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The works by the Vietnamese artist who combines archaic and modern elements in an art form that can be called spiritual and naïveNguyen Thi Mai (1966) is a self-taught artist based in Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam.She works mainly with acrylic painting and lacquer painting, although she is also experienced with oil on canvas, silk painting and ink painting.Lacquer painting is a traditional Vietnamese art form, with the painting done on wooden boards. However, Nguyen Thi Mai has given this traditional art form a new twist with her own unique technique.It is usual for lacquer paintings to have a glossy finishing. However, with her technique, Mai's lacquer paintings have a matte finishing. Thus the term "unpolished lacquer painting". The matte look has given her lacquer pieces a very subtle and refined look, not found elsewhere on the market. "As a self taught artist, I am very much influenced by the visions I see, the melodies I hear and my deep appreciation for tradition and beauty.Through my art, I advocate, and also seek, balance and harmony. Balance and harmony not only on the canvas, but more importantly, within me. When a pendulum reaches the extremes, it seeks the center. Through balance, we have harmony. Through harmony, we have peace. And through peace, we have happiness."

Born in 1963 in Dharamsala, India, Kesang Lamdark grew up in Switzerland, where helater apprenticed and worked as an interior architect. He went on to study at ParsonsSchool of Design in New York, and he received an MA in Visual Arts at Columbia University. The artist now lives and works in Zurich, Switzerland.Lamdark's plastic sculptures and mirrored lightboxes are evidence of his displaced and multicultural upbringing. His search for an appropriate cultural space ultimately turned inwards, as he came to understand and reconnect with his Tibetan heritagewhile living in the West. Through his Tibetan-Western identity, he is able tounderstand and strike a balance between both cultures. Combining unusualmaterials, from hair to plastic, beer cans to nail polish, Lamdark brings together the unfamiliar and revels in recycling everyday objects into works of art.In 2008, Lamdark presented in the Third Guangzhou Triennial, installing a work titledPink Himalayan Boulder - a 10,000-kilogram rock that he smuggled out of Tibet and encased in melted plastic - at SH Contemporary in Shanghai. He also participated in the annual Dharamshala International Artists' Workshop in 2012 and completed aresidency at the Samuel Dorsky Museum of Art in 2013.

The dominant role of female beauty in sixteenth-century Venice is unique both in the history of the Republic and other parts of the world. One reason for this is the Serenissimäs distinctive political-social structure, which granted women special rights in connection with their dowry and their ability to inherit; another was Venice¿s pivotal role as an international cultural centre. The rise of influential publishing houses attracted renowned poets and humanists such as Pietro Bembo, Sperone Speroni and Lodovico Dolce, who in their writings increasingly focused on women and their vital role for the family and the continuation of humanity as such. The crucial impetus for the visual realisation of this idea came from the Serenissimäs greatest artist: Titian. For him, artistic beauty was identical with female beauty. He was less interested in the canon of exterior beauty than in a women¿s character, in femininity as such. Titian elevates every depiction of a woman into a celebration of womanhood. Published for the exhibition in Vienna and Milan, the book aims to present the female image through the spectrum of possible themes and to compare individual artistic approaches between Titian and other painters of the time. The reader will experience the various aspects of female idealisation.

Model, photographer, muse, the first female war correspondent to report the horrors of the concentration camps liberated by American troops, and twentieth-century icon. Lee Miller was all this and much more. She went through life with passion and determination and life repaid her with love and friends, but also with pain and posthumous, or at least tardy, acknowledgement. Through approximately 140 photographs by Lee Miller and Man Ray, some objects d'art and video documents, loaned by Lee Miller Archives and Fondazione Marconi, Lee Miller. Man Ray. Fashion - Love - War intends to do justice to this woman as beautiful as she was clever and talented, taking her out of Man Ray's overpowering shadow, to reveal a deep but complicated relationship more objectively: Man Ray, first her teacher, then lover, and in the end friend. Published on the occasion of the exhibition in Venice, the volume pays suitable homage to Lee Miller, pioneer of surrealism in photography, placing her on a par with Man Ray, whose work tended to overshadow her both during her lifetime and after. The heart of the project lies the relationship between Lee Miller and Man Ray - which blossomed in Paris in 1929 and ended in 1932 - with a focus on their lives, careers and relationships at that time; it also documents the effect they both had on each other and how it inspired their work, including the photographic solarisation technique Man Ray adopted to the point that shots by Miller were erroneously attributed to Ray. The volume also presents portraits by Man Ray of friends and important protagonists of the artistic period: Max Ernst, Pablo Picasso, Giorgio de Chirico, Jean Cocteau, Salvador Dalí and surrealist shots of Lee Miller in which he seeks to investigate and reveal her soul and torments.

