Michael Bracewell

David Freedberg

Rochelle Steiner

Three Exhibitions

Glenn Brown

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant 'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare 'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...

Souvenir

Martin Clark

Explores the influence of folklore, mysticism, mythology and the occult on the development of modernism and surrealism in Britain. This book features the works of both historic and contemporary artists, and considers the influence of neo-romantic and arcane themes on a significant strand of British art practice.

Magic & Modernity in British Art

The Dark Monarch

UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?

Unfinished Business

Jennifer Higgie

Rebecca Daniels

Clare Woods

British artist Clare Woods is internationally regarded as one of the most significant painters working today. Her paintings and works on paper are found in important public and private collections around the world, and she has produced many highprofile public commissions in the UK and Europe. Her highly colouristic paintings in oil or gloss paint on aluminium of strange, dark landscapes and anthropomorphic forms hover somewhere between abstraction and representation, expressing both a poetic romanticism and an unnerving psychic charge. This beautifully designed and illustrated volume is the first monograph on Woods' art. It presents all the major works from her career to date, from small-scale intimate paintings and prints to ambitious large-scale architectural projects. The dynamic layout of the book, with a varied mix of close-up detail and installation shots, gives the reader a strong sense of the diverse scale and immersive, push-pull nature of the paintings. Five prominent writers consider various aspects of her practice, including her use of photographic source material; her engagement with the traditions of landscape and figurative art; her relationship with artistic forebears, such as Francis Bacon, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland; the context of painting practice today and twenty-firstcentury culture; and the connections between her life and work.

Strange Meetings

Eric de Chassey

* Includes a selection of critical writings starting with David Sylvester's review of her first exhibition in 1962 and ending with Dave Hickey's foreword to her 2019 exhibition in LA* Featuring reviews, essays, statements and conversations that have been specially selected by the artist and include her own writings* This book marks the first major survey of Riley's work to be staged in Scotland and the first of its scale in the UK since 2003* Published to accompany an exhibition at the National Galleries of Scotland from June until September 2019, and at the Hayward, London, October to January 2020This landmark book reflects on almost 70 years of works by Bridget Riley (b.1931), from some of her earliest to very recent projects, providing a unique record of the work of an artist still very much at the height of her powers. Essays from leading scholars and commentators on Riley's work will make this title the authority on Riley's practice. In the last decade, Riley has continued to push her practice considerably, producing several large-scale site-specific wall paintings as well as continuing to develop new paintings. This book will explore these recent developments. It will also examine the notable influence that other artists such as Georges Seurat and Piet Mondrian have had on Riley's work. Published to accompany an exhibition taking place in the National Galleries of Scotland, running from June - September 2019.

Bridget Riley

Linder Sterling

Linder

A Guide to Morecambe & Heysham

I Know where I'm Going

Lavinia Greenlaw

Joy Division

Catalogue of the New Normal Pictures first exhibited at Lehmann Maupin in September 2021

Gilbert & George: New Normal Pictures

Richard Forster

Ingleby Gallery (Edinburgh)

Richard Forster, Michael Bracewell

David Lodge

The Conclave charts the first thirty years in the life of a suburban dilettante with aesthetic aspirations, who, in the 1980s, begins a lucrative career. The story roams from the edge of London to a well-healed part of Bristol, and in doing so reveals a disturbing and unforgettable tale of loneliness and lost love.

The Conclave

Through dialogues between the works of diverse artists, this catalogue proposes a reflection on our current perception of disaster. It includes an insightful essay by British critic and novelist Michael Bracewell that discusses, among other issues, Warhol's engagement with the subjects of death and catastrophe.

The End of Days

Disaster

Michael Clark

Suzanne Cotter

Stephanie Jordan

Robert Violette

Notorious for his continually subversive takes on classical dance, Michael Clark is without doubt one of the most important dancers and choreographers of our time. This monograph celebrates the whole of Michael Clark's career to date, from the late 1970s to the present.

