Art

Widely loved illustrator Tasia brings her unique style to this issue's cover design, and she also provides an in-depth tutorial to show us how she creates her art. Kenneth Anderson creates a 70s rock band, Johanna Forster brings fruit to life, and Sara Paz shows us how to create characters from reference photos.

Character Design Quarterly (CDQ) is a lively, creative magazine bringing inspiration, expert insights, and leading techniques from professional illustrators, artists, and character art enthusiasts worldwide. Each issue provides detailed tutorials on creating diverse characters, enabling you to explore the processes and decision making that go into creating amazing characters. Learn new ways to develop your own ideas, and discover from the artists what it is like to work for prolific animation studios such as Disney, Warner Bros., and DreamWorks.

In Iran, the introduction of photography as developed in Europe rapidly led to the emergence of an independent photographic culture. Jonas Wenger uses the visual motif ‘labour’ to investigate the extent to which local photographers updated existing Orientalist stereotypes when they appropriated the technology. He also examines what rhetorical functions specific visual conventions have had for Iran’s internal discourse on internal expansionism, modernity, nationalism and independence. Over a period of seventy years, he reveals how European imperialist claims have intersected with Iranian efforts at nationalization in photographic representations of labour, and shows that European images of Iran overlap with inner Iranian tensions between centre and periphery.

As an historical account of the exchange of “duplicate specimens” between anthropologists at the Smithsonian Institution and museums, collectors, and schools around the world in the late nineteenth century, this book reveals connections between both well-known museums and little-known local institutions, created through the exchange of museum objects. It explores how anthropologists categorized some objects in their collections as “duplicate specimens,” making them potential candidates for exchange. This historical form of what museum professionals would now call deaccessioning considers the intellectual and technical requirement of classifying objects in museums, and suggests that a deeper understanding of past museum practice can inform mission-driven contemporary museum work.

The Museum of Mankind was an innovative and popular showcase for minority cultures from around the non-Western world from 1970 to 1997. This memoir is a critical appreciation of its achievements in the various roles of a national museum, of the personalities of its staff and of the issues raised in the representation of exotic cultures. Issues of changing museum theory and practice are raised in a detailed case-study that also focuses on the social life of the museum community. This is the first history of a remarkable museum and a memorable interlude in the long history of one of the world’s oldest and greatest museums. Although not presented as an academic study, it should be useful for museum and cultural studies as a well as a wider readership interested in the British Museum.

How do we follow affects in places? And how do they follow us? How can rural places be described as "affective places"? Considering local and global transformations and crises, this book examines the "how" of culture in rural areas. It delves into everyday stories and natural-cultural landscapes in three rural regions of Germany. On the basis of concrete places and institutions, traces and practices of cultural education are also followed; it becomes obvious that rural regions are not "Wastelands". They offer a wealth of "affective places" to be experienced and lived out. This "ethnographic collage" brings together vignettes, photo essays and reflections at the interface of affect theory, sensory ethnography, artistic research and feminist new materialism. Digitally available audios and videos add to the picture.

This smart, provocative book reveals how Useful Art is changing the world.

Does art have to be beautiful? What if it can be useful instead? In this cutting-edge book, John Byrne shows how the concept of ‘Useful Art’ is helping artists and communities fight back against the neoliberal takeover of our spaces, services and lives.

Byrne demonstrates that networks of artist-led activism and community-based direct action can provide a collaborative playbook of impactful and inclusive alternatives. From Turner Prize-winning urban regeneration projects to bakeries, vegetable gardens and multi-use arts spaces, Useful Art has enormous potential for bringing people together, recovering and preserving local skills and knowledge and reclaiming artistic endeavour for real-world good.

Exploring an international selection of projects, exhibitions and activism, this important new work champions the shift from aesthetics to use value, challenging traditional ways of seeing the world symbolically through art. Reaching beyond the financial logic of the art world, Byrne shows how Useful Art can offer an artistic toolkit for implementing radical change.

Marcel Duchamp was one of the most enigmatic artists of the 20th century. In 1920 he invented an alter ego called Rrose Sélavy, who would become one of the most dazzling characters in modern art. This ground-breaking book is the first to fully explore the complex history of Rrose Sélavy in detail. It takes into account all the relevant works, reconstructs all the historical contexts, and sheds light on Duchamp’s artistic attitude in the 1920s. "Known also under the name Rrose Sélavy" (Duchamp), he playfully and ironically mocked the pretensions of the art and artists of his time, friends and foes alike. In Rrose Sélavy, he, who rejected all -isms, took the liberty of creating his own -ism: a self-proclaimed "au-culism". Rrose Sélavy was mocking art.

