — sacredness — with a multidisciplinary approach that will shed a light on his main characteristics as a poet, writer, director, and artist and on the cultural influence he wielded. This is the catalogue for the show at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni, which is devoted to face, voice, costume, Pasolini’s relationship with women, and mockery. Text in English and Italian.

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This volume documents the show The Song of the Stars, a solo exhibition of paintings by French artist Fabienne Verdier (b.1962) at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. Her work is presented alongside ancient and modern art in the museum’s permanent collection, creating a kind of dialogue between the two. The central body of work reproduced here, Rainbows, was inspired by the range of colour and the aura of light in the Issenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald, one of the highlights of the museum’s holdings. In 66 works in the Rainbows series, Verdier reflects on the depiction of death no longer seen as an ending but rather as a trace of energy that is released for the living. The connection between man and cosmos, and the vital energy of the universe, is the theme at the heart of this work. Text in English and French.

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Maria Lai (1919-2003), the influential Sardinian artist whose work draws on the rich history and traditions of her native land, created multimedia works that explore community, religion, and folklore. This book, the catalogue for a show in Sardinia, presents nearly 70 works, most previously unseen, related to the extraordinary Via Crucis (Way of the Cross) series that Maria Lai created in 1981 and which she donated to the parish of Ulassai, her birthplace. Maria Lai’s artistic endeavour is strongly defined by a mix of secular and religious spirituality: the work presented in this volume reveal her idea of “making art” as something that must respond to the essential questions of mankind and the meaning of existence.

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This stunning 2-volume set introduces the Geneva-based Fondation Gandur’s collection of classical antiquities gathered over the past 40 years by founder Jean Claude Gandur. These two volumes are complementary: The first volume investigates the subject of ancient religion by observing images of idols, goddesses, gods, and devotees, and through them related rituals and religious practices; while the second focuses on especially exquisite objects, luxurious trifles known since ancient times as deliciæ. These two volumes interact with each other, forming a whole that offers a sparkling view of Greek-Roman antiquity, from Italy to the Roman Orient of the Later Empire, through archaic Cyprus, classical Greece, and Hellenistic Egypt.

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The inhabitants of Italian artist Maria Lai’s hometown of Ulassai live surrounded by mountains and a theatre of rocks, far from Sardinia’s famous coastline. This book documents Lai’s best-known large-scale collective art project, Legarsi alla Montagna (Bound to the Mountain) which took place over 3 days beginning on September 8th, 1981. Harkening back to a Sardinian legend of a young girl saved from death by chasing a blue ribbon out of a cave, the artist convinced the residents of Ulassai to tie their homes and the mountain together with 17 miles of blue ribbon. A symbolic act of communal unity, the process was tempered by personal conflicts and ancient family feuds, resulting in ribbon that was knotted (for friendship), wrapped tightly (for conflict), or hung with bread (for love). This combination of land art, performance art, and sculpture was captured at the time by renowned photographer Piero Berengo Gardin, in images that the artist has worked with watercolours and markers. Art historian Elena Pontiggia has contributed the text. Text in English and Italian.

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This second book in the Aboriginal Arts and Knowledge series documents a body of work created cooperatively by 4 artists: Ted Egan Tjangala, Dinny Nolan Tjampitjinpa, Johnny Possum Tjapaltjarri and Albie Morris Tjampitjinpa. Wamulu, a yellow flower, has traditionally been used during ritual ceremonies in the western desert of Australia. The wamulu flower is gathered, dried, cut up, and mixed with ochre and binders before being applied to the ground. This catalogue for an exhibition at the Fondation Opale showcases an exceptional project that took place near Alice Springs between 2002 and 2005, where this collective of artists used paint made from the wamulu flower, which is most often associated with impermanence, to create contemporary and permanent works of art. At the same time, they honoured the traditional Aboriginal process of communal performance, participation, and song that emphasises the link between the present and the past. Includes an interview with the noted Aboriginal art expert Arnaud Serval, who facilitated the work of the collective. Text in English and French.

