Böcker utgivna av Skira

The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi is a mother lode of paintings by artists such as Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, Cimabue and Giotto, reflecting the emergence of a new age in European art and offering an overwhelming multiplicity of imagery. Margaret Pont informs, provokes and enchants the reader in equal measure through her discussion of various selected visual vignettes represented in some of the frescoes. The distinct originality and diversity of these scenes are considered in their social, psychological and spiritual context. This book focuses on the exquisitely detailed beauty of these artworks and the town of Assisi, animating the profound humanism and affirmative energy which the radiant Francis brought to Umbria and Italy itself. Through an authoritative yet witty narrative, it guides our attention across key themes of the period accompanying the Franciscan phenomenon, which reflected a radical change in consciousness towards human relationships and one's rapport with Nature. The resonance between Christ and Francis is evidenced, as is the less well-known supportive role of women in both periods. Beautifully illustrated, this textured analysis aspires to evoke the artistically rich and innovative atmosphere and the complex medieval setting in which St. Francis, Giotto di Bondone and Dante Alighieri lived. Francis goes beyond personality; his universal vision connects us to the spirit world of cultures, such as the Druids and Buddhists. This book takes the reader on a journey back to find an eternal continuity and soulful pattern that relates to our own chaotic world.

Tom of Finland undoubtedly counts among the great and truly influential artists of the latter 20th century. Through his iconic images, he almost single-handedly changed the way gay men were perceived by society, and - maybe even more important - how gay men perceived themselves. The massive oeuvre that he produced over the course of a career spanning nearly six decades is devoted almost entirely to this one topic: men, their bodies, and their spirits. This extraordinary consistency in subject-matter was matched by a life-long passion for the supreme discipline of freehand drawing. All he needed to create a universe of dazzlingly gorgeous hunks was a pencil and a sheet of paper. And he most likely drew every day of his life. Drawing, it seems, was an exercise for his restless imagination and desire. Tom's world was populated by cowboys, mechanics, cops, punks and thugs - all indulging their desires with great camaraderie and without guilt or prejudice. This book assembles a cross-section of these characters as dreamt up by the artist in rough sketches or more carefully executed studies. Mostly they served as preliminary drawings for the highly finished works, many of which were intended for publication. The playful format of an imaginary sketch book lets the viewer take an intimate glance over the artist's shoulder and share in his exuberant joie de vivre.

This Italian artist, one of the greatest of his generation, has developed a significant and multi-faceted body of work over the years featuring lines of conjunction that are unique on the international panorama. Among these, the relationship that the artist has developed with the history of art is of clear importance. From the Italian Baroque tradition to impressionism, Quayola has conducted a dialogue through video installations, sculptures made by robotic arms, high definition prints, etc., using technology as a lens to explore the tensions and balances between apparently opposing forces: the real and the artificial, the figurative and the abstract, the old and the new. Classical sculpture, historic paintings and Baroque architecture are some of the aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola's abstract compositions. In addition to texts by important scholars and curators, the book will also develop as a journey through images, thus guiding the public on a fresh visual itinerary.

Nejat Sati, B.A., M.A., Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir, works as an independent professional artist in Istanbul and has participated artist-in-residences in programs in Turkey, Germany, and Nederland. Since the 2005s he has participated in numerous international exhibitions, biennials, and triennials. Nejat Sati's abstract work incorporates a variety of techniques and media, including painting, performance, drawings, sculpture, collaborative works and site-specific installations, often experimental materials. In his enigmatic painting Sati explores cultural hybridity and transculturality as basic conditions of our globalised lives. Sati's vibrant, large-scale recent works layer colour fragments with applications and scrapings of imposto and fosforic material, expressing complex psychological histories and emotions. The immersive nature of colour is fully illustrated. The book comprises of nearly hundred images from past ten years, with an emphasis on his most recent work series. These colour intensive works which could be perceived as reflections of the layers of the artist's subconsciousness, despite being produced simultaneously different time periods, are interconnected and in a continuous dialogue with each other.

