¿Monet is for me one of the greatest painters who ever existed. He went his way of exploring light relentlessly [...] the viscera of light became visible.¿ A major artist of the Viennese Actionist movement, of which he was one of the founders, Hermann Nitsch, born in Vienna in 1938, died in Mistelbach in April 2022. Internationally recognised as the master of Austrian performance art, the artist developed a powerfully expressive body of work, borrowing from religious dramaturgy to develop a total art that culminated every year since the 1950s in his ¿Orgien Mysterien Theater¿, where he invited friends and audiences to six days of uninterrupted festivities and performances. At the end of his career, Hermann Nitsch developed a painting of great vitality, increasingly colourful, always closely linked to his performative acts. Fascinated by Monet¿s Nympheas, the artist engaged in a dialogue with this masterpiece of Impressionism, whose proximity to his art he emphasised: ¿In my performances, my expressive and religious painting has become a finished drama, an analytical dramaturgy. What remains to be seen is a frenzy of colour and form that stands out far beyond its content, like the ecstasies of colour in Monet¿s Water Lilies¿. The book will bring together a collection of paintings and graphic works produced shortly before his death, chosen directly from the artist¿s studio.
The first monograph in English on a major Polish painter. Józef Halas (1927-2015) is one of the major Polish painters of his generation. Active in Wroclaw from 1949 until his death, first as a student and then as an artist and teacher, he left a unique body of work that, like many of those built largely during the Cold War, remained long unrecognized in Western Europe and North America. The Mountain series, which occupied most of his activity during the 1960s, marks both a strong connection with nature and a distance from the landscape painting tradition. The following series, Oppositions, Partitions, Verticals, Obliques, Levels and Interiors, constitute the pinnacle of his production and testify to a poetics of contradiction which is embodied in multiple and successful ways. The Pocket Gouaches, begun in the late 1970s, reveal an artist who has always remained open to experimentation. For a decade, the history of art has fortunately opened its field of investigation, modernity has become plural and its actors have become more numerous. There is no doubt that Józef Halas must now be counted as one of the important players in this global history. This monograph, with texts by Michel Gauthier, curator at the Centre Pompidou, Magdalena Howorus-Czajka, professor at the University of Gdansk, and Marjolaine Lévy, art critic, aims to contribute to the knowledge of Halas¿s work beyond Poland and by placing it in an international context.
The catalogue raisonné of the artist's complete works, featuring his famous seascapes and other lesser-known works. Jacques Cordier (1937-1975) was a French painter with a versatile artistic technique: when he wasn¿t using oil paint, he painted in watercolor or drew in Indian ink. Despite his short life, Cordier produced a multitude of works, listed here in this catalogue raisonné with over 1,200 illustrations. The book also includes a selection of letters and testimonials written by personalities such as Françoise Sagan, Bernard Buffet and François Cheng. The catalogue covers his entire body of work, from his first works in 1953, when he was just 16, to the year of his death in 1975 ¿ which is more than 20 years of creation. Grandson of sculptor Charles Cordier, Jacques discovered his vocation as an artist at an early age. At just 19, he exhibited his first drawings alongside those of Bernard Buffet. Initially, his muse was none other than Paris, which he portrayed in all its grandeur. From 1962 onwards, due to his military service in the navy, the artist created luminous works imbued with reverie, depicting the magnificent landscapes of the Mediterranean. A colorist¿s temperament is revealed in contact with the light of the South and the color of the ocean. In the latter part of his life, the influence of William Turner is felt in his art. During his lifetime, Jacques Cordier exhibited in France, the United States and Italy.
After more than three decades devoted to intercultural mediation, Brahim Alaoui, former director of the museum of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, looks back on his encounters with Arab artists in their home countries or in exile. He brings knowledge and a sensitive look at the work of a generation of modern artists, who were often trained in post-war Europe and then went back to their country to reflect on their identity and develop a post-colonial modernity. Alaoui then presents a selection of contemporary artists who have emancipated themselves from the classical ways of representation at the turn of the 21st century, exploring new mediums and bringing an original contribution to the global dynamics of international artistic networks. Through fifty portraits, we come across the history of art and the debates of different ideas in the Arab world, since the beginning of the twentieth century until today. The book displays numerous portraits of artists in their homes or their studios. An important interview with the art critic Pascale Le Thorel allows us to contextualize Alaoui's encounters with the various artists. A publication that also contributes to the reflection on ¿modernity¿, rethought in its plurality, in the light of new values brought by cultural globalization.