A Caravaggio "first", this accessible and attractive illustrated volume focuses on one of the famous artist's most iconic artworks, Victorious Cupid.

Usually housed at the Gemäldegalerie in Berlin, Victorious Cupid (1601-02) by Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio (1571-1610) is the centrepiece in a new focus exhibition at The Wallace Collection. Caravaggio’s painting, also known as Amor Vincit Omnia, shows Cupid, the Roman god of desire, as a young boy, in an animated pose while wearing dark eagle wings and holding two arrows. It was the last allegorical work Caravaggio painted in Rome. The music manuscript on the floor shows a large V in the margin of the right-hand page which is believed to acknowledges Marchese Vincenzo Giustiniani (1564-1537), who commissioned the painting, and is said to have prized Victorious Cupid above all other works in his collection.

This richly illustrated softcover print publication features an introduction by the director of The Wallace Collection, Xavier Bray, followed by five illustrated chapters by the volume’s principal author, Helen Langdon. A description of the painting and summary of Caravaggio’s early life, present Victorious Cupid against the background of his artistic development and the intellectual interests of his patrons, and within the broader context of the theme of "love conquers all". Langdon examines the meaning of the painting, and considers how Caravaggio brings the subject to earth, from the heavens to the bedroom, mocking the idealisations of renaissance art.

Publication accompanies an exhibition at The Wallace Collection, London.

This book explores the long and fruitful collaborations between the artist Robert Rauschenberg and Donald J. Saff, founder of Graphicstudio in 1968.

Out of the Real World: Robert Rauschenberg at USF Graphicstudio is the first comprehensive and scholarly publication to explore the significance of Robert Rauschenberg’s work at Graphicstudio, University of South Florida’s renowned atelier. Contributors detail Rauschenberg’s collaborative projects at Graphicstudio that pushed boundaries and redefined our understanding of printmaking. The legacy of the Rauschenberg Overseas Culture Interchange (ROCI) project, operationally headquartered at USF Graphicstudio and overseen by Saff as artistic director, is examined and reconsidered both geopolitically and through the lens of its resonance with host countries.

Inviting you to explore and contemplate the great art of the world

“Somewhere, sometime in the course of casual encounters with art, an icon may emerge and claim its person: an image that startles and calls to you, that separates from its setting to inhabit your mind and heart.” With these words Roger Lipsey introduces the theme, and sparkling challenge, of this book.

With more than sixty full-page, full-color illustrations of the world’s great art, Eyes to See is a feast for eye and mind—and heart. Through his selection of works and his enlightening, accessible commentaries, Lipsey renews for our time André Malraux’s “museum without walls.” What is the spiritual and how is it present in art? Allow this book to show you. It explores whole worlds of art, from ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean to medieval Europe and the Renaissance, India, the Far East, and the world of Islam. Lipsey’s approach encourages new understandings—felt, contemplative, inquiring—and offers readers a lasting orientation for their own future explorations.

“Icons emerge from the fog of things and make themselves known. You have no initial idea that you will cherish one work of art or another—until the moment of recognition, when light flashes into some little known or vital corner of self. The encounter engages not just the mind but also feeling and body in a moment of knowing, of surprise and delight, of measuring both what one is today and one’s sense of direction. The response is quite total, a memorable event. Adoption occurs: the image becomes part of oneself.”

Mara Kölmel erforscht die tiefgreifende Auswirkung digitaler Technologien auf die Skulptur seit den 1950er Jahren. Wenn Künstler*innen ihre Werke mittels KI, maßgeschneiderter Software oder Prototyping-Technologien konzipieren, wie sollte dann der Skulpturbegriff neu verhandelt werden? Anhand der Werke von Morehshin Allahyari, Alice Channer, Sterling Crispin sowie einer generationenübergreifenden Gruppe von Künstler*innen wird untersucht, wie sich Plastizität, Körperlichkeit und Monumentalität durch das Digitale verändert haben. Das Buch regt somit zu einer Neubewertung des Skulpturalen an. Systematisch und transhistorisch verbindet die Autorin Forschungsperspektiven zu Skulptur und digitalen Medien und zeigt auf, wie sich das Verständnis des Skulpturalen bis ins (post-)digitale Zeitalter hinein gewandelt hat.