He's the only person to whom The Velvet Underground ever played as an audience of one, the first British writer to talk to Patti Smith after her seventeen-year hiatus from rock. One reviewer hailed his previous book England is Mine as "surely the strangest and most beautiful book on pop music ever written." Greil Marcus said that even the "merely superb" passages of that book read like "intellectual sunrises," calling the work "intoxicated and intoxicating." The author in question is Michael Bracewell, celebrated surveyor of the punk and rock scenes. Now, through funny, engaging, and occasionally devastating essays about his experience in the thick of the music scene of the 1990s, Bracewell tackles a decade where Greed became disguised as Attitude, where a "cozy, urban feelgood fable" replaced punk, and where the role of anxiety, so intrinsic to the culture and music of the 1980s, was swapped for a shallow "I feel your pain" sensibility. Read When Surface Was Depth and discover why Time Out has called Michael Bracewell, in a word, "terrific."

Death By Cappuccino And Other Reflections On Music And Culture In The 1990s

When Surface Was Depth

Louisa Elderton

Barry Schwabsky

Marius Bercea

Blain/Southern (Gallery : London, England)

This is the first monograph on Romanian painter Marius Bercea, featuring over 60 colour images, three new essays and an interview with the artist.Marius Bercea was born and grew up in Cluj, Romania. At the age of 10 years old he experienced the demise of the communist period as the USSR disintegrated and the 1989 Romanian Revolution took place.The effects of this history are evident in the pictorial space that Bercea creates as he alludes to a post-communist, early-capitalist Romania.The artist's works are highly distinctive, as memory, recollection and reality seemingly merge upon the canvas' surface, giving rise to a visual sensuality that has made Bercea one of the leading artists of the Cluj School.Published to accompany the exhibition Marius Bercea: Hypernova, at Blain Southern, London, 28 March - 17 April 2014.

In answering the question posed by its title, and drawing on his twenty year relationship with the artists, Michael Bracewell is the first writer to engage directly with Gilbert & George to understand why they have devoted their lives exclusively and continuously - to the vision of art they conceived within months of first meeting. What emerges piece by piece is a portrait of Gilbert & George as two men who are infinitely more intense, strange, determined and alone than their longstanding public image suggests.

What is Gilbert & George?

the first clear anatomy of a confused decade, the 1990s – ‘Bracewell, with great verve and style, animates the cultural conversation’, Greil Marcus

The Nineties: When Surface was Depth

The anonymous, middle-aged narrator of Perfect Tense is a man broken on the wheel of office life - the great beige wheel of grinding routine, the uniform grey carpets, the endless buff envelopes. Driven by the entropy of the office, out of step with the zeitgeist, he has begun to question his whole generation, and his own empty, under-achieved life in particular. Recounting his day at the office - one particular day, which seems to mimic the coffee-mug slogan, 'Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life' - the narrator scrutinises the arcane of his environment like an urban anthropologist, looking for aesthetic or spiritual purpose and finding only print-outs and suspension files, spider plants and yuccas and polystyrene cups. In this short, brilliant novel, we are taken on a terrifyingly familiar tour of office life which is at once hilarious and profound - the comedy of recognition matched by deepening urban anxiety, as if TS Eliot had been blessed with Groucho Marx's comic timing. One man's unravelling philosophical crisis amid the leaving parties and sandwiches becomes, in the hands of Michael Bracewell, a metaphysical search for order and purpose deep in the back of a desk drawer.

Perfect Tense

Cultural critic and writer, Michael Bracewell has written widely and increasingly on modern and contemporary art and has been a regular contributor to Frieze magazines since its inception. He has written extensively for museums and galleries on artists including Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anish Kapoor, Keith Coventry, John Stezaker, Glenn Brown and Damien Hirst. This collection of Bracewell's writing on art explores connections between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and sub-cultures, while appraising the vision and ideas of individual artists and the relation of their work to its broader cultural context.

Michael Bracewell

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