Pascal Haudressy was a French visual artist of Tartar origin. After ten years at UNESCO as a cultural project manager, Haudressy decided to devote himself to artistic production in 2005. He develops his aesthetic style by combining different media: videos, sculptures, and paintings to reconcile the past and the future, materiality and immateriality or even science and myth. After a first monograph published by Skira in 2011, this book offers a rediscovery of Pascal Haudressy¿s artistic practice, especially through an essay by Françoise Paviot on the piece Heart. This major work was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 2019 and at the Sainte Eustache church for three years (2017-2020). According to the artist, "[...] it is truly a sculpture, animated by a random process," based on the sabotage of the machine and creating a work between figuration and abstraction. The artist has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in France and internationally, including a notable participation in the exhibition Artists & Robots at the Grand Palais in 2018 with the piece Brain. An essay by Jérôme Neutres, curator and independent art producer, will provide insight into this piece. His artworks have joined the collections of FRAC Nord Pas-de-Calais and agnès b.
Born in Senegal in 1977, Omar Ba lives and works between Dakar and New York. His paintings - made with various techniques and materials - include political and social themes with multiple interpretations. His plastic vocabulary reactivates historical and a temporal questions while elaborating an artistic statement of absolute contemporaneity. Omar Ba was trained at the Beaux Arts in Dakar and Geneva. In recent years, he has participated in numerous solo and group exhibitions, including Voyage au-delà de l'illusion at the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium (2022) and Global(e) Résistance at the Centre Pompidou (2020). His works have entered several public collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou and the Centre National des Arts Plastiques (CNAP) in France, the Swiss National Collection (Basel) and the Louvre Abu Dhabi. This book is an opportunity to explore Omar Ba's paintings, some of which will be displayed for the opening exhibition of Galerie Templon in New York.
For the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, the Lebanese Pavilion exhibits two Lebanese contemporary artists, Danielle Arbid and Ayman Baalbaki, in the exhibition The World in the Image of Man. The dialogue between these two artists is characterized by different geographical and aesthetic points of view: the video Allô Chérie by Danielle Arbid, a filmmaker and video artist who emigrated to Paris, interacts with Janus Gate by Ayman Baalbaki, a painter who lives and works in Beirut. Within his monumental installation, Ayman Baalbaki creates a work embodying the process of fragmentation suffered by the city of Beirut due to the return of barriers and barricades in its streets. The movement of the door of Janus, which is alternately wide open, shuttered or closed, responds to the mother of the artist's frantic race car through Beirut. The video is organized in a split screen, enhancing the impression of a divided city. The soundtrack is composed of snatches of negotiations on the phone accounting for a fractured city in the midst of uncertainty. The catalogue gathers several articles facilitating the apprehension of these two artists and marks the return of the Lebanese Pavilion to the Venice Biennale after 5 years of absence.
Philippe Cognée is a French artist born in Nantes in 1957. Active since the 1980s, he is one of the artists who marked the return to painting in this period. Cognée is known for his practice of wax painting. He projects the photographed or filmed motifs onto the canvas and paints them on the support with encaustic paint. He then covers the canvas with a plastic film and uses an iron to liquefy the wax. The motifs begin to deform under the heat, creating an effect of blur and depth. This technique allows Cognée to dissolve the represented elements, often blurring the line between figurative painting and abstraction. Urban landscapes, views of supermarkets or slaughterhouses, Google Street View shots ¿ the painter finds his inspiration in what surrounds him. While drawing subjects from everyday life and thanks to his atypical technique, Cognée creates original works in which, through the distortion of reality, he shows a poetic vision of the world.
Having exhibited the most iconic works made by famous designers ¿ from Charlotte Perriand, Serge Mouille, Jean Prouvé, Le Corbusier and Ettore Sottsass to Ron Arad, Isamu Noguchi and Choï Byung ¿ the gallery has imposed itself locally and internationally as a major reference in design. Focusing on showing a selection of the best objects and pieces of furniture ever designed, this book also testifies to the high-level quality of curation at Laffanour Galerie Downtown Paris. With exhibitions recreating entire spaces of living, smart staging allows a wonderful immersive experience through the most refined interiors. The gallery participates to the most renowned art fairs: pictures of the gallery¿s booths will also be displayed in the book.