Madoff rethinks modernism—from Wagner to Duchamp, Dada to the Bauhaus—for our present era of network culture

For more than a century, European modernist art has been written about as a profound expression of fragmentation—of an alienated world in pieces. In this book, critic and curator Steven Henry Madoff proposes that there was always another artistic intention present among the modernists that offered visions of wholeness in the face of anomie brought on by wars and new technologies. From the mid-nineteenth century, when Richard Wagner championed his idea of the Gesamtkunstwerk (the total work of art), to the rise of the Bauhaus out of the ruins of World War I as the most influential art school of the twentieth century, the urge to connect different art forms into single, unified works points toward our own omnipresent culture of networks and has given rise, over the last sixty years, to such artistic practices as installation and performance art that also combine many kinds of art into one—dreams of interconnectivity binding disparate elements together. Using the contemporary lens of network aesthetics to rethink the artworks of some of the towering figures of European modernism, including Paul Cézanne, Marcel Duchamp, Hugo Ball, and Walter Gropius, this book revises standard readings of this historical art, providing not only a way to more deeply understand the art of the present, but also as a way to look at and reimagine our own society in a time of increasingly divisive turmoil.

Die Gewehrgalerie im Langen Gang des Dresdner Residenzschlosses präsentiert rund 500 einzigartige Handfeuerwaffen aus dem Besitz der sächsischen Kurfürsten und Könige. Die prunkvollen Gewehre und Pistolen aus dem 16. bis 19. Jahrhundert dienten der Jagd, dem Scheibenschießen sowie der höfischen Repräsentation. Der neue Museumsführer stellt die Sammlungsgeschichte sowie Architektur und Ausstattung des Langen Ganges vor. Der rund 100 Meter lange Renaissancebau verkörperte mit seiner Ahnengalerie die dynastische Memoria des Herrscherhauses und beherbergte seit 1733 das kurfürstliche „Leibgewehr". Eine reichbebilderte Objektauswahl bietet eine Reise durch drei Jahrhunderte europäischer Büchsenmacher- und Dekorationskunst, wobei die Exponate in ihren vielschichtigen kulturhistorischen Zusammenhängen erläutert werden.

• Meisterwerke der Büchsenmacherkunst aus einer der führenden fürstlichen Waffensammlungen Europas
• Dauerausstellung der Rüstkammer, im Residenzschloss Dresden, Staatliche Kunstsammlungen Dresden

A magnificently illustrated study of skin in Renaissance Europe.

People in the Renaissance saw skin differently from how we do today. The Europe of 1500 to 1700 was a world of humours, and skin – the clothing of the body – was thought to be dangerously porous.

In this landmark book, Evelyn Welch explores Renaissance skin as a bodily surface, as physical matter and as a generator of new knowledge. Ranging across anatomy, surgery and sausage making, she reveals how skin was managed by physicians as well as by glovemakers, butchers and parchment makers. How did people protect their health in a changing global environment, one where the air itself could be pathogenic? How did they see their bodies in a world where there was suddenly a multiplicity of skin colours and decorations?

Addressing these questions and more, Welch show us what happens when you see skin differently, either in the marketplace, where men and women from far-away lands were put on display, or under the microscope. In doing so, she reveals that the past had a distinctive and very different way of understanding bodily experiences.

Für die Künstler*innen des Blauen Reiters, 1911 von Wassily Kandinsky und Franz Marc gegründet, spielten die Zeichnung und die Druckgrafik neben der Malerei eine wichtige Rolle. Den grafischen Gattungen widmete der Blaue Reiter 1912 seine zweite Ausstellung, die mit Arbeiten von Ernst Ludwig Kirchner über Robert Delaunay bis Natalja Gontscharowa eine künstlerische Vielfalt von europäischer Spannweite anschaulich machte.

In „Kosmos Blauer Reiter" präsentiert das Berliner Kupferstichkabinett erstmals seine facettenreiche Sammlung an Grafik des Blauen Reiters, bereichert durch ausgewählte Arbeiten aus weiteren Häusern der Staatlichen Museen zu Berlin. In sieben thematischen Kapiteln und ergänzenden Essays wird die Auseinandersetzung des Blauen Reiters mit der damals aktuellen Kunst in Europa lebendig.

