This exhibition book, created to accompany Tate Britain’s 2020 exhibition British Baroque: Power & Illusion, explores how art and architecture were used by the crown, the church, and the aristocracy to project images of status in an age when the power of the monarchy was being questioned.
Featuring the work of the leading painters of the day—including Peter Lely, Godfrey Kneller, and James Thornhill—it celebrates ambitious grand-scale portraits, the persuasive illusion of mural painting, the brilliant woodcarving of Grinling Gibbons, and the magnificent architecture of the great buildings of the age by Christopher Wren, Nicholas Hawksmoor, and John Vanbrugh.
Far more than being about a single artwork, this book participates in the myriad conversations and debates on the meaning of public art. The essays prise open critical questions about public space in Johannesburg; Oliver Barstow’s interviews with the various collaborators on the sculpture reveal the complexities and challenges of creating such a massive work in so short a time; and the images by John Hodgkiss of the making of the sculpture, alongside two photo essays suggest the metaphorical power of Fire Walker as well as the fragile hold of street vendors over their small share of city space.
This richly illustrated book, created to accompany the traveling exhibition of the same name, provides a fascinating critical overview of Ant Farm, the radical architecture collective that brought us Cadillac Ranch, Media Burn, and The Eternal Frame.
With text by Diane De Beer, Decade Of Design is a visual journey celebrating the past 10 years of architecture and design by the firm Mathews & Associates Architects, presented in a hardcover coffee table book.
After opening its doors in 2000, Tate Modern quickly became the most popular modern and contemporary art destination in the world, welcoming more than five million visitors a year. Architects Herzog & de Meuron created a gallery of singular power and beauty, whose spaces articulate a rare affinity with contemporary art.
David Chipperfield, one of the most important architects at work in the world today, is known for his subtle and sophisticated buildings. This book, published to accompany the major exhibition at Londons Design Museum, spans his entire career to date, examining a range of projects through new and archive models, sketches, drawings, photographs and film.
This is the most complete and beautiful study of the Chapel of the Rosary in Vence, near Nice in the South of France, considered one of the most important religious structures of the modern age and regarded by Henri Matisse himself as his great masterpiece.
Frederick Hutchinson Page was an artist who is regarded as South Africa’s foremost Surrealist painter. He died in 1984 at the age of 76 having produced a body of work which is remarkable not only for its unique personal imagery, but which is also one of the few examples, in the 20th century, of an painter who portrays with some accuracy, the particular architectural features of the city in which he lived. Between 1947 and 1980, Port Elizabeth, South Africa, formed the backdrop for his extraordinarily fertile visual imagination. Reclusive by choice, he lived in an area close to the city’s harbour called Central where most of the material he used for the images was gleaned from sketches and photographs.
A survey of the full breadth and complexity of Mexican art history, ranging widely across genres and offering new interpretations of painting, sculpture, architecture, prints and photographs
While some architects have a signature style, Renzo Piano seeks to apply coherent ideas to extraordinarily different projects. His buildings impress as much for their individual impact as for their diversity of scale, material, and form.
Famed for his motto “less is more,” Ludwig Mies van der Rohe (1886–1969) was one of the founding fathers of modern architecture and a hotly-debated tastemaker of twentieth-century aesthetics and urban experience.
Spanish visionary Santiago Calatrava is renowned around the world as an architect, structural engineer, sculptor, and artist. Famed for bridges as much as buildings, he has made his name with neofuturistic structures that combine deft engineering solutions with dramatic visual impact.
From the towering Sagrada Família to the shimmering, textured façade of Casa Batlló and the enchanting landscape of Park Güell, it’s easy to see why Antoni Gaudí (1852–1926) gained the epithet “God’s architect.” With fluid forms and mathematical precision, his work extols the wonder of natural creation: columns soar like tree trunks, window frames curve like flowering branches, and ceramic tiling shimmers like scaly, reptilian skin.
Travelling the world with an architect’s eye Architect Harry Seidler spent more than 50 years traveling the globe, extensively photographing the peak achievements in architecture from 3000 B.C. to the present day. Thanks to sound advice given to him early on by his photographer brother Marcell (“Only use Leica cameras and Kodachrome film, which is archival”), Seidler’s hobby quickly developed into a passion and, finally, an impressive archive of world architecture.