Today, the word "pullman" has come to mean "a railroad passenger car with especially comfortable furnishings for day or especially for night travel". But before the word entered the mainstream, it was a name, that of George Mortimer Pullman, a serial entrepreneur, an extraordinary innovator and one of the cleverest businessmen of America's Gilded Age. Pullman gave his name first to a coach, then to a train and finally to a notion, that of luxury travel. This book will retrace the history of Pullman, from the genius innovation of overnight travel, dining wagons and sleeper beds, to a globally recognized brand synonymous with pioneer engineering, premium mobility and lavish "hotels on wheels". Pullman's history is closely tied with the history of 20th century USA, yet it extended its influence across the world. George Mortimer Pullman (1831-1897) was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car, a luxurious railroad coach designed for overnight travel, and founded a company town, Pullman, for the workers who manufactured it. In 1894 workers at his Pullman's Palace Car Company initiated the Pullman Strike, which severely disrupted rail travel in the midwestern United States and established the use of the injunction as a means of strikebreaking. In 1898, the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the town, which became a neighborhood of the city of Chicago.
L'Atlas is a Parisian artist born in 1978. Fascinated by handwriting from an early age, he moves to different Arabic countries in the 1990s to study calligraphy. In France, he starts by graffiti art, which he combines with his great passion for writing. A balance between form and letter is since then at the heart of his practice. He uses spray paint, scotch tape or gaffer on various supports: canvas, pavement, buildings' facades, etc. and is also well-known for his performances. L'Atlas creates his own labirynthical alphabet which, inked in the city, invites us to question the universality of the language and the limits of illegibility. This monograph presents many variations of artist's codified language. Between Optical Art, abstraction, street art, Pop Art and Minimalism, L'Atlas' art is multifaceted.
Originally from Brittany, Renk-whose real name is Walig Nicolet-grew up in Rennes in a family of artists. He left school at a very young age and began painting in the street. A few years later, working in studios in Paris and Los Angeles, he started painting on large canvases. His practice at the time was based on the accumulation and repetition of his tag-RENK-and soon evolved into the creation of vast colored areas whose variations evoke Color Field painting. Perched on the roofs of Parisian buildings or canoeing along the coast of his native Brittany, Renk travels in search of "climatic moments" that allow him to express his passion for limitless space and pure color. This book, the artist's first monograph, traces Renk's journey from the 2010s to today.
Born in 1982 in Tunis, Thameur Mejri graduated from the Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis. In his initial abstract paintings, Thameur Mejri inserts figurative elements. The human figure finds a predominant place by its recurrence. As a standing figure or reduced into a simple skull or other bones, it is revealed by the application of fine lines made in charcoal or pastel emerging delicately from the large flat areas of colour. Colours collide into one another as if to better exacerbate the vicissitudes endured by the body. These violent oppositions of colours also testify to the speed of execution of the artist, made possible using acrylic paint. By establishing an atmosphere of confrontation, the artist manages within a single work to transcribe the impetuosity of his gesture while creating a suspended chaos where the complexities of human existence appear to everyone. This book is the artist's first monograph and provides a better understanding of the discovery of these particularly immersive large formats.
André Marfaing (1925-87) was a French non-figurative painter and printmaker associated with abstract art and informalism. This catalogue raisonné of is a complete repertory of his painted work, from his initial "youth" paintings (1948-52) until his last works completed in 1986. 1952, the year he took up non-figuration, was a fundamental step that led him very quickly to abstraction. His first forays into painting, his earlier figurative canvases, still lifes, landscapes and even his few portraits, live on as witnesses to his apprenticeship and as pointers to an artistic adventure that remained latent. The use of acrylic, which gained ground in 1970, led to formal inflections that reached into the heart of his painting.Marfaing probes what is deepest in others as well as his own private space, the confines of a nature within, a cosmos without landscape, a terrain whose contours and features he ceased depicting long ago. The present catalogue raisonné retraces such a path step by step, following up the clues and noting the silences, without ever dissipating the mystery that Marfaing knew how to fathom and to sustain. One must follow these traces as he himself proceeded - with humility, to come to him in the same way his painting calls us. His works, his writings, his friendships, his struggles form an inter woven and inextricable whole.
Two-dimensional Plensa Jaume Plensa is one of the major figures of contemporary sculpture, best known for his large-scale human figures in stainless steel. This monography presents the artist from another angle, showing his graphic works. The book offers an intimate insight into Plensäs universe. Characterised by a greater freedom, as they are not made to order and do not require assistants¿ help, the drawings are a form of reflexion and experimentation for Plensa. He works with various materials, such as plastic sheets, or thick glue on paper or Plexiglas, which allows him to play with light and transparency and gives his works an impression of volume. As in the case of the sculptures, the artist focuses on the human, representing a variety of figures, which he assembles with elements such as photos, letters from different alphabets or numbers. This monography brings to light the diversity of Plensäs creation and the richness of his artistic language. Far from being reduced to preparatory works, Plensa's drawings, often of very large dimensions, function as artworks in their own right, showing the diversity of Plensäs ideas.