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Why are these specific artworks the subject of this first monograph? Produced in 2018, the sumptuous paintings, aa is the Kulata Tjuta Kupi Kupi installation, are collaborative artworks. They are reminiscent of the collaborative production process of art in Aboriginal Australia. These major works, in which a variety of Dreaming stories that define the region converge, form cornerstones of the collection that lies at the heart of the Fondation Opale. The Fondation Opale, and its founder and driving force Berengere Primat, has a particularly strong and active relationship with the art centres and the artists of that region of Australia. Several journeys were made to the APY lands in Central Australia. Both paintings, to which respectively several senior women and men collaborated, were commissioned by Berengere Primat and the painting process abundantly documented. These magisterial paintings are testimony to the continuum of culture and intimate knowledge of the land through art. Kupi Kupi, an iteration of the ongoing Kulata Tjuta (many spears in the Pitjantjatjara language) initiated in 2010, is a contemporary and monumental art installation consisting of 1500 spears. It is a metaphor for contemporary Anangu society and the unpredictable direction in which it is moving. All these artworks are testimony to the renewal and relevancy of Aboriginal art in contemporary times. Text in English and French.

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This photographic narrative by Luigi Spina reveals unexpected treasures that hail from Pompeii and Ercolano, hidden from the public eye and concealed under the roofs of the National Archaeological Museum in Naples. Spina's collection of black and white photographs gives the reader a glimpse of the bronze, glass, ceramic, and terracotta artefacts such as candle sticks, decorations, handles, statues, pots, oil lamps - and even charred bread, that fill the cells in this Neapolitan institution. Text in English and Italian.

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Maria Lai (Ulassai, September 27, 1919 - Cardedu, April 16, 2013) is without doubt one of the leading figures in the history of contemporary Italian art. Not only on account of the content of her works, but also thanks to the diversity of her artistic approach, ranging as it does across many media - public art, embroidery, weaving, sculpture, drawing, and writing: all are grist for her poetics. The book is published to coincide with the exhibition at the MAXXI Museum in Rome, which is presenting to the general public over one hundred works by the Sardinian artist, from the early 1960s to her very last works, and explores the various themes dear to the artist with the contributions of experts in their fields: the locations, the creation, and publication of art books, her public art events and her relationship with the written word and her own writing. Her entire oeuvre is distinguished by its powerful visual impact, revealing a 'way of doing art' that is nothing other than an instrument of thought. The book's structure reflects the exhibition's own sections, arranged by theme, whose titles are paradigmatic of Lai's oeuvre as a whole: Essere è tessere. Cucire e ricucire; L'arte è il gioco degli adulti. Giocare e raccontare; Disseminare e condividere; Il viaggiatore astrale. Immaginare l'altrove; L'arte ci prende per mano. Incontrare e partecipare. Text in English and Italian.

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Erik Desmazières's first love was drawing and he began engraving in the Ville de Paris studios from 1971. René Tazé joined the Leblanc studio, a famous and ancient Parisian intaglio printer's workshop in 1969. It was here, on Rue Saint-Jacques, the printers' quarter since the seventeenth century, where they met: in this corner of Paris imbued with history. In the spring of 1978, René Tazé opened his own studio at 11 Rue Hittorf, by the side of the town hall in the tenth arrondissement in Paris. The printer and the artist then established a professional bond that has lasted up to the present day. During the four decades of their work together, they have made over 200 prints and no fewer than 20,000 proofs in various formats; their preparation benefited greatly from the skill and noteworthy talent of René Tazé, who was awarded the title of Maître d'Art in 2006. While René Tazé made the prints, Erik Desmazières began to draw his surroundings, by which he was much inspired. The result was a set of seven large engravings made from 1979 onwards depicting the studio and its wonderful machines from different angles. In 2006, René Tazé was forced to leave his studio, which was to be demolished. He moved to a studio in Villa du Lavoir, near Porte Saint-Martin, not far from where he worked previously. The new studio was far more 'modern' and more maze-like, but just as inspiring and gave rise to an engraving of the studio just before its conversion: Atelier René Tazé VIII, 2018. The renovated studio offered the engraver the chance to make a new work of the space, which had a completely different layout: Atelier René Tazé IX. Text in English and French.

