Painting

Phyllida Barlow (*1944) tests boundaries with her monumental sculptures in an eccentric yet humorous manner, reflecting on the relationship with our environment through her use of industrial and everyday materials. With impressive installation photos and never-before-seen archival material the publication presents Barlow’s unique oeuvre from her early works until the present day.

Picasso’s study of the old masters forms an impressive focus of his late work. At the beginning of this new interest stood the works series "Les Femmes d’Alger", which was on view in Paris, Munich, Cologne and Hamburg in 1955 and which today is scattered across several continents. The volume presents the series within the context of its reference works by Delacroix and Matisse.

Stirring paintings, colourful picture collages made from countless scraps of paper, moving photo collages – the art of Tammam Azzam (b. 1980 in Damascus) is multi-faceted, political and topical. The publication provides a comprehensive overview of the oeuvre of the Syrian artist and describes his career over the past 20 years.

Philip Grözinger’s art derives from his investigations of future-oriented visions. With his individualistic painterly signature he invites the viewer to join him on a surreal journey through the pictorial traditions of the Pop culture of recent decades. This volume is a retrospective which provides a comprehensive overview of his outstanding oeuvre.

In less than two decades, Jacoba van Heemskerck (1876–1923) created a powerful oeuvre comprising paintings, woodcuts, glass works and mosaics. Her expressive subjects, including landscapes, townscapes and harbour scenes, are characterised by luminosity and increasing transparency, by rhythmical compositions of the pictorial space, black contours and an intensive use of colour.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner spent his last years between 1917 and 1938 recovering from a mental breakdown in Davos. The overwhelming impression of the Alps moved him to create colourful, visionary landscapes and paint the daily lives of the peasants. The publication shows vividly the significance of the mountain world as inspiration for Kirchner’s late works.

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.

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.

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.