Forthcoming Books

Over one hundred years ago, Adolf Loos had already complained: “The architect has caused architecture to sink to a graphic art.” He was pointing to a problem that had gone unnoticed for centuries. But today, in the age of digitalization, the separation between design and building practice that Loos had lamented is expanding immeasurably.

Accompanying Paulo Nazareth’s first US museum show at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami in 2019, "Melee" presents an engaging and timely look at the artist’s multifarious work and elaborates on how it engages the complex colonial and racial histories of the Americas.

Starting with Helmar Lerski’s outstanding photo series "Metamorphosis through Light" from 1935/36, the magnificent volume "Faces – The Power of the Human Visage" presents portraits from the era of the Weimar Republic. The photographs taken by the photographers of the 1920s and 1930s achieved a radical renewal of portrait photography.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (1880–1938) and Emil Nolde (1867–1956) are leading figures in the German Expressionist movement. Turning away from Western society and the established norms of bourgeois culture, the artists looked to people, lifestyles and objects from other parts of the world for inspiration, especially Africa and Oceania.

People between light and shade, love and despair, closeness and distance, calm and restlessness. Miwa Ogasawara’s painting represents the attempt to approach Man quietly in all his nuances. In her pictures she captures the brittle, shimmering present, the beauty and the fragility of our existence.

Singapore is rejuvenating and transforming her building stock constantly and in comparatively short cycles. The book analyses these transformations of the global city and shows documents, plans and sources dating from the past two centuries. 

Pioneering Pakistani American artist Shahzia Sikander is one of the most influential artists working today. Sikander is widely celebrated for expanding and subverting miniature painting to explore gender roles and sexuality, cultural identity, racial narratives, and colonial and postcolonial histories.

"The Art of Orientation" explores the mosque through 125 artefacts from across the Islamic world. It employs an original and contemporary approach by incorporating essays by leading Arab and international authors, which provide a fresh interpretation of the cultural history behind the shown objects by interweaving concepts, histories and ideas.

In the art of the Italian Renaissance, the subject of the Madonna with Child was chosen for pictures more frequently than any other.  Raphael’s paintings are regarded as some of the most innovative compositions to this day, 500 years after his death. Their groundbreaking significance is illuminated in this volume through comparisons with other principal works of the period, including those by Botticelli and Mantegna.

The Great Landscape with a Tempest in Vienna is one of Peter Paul Rubens’s largest and most dramatic landscapes. Starting from the far-reaching discoveries during the latest restoration, the volume provides a comprehensive insight into the process of creation of this fascinating picture as well as its art-historical interpretation.