• Erste Publikation zur Grafik des Blauen Reiters im Berliner Kupferstichkabinett
• Mit einem besonderem Fokus auf Künstlerinnen im Blauen Reiter
• Ausstellung: Kupferstichkabinett, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin – Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Kulturforum), 01.03. bis 15.06.2025

Grand-Gugignol Cinema and the Horror Genre traces important contributions of the Parisian Grand-Guignol theatre’s Golden Age as theoretical considerations of embodiment and affect in the development of horror cinema in the twentieth century. This study traces key components of the Grand-Guignol stage as a means to explore the immersive and corporeal aspects of horror cinema from the sound period to today. The book is a means to explore the Grand-Guignol not only as a historical place and genre, but theoretically, as a conceptual framework that opens up an affective mapping of Grand-Guignol attractions in cinema. 

In a broader theoretical sense, Mario DeGiglio-Bellemare positions Grand-Guignol cinema in corporeal and affective terms as a way to discuss central themes from the Golden Age of the Grand-Guignol theatre as they figure within the framework of post-representational analysis in cinema studies. Post-representational analysis draws meaning out of matter, or the material intensities of films; here, making sense (representation and meaning) and also sensing (in a more corporeal, sensorial way) have political relevance that cut across gender, class, race and sexuality. The author deploys the Grand-Guignol as a conceptual tool to reveal its important influence on the horror genre by focusing on the dominant themes of the Grand-Guignol theatre that cinematic horror has taken up in its own immersive theatrics of the corporeal and sensorial.

This study’s restoration of a long Grand-Guignol tradition in cinema makes it a significant contribution to new theorizations of horror. It brings seemingly disparate traditions into conversation, as American, Canadian, French, and Italian cinema are all important sites for thinking through cinematic embodiment. These four countries have developed their own important genres and movements of Grand-Guignol cinema: the slasher, the “French Films of Sensation,” Canadian “body horror,” and the giallo. The Grand-Guignol famously operated in a dead-end of Chaptal Street, in the Pigalle district of Paris; this study offers affective and corporeal readings that open up new byways beyond the dead-end of psychoanalytic readings that continue to be dominant in horror genre scholarship.

Learn to create stunning abstract and stylized art using easy techniques and an intriguing variety of art materials including watercolor, inks, glazes, foils, stamps and more!

In this highly anticipated follow-up to her bestselling book Creative Abstract Watercolor, artist and art tutor Kate Rebecca Leach continues the journey of discovery into her joyful art style, introducing a wide range of exciting materials alongside watercolors to create mixed media art.

• Get creative: Kate's unique approach allows you to have fun, be present and play with colour, shape, texture and materials to your heart’s content, without worrying about accuracy or detail.

• Try new things: Start experimenting with a host of techniques including collage, printing, metallics, salt, alcohol, crackle glaze, and even adding simple embroidered accents to your work.

• Improve your skills: Follow Kate's expert guidance and helpful tips and tricks help you to build your repertoire of techniques and start creating art you love.

• Go with the flow: Relax into the process, letting the natural watercolor puddle and pool to help form your compositions, then add mixed media embellishments to take it to the next level.

• Find your tribe: Join Kate's rapidly growing Instagram community of over 180,000 passionate followers (@essoldodesign) and connect with likeminded artists all over the world.

Packed with information and inspiring images, this beautiful book will take your work to new creative heights and allow you to try something new, exciting and most of all fun!

A structured, creative course for the comic artist and the wider Fan Art community.

• features both digital and analogue art techniques
• coaches the artist to develop fun, engaging artworks of friends, family and the famous
• guidance on going professional and for commercial gain at corporate events or shows
• includes profiles and insight from leading caricature artists from all around the world

Packed with expert tips and step by steps, you too can learn to draw quickly and develop your Fan Art skills.

Be More Creative and Discover the Art of Urban Printmaking

• features an introductory section to show the basic techniques and guide to finding inspiration for your work.
• detailed architectural skylines, bridges, drain covers, street furniture and diverse crowd scenes offer a new perspective on this traditional art form.
• experimental section prompts research and discovery of new materials

Explore your street with Printmaking in the City to create stunning, relevant and highly original work.

Be More Creative and Discover the Art of Urban Sketching

• features an introductory section to show the basic techniques and guide to finding inspiration for your work.
• detailed architectural skylines, bridges, drain covers, street furniture and diverse crowd scenes offer a new perspective on this traditional art form.
• experimental section prompts research and discovery of new materials

Explore your street with Sketching in the City to create stunning, relevant and highly original work.

