Don Paterson

Colin Wiggins

British artist Alison Watt (b. 1965) creates monumental paintings depicting richly draped fabric. These canvases show closely cropped folds, gathers, tucks, and creases––all sensuously developed from a selective palette of white, grey, burnt sienna, cadmium red, and yellow. The National Gallery’s seventh Associate Artist, Watt has been working in a studio near the permanent collection. This proximity to masterpieces she has long admired has concentrated her focus on the tradition of drapery in western art and inspired her dramatically abstracted reinterpretations. This beautifully designed and illustrated book presents her most recent series of powerful, large-scale paintings. In an essay featuring photographs of Watt at work in the gallery studio, Colin Wiggins reviews the artist’s creative process. Also included is a new piece written by celebrated Scottish poet Don Paterson that responds to these works.

Phantom

Alison Watt

Tracy Chevalier

Tom Hunter is a London-based photographer of international renown for his engaging, distinctive, and often provocative re-creations of Old Master paintings. In 1998 he won the John Kobal Photographic Portrait Award for A Woman Reading a Possession Order, a beautifully crafted photograph based on a composition by the Dutch master, Johannes Vermeer (1632–1675). Featuring selections of the bold images that established Hunter’s reputation, together with new work, this book conveys the artist’s deep concern with depicting the lives of the residents of Hackney, East London, as captured in the headlines of Hunter’s local newspaper, the Hackney Gazette. These startling, sometimes tragic, stories are retold in carefully staged photographs, whose compositions are frequently derived from paintings in the National Gallery. An essay by best-selling novelist Tracy Chevalier examines Hunter’s story-telling, while Colin Wiggins discusses the relationship between Hunter’s work and paintings in the National Gallery and elsewhere.

Living in Hell and Other Stories

Tom Hunter

National Gallery (Great Britain)

Richard Cork

Jennifer Sliwka

Michael Landy

British artist Michael Landy (b. 1963) is known primarily as an installation artist. His work, along with others associated with the Young British Artists (YBAs), was first catapulted to the world spotlight when it was featured in the notorious Sensation exhibition (1997). His sculptural installations and performances explore political and social themes, such as the nature of consumerism and commodity. In 2009, Landy began a three-year artist residency at the National Gallery, London. He chose to focus his project on representations of saints and their accompanying stories, often gruesome, which were once part of common culture but are now largely unknown. Landy's preoccupation with recycling narratives and repurposing imagery results in Saints Alive, the subject of this book, conceived to include drawings, collages, and a series of kinetic, interactive sculptures with moving parts and sounds.

Saints Alive

Colin Wiggins

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