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This book is dedicated to Godai, an installation by Japanese artist Tanabe Chikuunsai IV, who represents the fourth generation of a prestigious line of kagoshi (master wickerwork weavers) in Japan. Godai is a homage to nature and to a tradition of handcraftsmanship. This monumental work, six meters high and nearly as broad at its base, was installed in 2016 in the Rotunda of the Musée des Arts Asiatiques Guimet in Paris and presented to the public from April 12th through September 19th, when the artist still presented himself under the name of Tanabe Shouchiku III. The structure, composed of 8,000 small pieces of bamboo prepared in Japan, was extremely well received. It represents a world in which the five elements, godoi, that make up our world (wind, water, earth, void and fire, according to Japanese tradition) intertwine. Tanabe couldn't find a more suitable material. Tough yet flexible, bamboo has been part of the lives of people in Asia since ancient times and used for numerous purposes. Because of its great significance (it represents 'principles, integrity and constancy'), it has also been represented in many historic paintings and used as a design motif in stationery and furniture. Tanabe's works are both historic and modern and invite a response from the viewer. His bamboo installations, presented in a form adapted to the space in which they are displayed, induce viewers to be aware of and appreciate that space. Each work is dismantled at the end of the exhibition to leave just its memory. And the same bamboo is used for new installations, giving a tangible sense to the concepts of 'continuity' and 'rebirth' and providing a sense of connection with space that transcends time. Godai is no exception: a monumental and ephemeral work, like a piece of organic architecture, it transmits positive energy. Text in English and French.

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Mythical Diary is a visual journey through the classical sculpture of Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli. It is a physical engagement with the marble bodies of myth. Through his black and white photography, Luigi Spina disassembles the limbs of the sculptures, emphasising their curves and hidden eroticism, humanising them to establish a dialogue with the observer. A sculpture is the sign of eternal, unchanging beauty: the only real evidence of the many lives that have passed and come to an end leaving a profound mark in the story of many other existences. For Spina, with his own vision of sculpture, a statue of Aphrodite is not merely a stereotypical portrayal of myth. In it are gathered the anxieties, dreams, hopes and joys of all those who have set eyes on her and dreamed or studied her. In a way, classical sculpture is profoundly present in our veins, in our very breath. The project takes the form of an imaginary diary covering fifteen days. But this is only an ephemeral period of time, a convention. The whole work developed over a period of days and months amounting to years, always in contact with the circumscribed space made of myriad lives and stories, which we call a museum. In Mythical Diary, Spina attempts to make classical sculpture interact with the viewer's desire to be a part of this ancient world that has always influenced our way of life, our culture and our society, proving itself to be contemporary with any period.

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Carlos Luna, one of the foremost contemporary Cuban award-winning painters is part of a generation of Cuban artists who embrace their strong heritage and traditions but have reinvented themselves along the way. Thrumming with the spirit of Afro-Cuban tradition, Luna's works range from jacquard tapestries, works on metal sheets, and Talavera ceramic plates to mixed media on wood and largescale oil paintings. This monograph illustrates Luna's blend of influences from living and working in Cuba until 1991, then in Mexico for thirteen years, and now in Miami, since 2002. This book, lavishly illustrated, will take the reader through the artist's amazing world of bright colours and will show, by a selection of plates and details, some unpublished works as well as his renowned masterpieces. Carlos makes visible the invisible, conveying messages and lessons from his past to offer to the present and future. His work is not on the surface, it is filled with subtle embedded messages. One must know the issues to decode. Often these messages are hidden in plain sight, lessons to be learned through reflection. His towering centerpiece, El Gran Mambo, a massive six-panel painting, which stood on display at the Museum of Latin American Art in 2008, serves as a focal point for 2015's Green Machine: The Art of Carlos Luna at The Frost Art Museum in Carlos's adopted home of Miami. Text in English and French.

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Art lovers well know the works of the different groups of peoples generally referred to as 'Guro' who live in the centre of the Ivory Coast. Close to the Wan, Baule, Yaure, and Bete, the Guro have maintained close contacts with their neighbours, and reciprocal influences are apparent in their various artistic creations. Masks have a particular importance that goes well beyond the value attributed to them for their aesthetic qualities on the art market. These objects might even be considered emblematic, having till now allowed those who have defined themselves as Guro to lay claim to this identity. Whereas the French colonisation largely weakened the prestige of those men whose power resulted from their hunting and war activities, the continuation of complex rituals that entailed the use of masks allowed the men to preserve a form of political and religious control. By diversifying the categories of masks between, on one hand, those that receive blood sacrifices to honour spiritual entities, and those, on the other hand, made more for entertainments given at funerals, political demonstrations, and tourist events, the Guro have reinvented, regalvanised, and readapted perfectly integrated rituals to a contemporary society in permanent change.