Daniel Neuberger wird mit diesem Ausstellungskatalog erstmals umfassend gewürdigt. Der vielseitige Künstler war als Bildhauer, Grafiker, Maler, Steinschneider und Literat tätig und erreichte seine größte Meisterschaft im Wachsbossieren, der Kunst des plastischen Formens in Wachs. Besonders seine feinen, oft nur wenige Zentimeter großen Werke waren an europäischen Fürstenhöfen begehrt.

Der Katalog beleuchtet Neubergers Tätigkeit am Wiener Kaiserhof zwischen 1650 und 1663, wo er für Kaiser Ferdinand III. und dessen Söhne als Wachsbossierer, Porträtist und Edelsteinschneider tätig war. Zwei seiner bedeutendsten Werke, ein 60-teiliger Zyklus der Metamorphosen nach Ovid sowie eine allegorische Darstellung auf den Tod Kaiser Ferdinands III., stehen hier im Mittelpunkt. Ergänzt durch eine umfassende kunsthistorische und konservierungswissenschaftliche Analyse, ermöglicht die Publikation einen vertieften Einblick in Neubergers Werk und Technik.

• Würdigung eines fast vergessenen Künstlers: Erstmals umfassende Darstellung des vielseitigen Schaffens Daniel Neubergers.
• Fokus auf Wachskunst: Einzigartiger Einblick in Neubergers meisterhafte Wachsbossierkunst und seine bedeutendsten Werke.
• Interdisziplinäre Analyse: Verknüpfung kunsthistorischer, konservierungswissenschaftlicher und technologischer Aspekte seines Werkes.

By the late 1960s cartographic formats and spatial information had become a regular feature in many conceptual artworks. This volume offers a rich study of conceptualisms’ mapping practices that includes more expanded forms of spatial representation.

The book presents twelve in-depth case studies that address artists’ engagement with matters of space at a time when space was garnering new significance in art, theory and culture. The chapters shed fresh light on an evident ‘spatial turn’ that took place from the postwar to the contemporary period, revealing how it was influenced by larger historical, social and cultural contexts.

In addition to raising questions about conceptualism’s relationship to the world, the contributors illustrate how artists’ cartographies served as critical sites for formulating their politics, upsetting prevailing systems and graphing new, heterogenous spaces.

Stuart Brisley is a pioneering multi-media and performance artist who developed performance art as a form of social action in the 1960s and 1970s. This book assesses his seminal influence on British art through a focus on his lifelong engagement with the histories and imaginaries of revolution.

Linking revolutionary history with material from a critical dialogue established with Brisley over the last decade, the book recognises Brisley's corpus as a fascinating stage for addressing important questions about the relationship of art, politics and history. How do we make sense of politically committed art in a contemporary context where revolution has supposedly died or is deemed impossible? What can the afterlives of performance art tell us about the historical past, including the promises and contradictions of revolutionary time?

An inspiring account of three women artists who pioneered new forms of the nude.

Even in the bohemian world of avant-garde Paris, certain rules had to be obeyed. One of these rules was that women artists did not paint nudes. Yet three women would challenge this prohibition, offering their own distinct takes on the classic genre.

Suzanne Valadon, Émilie Charmy and Marie Vassilieff painted in different styles, but they were united in their fascination for the nude. Their artistic explorations saw them experimenting with a range of cutting-edge subjects, including the male nude, the Black female nude, the pregnant nude and the nude self-portrait, a genre that few artists would tackle until half a century later.

Painting her pleasure situates the work of Valadon, Charmy and Vassilieff within and against modernism, drawing parallels with later feminist artists and philosophers. Unravelling the complexities of early twentieth-century gender regimes and persistent cultural stereotypes, it provides an illuminating history of women, sexuality and the body.

Paulus Potter can be regarded as one of the most famous Dutch animal painters. For the first time in his work, animals were the protagonists; as a rule, human beings played only a subordinate role. Potter's works were sought-after during his lifetime and fetched high prices, especially in the 18^th century. According to the first catalogue in 1783, Kassel Picture Gallery owned no fewer than ten paintings by the artist, who died young. No other collection had more of his works. However, many of them were lost during the Napoleonic occupation. The successful re-acquisition of Paulus Potter's "Watermill" offers an opportunity to examine the Kassel gallery’s eventful history and shed light on Potter's significance as an animal painter.

