Book of the Day Posted Dec 08, 2020

Book of the Day > Barbara Kasten: Works

● Purchase ● Over the past five decades, the American artist Barbara Kasten has created an impressive multimedia oeuvre, centred around her compelling photographs. Her works can be found in some of the most important museum collections worldwide (including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Modern, London, and Centre Pompidou, Paris).
 
This bilingual publication produced in close collaboration with the artist, presents a comprehensive overview of her oeuvre on more than 250 pages with numerous large-format illustrations – from early sculptures and photograms to her usually colourful, concrete photographs and the most recent video installations.
Book of the Day Posted Dec 03, 2020

Book of the Day > Flower Art: Makoto Azuma

● Purchase ● The art of Makoto Azuma uses flowers and plants as its starting point, but juxtaposes their timeless yet transient beauty with an incredibly diverse range of striking settings. In a series of sculptures, installations and interactive events, he delights in blurring the boundaries between nature and artifice.
 
Azuma founded the floral atelier Jardins des Fleurs in 2002, taking commissions from private clients as well as brands and corporations, both in Japan and all over the world. His parallel career as an artist began in 2005 and involves creating and exhibiting artworks that turn flowers and plants into a medium for self-expression. In 2008, Azuma founded AMKK (Azuma Makoto Kaju Kenkyujo), a group specializing in experimental floral creation, with the aim of seeking new forms of botanical beauty and new ways to exhibit them. His works have travelled the globe, from barren deserts to frozen expanses, from thousands of feet below the sea to the very edge of space. Featuring more than sixty projects captured in breathtaking photography, this beautiful book is the most comprehensive showcase of Azuma’s art ever published.
Book of the Day Posted Dec 01, 2020

Book of the Day > California Love: A Visual Mixtape

● Purchase ● Curated by Michael Rababy this book features the work of 110 photographers from all over California – celebrating what makes our diverse, inclusive, forward-thinking state so great. This is Rababy’s visual mixtape, featuring the greatest hits of friends’ and colleagues’ work that I’ve enjoyed through my years as a curator. I hope to share the excitement I have for great images the way I’ve shared my favorite rare grooves, B-sides, and bootleg recordings over my lifetime. All proceeds from sales of this book benefit the Los Angeles Center of Photography (LACP)
Book of the Day Posted Nov 20, 2020

Book of the Day > Interior Space: A Visual Exploration of the International Space Station

● Purchase ● Unseen images of the International Space Station, untenanted and eerie: the legacy of humanity's fragile foothold in space
 
On November 2 2020, NASA celebrated the 20th anniversary of continuous human habitation in space of the International Space Station. In Interior Space, American photographer Roland Miller and Italian astronaut and photographer Paolo Nespoli offer an in-depth portrait of the ISS, creating amazing unpeopled images of the interior of the ISS for the first time. As internationally acclaimed scholars of space archaeology Alice Gorman and Justin St. P. Walsh write in their essays, the ISS speaks not only of who we are and will be, but also of who we were. In 2024 the ISS will be abandoned; in 2028 it will be destroyed. This book provides us with an eerie account of what will remain in the space after our passing.
Book of the Day Posted Nov 19, 2020

Book of the Day > Magic Papers

● Purchase ● Magic is largely a solitary endeavour, but the channels of its tips and tricks had a little ‐ known heyday around a hundred years ago. That golden era circulated secrets in printed matter packed with flamboyant custom lettering, sensational language and mystifying illustrations — largely made by and for its own community, compiled and consumed by dedicated practitioners and hobbyists. Often unregulated and infrequently archived beyond private collections, these magic papers collided with cults of personality, unshakable passion, and a thirst for notoriety.
 
The book features a huge assembly of printed material from the collection of Philip David Treece, a magic expert dedicated to preserving a golden era of magic publishing. This collection celebrates journals, periodicals, books and other ephemera created for the magic community between 1890 and 1960. Each book includes a 16 page gloss insert featuring a collection of magical apparatus.
Book of the Day Posted Nov 18, 2020

Book of the Day > Gas and Glamour: Roadside Architecture in Los Angeles

● Purchase ● “I love cars and I love Los Angeles for being a city of cars. Over the last decade or so, I have been intrigued by L. A.’s love affair with the automobile, tracing back to a time when cars themselves were objects of beauty. Those cars are no longer on the streets today but the buildings from that era remain. As an architectural photographer, I wanted to capture L. A.’s car-culture-induced optimism and ambition reflected in polychromatic, starspangled coffee shops, gas stations, and car washes, that once lured the gaze of passing motorists.” – Ashok Sinha
 
Ashok Sinha is an architectural and fine art photographer whose large-scale photographs capture a sense of place tied to both natural landscapes and built environments. His photographs have been published by editorial outlets such as The New York Times, Architectural Digest, Interior Design, and exhibited at The Museum of the City of New York, the International Center of Photography, and The Royal Photographic Society.
Book of the Day Posted Nov 13, 2020

