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Prestel
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This generously illustrated volume on the work of Caravaggio makes the world's greatest art accessible to readers of every level of appreciation. This monograph explores Caravaggio's entire life and career by focusing on the most important of his works. Readers will learn about his innovated use of light and shadow, his physical and psychological realism, and his radical technique of omitting initial drawings and creating straight onto the canvas. Along the way readers will learn details of the artist's colorful, and often troubled life, as well as the important role he played in the evolution of Western painting. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details-allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre. Chronologically arranged, the book coveres important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline, and suggestions for further reading. |
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This generously illustrated volume on the work of Dürer makes the world's greatest art accessible to readers of every level of appreciation. This monograph explores Dürer's entire life and oeuvre by focusing on the most important of his works. It follows the artist as he traveled throughout Europe, completing commissions for noblemen, kings, emperors, and popes-all the while satisfying his own thirst for knowledge and struggling with the changes brought about by the Reformation. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details-allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and output. Chronologically arranged, the book covers important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline, and suggestions for further reading. |
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This generously illustrated volume on the work of Vincent van Gogh makes the world's greatest art accessible to readers of every level of appreciation. Tracing the arc of van Gogh's career, this volume presents his portraits and self-portraits, landscapes, and haunting interiors. Readers will learn deteails of van Gogh's complicated personal life including his struggles with mental illness and his close but difficult relationship with his brother, Theo. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details-allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre. Chronologically arranged, the book covers important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline, and suggestions for further reading. |
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Focusing on modern architecture, this book gives readers the tools they need to grasp the architectural language and building forms of this diverse period. Part of an accessibly written and generiously illustrated series on architecture through the ages, this book features modern architecture's most important architects and buildings, interior and exterior photographs, detailed images, drawings and plans. A style driven by huge technological advances, modernism is architecture's most diverse period. It encompasses buildings as varied as the Sydney Opera House and the Empire State skyscraper. This volume helps readers sort through the numerous movements, schools of design, and architectural styles of Modernism. Chronologically arranged, it includes some of twentieth century's most exciting buildings. |
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For four decades, gmp has been designing and constructing buildings around the world. Their projects run the gamut from homes, hotels, museums, theatres, concert halls and office buildings, to commercial centers, hospitals, research and educational facilities and transportation stations. Covering more than 200 of these projects, this impressive volume offers a chronological retrospective of gmp's oeuvre. Highlights include innovative renovations to airports in Stuttgart and Hamburg, designs for the reconstruction of the Olympic Stadium in Berlin, and the Rhein Energie Football Stadium in Cologne. With work completed across the globe, the gmp group has established itself as a major force in the world of architecture. This stunning book is a fitting tribute to their accomplishments. |
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When Niki de Saint Phalle died, the world lost not only an artist of enormous passion, but also a remarkably creative woman whose work and life were inextricably linked. Throughout her forty-year career Saint Phalle explored female roles in society and myth, basing many of her disquieting and joyful depictions on personal experience. The full range of Saint Phalle's oeuvre is paid glorious tribute in this retrospective volume, which also features new images and an extended biography. Chronologically arranged, this updated book takes readers from the visceral and controversial shooting paintings and her playfully voluptuous nanas to the impressive installations and wonderfully elaborate sculpture gardens such as the Tarot Garden in Tuscany, the Sun God in San Diego and the Stravinsky Fountain in Paris. In addition to nearly a hundred color and black and white photographs of Saint Phalle's work, the artist's own comments and sketches are interspersed throughout the book, providing an integral framework for understanding and appreciating her unusual talent. |
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Although books on Hundertwasser's work abound, few are as satisfying as this luxuriously designed, one of a kind volume that was originally created as an exhibition catalogue. Bound in black linen, foil-embossed, and printed in six colours with impeccable attention to detail, this gem of a book contains ninety-eight colour illustrations featuring a selection of Hundertwasser's graphic works along with critical texts and commentary by the artist. A short introduction, an essay on the artist's graphic work and an up-to-date biography make this an indispensable book for fans of Hundertwasser and lovers of beauty. |