• Paulus Potter as an animal painter
• Re-acquisition of an important painting by Potter
• History of the Kassel collection

When Robert Rauschenberg reminisced about Josef Albers teaching students that their art had to do with “the entire visual world,” he was suggesting an inclusive realm of visual expression from which Albers intended his students to draw. Beyond finding inspiration only in fine art objects, Albers pushed them to look outside the confines of their studios and classrooms and onto the streets where they would be confronted with the visuality of mass culture; Albers therefore developed assignments using examples of typographic design and printed imagery drawn from popular publications of the day. In looking closely at these printed images, though, artists like Rauschenberg learned not only that visual inspiration could be found in quotidian objects, but that those objects were also the products of aesthetic decision making, that they were designed. Although the visual workings of mass imagery have sometimes been met with discomfort by art historians and critics, culture’s simultaneous engagement with design and art objects has a long and significant history. My book would be among the first to examine a moment of that history through an exploration of the critical intersection between art and graphic design in New York in the years between 1959 and 1972.

It may seem most expedient to discuss the connection between art and design through formal congruences, but this strategy can limit the deeper investigation of the mutual influence shared by these two areas of production. Indeed, the presumption that there exists simply – and only – a visual connection between design and art has driven most of the art history that has taken up the subject. This methodology, however, assumes that the influence of popular imagery on fine art works only in one direction, and that movements such as Pop art borrow motifs from mass culture and then “elevate” them into high art. This ignores any influence that art might have on design and designers, an influence that has considerable impact on our visual world. In addition, it serves to place mass imagery consistently in the lesser, negative position because it always presupposes design’s complicity in the culture industry. Yet I show that not all design is made for commercial purposes. Design with civic intentions – that developed for signage, street furniture, and subway maps – has had no place in such a formulation, and therefore has never been seriously included in art historical discussions, even those that take design into account.

Given the limitations of a formalist approach, I go beyond the visual similarities of art and design to uncover the logic systems shared between artists and designers as well as their processes. I assume a family resemblance between design

and art and therefore use such resemblances to expose the syntax they hold in common. I employ, therefore, a more inclusive look at the “visual world” of 1960s New York and examine design and art side-by-side to explore how their relationship manifested itself in deeper ways than have been previously realized. The isolated, frontal, mechanically-reproduced image, for example, is shared by both Doyle Dane Bernbach’s late-1950s advertising campaign for Volkswagen as well as Andy Warhol’s screen print imagery. The mid-century anti-billboard movement provides an opportunity to investigate Robert Rauschenberg’s awareness of the visual culture that existed outside his downtown New York studio by way of his use of street signs in his urban combines, but also opens a path to exploring designers such as Peter Chermayeff and Milton Glaser’s own discomfort with outdoor advertising. The logic behind the placement of signage – in which designers follow unwitting pedestrians to see where signs fail them – is echoed in Vito Acconci’s performance Following Piece, in which the artist followed his targets until they entered a private place. The design firm Unimark International carried out such following in the New York City subway system at the very same moment that Acconci’s performance occurred. In each of these examples, I reveal the correspondence between artists and designers to be their practices and their decision making; the objects that result permit us to examine these relationships in fresh ways.

With the paradigm of salon exhibitions, developed some three centuries ago, bourgeois art patrons were moved to transform their experience of an exhibition into words. This incitement to discourse persists as a central component of curatorial practice today, within and beyond exhibitions as singular events. In The Curatorial Incitement to Discourse, Mick Wilson draws out the link between the imperative to generate discourse and the imperative to civilize that emerge in the genealogy of the salon, the exhibition complex, and the museum.

The first volume in the forthcoming series On the Curatorial, which explores the decades-long debate on the genre of exhibition making and its limits.

(English / German)
The special volume ZERO in the Notizen zu Uecker series collates lecture manuscripts from the workshop "Der Zustand des Erlebens", which took place in Düsseldorf in cooperation with the ZERO foundation in 2023. Invited participants addressed pressing questions regarding artistic action in recent debate. The contributions include approaches focussing on German post-war art, art historical discourses and political theory in the 1960s, elaborated in contemporary debate about artistic production, the field of action, and experiencing the work and the subject, as well as action art, performance, and performativity. The authors’ varied expertise offers fresh perspectives on a contemporary field of discourse.

