Jason Beard

Other Criteria presents the book produced for Damien Hirst’s first show in Mexico, 'The Death of God - Towards a Better Understanding of a Life Without God Aboard the Ship of Fools’. Containing 69 full colour reproductions of all the works in the show, the catalogue also includes an interview with the gallery owner, Hilario Galguera, on the nature of Hirst’s current work and its exploration of religion as a continuing theme. Hirst’s earlier poems, The Cancer Chronicles, are reproduced within the catalogue alongside light micrographs of nineteen different kinds of cancer cells. With three-colour foil blocked cover and real metallic gold printed throughout, the catalogue also contains a foldout detail of the work 'In the Name of the Father’. All text appears in both English and Spanish and there are two covers available - a Spanish and an English version - with identical interiors. This book is a must have for everyone interested in Hirst’s work.

The Death of God

Danny Moynihan

Private Collection is a unique and fascinating publication of over 250 pornographic photographs from Danny Moynihan’s personal collection, including images made by some of the earliest erotic photographers, right up to the 1940s. This publication visually documents attitudes about sex and pornography, and by so doing shows how they were developed alongside a 'correct’ social and cultural behavioural code of restraint, particularly with regard to sexual intercourse and role-play. By providing a historical overview of nudity and sex in photography, the book offers an intriguing insight into the way pornography was made alongside the development of photography. Private Collection includes an extremely readable and informative essay by Cressida Connolly which discusses pornography from an historical perspective, the way the sex industry was used in the 19th century, and how this affected the production, function and availability of pornography: "There were no rules. It is the revolutionary newness of these images which makes them as exciting as their subjects.”

A History of Erotic Photography (1850-1940)

Private Collection

Mel Gooding

Alan Davie

John Bellany

Amie Corry

Cradle of Magic

John Bellany and Alan Davie

This catalogue was produced to accompany Damien Hirst’s 2003 exhibition at White Cube, London. The show dissected and recast the story of Jesus and his disciples through paintings and sculptural work while revealing the uncertainty at the heart of human experience. The exhibited works included The Apostles, a series of 13 clinical steel and glass cabinets filled with medical instruments, weapons, ornaments, blood, and life’s detrius: a dozen canvases encrusted with flies suspended in resin, each given a fatal disease for a title: skinned cows’/bulls’ heads in individual tanks punctured/lacerated/stabbed with knives and glass fragments; and huge canvases embedded with butterfly wings arranged in extraordinary grid systems. This book contains 43 colour illustrations, including many details of the exhibited works and four gatefolds. An introductory essay by Annushka Shani examines each work more closely, drawing out the themes of love, life and death explored by Hirst through this exhibition. Softback with dust jacket 4 x gatefolds.

Romance in the Age of Uncertainty

This is the first significant publication on the work of British painter Neal Tait. This visually fascinating book takes ‘a studio approach’ to illustrate the range and focus of Tait’s paintings. Photographs of Tait’s archive collection of found imagery (including newspaper cuttings), sketchbook drawings, preparatory drawings and finished drawings are woven within the body of full colour reproductions of his paintings, allowing for lateral readings of the genesis and development of ideas alongside finished works. Initially, Tait’s output reflects a rather idiosyncratic narrative, harnessed to what might be broadly described as a ‘contemporary European sensibility’, but this publication reveals that Tait is in fact wrestling with a strong sense of painting’s tradition, something in-keeping with a painter’s painter. This book includes the paintings which perhaps brought Tait’s work to wider appeal – the ghost-like heads, appearing as if x-rayed by generally tonal colours, emphasizing the relationship between the weight of the surface of a painting in relation to the presence of a sitter. And this cornerstone of negative presence is something that can be seen to recur or resurrect itself throughout the more recent open-ended picture making. Fragments of the body are often merged with their surroundings, abstracting them from their ‘home’ context in order that they might act as a signifier in the space of the ‘painting’ and, by so doing creating a tension between what we know the thing to be and what Tait’s emotional and psychological connection could be. Birds, a birdhouse, a television or a playground swing take on a more significant charge in a world that seems, oddly, in tension between a calm innocence and an anxious foreboding. And this is further emphasized by Tait’s exquisite colour sense and draughtsmanship – a child-like palette of warm and cold tones and bright energetic high-key colour (reminiscent of the Paris School), contained within a firm but delicate stylized line. Along with two intelligent and empathetic essays by Michael Bracewell and Jeremy Millar, this publication is more a catalogue of a practice – a practice which is about itself and the subject the medium eventually finds and commits to saying.

Neal Tait

Bunny

This catalogue illustrates the complete paintings featured in Damien Hirst’s recent New York exhibition 'The Elusive Truth’. Extended captions written by the artist accompany many of the paintings. Damien Hirst’s art takes on numerous forms. He tackles the big subjects of love, desire, life and death, and creates unavoidable sculptures and paintings that contain irony, wit and wisdom while questioning art’s role in contemporary culture. 'The Elusive Truth’, Hirst’s recent exhibition of paintings, signals an exciting new direction in his work.

Jason Beard

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