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Probably no artist was more prolific among 18th-century topographers than Grimm in recording the landscapes and historic buildings of Great Britain, and none played a more important role. Born near Bern in Switzerland, Samuel Hieronymus Grimm studied under various teachers before deciding to move to London in 1768, where he remained for the rest of his life. A talented watercolour artist, he earned an impressive reputation among his clients as a quick, accurate painter. The most important of his patrons was Sir Richard Kaye, who retained Grimm's services for nearly two decades and during this period accumulated over 2,600 drawings and watercolours. Grimm was a tireless traveller, ranging far and wide over Britain and creating works of various kinds, from simple landscapes to highly detailed and now invaluable scenes of daily rural life. While in London, Grimm also revealed an unexpectedly sharp, witty side to his talent, publishing a series of political caricatures and drawings satirising the society of the time and its fashions. Some of Grimm's most conspicuous commissions came from the Society of Antiquaries, which was keen to build a visual record of historical monuments at risk of being destroyed. In spite of the considerable success he enjoyed during his lifetime, his reputation quickly faded thereafter and the exhibition held in the Kunstmuseum in Bern in 2014 was the first show devoted entirely to his work. The accompanying monograph by Dr. William Hauptman restores Grimm to his rightful place in the history of British painting.

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This stunning book presents Charlotte Perriand's photographic achievement in its entirety, offering new and valuable insights into the work of this important designer. Charlotte Perriand (1903-1999) was one of the most innovative furniture and interior designers of the twentieth century, long renowned for the tubular-steel chairs she created with le Corbusier. Her career spanned nearly seventy-five years and included work in her native France as well as in Africa, South America, Asia, and Europe, and today her designs are highly collectable. Recently, several hundred photographic negatives were uncovered in her archives, revealing for the first time the scope of her work as a photographer. In the late 1920s, French interior and furniture designer Charlotte Perriand was at the cusp of her career, just beginning her work as an architect, designer, town planner, and political militant. Starting in 1927, she turned to photography, which was to play a pivotal role in her development as a designer through the pioneering years of the modern movement. Her photographic venture ended in Japan in 1941, when the hope of a better world was shattered by World War II. For Charlotte Perriand, photography was a machine for thinking, taking notes, and stirring emotions, but it was also an instrument of political engagement. Today, her photographs are a revelation, offering unseen glimpses into her creative process and intellectual development. Her photographs express the important themes and questions explored by modern artists of the day, and are part of the vast stream of avant-garde movements in which painters, architects, and photographers - and sometimes all three combined - worked together in a common spirit.

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This volume brings to light what is American about American design. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, and 5 Continents Editions present a new series dedicated to industrial and graphic design. Each volume, beautifully designed and with superbly printed reproductions, offers an overview of a single country's design achievements and illustrates its particular design history and aesthetic, showcasing prominent architects and designers through exemplary works drawn from MoMA's unmatched collection. Each volume contains an introduction by Paola Antonelli, Senior Curator in the Department of Architecture and Design at MoMA, and an illustrated essay by a distinguished design critic, accompanied by a visual timeline of significant events and a comprehensive bibliography. American design, like much of American culture, perennially oscillates between populism and elitism, between the revolutionary beauty and availability of Tupperware and the elusive exclusivity of Tiffany's. This book traces the development of American design from the 'armory practice' of early American machinists, through mid-century 'design for modern living', to the branded, consumer-oriented design of the present day. Paola Antonelli's lively introduction provides an overview of United States' design culture; an essay by Russell Flinchum illuminates the masterpieces of modern American design reproduced in the volume's plate section. They are accompanied by an illustrated chronology of important events that have influenced American design as well as a comprehensive bibliography.