• Bilingual German-English
• Artistic action, action art, performance, and performativity
• Günther Uecker and German postwar art

Der Sonderband ZERO der Schriftenreihe Notizen zu Uecker versammelt Vortragsmanuskripte des Workshops „Der Zustand des Erlebens", der in Kooperation mit der ZERO foundation 2023 in Düsseldorf stattfand. Eingeladene Akteur*innen beschäftigten sich dabei mit drängenden Fragen zur künstlerischen Handlung in jüngsten Debatten. Die Beiträge umfassen Ansätze mit Fokus auf die deutsche Nachkriegskunst, kunstwissenschaftliche Diskurse und politische Theorie der 1960er-Jahre, erweitert um zeitgenössische Debatten zum künstlerischen Herstellen, dem Aktionsfeld und der Erfahrbarkeit von Werk und Subjekt sowie der Aktionskunst, Performance und Performativität. Durch die unterschiedlich gelagerten Expertisen der Autor*innen ergeben sich neue Perspektiven auf ein zeitaktuelles Diskursfeld.

• Künstlerische Handlung, Aktionskunst, Performance und Performativität
• Günther Uecker und die deutsche Nachkriegskunst

Ziel der Auseinandersetzung um Raubgut aus der Zeit des Nationalsozialismus ist das Finden einer "gerechten und fairen Lösung". Was jedoch sind "gerechte und faire Lösungen"? Und wie prüft man NS-Raubgutfälle? Diese vollkommen neuartige Publikation zeigt Herangehensweisen an entsprechende Fälle und das Entwickeln von Lösungen auf. „Alternate History"-Elemente wie z.B. Da Vincis "Formel der Unsichtbarkeit", Antonio Vivaldis Komposition "Die fünf Jahreszeiten", oder eine Landkarte von 1506, die erstmals einen neuen Kontinent namens „America" erwähnt -, sind Ausgangspunkt für die Prüfung und Lösung der Fälle. Die venezianischen Fälle stellen damit einen Brückenschlag zwischen Kunst, Geschichte, Recht und Ethik dar. Sie werden von Lösungsaspekten und -modellen sowie dem Muster einer konkreten Restitutionsvereinbarung begleitet.

The rural, remote, and wild territories we call “countryside”, or the 98% of the earth’s surface not occupied by cities, make up the front line where today’s most powerful forces—climate and ecological devastation, migration, tech, demographic lurches—are playing out. Increasingly under a ‘Cartesian’ regime—gridded, mechanized, and optimized for maximal production—these sites are changing beyond recognition. In his latest publication, Rem Koolhaas explores the rapid and often hidden transformations underway across the Earth’s vast non-urban areas.

Countryside, A Report gathers travelogue essays exploring territories marked by global forces and experimentation at the edge of our consciousness: a test site near Fukushima, where the robots that will maintain Japan’s infrastructure and agriculture are tested; a greenhouse city in the Netherlands that may be the origin for the cosmology of today’s countryside; the rapidly thawing permafrost of Central Siberia, a region wrestling with the possibility of relocation; refugees populating dying villages in the German countryside and intersecting with climate change activists; habituated mountain gorillas confronting humans on ‘their’ territory in Uganda; the American Midwest, where industrial-scale farming operations are coming to grips with regenerative agriculture; and Chinese villages transformed into all-in-one factory, e-commerce stores, and fulfillment centers.

This book is the official companion to the Guggenheim Museum exhibition Countryside, The Future. The exhibition and book mark a new area of investigation for architect and urbanist Rem Koolhaas, who launched his career with two city-centric entities: The Office for Metropolitan Architecture (1975) and Delirious New York (1978). It’s designed by Irma Boom, who drew inspiration for the book’s pocket-sized concept, as well as its innovative typography and layout, from her research in the Vatican library.

The book brings together collaborative research by AMO, Koolhaas, and students at the Harvard Graduate School of Design; the Central Academy of Fine Arts, Beijing; Wageningen University in the Netherlands; and the University of Nairobi. Contributors also include Samir Bantal, Janna Bystrykh, Troy Conrad Therrien, Lenora Ditzler, Clemens Driessen, Alexandra Kharitonova, Keigo Kobayashi, Niklas Maak, Etta Madete, Federico Martelli, Ingo Niermann, Dr. Linda Nkatha Gichuyia, Kayoko Ota, Stephan Petermann, and Anne M. Schneider.

1961, three years after meeting Jeanne-Claude in Paris, Christo made a study of a mammoth project that would wrap one of the city’s most emblematic monuments. 60 years, 25,000 square meters of recyclable fabric, and 3,000 meters of rope later, the artists' vision finally came true. Discover their posthumous installation with this book gathering photography, drawings, and a history of the project's making.

Like most of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's work, L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped is temporary and runs for 16 days from Saturday, September 18 to Sunday, October 3, 2021. Carried out in close collaboration with the Centre des Monuments Nationaux, the historic structure is wrapped in recyclable polypropylene fabric in silvery blue and recyclable red rope. The project is the posthumous realisation of a long-held dream for Christo and Jeanne-Claude, who first drew up plans to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in 1961 while renting a small room near the monument.

