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Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics: A Close Embrace of the Earth
by Louise Allison Cort (Author) / Bert Winther-Tamaki (Author) / University of California Press (Editor)

Japanese American artist Isamu Noguchi (1904-1988) is renowned for his stone and bronze sculpture, his gardenlike installations in public spaces, and his furniture designs. Far less familiar, but no less important, is Noguchi's work in clay, which he executed in three intensive sessions in 1931, 1950, and 1952, all during visits to Japan. The pieces included in this elegant volume and the accompanying exhibition comprise the first major museum presentation of Isamu Noguchi's ceramics and the introduction of the work of major postwar Japanese ceramic artists with whom Noguchi collaborated or interacted. Supported by four linked essays and opulently illustrated in full color and black and white, Isamu Noguchi and Modern Japanese Ceramics highlights the sculptor's struggles with cultural identity and his experimentation with the conflicts between modernity and tradition.
Noguchi's sculptures in the medium of clay reveal informal, spontaneous, and humorous aspects not visible in less flexible media such as bronze or stone. Through clay, Noguchi probed unresolved personal issues surrounding his ambiguous cultural identity as the son of a Japanese father and American mother. Because Noguchi made his ceramics in Japan, his work also creates links to a diversity of approaches within the ceramic world of Japan. These range from traditionalists such as Kitaoji Rosanjin and the Living National Treasure designates, to primitivists exemplified by Okamoto Taro and Tsuji Shindo, to avant-garde experimentalists led by the Sodeisha group. An understanding of the nature and scope of the concerns Noguchi expressed through clay is crucial to understanding his work as a whole, and consideration of Japanese ceramic artists in the 1950s reveals a largely unknown genre of modern Japanese art.
Copublished with the Smithsonian Institution

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Jeff Wall (Contemporary Artists)
by Thierry Duve (Author) / Phaidon Press (Editor)

Jeff Wall is foremost among the artists who since the late 1960s have brought photography to the forefront of contemporary art. This revised and expanded edition of the definitive monograph on the Canadian artist, first published in 1996, includes a new fully illustrated essay on Wall's recent work by the French historian of art and photography Jean-Fran+ois Chevrier, in addition to the artist's recent writings. Describing himself as 'a painter of modern life', Wall produces huge transparencies mounted onto light boxes which diffuse a brilliant glow through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and 'constructed' social situations. These images employ the latest technology to create tableaux which are evocative of subjects ranging from Hollywood cinema to nineteenth-century history painting. When installed they evoke both the seduction of the cinema screen and the physical presence of minimalist sculptures. Wall engages at a sophisticated level with theories of representation both as an artist and as a theoretical writer on contemporary art and culture. Major surveys of his work have been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1995); the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris (1995); the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1996), and the Mus+e d'Art Contemporain, Montreal (1999).

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Land & Environmental Art (Themes and Movements)
by Brian Wallis (Author) / Jeffrey Kastner (Editor) / Phaidon Press (Editor)

DesignAddict review:


This book fully documents the 1960s Land Art movement as well as surveying later examples of environmental art to the present day. Earthworks, environments, performances and actions by artists ranging from Ana Mendieta, Robert Smithson or Walter de Maria in the 1970s-80s to Peter Fend and Mierle Laderman Ukeles in the 1990s are all illustrated with breathtaking photographs, sketches and project notes. They are accompanied by documents which chart the ideas, their critical reception and the broader philosophical and cultural context which framed them.

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Matthew Barney: The Cremaster Cycle
by Neville Wakefield (Author) / Nancy Spector (Contributor) / iPublish.com (Editor)

DesignAddict review:


Filled with hundreds of Matthew Barney's fantastical images, this comprehensive volume, which accompanies a major exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, surveys the popular artist's CREMASTER cycle?an epic five-part film project that uses the biological model of sexual difference as its conceptual departure point.

Three essays by Barney experts articulate the series' diverse themes and explore the artist's innovative aesthetic vocabulary; interviews with key collaborators? composer, costume designer, make-up artist, technicians, and actors?reveal his working process. In addition to stills from the five films?including the final episode, CREMASTER 3, which will premiere at the exhibition?the book features related sculptures, photographs, drawings, and storyboards. For anyone intrigued by this Wagner of contemporary art, this is an atlas to his enticingly hypnotic worlds.

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Minimalism (Themes and Movements)
by James Meyer (Author) / Phaidon Press (Editor)

For more than 20 years, Gregory Battcock's Minimal Art: A Critical Anthology has been the book on this deceptively simple approach to art-making, which sought to remove any trace of the artist's hand or emotion from the work. (Detractors naturally found it ludicrous that such reductive sculpture, often consisting of no more than a few basic modular units attached to the wall or placed on the floor, generated such a voluminous and dense stream of critical analysis, beginning in the mid-1960s.)Part of Phaidon's Themes and Movements series, Minimalism offers the first straightforward and useful summary of the output and outlook of the artists associated with minimalism in its heyday, as well as its subsequent development into more nuanced visual forms and its relationship to postmodernism. Editor James Meyer is a specialist who has written extensively on Carl Andre, Donald Judd, Dan Flavin, and Sol LeWitt, four of the seminal minimalists (the fifth is Robert Morris). Despite the intellectual thorniness of this art, Meyer avoids the turgidity that marks much of the writing associated with it. Tracing the origins of minimalism primarily to Frank Stella's "Black Paintings" of 1959, Meyer outlines the shifting, often warring definitions of this new kind of art. Once sculptors Andre and Judd had made their mark, there was doubt that painters could be minimalists. Brice Marden and Robert Ryman made the cut because their work was believed to be purely about the process of painting. Interestingly, although this was overwhelmingly a male club, curators also initially embraced the work of several women artists (including Agnes Martin and Anne Truitt) who retained such minimalist no-noes as irregular, handmade marks, color that could be perceived independently of form, and a belief in transcendent meaning.The 141 pages of color and black-and-white photographs (including rare glimpses of early work by some artists) and a generous assembly of texts by such key commentators as Michael Fried, Barbara Rose, Rosalind Krauss, and the artists themselves (including previously unpublished or hard-to-find material) make this volume indispensable for anyone seriously interested in contemporary art. --Cathy Curtis