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On the whole, when one thinks of seventeenth-century sculpture in Rome, one has in mind the wonderful and famous works of Gian Lorenzo Bernini, such as the Fountain of the Rivers or The Ecstasy of St. Theresa. The very idea of Roman baroque is commonly identified with the century's great genius. And indeed, the influence of Bernini's work on the sculpture and art in general of the period was, especially in Rome, decisive. However, this domination spread only during the second half of the seventeenth century, and less unequivocally than one might suppose. Other great sculptors, with personalities that were often very different form Bernini s, contributed to making the extraordinary proliferation of Roman statuary extremely complex and varied at that time. This book is aimed especially at students and museum visitors who would like to learn more about the topic and discusses the art in a straightforward and strictly chronological fashion. The narrative begins in the early decades of the seventeenth century with sculpture created by a motley and conspicuously cosmopolitan group of artists. Later, with the growing success of the great masters, commissions began to gravitate around Bernini, Alessandro Algardi, and Francois Duquesnoy. A new approach to Antiquity went hand in hand with a marked predilection for striking chromatic effects, borrowed from Venetian painting, and a desire to make a strong impact and achieve a particular tone, often with results of surprising originality. Taking the most up-to-date and best founded historiographic observations on the subject we have tried to highlight the workshop relationships between the great masters and the giovani, their pupils or occasional assistants, and in this way put into relief the experimental approach of some of these apprentices, such as Melchirro Caffa or Antonio Raggi, or the ability of certain others, for instance Ercole Ferrata, to fuse the most diverse influences. The book thus aims to show how marble and travertine were used throughout the century to create a whole army of statues that were positioned in the open and in churches, lending modern Rome its truly incomparable new face.

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“Outsider art” is the name given to the idiosyncratic work of self-taught creators who are driven to use their own invented visual language to bring forth images from their imaginations. It is outside the continuum of art history, outside the boundaries of art recognised by established art institutions, and outside the collective discourse of the mainstream art world. This book examines the underlying biases, ideologies, and social factors that inform the various approaches to outsider art, including myths surrounding mental illness, movements toward social inclusion, and movements away from the marginalising effect of labels. Most importantly, Outsider Art of Canada explores how we think about art and who is entitled to call themselves an artist. In this survey dedicated to outsider art in Canada, the first of its kind, the artists introduced have much to tell us about their need to create, unapologetically and without regard to public opinion.

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Loving: A Photographic History of Men in Love, 1850-1950 portrays the history of romantic love between men in hundreds of moving and tender vernacular photographs taken between the years 1850 and 1950. This visual narrative of astonishing sensitivity brings to light an until-now-unpublished collection of hundreds of snapshots, portraits, and group photos taken in the most varied of contexts, both private and public. Taken when male partnerships were often illegal, the photos here were found at flea markets, in shoe boxes, family archives, old suitcases, and later online and at auctions. The collection now includes photos from all over the world: Australia, Bulgaria, Canada, Croatia, France, Germany, Japan, Greece, Latvia, the United States, the United Kingdom, Russia, and Serbia. The subjects were identified as couples by that unmistakable look in the eyes of two people in love - impossible to manufacture or hide. They were also recognised by body language - evidence as subtle as one hand barely grazing another - and by inscriptions, often coded. Included here are ambrotypes, daguerreotypes, glass negatives, tin types, cabinet cards, photo postcards, photo strips, photomatics, and snapshots - over 100 years of social history and the development of photography. Loving will be produced to the highest standards in illustrated book publishing, The photographs - many fragile from age or handling - have been digitised using a technology derived from that used on surveillance satellites and available in only five places around the world. Paper and other materials are among the best available. And Loving will be manufactured at one of the world's elite printers. Loving, the book, will be up to the measure of its message in every way. In these delight-filled pages, couples in love tell their own story for the first time at a time when joy and hope - indeed human connectivity - are crucial lifelines to our better selves. Universal in reach and overwhelming in impact, Loving speaks to our spirit and resilience, our capacity for bliss, and our longing for the shared truths of love.