This book presents a rich selection of paintings, sculptures, films, photographs and fashion of time, and showcases the extraordinary creativity in Paris from the mid-19th century to mid-20th century. The catalogue traces the development of artistic modernity and its repercussions on society over the course of a century, highlighting the crucial role played by international cross influences and the phenomenal cultural melting pot. Bringing together approximately 150 masterpieces, the book presents an exceptional moment, portrayed through the work around 100 artists including Renoir, Gauguin, Monet, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Giacommetti, Delaunay, Brassaî, Chagall, Mirò, and Duchamp. In addition to significant works from Qatar Museums collections, which have not been published before.

If New York is the world, Los Angeles is definitely America. Or at least that America that seizes our imagination and never lets go. A megalopolis in the desert, a universe in itself that speaks a host of languages and embodies just as many contradictions: a Republican territory that's home to Underground culture; Hollywood and the Beat generation; Charles Manson and Marilyn Manson; a hotchpotch of languages, dialects and peoples. Los Angeles (state of mind) is the story of a city through different generations of artists who found success there from the 1970s to the present day. At first, even in California, styles and languages overlapped with each other with no prevalent direction or genre. We find the Pop Art of Ed Ruscha coexisting with the most recent abstract art experiences of Sam Francis. But the 1970s were also the decade of conceptual art, Body Art and the happenings, with figures such as John Baldessari, Chris Burden and Paul McCarthy, often extreme performers, and Bruce Nauman, Ed Kienholz and Lynda Benglis, a leading exponent of militant feminism. The in-between generation of artists were of great importance: born between the 1950s and '60s, they were defined by Mike Kelley as: "too young to be a hippy, too old to be a punk". Among the artists who emerged in the 1990s were Doug Aitken, who expresses himself through video installations and photographs, and the neo-minimalist Rita McBride. The Los Angeles of today is particularly focused on Black Culture, a phenomenon that manifests itself in all its social urgency and constitutes the fundamental basis for the reform that is so crucial for American culture. The drawings of Umar Rashid and the intense paintings of Henry Taylor bear witness to this epoch-making transition, for an America that is still diverse.

The wide and articulated exhibition project, which placed the theme of "light" as a symbolic, meta-physical, artistic archetype at the center of the investigation, gave rise to a new reflection on the works of Christian Boltanski and placed them in dialogue with the works of Shay Frisch resulting in an exhibition itinerary that winds on the noble floor of the Palace. A project that unfolds on different lines, parallel but autonomous, which analyzes the same relationship from several angles, linked to the aesthetic experience but also to the languages of the contemporary. It is a direct dialogue between Christian Boltanski's luminous non-light charged with mnemonic values, which become shadows, ghosts, strong symbols and Shay Frisch's electrical fields with their energetic charge, the evocative forms and the conceptual declinations deriving from his archetypal language. Light as pure energy, a unique stream of memory that receives meanings from darkness. While Boltanski amplifies the emblematic value of objects in his reflection, Frisch bends the iconography by drawing a new meaning from it. The decorative element becomes, for both artists, useless, amorphous, to be rewritten.

The third volume of the series of Photographic Albums of the Intesa Sanpaolo Historical Archives is devoted to a striking and previously unpublished collection of photographs linked to the history of the Banca Commerciale Italiana (COMIT), a credit institution that set up the Società Commerciale d'Oriente (COMOR) in Geneva in 1907, together with a group of Venetian entrepreneurs led by Giuseppe Volpi. Their aim was to promote the financing of plants and infrastructure such as railways, mines, electric power stations and shipping companies in the Near East. COMOR moved its headquarters to Milan in 1912 but it had various offices it could count on in the Mediterranean basin, including an office in Istanbul, then Constantinople, managed by engineer Bernardino Nogara, a fiduciary of COMIT in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, and a prominent figure in the history of the 20th century. The photographic narrative begins in the Ottoman Empire of the early 20th century, and ends with the outbreak of the First World War. It is centred around the Nogara family, who followed the head of the family to Constantinople. All the photos published in this book come from the Bernardino Nogara Private Archives, a photographic collection with a value that extends far beyond an interest in the history of the bank. It is a revisiting of subjects that have until now mainly been known and studied only through the official photographs circulated by the Empire to show the West the modernity of Ottoman society. Intesa Sanpaolo has decided to exploit this remarkable visual heritage and make it available to everyone through the bank's Culture and Historical Archives Project.