Magdalena Abakanowicz (1930) today is revered for her uncompromising, individualistic vision developed in her native Poland under the hostile eyes of the repressive Communist regime that was in power for most of her adult life. She has personally witnessed the worst of humanity¿s instinct for destructive behavior and has made art that unflinchingly presents the human condition. She had, by the 1960s, gained the beginning of an international reputation as a sculptor in soft materials with the creation of monumental environments called Abakans. Always alert to build on her personal independent vision, she has created large groups of human figures out of old burlap sacks and resin. Her 80 backward-seated figures and 50 standing figures have attracted widespread attention and evoked provocative cultural and political associations wherever they have been shown. At the Venice Biennial of 1980, her ambitious exhibition in the Polish Pavilion caused a sensation among critics and the general public. Her retrospective moved to America from the Musée d¿Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris to be shown in seven important museums. Since then the level and variety of her work has been nothing short of astonishing.She changed sculpture from ¿object to look at¿ into ¿space to experience¿. Monumental, powerful compositions in bronze or stone, iron or concrete have been created for specific locations¿the Gori Collection in Italy, the Olympic Park in Seoul (Korea), the Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Vilnius (Lithuania), and Chicagös Grant Park¿and are permanently installed as environments accessible to people.She has transformed the casting process into a way of building individual bodies with personal expression. Her largest group of figures (the environment in Chicago) consists of 106 headless shells in walking movement, made of material that resembles tree bark or rags from a mummy. She has also worked with tree trunks that she has armed with metal (War Games) and built multi-figurative compositions out of welded stainless steel (King Artur¿s Court).

A selection of masterpieces from one of the most prestigious private collections in the world.One of the most important private art collections in the world, the Emil Bührle Collection occupies a prominent place in the museum-quality group of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist works that forms its core and which in this volume is represented by masterpieces by Manet, Degas, Renoir, Monet, Cézanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh and others.The works, published in colour and accompanied by commentaries by authoritative art historians, illustrate the principles according to which Bührle built his extraordinary collection: on the one hand, the desire to relate modern art with the highest results of European painting in previous centuries - of which the masterpieces by Canaletto, Strozzi, Delacroix and Corot are the spokesmen - on the other hand, the choice to document in an exhaustive way the path of the protagonists of modern art, such as Manet, Degas, Van Gogh and Cézanne, whose phases of artistic production is proposed a partial review.Exemplary in this sense is the presence of works by Claude Monet: from the landscape painteden plein air Champ de coquelicots près de Vétheuil (1879 circa) to the revolution of Le Bassin aux nymphéas, reflets verts (1920-1926), the catalogue emphasises Monet¿s importance not only as a reference figure for the Impressionist movement, but also as a source of inspiration for later generations of artists.

The first publication devoted to the important series by the American artist.Published in collaboration with the Kavi Gupta and Paul Kasmin galleries, this volume offers the first in-depth look at American artist Roxy Paine's Dioramas. Initially conceived in the 1990s, it was not until 2012 that Paine began to produce the first of his technically ambitious Dioramas, eventually producing seven museum-scale works that broaden and deepen his engagement with altered realities and the psychogeography of American life and modern culture. The Dioramas represent an important reinvention of the diorama, the nineteenth-century ur-form of modern spectacle, for the twenty-first century.Edited by Saul Anton, the volume includes an extended conversation between Paine and Wexner Center of the Arts curator Michael Goodson, who organized Serotonin Reuptake Inhibitor, a 2016 exhibition of the Dioramas at the Beeler Gallery of the Columbus College of Art & Design. The volume also includes essays by Blaffer Museum director Steven Matijcio and critics Saul Anton and Mia Kang that explore their rich historical and social resonance, and reflect on their place in the landscape of contemporary art and art history.Since the 1990s, Roxy Paine has positioned his work at the intersection between the monumental and the microscopic, the natural and the artificial, the material and the ideal. Featuring documentation and images from all seven dioramas produced between 2012 and 2017, this volume shows how he has continued to track these themes into new social and historical areas.