Graffiti is like art: everyone thinks they know what it is, but things get complicated if you try to give a precise explanation. This book will trace a history of the art of graffiti through the evolution of Tilt's work. Graffiti writing, which is based on drawn and painted letters, is a movement many of today's graffiti artists - Tilt included - claim to be part of when they want to highlight their own singularity and resist the "street-art turn" of the visual artworks currently produced in public space. The artist painted his first tag as "Tilt" in 1990. He knew from then on that graffiti would be a lifelong passion. Graffiti conveys a libertarian, if not anarchistic and invasive, relationship with the city, against architectural and urban authoritarianism, the pervasiveness of advertising, and disfigured blocks. As far as Tilt is concerned, the content does not necessarily have to bear any explicit political message: the gesture itself embodies an activist form of intervention on the territory. From 2016 on, Tilt has been recreating a series of abstractions in his studio. His recent artwork tell its own story, just as strikingly surprising as a piece of graffiti you would happen to see in the city, they are both inscribed in the subversive origins of graffiti and in the history of painting. Whether it be vandalistic-in the streets, where it belongs to everybody - or a decorative object - as the first writers to enter New York City's art galleries as early as the 1970s had decided - graffiti is an ongoing story to tell - or rather, to write...
Slimen El Kamel was born in 1983 in Mazouna in the region of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. Nourished by popular stories, his childhood was shaped by the imagination of the rural environment where the tradition of storytelling and popular poetry flourished. His studies at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis allowed him to crystallize this literary and intellectual heritage into a singular plastic practice. A practice whose genesis opens through a writing and draws its resources in his texts, sometimes poetic or literary, sometimes memorial or improvised. The daily scriptural exercise, as much as it circumscribes, extends the horizons of his plastic universe. Not far from the free figuration, the artist questions the relation of the real and the imaginary by the dramatization of the constellated image. The figure of a reality levitates in the space of an imagination and a proliferating abundance where a transfiguration of the social and popular fact in a surrealist vision is played. Images of the memory, images of a reality taken on the supports of the everyday life cross in a pictorial field where, to flower of painting, the rustle of a dialogue begins without end, not for the account of a fact, but for a festival of the accounts.
The immersive exhibition Imagine Picasso makes it possible to discover Pablo Picasso's work from new, innovative angles. Each visitor is invited to wander through a mosaic of emblematic paintings, removed from their frames and projected on a huge origami-like forms. Penetrating the mesmerizing world of unusual compositions of large-scale artworks gives the opportunity to explore the richness of details of Picasso's art. The album offers the possibility to relive the immersive experience through multiple photos from the exhibition. They are accompanied by texts by Androula Michael which provide clear descriptions of different Picasso's periods and of subjects that were dear to him. The reader can discover Picasso's art from the early years, through blue and pink period, cubism, "neoclassical" period, surrealism, up to his final years. Les demoiselles d'Avignon, Portrait of Dora Maar, Guernica and many more are to be explored in this book that offers a new way of looking at the work of this genius of modern art.
Adrian Burns is a Mexican photographer trained at the prestigious Putney School and at the Parsons School of Design where he completed his training in art history and photography. Trilingual, the artist lives between Mexico, the United States and France. Today, his photographs can be found all over the world; they are exhibited in numer ous museums and they are also published on the covers of numerous magazines (Travel & Leisure, Deep, Elle Mexico, FHM Mexico, Sportswear International, National Geographic, among others). From portraits to landscapes, Adrian Burns' work is marked by his fascination for nature. Vegetation is omnipresent in his landscape photographs. A plurality of worlds often composed of geometric forms that are seen through the photographer's sharp eye. By enhancing many landscape photographs with graphite or acrylic varnish, he brings us into his unique and poetic universe.
From the first pages, we are immersed into the history of the creation of Fairmont. Echoing the wonderful endeavor of railway, the flourishing of Fairmont palaces and Chateaux-hotels in North America results from a succesful combination between Luxury and Nature. The constant attention to surroundings hows Fairmont's strong concern in sustainability and wildlife preservation. Focusing on Architecture, the book presents the historic hotels along with the most recent yet iconic hotels ever built. Through architectural and design innovations, the Fairmont hotels managed throughout time to stand out in hospitality Architecture. Traveling from San Francisco to Singapore, one discovers the magnificent locations where Fairmont hotels stand across the world. While exploring the resorts built in heavenly places, one can only wonder at the unlimited solutions used by Fairmont to renew the typology. Praised by international and prestigious guests, the Fairmont hotels has a long experience hosting royal members, actors, singers and politics. The book is illustrated with rare pictures of famous guests while staying at Fairmont hotels. The best of Fashion can be appreciated along with a real enthusiasm for themed balls and parties. This unique material reenacts the wonderful atmosphere that can only be experienced at Fairmont Hotels & Resorts. ¿ Luxury hotels throughout the world ¿ Iconic architecture ¿ Historical guests Starting with a foreword written by Fairmont ambassador and Award winning actress Susan Sarandon, this book celebrates the long history of Fairmont through three chapters (Origins, Architecture and Soul) and rich archival material. The book recreates the unique experience given to Fairmont's customers and makes the reader part of its grand and stupendous history. Accor Group is one of the world leading company in the hospitality industry.