Published as a tribute to the late artists and their lifelong partnership, the book includes original sketches, technical data, and exclusive photography, creating a fascinating behind-the-scenes look at the genesis of this prodigious artwork.

Glamour und Geld, Intrigen und Skandale bestimmten das Leben der ungarischen Porträtmalerin Vilma Parlaghy (1863-1924), die ihren Ruhm der Zurückweisung ihrer Werke auf den Berliner Kunstausstellungen und einer durch Kaiser Wilhelm II. verliehenen großen Goldmedaille verdankte. Kaiser, Könige, Minister und Industriemagnaten saßen ihr Modell und durch ihre Ehe mit einem russischen Aristokraten erlangte den Ruf einer Malerfürstin. Nach der Scheidung setzte sie ihre Karriere in Amerika fort, wo sie den Stahltycoon Andrew Carnegie, Präsident Theodore Roosevelt oder den geniale Erfinder Nikola Tesla porträtierte. Sie wurde Millionärin und verlor zuletzt doch alles. Sie starb mit 60 Jahren in New York und ist heute völlig vergessen, nicht zuletzt, weil sie ihr größtes Kunstwerk mit ins Grab genommen hat: sich selbst.

• Malerfürstin
• Porträts der internationalen High Society
• Kunst und Gesellschaft um 1900

Ukraine at war in a unique chronicle that examines expressions of the Ukrainian people on the street, in graffiti, murals, and quotidian life.

On his travels to wartime Ukraine, where even the feeling of relaxation is dangerous, Mitja Velikonja observed thousands of images of the culture of war in what he saw on the street and everyday life, from bakeries, road signs, billboards and murals, to unsanctioned graffiti. This street iconography, invested with a patriotic vocabulary, was also informed by his conversations with people, the scenes of destruction, misery, and above all, the strong will to resist, from which everyday heroism emerges.

The author went twice to the war zones of Ukraine and took more than 3,000 photographs of the street iconography of the state of war. Although all nationalists are equally foreign to him, when he talks to people, he asks himself how he would feel in their shoes, how he would react. When war creeps up to our front door, it affects everyone: leftists and right-wingers, nationalists and pacifists, patriots and those who don't care what flag they live under.

"Thus, while driving or waiting anywhere, I took a small test: how long does it take to come across images of war, warrior iconography, vocabulary of emphatic patriotism, the sound of a national awakening song, footage from battlefields. Mostly it was a matter of seconds."

Through these pieces of the culture and a people holding themselves together against an invader through a self-defensive nationalism, Velikonja sees that nationalism hides poverty — the more severe, the bigger the flags. In Ukrainian Vignettes, Velikonja compiles the images, words, impressions and voices of everyday life in war, to help us understand how clearly politics and ideology are displayed directly on the street. His philosophical approach of essays as vignettes allows him to have a critical eye even as he struggles to understand tragic events, and despite his affection for those closest to him. The author remains critical of both sides in his analysis, despite his sympathy for those closer to him.

The Ukrainian response to the 2022 Russian invasion has inspired a new appreciation for their country both within and beyond Ukraine. The steadfastness of Ukrainians in the defense of their country no longer surprises observers as Ukrainians have demonstrated a deep commitment to their country for more than two years.

The stories presented here from the war’s second year highlight the ways in which Ukrainians have explored the meaning of their country and culture through the arts; and the manner in which the arts and their creators have empowered Ukrainians to confront the Russian invaders. They represent an extension of the artistic efforts during the war’s first year—chronicled in The Arts of War: Ukrainian Artists Confront Russia. Year One—to bolster Ukraine’s war efforts.

(English / German)
Psychoanalysis, the study of the unconscious, has provided artists in the 20th and 21st centuries with both a visual language and valuable psychological tools to address the social phenomenon of violence against women. The volume presents groundbreaking research on various representations of gender-based violence in art. The book aims to examine the cultural constructions embedded in this phenomenon and to explore the different strategies that have been developed on different continents to counteract it.
The artists featured are Oskar Kokoschka, María Izquierdo, Grete Stern, Dorothea Tanning, Ana Mendieta, Kiki Kogelnik, Marina Abramović, Soli Kiani, Sigalit Landau, and Hava Raucher, as well as the filmmaker Ruth Beckermann and the philosopher Hélène Cixous.