The book follows Wolski's sustained engagement with the themes of organicity and the natural form. Over the last three decades, Wolski has deployed a diversity of non-representational vocabularies-ranging from geometric shapes inspired by early twentieth-century abstraction to Surrealist-inspired biomorphic forms-to investigate the idea of unification between the individual self and nature. While primarily a sculptor, Wolski is concerned with the question of materiality, which he often sees as a form of philosophical inquiry in and of itself.Wolski's practice often verges on the spiritual, although it maintains an active dialogue with the outside world. The artist's career-which began in the 1980s-has been historically aligned with the rapid deterioration of planet Earth and the depletion of its natural resources, thus turning the artist's personal rumination on nature into an open manifestation of his environmental awareness. Through this resolutely inter-disciplinary body of work, Wolski continues to examine such wide-ranging and socially topical issues as the relationship between the individual and one's habitat, the role of nature as a guardian of human history, and nature's influence on artistic and philosophical expression in the modern era.Xawery Wolski was born in Warsaw, Poland, in 1960 and currently lives and works in Mexico City. He was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts (Warsaw), the Academy of Fine Art (Paris), and the Institute of Higher Education in Visual Arts (Paris).

Petra Cortright's varied style is finally encapsulated in a wide-encompassing monograph that covers the directions her art has taken throughout her career. Known for her video works available on YouTube and in galleries, Petra Cortright has experimented with the image of physical bodies in digital spaces, exploiting the main formal properties of video software. Her video research led to outcomes at times controversial (such as her works with strippers in VirtuaGirl), at times heralded and lauded. The work also includes Cortright's painted created with a digital software, mixing concrete and abstract elements and printed on a wide variety of material. Such works are the product of an experimentation with Photoshop layers on a so-called "mother-file", enriched with the use of digital tools, and then manipulated through the use of industrial printing techniques. Petra Cortright (born 1986) is a Los Angeles-based artist working in video, painting, and digital media.

Celebrities "au naturel", without makeup and hairstyling, in the photographer's portraits.Private Sitting is a project Gianluca Fontana undertook in order to break beyond a limit, to try to cross the line between the person and the persona and to investigate that boundary through the lens of the emotions - the little gaps, moments of uncertainty, introspection or liberating joy.Each shot is the sum of deliberate sacrifices: no make-up artist or hair stylist, no costumes, a minimum of light, neutral backgrounds and no other person on the set.Gianluca Fontana has been able to create an intimate space and repay the sense of challenge inherent in this project, while his subjects have been able to seize the opportunity to join a gallery of portraits that absorbs and recapitulates the most significant artistic expressions of contemporary photography.Begun five years ago, the project has involved fifteen women (Alessandra Mastronardi, Ambra Angiolini, Anita Caprioli, Carolina Crescentini, Cristiana Capotondi, Giulia Elettra Gorietti, Isabella Ferrari, Kasia Smutniak, Margareth Madè, Marta Gastini, Matilde Gioli, Miriam Dalmazio, Tea Falco, Valeria Bilello and Vittoria Puccini), who certainly know the "aesthetic tricks" of an increasingly sophisticated form of photography. In this case, however, they have allowed themselves to be photographed with no "special effects".

A monograph dedicated to one of the main figures of the Iranian contemporary art scene.Shahriar Ahmadi is one of the leading exponents of the new Iranian art.40-something, he has been able to elaborate a painting that also visually is the crossing between Middle East and West, in the purest spirit of the Persian tradition.The Sufi philosophy of Rumi together with the Existential Western Philosophy meet in the large canvases that Ahmadi has been painting since the mid-nineties: great pictorial cycles of a figurative expressionism Persian that combine imagination with symbols and meanings of a globalize world.Shahriar Ahmadi was born in 1978 in Iranian Kurdistan.Once he moved to Tehran, he studied western modern painting and the philosophical currents related to Sufism. His first solo exhibition dates to 2000 at the Barg Gallery of Tehran.His international recognition was sealed by his participation to the exhibitions at the AB Gallery in Luzern in 2014, at the Etemad Gallery in Dubai and culminated with the Iranian Pavilion at the 56th edition of the Venice Biennal in 2015.