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This catalogue accompanies the monographic exhibition that Museo Vincenzo Vela, in Mendrisio-Ligornetto, has dedicated to the works of Lawrence Carroll (b. 1954). Born in Melbourne, Carroll moved to California with his family in 1958. Some twenty-five years later, in 1984 he moved once again, to New York, where he pursued his artistic development, having little concern for the fashions of the moment but a profound sense of personal commitment and dedication to the language and practice of painting. As he understands it, painting abuts on many other art forms: in his hands it becomes the slow stratification of colour, materials, and objects, in which the surface of the painting interacts with the surrounding environment, blurring the borders between painting, sculpture, and installation. Moving from place to place, Carroll has always been most at home in the quiet of his studio, which provides him with the intimacy he requires to express himself. Here he explores duration as the fragility of time and space, placing memory at the heart of his poetics. Old remembrances emerge on the surface, overlaying each other layer upon layer, like an accumulation of light, dust and matter in pale colour tones as close to the colour of the canvas as possible. Inherently porous as the surface is, one can make out graphemes and underlying traces, while objects are applied directly onto it. The result is a poetics of rarefied references, narratives that gradually form and are at the same time swathed in a metaphysical atmosphere of suspension, a sort of 'metaphysics of the quotidian'. Designed like an autobiography installed in the rooms of the museum-house, the exhibition provides an overview of Carroll's artistic development, from his earliest works to the present day, highlighting the subtle recurring themes as well as the fresh departures that have taken him on wholly new artistic journeys. The catalogue offers the first ever overall assessment of the artist's work as it has evolved during his life. The book is lavishly illustrated, and includes a full biography and comprehensive bibliography, as well as providing an engaging interview with the artist. Text in English and Italian.

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“The sound of the yidaki calls everyone together in unity.” - Djalu Gurruwiwi Yidaki, more commonly known as didgeridoo, is the iconic Aboriginal instrument. Yidaki found its way to the streets of Europe and gained tremendous popularity to the point that this music instrument is almost synonymous with Aboriginal Australia. Despite this widespread attention, very little is known about yidaki. The exhibition at the Fondation Opales, and this accompanying publication sets out to acquaint a European audience with this captivating musical instrument, with the people and the unique culture who produced it and with the land where it originated. More than just an emblematic wooden instrument, yidaki is a cultural and spiritual marker. It is the whole story of a region and a people; it is also about healing. Through the work of three prominent Yolngu artists that all share the remote community of Gangan as homeland - Gunybi Ganambarr, Malaluba Gumana and Bulthirrirri Wunungmurra - several ancestrally significant places are visited and stories linked to these, such as that of the Mokuy spirits or Wititj, the Rainbow Serpent, are told. Anchored in deep cultural knowledge, their vivid and innovative work connects past and present.

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This double volume devoted to Yves Dana, a Swiss sculptor of Egyptian descent, is the ideal continuation of a 2015 publication by 5 Continents Editions. His sculptures present themselves to contemporary viewers as if they were the archaeological finds of ancient civilisations, and it is possibly from this very trait that they derive their extraordinary strength. The chronological narrative follows the works created by Dana since 2017 and calls the reader’s attention to the dialogue between the artist and his medium, which finds its voice in the creative process. In the interview with Marc-Alain Ouaknin included in this volume, it becomes clear that to Yves Dana his task is first and foremost observing what nature has to say — observing with his eyes, but also with his hands. Text in English and French.

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This thought-provoking essay by Corinna Thierolf stems from the art created by Fabienne Verdier in a visual and spiritual dialogue with the Isenheim Altarpiece by Matthias Grünewald (1516), housed at the Musée Unterlinden in Colmar. Between 2019 and 2022, Verdier produced to a series of 78 large-format paintings that develop Grünewald’s meditation on light, drawing not only upon significant moments in the history of science, but also on pivotal themes of both Eastern and Western painting and thus confirm the universal power of art. Text in English, French and German.

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This volume is one of three companion catalogues to an exhibition taking place simultaneously at three venues in Rome on the large-scale projects of Pier Paolo Pasolini. They explore a theme dear to Pasolini — sacredness — with a multidisciplinary approach that will shed a light on his main characteristics as a poet, writer, director, and artist and on the cultural influence he wielded. This is the catalogue for the exhibition at Fondazione MAXXI, which explores the many facets of Pasolini’s political engagement. Texts, images, movies, notes, and documents will narrate the beginning of a protest that has endured to this day, with interpretations of Pasolini’s work is seen through the voices of contemporary artists. An essay by Anne Violaine Houcke analyses Pasolini’s final period, while Ara Merjan’s text explores his aesthetics. Marco Belpoliti explores the 1975 timeline, giving special attention to the political events most closely connected to Pasolini. Incudes contributions by Eleonora Cardinale, Roberto Chiesi, Silvia De Laude, Fabio Francione, Giuseppe Garrera, and Vincenzo Trione. Text in English and Italian.

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