This book presents the 16th century cartoons of Gaudenzio Ferrari and his school, a valuable collection that arrived at the Pinacoteca dell'Accademia Albertina in Turin in 1832, as a donation from King Charles Albert of Savoy. It consists of a collection of fifty-nine preparatory drawings, some quite large, which mainly relate to important paintings by Gaudenzio Ferrari, Bernadino Lanino, Gerolamo Giovenone and Giuseppe Giovenone the Younger. This is a unique collection of cartoons that has remained preserved for centuries despite its fragility, and that enables us to enter the workshops of the 16th century to find out about art education in the Renaissance, before the arrival of the modern Academies of Fine Arts. The book includes a historical essay by Giovanni Testori and previously unpublished essays by Andreina Griseri and Simone Baiocco, and offers the reader a feast of beauty, with large photographs of all 59 drawings, printed in high resolution for the first time.

Jeff Koons: Lost in America brings together more than 60 of the artist's most iconic sculptures and paintings along with new productions and recently completed works. Edited by curator Masimilliano Gioni, the book focuses in particular on Koons' art as seen in relation to contemporary American culture. With his aesthetics of plenitude and his pop-up dreams of social mobility and acceptance, throughout his career Koons has composed a "fantasy America [...] custom-made from art and schmaltz and emotions"-to use Warhol's description of his own interpretation of American culture. Through the inclusion of source materials, personal recollections and biographical narratives, the book reads each of Koons' celebrated series through the prism of his biography and the ways in which his individual history intersects with that of his country and culture. Ranging from his upbringing in rural Pennsylvania to his fascination for popular culture and vernacular art, the publication composes an unconventional view of Jeff Koons and his work, retracing the personal influences and cultural histories that have shaped Koons's unique formal vocabulary. Published to accompany the major exhibition in Doha in March 2021, the catalogue features an interview with Jeff Koons by the curator, and essays by the well-known art critic Dodie Kazanjian and the Qatari-American writer and artist Sophia Al Maria.

Emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he quickly established himself at the forefront of the loose cohort of artists, now known as Mono-ha, who radically redefined postwar Japanese art through their ephemeral interventions into both institutional and everyday spaces. Often working with raw natural and industrial elements, Suga gained recognition for installations such as Parallel Strata (1969), a fortress-like configuration of slabs of paraffin wax that subtly deformed in response to the environmental conditions at the venue, and Infinite Situation II (steps) (1970), for which he altered the function of a stairwell at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, by covering its steps with sand smoothed to reflect the grade of the incline. Such works were conceived by Suga as "situations," or expansive fields where objects engage each other through relations of fundamental equality and interdependence. According to Suga, the elements of a situation exist in a state of "being left" that activates viewers by its very resistance to being processed as information. In denying the agency of the artist, this vision was an early argument for the agency of all things. Kishio Suga Writings, 1969-1979 is the first volume in an authoritative anthology of translations that will, for the first time, offer English readers a thorough understanding of Suga's thought. It features the trilogy of formative texts Suga wrote in 1968-69 under the penname Katsuragawa Sei; fragmentary statements published in the exhibition listings section of the magazine Bijutsu Techo from 1972 to 1981; and groundbreaking essays spanning the 1970s. This volume also includes a substantial introductory essay by Andrew Maerkle on the theoretical implications of translating Suga, along with commentary by Maerkle on each of the translated texts, and a glossary of Suga terms. Additionally, an essay by Ashley Rawlings addresses the history of the translation of Suga's artwork titles. Illustrations of Suga's works appear throughout.

Ten years after the death of the well-known art collector Giuseppe Panza di Biumo and twenty years since his collection at Villa Menafoglio Litta Panza was opened to the public, the book describing the collection, conceived and created by Panza himself, is being reissued: over 150 works by American artists, inspired by the themes of light and colour, living in harmony in the age-old spaces of the Villa, with the Renaissance furnishings and the fine collections of African and pre-Columbian art. Panza's book - also published by Skira - is now re-issued in a slipcase together with a second volume that describes the evolution of the Villa and the Collection from 2002 to 2020: the new displays, new acquisitions and most important exhibitions of the last twenty years that took place under the expert management of Fondo Ambiente Italiano (the Italian National Trust). It features site-specific installations by Robert Irwin, James Turrell and Robert Wilson, the spectacular rooms of light by Dan Flavin and the moving tribute to Ground Zero by Wim Wenders. A large photographic section is devoted to the centuries-old Italian gardens embellished by environmental art installations.