Renowned architect Hala Wardé designed "A Roof for Silence" for the Lebanese Pavilion at the 17th International Architecture Exhibition - La Biennale di Venezia. The design of the work was based on a poem-in-paint by Etel Adnan, as well as on the Antiforms of Paul Virilio, hung facing a series of sixteen ancient trees of Lebanon that were photographed in daylight by Fouad Elkoury, then plunged into darkness by Alain Fleischer, who filmed them in their sleep, with the musical accompaniment of the Soundwalk Collective. The Lebanese Pavilion is conceived as a musical score, resonating disciplines, shapes, and periods to provoke the sensory experience of a thought, articulated around the notions of emptiness and silence, as temporal and spatial conditions of architecture. Treated as a manifesto for a new form of architecture, Hala Wardé's project is based on the cryptic shapes of a group of sixteen olive trees that are a thousand years old in Lebanon. These legendary trees, whose hollowed forms are home to various species, are the tutelary figure of the Lebanese Pavilion. They are places of recollection or gathering, where peasants have convened for generations to decide on village affairs or to celebrate weddings. This book tells the story of the Lebanese Pavilion and explains, through plans, sketches and models, the intentions, and concepts behind the spatial organization of the exhibition.
Ghada Amer (born in 1963 in Cairo) is an Egyptian painter and embroiderer. She studied at the Villa Arson in Nice and at the Institut des hautes études en arts plastiques in Paris. The increasing oppression of women in Egypt and the exclusionary experience of sexism at art school in France inspired in Amer a resolute rebellion against patriarchy that would motivate and propel her artistic strategy for decades to come. With a background in painting, influenced in particular by abstract expressionism, she then decided turn to embroidery as a strategy for infiltrating the male space of painting with a material of traditional female expertise. She bases her early work on the images of female figures found in magazines, thus exploring the construction of the place occupied by women, sexuality, and love in contemporary societies. Her embroidery is loose, threads dangle from the canvas, provoking a pictorial effect resembling that of Pollock's dripping. Her recent work merges text and imagery in her embroidered paintings, layering famous quotations and pithy aphorisms-often regarding themes surrounding women and power-with close-up portraits of women's faces. For Amer, embroidery has been the symbol of her lifelong revolt-a tool for fighting women's exclusion from the rarefied space of painting. That revolt has been the impetus for her to forge new ground, not only in the arena of painting, but in sculpture, ceramics, and earthworks as well. She currently lives and works between New York and Paris and has exhibited among others at the Venice Biennale, the Sydney Biennale, the Whitney Biennale, and the Brooklyn Museum.
The first catalogue raisonné of a leading artist of the Cubist movement.Raymond Duchamp-Villon (1876-1918) was born in Eure, in the Haute-Normandie region of France. He was the brother of the artists Jacques Villon, Marcel Duchamp, and Suzanne Duchamp-Crotti.In 1894 Duchamp-Villon started a career in medicine at the Sorbonne. However rheumatic fever forced him to abandon his studies in 1898 and he began to pursue an interest in sculpture.He soon achieved a high level of mastery and acumen. In 1902 and 1903, he exhibited at the Salon de la Société Nationale des Beaux-Arts.He exhibited his work at the Salon d'Automne in 1905 and he was made a member of the jury of the sculpture section in 1907, becoming instrumental in promoting the Cubist movement.He participated in major salons in Paris and in 1912 he exhibited at the important Armory Show in New York City.During World War I Duchamp-Villon served in the French army in a medical capacity, but still participated in exhibitions and completed his major cubist sculpture, The Large Horse. In late 1916, Raymond Duchamp-Villon contracted typhoid fever and diedin a military hospital at Cannes.In 1967, in Rouen, his last surviving artist brother Marcel helped organize an exhibition called Les Duchamp: Jacques Villon, Raymond Duchamp-Villon, Marcel Duchamp, Suzanne Duchamp. Some of this family exhibition was later shown at the Musée National d'Art Moderne in Paris.
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