Forthcoming Books

Monet / Mitchell is the first US exhibition to examine the complex relationship between two of the most experimental painters of the twentieth century: The worldfamous paintings of the preeminent French Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926) meet the fascinating gestural brushwork compositions of the leading American artist Joan Mitchell (1925–1992).

Funk You Too! arrives at a moment when clay has unprecedented currency in the art world as a sculptural medium. It is the first book to connect the history of Funk Art to contemporary ceramic practice through an exploration of the enduring role of humor in clay image-making. The founding generation of Funk artists used forms of subversion to deflate the power of the aesthetic hierarchy that dismissed ceramics as hobby art. Today, in the hands of a younger, more diverse cohort, the ...

"Chakaia Booker: The Observance" is the first comprehensive monograph on this important yet understudied American artist. Illuminating more than three decades of Booker’s practice, the publication explores her signature form – monumental works made of rubber – while showcasing her innovations across mediums including photography, painting, and prints.

Cooler and harder than glass, but softer than a diamond: rock crystal has always been regarded as an unusual material. Countless legends have grown up around its origins and its remarkable strengths. At the latest since Antiquity, rock crystal has played an important part as a remedy, for fortune-telling, in the Church and at courtly banquets. Breathtaking artworks have been assembled in this publication.

In her elective home country of Mexico, the artist Olga Costa (1913–1993), a native of Leipzig, has long been established as an important female voice of Mexican Modernism. This volume presents impressively her autonomous artistic work between Mexican and European Modernism, and follows the traces of her life from Germany out into the world and back again.

Recent events have pushed artists to visualize ideas of closeness in a new light. "Kinship", published on the occasion of the National Portrait Gallery’s next “Portraiture Now” exhibition, features the work of eight leading contemporary artists who explore familial relationships through photography, painting, sculpture and performance.

The significance of the street is complex: it is a place of representation, self-dramatisation and communication, of resistance and protest. In this lavishly illustrated volume we encounter the bandwidth of this highly topical subject and its implementation in painting, graphics, photography, film, performance and installation during the 20th and 21st centuries.

Sculpture is just a word, an English word, which elicits an image in the mind’s eye. Sculpture is a European idea. In China, on the other hand, statues, stele, and other figural objects were made for millennia without being thought of as Sculpture. There was no Sculpture in China. "Imagining Sculpture" is the story of this something that did not exist.

Important artists of Hungarian Classical Modernism lived and worked temporarily on the banks of the Spree and were present in the Berlin avant-garde. The publication presents a brilliant overview of the close links between the culture of the Weimar Republic and the creative forces of Hungary, which ended with the seizure of power by the National Socialists.

Marc Chagall (1887–1985) is regarded as the poet amongst modernist artists. His works from the 1930s and 1940s are less well known. In them, his bright  colour palette became darker. Even in the early 1930s, Chagall addressed the increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism and touched in his artistic works on central themes such as identity, homeland and exile.