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Munari's Machines / Le Macchine di Munari
by Bruno Munari (Author) / Edizioni Corraini (Editor)

Artist, writer, product designer, architect, graphic designer, illustrator, educator, and philosopher Bruno Munari created an enormously successful and utterly charming book in 1942 called Le Macchine di Munari. Faithfully reprinted here, it contains instructions for building the most fantastical of mechanical structures, including a machine for taming alarm clocks, a lizard-driven engine for tired tortoises, a mechanism for sniffing artificial flowers, a humiliator for mosquitoes, a machine for playing the pipe even when you are not home, a machine for seeing the dawn before anyone else, and a tail wagger for dogs.

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Nils Udo: Art In Nature
by Hubert Besacier (Author) / Nils Udo (Photographer) / Flammarion (Editor)

DesignAddict review:


Sculptures that burst into flower, grow foliage, and change color with the seasons; sculptures that are buried in snow and metamorphosized by vegetation: the originality of Nils-Udo's work, when compared to that of Land Artists in general, lies in the way he harnesses the vital spark of nature itself as an integral part of his creative activity. Nature is no longer simply a model, but instead the very object of the artistic process. If Nils-Udo's work have had such strong resonance since he began working with nature in 1972, transcending borders and categorization, it is doubtless because his creations are rooted in a quest shared by all human societies: we look for ourselves in nature and nature makes us look at ourselves.

In his installations and arrangements, Nils-Udo works in a series of undestructive gestures; he makes simple changes, subtle realignments that bring colors, plants, and other natural elements together. The most ordinary of materials becomes the focal point of an artistic composition, crystallizing in miniature the whole spectrum of natural forms that have inspired architecture and ornament throughout civilization. The artist acts as mediator. And therein lies a profound artistic truth: creativity is the fruit of solitary reflection and activity, an exclusively personal journey. The role of the work of art is to share a private vision, a unique way of looking at the world.

To record this journey, Nils-Udo uses photography to document the various phases of the living process of change in his work. Through his photographs, we observe the growth, life, and occasionally the death of a work of art.

This book features 109 installations by Nils-Udo, most accompanied by the artist's own comments on the origins of the piece. The text, by art critic Hubert Besacier, places Nils-Udo's art in the history of artistic practice, and explains his working methods, the materials he uses, and the difficulties he sometimes encounters.

The viewer is left to be absorbed by the enigmatic silence of the images that Nils-Udo proposes.


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Damien Hirst
by Gordon Burn (Author) / Universe Publishing (Editor)

Damien Hirst is one of the most controversial, influential, and fascinating artists working today, and arguably the most famous. From the controversy of his early work to the political storm surrounding the arrival of the exhibition Sensation at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, his work has redefined international expectations of modern art. Even people with only a passing knowledge of art are familiar with his installations of a shark, cows, and sheep pickled in formaldehyde.

On the Way to Work is an extremely candid autobiography of Hirst presented in a series of conversations. He expounds in unpredictable and scabrously funny ways on everything from art to celebrity to sex, and these frank and intimate conversations are punctuated with art from all phases of his career chosen by Hirst himself. This book is a window into Hirst's world: growing up in working class northern England, roughhousing in pubs, obsessing about life and death, questioning art world fame, and believing that art and beauty make a difference in the modern world.

In addition to the attention he generates, this dynamic artist also garners critical acclaim-he is the winner of the Turner Prize and, ever since the groundbreaking exhibition that he organized as a fledgling artist in the early nineties, he is considered the unofficial leader of the Young British Artists movement. Hirst's appeal goes beyond the world of art; he's an influential figure to architects, designers, and the fashion crowd as well. Engaging, well-illustrated, and a real event in the art world, On the Way to Work, like its subject, will generate controversy and acclaim.


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Passage
by Andy Goldsworthy (Author) / Harry N. Abrams (Editor)

Andy Goldsworthy's Passage focuses on the journeys that people, rivers, landscapes, and even stones take through space and time. A cairn made by the renowned sculptor in the Scottish village where he lives reveals the influence that his work close to home has on projects he creates elsewhere. A series involving elm trees, from glowing yellow leaves to dead branches, exemplifies his work's vigorous beauty as well as its association with death and decay. Creations on the beach and in rivers explore the passage of time, while a white chalk path investigates the passing from day into night.

Passage also includes the Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York, where the artist planted 18 oak trees through holes in hollowed-out, earth-filled boulders. Documenting these and other recent works, this beautiful book is an eloquent testament to Goldsworthy's determination to deepen his understanding of the world around him, and his relationship with it, through his art. AUTHOR BIO: Andy Goldsworthy's work is regularly exhibited in Britain, France, the United States, Japan, and elsewhere. Although commissions take him all over the world, the landscape around his home in Dumfriesshire, Scotland, remains at the heart of his work. Goldsworthy's best-selling books for Abrams include A Collaboration with Nature, Time, Stone, Wall, and Wood. Terry Friedman is an architectural historian and former principal keeper of Leeds City Art Gallery and Henry Moore Centre for the Study of Sculpture in Leeds, England. He curated the first major retrospective of Goldsworthy's work, in 1990.

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