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Tracing Miro's career, this book begins in the 1920s with the artist's introduction to surrealism, cubism, and dadaism, and the flowering of his friendships with Picasso, Braque and other influential artists and poets. It moves on to his creation of an iconographic pictorial style, which reached maturity in the 1940s and forever distinguished Miro from his contemporaries. Nearly one hundred of his greatest works reproduced in this book display the artistic range of this lyrical painter, whose brilliant use of color, line and shape resulted in haunting compositions. Fascinating photographs depict the artist at various stages of his life and perceptive essays about his work round out this exciting perspective of the world as portrayed in Miro's art. |
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Big art for little hands, these enchanting activity books allow young artists to explore the worlds masterpieces on their own terms and with plenty of space to color outside the lines. |
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Big art for little hands, these enchanting activity books allow young artists to explore the world's masterpieces on their own terms and with plenty of space to color outside the lines. |
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Created during Alexander von Humboldt's historic expedition to the Americas and Cuba-hailed by many as the scientific discovery of America these intricate and delicately tinted prints record his revolutionary findings as he traveled through jungles, across rivers, and over mountainous terrain. The illustrations in the book give the English and Latin botanical names of the plants and are followed by an exhaustive index. Published to coincide with the 150th anniversary of Humboldt's death, this collection of botanical prints contains many works that have never been published before. Internationally renowned botanist H. Walter Lack lends his expertise to a fascinating essay that discusses Humboldt's significant contributions to the world of botany and scientific research. Technically precise, the prints are equally appealing to anyone who appreciates fine art and botanical illustration. |
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Full-colour illustrations and foldouts of Rothenberg's bestknown early works as well as exciting new paintings afford readers the chance to observe the evolution of Rothenberg's themes. From her earliest horse paintings through her spinning figures of the 1980s and early 1990s to her most recent series of paintings of dismembered puppets, this book highlights key compositional strategies in Rothenberg's work. Michael Auping contributes an essay addressing Rothenberg's painting process and the eclectic influences that have helped shape her figurative and spatial distortions. Barbara Buhler Lynes addresses Rothenberg's work in the context of Santa Fe and the tradition of twentieth-century women artists it has inspired, from Mable Dodge Luhan to Georgia O'Keeffe to Agnes Martin. |
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The rise of digital photography is perhaps the most manifest legacy of the digital revolution in art. Through the use of sophisticated software and scanners, artists are able to enhance photographs, saturate them with colour, and create mesmerizing effects. Focusing exclusively on digital photography and its enormous varieties of technique and style being practiced today, Sylvia Wolf explores a genre that challenges our notions of the art and the role of the artist. This lavishly illustrated book takes readers from the earliest experiments in digital photography to the latest innovations. Wolf candidly discusses issues of authenticity and narrative and points to technological trends of the future. A global panoply of artists, including Andreas Gursky, Chris Jordan, Loretta Lux, and Lucas Samaras, demonstrates just how diverse and complex the field has become. Today as digital photography is being used by artists to portray unbridled consumption and warn of ecological disaster; as artists employ Photoshop, Google and their own programming skills to create software-cum-art objects; and as seasoned photographers turn from film to their laptops, this volume offers a riveting snapshot of a medium that is changing the way we look at pictures. |
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Part survey, part artist's book, this long-awaited look at the full range of Kiki Smith's photography allows that body of work to be recognized as an essential part of her working process and of the acclaimed body of work that includes her sculpture, installations, drawings, prints, and books. Over the three decades of her career, Smith has experimented with photography as a working tool, a means of personal expression and simply as a medium in which she can explore space, composition, colour and texture. I don't think my work is particularly about art, A Smith has said. It's really about me, being here in this life, in this skin. I'm cannibalizing my own experience, my surroundings. A Smith's selection of unseen photos for this book parallels the four concerns discussed in Elizabeth Brown's essay-studio process, reflecting and constructing identity, making stories and recording her own artworks-and allows us to intimately share her unique vision. |
