Gregor Muir

These days artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin are major celebrities. But Gregor Muir knew them at the start; his unique memoir chronicles the birth of Young British Art. Muir, YBA’s ‘embedded journalist’, happened to be in Shoreditch and Hoxton before Jay Jopling arrived with his White Cube Gallery, when this was still a semi-derelict landscape of grotty pubs and squats. There he witnessed, amid a whirl of drunkenness, scrapes and riotous hedonism, the coming-together of a remarkable array of young artists – Hirst, the Chapman brothers, Rachel Whiteread, Sam Taylor-Wood, Angus Fairhurst - who went on to produce a fresh, irreverent, often notorious form of art - Hirst’s shark, Sarah Lucas’s two fried eggs and a kebab. By the time of the seminal Sensation show at the Royal Academy YBA had changed the art world for ever.

The Rise and Fall of Young British Art

Lucky Kunst

Michael Mack

Berlinde de Bruyckere

Ali Subotnick

This book focuses on recent sculptures and installations by Belgian artist Berlinde de Bruyckere and provides a rare and intimate glimpse into her studio and working process. De Bruyckere uses a range of sculptural media, including wax, wood, wool, horse skin, and hair which are combined to create compelling forms that suggest distorted human and animal bodies. Her figures are often faceless, malformed and fragmentary. They perch precariously on high stools or are suspended from the walls, ceiling or tall iron columns. At first their shape seems familiar although they resist interpretation, offering a disturbing vision of fragility and suffering and they appear vulnerable and violated, their skin stretched and broken. The works presented in the book invoke the Schmerzensmann, the eternal Man of Suffering, and focus on eight sculptures in wax, one of the artists preferred materials. The texture of the pallid wax suggests a skin so thin and fragile that it is almost translucent. Close inspection reveals subtly mottled hues and textures that imply vulnerability to heat and cold but also to the more intangible threat of violence and fear. Each of the eight sculptures is illustrated from many viewpoints, offering the chance to examine in detail their form, surface texture, spatiality and relation to the viewer.

Schmerzensmann

Yilmaz Dziewior

A new reading of Warhol presents his life and work in the context of contemporary concerns, emphasizing his continued relevance in the digital age. As an underground art star, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) was the antidote to the prevalent abstract expressionist style of 1950s America. He introduced popular everyday subjects into his practice and openly acknowledged the wide-ranging influences on his work. Throughout his career, his forays into advertising, fashion, lm, TV and music videos, marked a fascination with mainstream popular culture. This book will position Warhol at the vanguard of artistic experimentation. Looking at his background as an immigrant, ideas of death and religion, and his queer perspective, it will explore his limitless ambition to push the traditional boundaries of painting, sculpture, lm and music, and reveal Warhol as an artist who both succeeded and failed in equal measure; an artist who embraced the establishment while cavorting with the underground. It will further highlight Warhol's knowing flirtation with the commercial world of celebrity alongside his socially engaged collaborations and advocacy of alternative lifestyles. Including his iconic depictions alongside lesser-known works, as well as an installation of his Silver Clouds, this fascinating book returns Warhol to his conceptual ambition and positions him within the shifting creative and political landscape in which he worked, permitting a broad view of how Warhol, and his work, marked a period of cultural transformation.

Gregor Muir

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