Book of the Day > Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks

● Purchase ● An illustrated mid-career monograph exploring the 30-year creative journey of the 8-time Academy Award–nominated writer and director
 
Paul Thomas Anderson has been described as "one of American film's modern masters" and "the foremost filmmaking talent of his generation." Anderson's films have received 25 Academy Award nominations, and he has worked closely with many of the most accomplished actors of our time, including Lesley Ann Manville, Julianne Moore, Daniel Day-Lewis, Joaquin Phoenix, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. In Paul Thomas Anderson: Masterworks, Anderson’s entire career—from Hard Eight (1996), Boogie Nights (1997), Magnolia (1999), Punch Drunk Love (2002), There Will Be Blood (2007), The Master (2012), Inherent Vice (2014), and Phantom Thread (2017) to his music videos for Radiohead to his early short films—is examined in illustrated detail for the first time.
 
Anderson’s influences, his style, and the recurring themes of alienation, reinvention, ambition, and destiny that course through his movies are analyzed and supplemented by firsthand interviews with Anderson’s closest collaborators—including producer JoAnne Sellar, actor Vicky Krieps, and composer Jonny Greenwood—and illuminated by film stills, archival photos, original illustrations, and an appropriately psychedelic design aesthetic. Masterworks is a tribute to the dreamers, drifters, and evil dentists who populate his world.
Book of the Day Posted Nov 12, 2020

Book of the Day > Futura: The Artist's Monograph

● Purchase ● The most in-depth and comprehensive survey of the life and career of one of the pioneering artists of the original graffiti generation.
 
Having forged his graphic style painting subways in New York in the late 1970s, Futura was among the first graffiti artists to be shown in contemporary galleries in the early 1980s, where his paintings shared space with works by Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, and Kenny Scharf. As the commercialization of street culture in the 1990s inspired collaborations with fashion and lifestyle brands, Futura's work moved toward a more refined expression of his abstract graffiti style. Commissions from era-defining brands such as A Bathing Ape, Stüssy, Supreme, and Mo' Wax saw his artwork canonized as an elemental component of the street aesthetic.
 
Collected here, among never-before-published reproductions of earlier paintings and drawings, is an archive of personal photography and ephemera that reveals how integral Futura has been to the evolution of street art and culture. Guided through more than forty years of work, and with interviews with key players in Futura's career, this is at once a definitive monograph of a legend of contemporary art and an indispensable chapter in the history of graffiti.
Book of the Day Posted Nov 11, 2020

Book of the Day > Masterpieces of Fantasy Art

● Purchase ● Fantasy art, that colorful blend of myth, muscle and sexy maidens, took off in 1923 with the launch of Weird Tales magazine, was reinvigorated in the 1960s with The Lord of the Rings, Conan the Barbarian paperbacks with Frank Frazetta covers, and the late ’60s emergence of fantasy psychedelia. It went big in the ’70s with the role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, the brilliant French magazine Métal Hurlant, and the first Star Wars film. The number of active artists peaked in that decade, but a new generation of fans discovered the genre through fantasy trading card games in the ’90s, leading to a massive interest in the art form today. Frank Frazetta’s oil paintings—when they infrequently come to market—have sold for more than $ 5 million in recent years. Fans line up at Comic-Cons to meet Boris Vallejo, Rodney Matthews, Greg Hildebrandt, Michael Whelan, and Philippe Druillet, and memorialize dead icons HR Giger, Jeffrey Catherine Jones, and Frazetta. Imagine how eagerly they’ll welcome TASCHEN’s History of Fantasy Art, including all the artists listed above and more.
 
This monster-sized tome features original paintings, contextualized by preparatory sketches, sculptures, calendars, magazines, and paperback books for an immersive dive into this dynamic, fanciful genre. Insightful bios go beyond Wikipedia to give a more accurate and eye-opening look into the life of each artist. Complete with tipped-in chapter openers, this collection will reign as the most exquisite and informative guide to this popular subject for years to come.
Book of the Day Posted Nov 06, 2020

Book of the Day > Design Commune

● Purchase ● A journey through the acclaimed design studio’s effortless California aesthetic, ethos, and lifestyle
 
Design Commune reveals the evolution story of an acclaimed design studio rooted firmly in the California aesthetic, ethos, and lifestyle. Truly multidisciplinary in practice, Commune has, since its inception in 2004, tackled all areas of design. The work featured in this second book highlights all disciplines that Commune engages in, including interior design projects for private and commercial spaces, artist collaborations, product designs, packaging, and graphics. Its projects share many common threads, such as the influence of handcrafted materials, but each remains deeply personal and unique.
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