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Organized around the themes of models, monuments, and memorials-key subjects in Schutte's art-this volume offers a comprehensive selection of work from the late 1970s to today by an artist considered a key figure of his generation. Schutte's installations, sculptures, prints, drawings, and watercolours often take contradictory forms, and his art may seem to depict alien worlds. Yet his focus is everyday life, whose basic constituents-natural, cultural, political-he revises, using a broad range of materials and colours, while asking questions about the place of art in society. Schutte has long engaged with many of the traditional genres of sculpture-the reclining female figure and the commemorative portrait bust, for example-yet the results are utterly unconventional. A deeply contrarian spirit informs his approach, resulting in a transformation of standard and formulaic modes into singular statements that reflect on history, politics, social space, and collective experience. Together the works in this book comprise an impressive career marked by constant change and innovation. |
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The importance of the work of Hannah Wilke (1940-1993) has never been clearer. In retrospect, her artwork, like her life, frames a heroic story about formal invention and social activism; about personal loyalties and individual freedom; and, above all, about breathtaking risk. A defining presence in a nascent community of women artists, determined to expose (and fix) the inequities of the fast-growing art world of the 1960s. At the same time, Wilke was an unapologetic individualist, who celebrated her relationships with men as well as women and frankly explored the pleasures of sexuality. Using a wide range of unconventional media, including latex and chewing gum as well as photography and film, she paid tribute — however irreverently — to her predecessors, from Duchamp to David Smith. A key concern was the body as instrument and object of visual expression; Wilke was most boldly honest in an unremitting self-exploration that she undertook without false modesty (when her naked body was an uncomplicated delight to behold) or shame (when it was mercilessly blighted by cancer). Beauty and glamour, power and individual prerogative, and the responsibility to account for one's place in the political landscape are all issues that Wilke explored thoroughly, and in which her work provides an essential seminar for younger artists. Wilke's photographs, films, installation and writing now find themselves in a cultural climate that once again seems more favourable to candour and controversy. |
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For centuries Japanese potters have been turning out porcelain vessels, known for their purity of colour and perfection of form. In contrast, the work of Taizo Kuroda is revered not for its purity or precision, but for the luminous warmth and joyful asymmetry that makes his work both approachable and appealing to the senses. This monograph celebrates Kuroda's most beautiful creations — vessels that transcend their functionality to become works of art. Kuroda's unique approach to glazing, his love of shape and silhouette, and his willingness to let the potter's hands become part of the piece all serve to make his art some of the most revered and sought after in the world. |
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Few contemporary buildings demonstrate the purpose of their existence as effectively as Hawkins\Brown's newest scheme. Built to bring together lecturers, researchers and students previously based in separate buildings across Oxford's campus, its glass and steel exterior literally reveals the cutting-edge work being done in its interior — challenging the notion that laboratory walls should be opaque and secretive. The building includes an ambitious art project, Salt Bridges, which combines chemistry and design to illustrate the chaos and coincidence that so often shape scientific discovery. This volume features a fascinating critical introduction to the project, photographs of plans and models, contributions from the builder on the construction process, and conversations between architects, artists and scientists at the heart of the building's conception. The story of collaboration between seemingly disparate disciplines makes this monograph particularly appealing to those interested in the relationship between art, architecture and science. |
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The firm of Hilmer & Sattler und Albrecht has been making headlines after winning the competition to design the Potsdamer Platz in Berlin. This book highlights their prolific output from 2004 to 2010 and features housing projects, hotels, office buildings, retail shops and private residences in Germany, Switzerland, and other countries. Full-colour photographs, sketches, and detailed plans reveal the firm's talent for incorporating classic European principles into cutting-edge buildings. |
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Celebrated for his penetrating portraits, richly detailed landscapes and evocative narrative paintings, the seventeenth century artist Rembrandt is generally considered one of Europe's greatest painters and printmakers, and the master of the Dutch School. His work is distinguished by broad brushwork, luminous palettes, and a sense of order and movement that recalls the finest Renaissance art. Overflowing with impeccably reproduced images, this book offers full-page spreads of masterpieces as well as highlights of smaller details-allowing the viewer to appreciate every aspect of the artist's technique and oeuvre. Chronologically arranged, the book covers important biographical and historic events that reflect the latest scholarship. Additional information includes a list of works, timeline and suggestions for further reading. |
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