Book of the Day Posted Mar 10, 2022

Book of the Day > Louis Wain's Cats

● Purchase ● ‘Louis Wain invented a cat style, a cat society, a whole cat world’. Broadcast in 1925 by H.G. Wells, these words characteristically foretold the future of the Wain cat which has, once more, become the century’s most recognizable image in cat art. During their heyday, in the time before the First World War, Louis Wain’s cats, dressed as humans, portrayed that stylish Edwardian world having fun: at restaurants and tea parties, going to the Race and the Seaside, celebrating at Christmas and Birthdays, and disporting themselves with exuberant games of tennis, bowls, cricket and football. This is a titillating world of cats at play, uninhibited and slightly dangerous, with most group activities likely to turn into mishap, mayhem and catastrophe. This is Wain’s world, funny, edgy and animated: a whole cat world.
 
The first comprehensive exhibition of Wain’s work was held at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London in 1972 and, since then, Louis Wain has steadily become more fashionable, and collected worldwide. This biography contains 300 plates of richness and variety, all of which are reproduced faithfully from the original artwork.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 09, 2022

Book of the Day > Tom Warren: The 1980s Art Scene in New York

● Purchase ● Insider snapshots of the city's thriving downtown culture, with Quentin Crisp, Keith Haring, Kiki Smith and more
 
The 1980s in New York were full of contradictions and polarities: on the one hand, the city was marked by high crime and the AIDS crisis; on the other hand, the economy was booming, allowing those who profited to live decadently. Artists and cultural workers were attracted to this city of contrasts, and dealt critically with issues such as politics and gentrification, while also enjoying a hedonistic lifestyle. Photographer Tom Warren (born 1954) was a significant part of the New York art scene, gaining notoriety for his artistic repurposing of vacant spaces in the East Village. This monograph showcases his photographs from this period, with images of Barry Blinderman, Cornelius Conboy, Quentin Crisp, Luis Frangella, Keith Haring, Pat Hearn, Marilyn Minter, Lady Pink, Rene Ricard, Judy Rifka, Sandra Seymour, Kiki Smith, Hannah Wilke, David Wojnarowicz and more.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 08, 2022

Book of the Day > Melanie Nissen: Hard + Fast

● Purchase ● Melanie Nissen was the co-founder and photographer of the legendary Los Angeles magazine, Slash. Between 1977-1980 she photographed the Los Angeles punk scene. Taking photos of the fans, the bands and the scene around her.
 
Local heroes like Screamers, Bags, Germs, X, Go-Go’s, Black Randy, Weirdos, Dils, Zeros, Alley Cats, Deadbeats, Fear along with local legends Brendan Mullen, Kim Fowley, Claude Bessy, Russ Meyer, Penelope Spheeris, northern neighbors The Nuns, Avengers, Crime, Dead Kennedys, The Offs and visitors including Pere Ubu, Magazine, Devo, Damned, Cramps, Dead Boys, Peter Tosh, Ramones and Sex Pistols all form her body of work from this time.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 04, 2022

Book of the Day > Pieter Hugo: Solus Volume I

● Purchase ● Portraits of uncommon beauty from the author of the acclaimed La Cucaracha
 
In Solus Volume I, South African photographer Pieter Hugo (born 1976) reflects on the values implied by the fashion industry’s shifting aesthetics through portraits of street-cast models found in diverse locations such as London, Paris, New York and South Africa. Hugo found himself captivated by sitters with unconventional and atypical looks, particularly before they underwent the machinations of wardrobe, makeup and hair. Drawn to this uniqueness and recalling the sense of not-belonging that is part of the intense experience of youth, Hugo’s invitation to the models was: “simply present yourself.” The resulting photographs embrace vulnerability and frailty as much as they do the agency and idealism of their subjects. Hugo’s typological study questions fashion’s commodification of youth and the “outsider,” while embracing the beauty of peculiarity worn with acute awareness and the paradox of craving both difference and conformity.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 03, 2022

Book of the Day > Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat: Crossing Lines

● Purchase ● An exploration of the personal and artistic connections between two icons of twentieth-century art
 
Keith Haring (1958–1990) and Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960–1988) changed the art world of the 1980s through their idiosyncratic imagery, radical ideas, and complex sociopolitical commentary. Each artist invented a distinct visual language, employing signs, symbols, and words to convey strong messages in unconventional ways, and each left an indelible legacy that remains a force in contemporary visual and popular culture. Offering fascinating new insights into the artists’ work, Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat reveals the many intersections among Haring and Basquiat’s lives, ideas, and practices.
 
This lavishly illustrated volume brings together more than two hundred images—works created in public spaces, paintings, sculptures, objects, works on paper, photographs, and more. These rich visuals are accompanied by essays and interviews from renowned scholars, artists, and art critics, exploring the reach and range of Haring and Basquiat’s influence.
 
Keith Haring | Jean-Michel Basquiat provides a valuable look at two artistic peers and boundary breakers whose tragically short but prolific careers left their marks on the art world and beyond.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 02, 2022

Book of the Day > Mary Weatherford: Canyon—Daisy—Eden

● Purchase ● This career-spanning volume documents the first museum retrospective devoted to the work of Mary Weatherford, a daring practitioner of American abstraction and a leading painter of her generation.
 
Over the last three decades, Mary Weatherford has developed a rich and diverse painting practice, from her early 1990s target paintings based on operatic heroines, to the expansive, gestural canvases overlaid with neon glass-tubing that brought attention to her practice in the 2010s. Mary Weatherford: Canyon—Daisy—Eden presents a survey of Weatherford’s career, drawing from several distinct bodies of work made between 1989 and 2017. As constant experiments with color, scale, and materials, these works as a whole reveal the continuity of Weatherford’s interest in human experience, both personal and historical.
 
Featuring 120 full-color plates and expansive installation views, this volume—published by Gagosian in association with the Frances Young Tang Teaching Museum and Art Gallery at Skidmore College—documents an exhibition presented at the Tang and at SITE Santa Fe.
Book of the Day Posted Mar 01, 2022

Book of the Day > Elliott Landy: Photographs of Janis Joplin On The Road & On Stage

● Purchase ● Celebrated photographer Elliott Landy presents an intimate look at the legendary female singer-songwriter, Janis Joplin.
 
Landy's iconic images of Janis, both on the road and in concert, capture and preserve her pure essence as well as her onstage magnificence. Photographs of Janis Joplin: On the Road & On Stage features beautifully reproduced large format images, many never before published.
 
Janis's own words, taken from recorded interviews by David Dalton, are used as extended captions and paired with photographs to provide insight into the woman behind the legend.
Book of the Day Posted Feb 25, 2022

Book of the Day > Pep Bonet: Hellbangers

● Purchase ● The Hellbangers are the “enfants terribles” of a sleepy, diamonds rich country.
 
Photographer Pep Bonet (°1974, Mallorca) has been following Overthrust, a heavy metal band from Botswana, Africa, and shows us a growing, exciting and thoroughly organic heavy metal community. Ten years ago, one group existed. Today there are more than ten – and their fans are growing every year.
 
The inhabitants of Botswana portrayed in this book are tattooed, wear loudly and proudly leather jackets, leather trousers and play heavy death metal music. Imagine the DIY ingenuity of their ‘costume creation’ involving harvested animal skulls and other natural elements.
 
With names like Demon and Gunsmoke, it would be easy though to think they are thugs, but “We try to be examples. Rock is a wild thing, but also something for the heart”, says Gunsmoke, the heavy metal head. Here too, the lyrics of the songs are very critical towards societies, just like their western peers. Metal in Botswana is rebellious movement against authorities. This is the story of what looks at first to be an unlikely union, yet one which powerfully illustrates how music, how heavy metal music, has become a positively unifying force in an unlikely part of the world.
Book of the Day Posted Feb 24, 2022

Book of the Day > Mark Steinmetz: Rivers & Towns

● Purchase ● The photographs in Mark Steinmetz's expansive new book Rivers & Towns were made in the 1980s in working class towns and cities in Connecticut, USA.

"The brooding factories and mills built alongside rivers had seen their heyday and were beginning to decline. I was moved by these places and wanted to describe the bridges, houses, and streets, and to show something of people's inner lives. At the same time, I was trying to discover myself as a photographer." - Mark Steinmetz
Book of the Day Posted Feb 22, 2022

Book of the Day > Giger / Sorayama

● Purchase ● This super book published by KALEIDOSCOPE accompanies a two-artist exhibition co-curated by Alessio Ascari and Shinji Nanzuka, bringing together for the very first time the work of Japanese artist Hajime Sorayama and Swiss artist HR Giger. Touring from PARCO Museum in Tokyo to PARCO Event Hall in Osaka between December 2020 and February 2021, the exhibition coincides with the 80th anniversary of Giger’s birth and features over 50 works ranging from the late 1960s to the present day.
 
The catalogue, designed by Swiss-based art direction firm Kasper-Florio with Samuel Bänziger, features a foreword by co-curator Alessio Ascari, a critical essay by Venus Lau, an interview with the late HR Giger by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Patrick Frey, and a recent interview with Sorayama by Ascari. It comes with a 50x70cm two-sided poster, and two 20cm die-cut stickers.
 
Born and trained at opposite ends of the world, Sorayama and Giger are apparently at odds—one’s bright colors are swallowed by the other’s dark chiaroscuro; one’s enthusiastic outlook on technology borders with the other’s nightmarish dystopia; one’s “super-realism” challenges the other’s surrealism—yet they share more than meets the eye. Both emerged in the 1970s and 1980s, becoming acknowledged masters of airbrush painting and influential creators beyond the boundaries of the traditional art world, blurring the relationship between commercial and personal work. But more importantly, at the very core of their practice lies a similar concern: an obsessive investigation of AI, eternal life, and the fusion of organic and apparatus. Gynoids (female androids) are predominant subjects, conjuring the post-human and the apotheosis of the woman to reveal an underlying tension between life, death, power and desire.
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