Book of the Day Posted Apr 17, 2019

Book of the day > Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne: In the Domain of Dreams

Book of the day > Francois-Xavier and Claude Lalanne: In the Domain of Dreams. Published by @RizzoliBooks. "The Lalannes' charming, dreamy, and surrealistic body of functional sculptures, once a guarded secret for exclusive collectors such as Yves Saint Laurent and the Agnellis, is celebrated in full in this stunning new book. The legendary husband-and-wife artist team has been the inspiration for high-society collectors and decorators, such as Pierre Bergé, Serge Gainsbourg, Peter Marino, Jane Holzer, and Reed Krakoff for over five decades. Crossing over many audiences - from interior design to fine art to high society, the works of the Lalannes have aspirational yet broad appeal. Their surreal flock of sheep sculpture is now de rigeur for any important collection, while their functional hippopotamus wet bar sells for millions of dollars at auction. Highly collected and promoted by an important group of art insiders, Lalanne works are often the focus of the well-curated room, as seen in many magazine covers. This book on their work will appeal to decorators, designers, artists, and all those who love beautiful art objects." R.I.P. Claude Lalanne, 1924-2018.
Book of the Day Posted Apr 16, 2019

Book of the Day > New Architecture Los Angeles

Book of the Day > New Architecture Los Angeles. Published by Prestel. "This exhilarating and richly illustrated guide to Los Angeles’s most exciting new buildings establishes the city as a mecca for forward-thinking and environmentally conscious architecture.
Some of the world’s leading architects are making their mark on Los Angeles’s cityscape with exciting and innovative projects. Fifty of the most striking buildings are profiled in this book that features every type of architecture—houses, municipal structures, art museums, office buildings, performance spaces, and houses of worship. Some of the world’s leading design firms, including Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Eric Owen Moss Architects, Selldorf Architects, and wHY Architecture, have contributed to the city’s structural vernacular. While the projects here are as varied as the luminous Walt Disney Concert Hall by Gehry Partners and Bestor Architecture’s compact housing development named “Blackbirds,” each building embraces an unmistakably Californian aesthetic reimagined for a new century. With original photography, this is the first book to focus on the surge of creative building that has taken place in Los Angeles in the new millennium."
 
Book of the Day Posted Apr 14, 2019

Book of the Day > Matthew Craven: Primer

Book of the Day > Matthew Craven: Primer. Published by Anthology Editions. "Utilizing found images from textbooks along with his own geometric patterns, Matthew Craven’s collages and illustrations seek to create a new handmade universe, juxtaposing imagery from different cultures and time periods to celebrate commonalities. Photographs of archaeological remains and the natural world are overlaid on colorful textiles drawn on the back of vintage movie posters, to create a hypnotic and mesmerizing vernacular of symbols and designs. Featuring an introduction by LACMA curator Leslie Jones, PRIMER is the first publication of Craven’s art and a reconfiguration of traditional historical narratives inspired by obsessive formations."
Book of the Day Posted Apr 11, 2019

Book of the Day > Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence

Book of the Day > Votes for Women: A Portrait of Persistence. Published by Princeton University Press. "Marking the centenary of the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in 1920, Votes for Women is the first richly illustrated book to reveal the history and complexity of the national suffrage movement. For nearly a hundred years, from the mid-nineteenth century onward, countless American women fought for the right to vote. While some of the leading figures of the suffrage movement have received deserved appreciation, the crusade for women’s enfranchisement involved many individuals, each with a unique story to be told. Weaving together a diverse collection of portraits and other visual materials—including photographs, drawings, paintings, prints, textiles, and mixed media—along with biographical narratives and trenchant essays, this comprehensive book presents fresh perspectives on the history of the movement. Bringing attention to underrecognized individuals and groups, the leading historians featured here look at how suffragists used portraiture to promote gender equality and other feminist ideals, and how photographic portraits in particular proved to be a crucial element of women’s activism and recruitment. The contributors also explore the reasons why certain events and leaders of the suffrage movement have been remembered over others, the obstacles that black women faced when organizing with white suffragists and the subsequent founding of black women’s suffrage groups, the foundations of the violent antisuffrage movement, and the ways suffragists held up American women physicians who served in France during World War I as exemplary citizens, deserving the right to vote. With nearly 200 color illustrations, Votes for Women offers a more complete picture of American women’s suffrage, one that sheds new light on the movement’s relevance for our own time."
 
Book of the Day Posted Apr 10, 2019

Book of the Day > Martin Parr: Beach Therapy

Book of the Day > Martin Parr: Beach Therapy. Published by Damiani. "During his long career as a photographer, Martin Parr has always photographed beaches, particularly in the UK. The beach is more than just a common subject for Parr; he has often used the beach as a laboratory to experiment with new cameras and techniques. For example, when Parr switched from working with black-and-white film to medium-format color in the early 1980s, he tested out his new approach on the beaches of New Brighton, a run-down seaside resort near Liverpool. In recent years Parr has started exploring the beach with the aid of a telephoto lens. This lens is rarely used in the world of art and documentary photography, and Parr has experimented to find new ways to use its unique visual qualities, for example by incorporating the vegetation on the perimeter with the beach as a backdrop, both in and out of focus. Martin Parr: Beach Therapy focuses on this new body of work, the latest in his long experimental engagement with beaches and their users. "
 
Book of the Day Posted Apr 06, 2019

Book of the Day > Extraordinary! Unknown Works From Swiss Psychiatric Institutions Around 1900

Book of the Day > Extraordinary! Unknown Works from Swiss Psychiatric Institutions Around 1900. Published by Scheidegger & Spiess.
"There has been a rapid rise in interest in recent years in art created by people suffering from mental illness, with new museums dedicated to it, major surveys, and attention from the media and public. Yet there has been little research undertaken to systematically examine this body of art.
Extraordinary! presents the results of an exceptional research project undertaken at the Zurich University of the Arts that documented and examined art produced in asylums and mental hospitals throughout Switzerland around 1900. Varied in style and media, the works often mark long periods of dedicated and passionate work and reveal remarkable technical and artistic prowess. They serve, the editors show, as both an expression of their creators’ ideas and an act of compensation for, and their own ciriticism of, the dull and often hard life at the institutions they treaded.
Featuring a diverse selection of previously unpublished works, Extraordinary! questions our contemporary understanding of art, encouraging the reader to engage with these artists and their work and thereby revisit the very idea of what constitutes art."
Book of the Day Posted Apr 05, 2019

Book of the Day > Kenzo Takada

Book of the Day > Kenzo Takada. Published by ACC Art Books.
"In 1970, the young Japanese designer Kenzo Takada opened his first boutique, Jungle Jap, in Paris and revolutionized the fashion world. His colorful, ethnic, and nomadic- influenced collections, made with luxurious and vibrantly patterned textiles, tweaked the conventions of haute couture while maintaining the quality of traditional European clothing houses. He was influenced by Parisian fashion and Japanese kimonos, boldly mixing colours and prints, cuts and materials. His vibrant palette and pattern combinations were joyful and whimsical, and very different from the subtle tailoring of the traditional Paris couturier. In his inspired blend of the opulent and the exotic, he developed a signature style and found early success.
With stunning photography, and over 300 sketches from Kenzo's private collection, this book traces more than forty years of his creative output. It includes photographs from his high-energy runway shows, in addition to personal photographs, and a behind-the-scene look at the creation of a spectacular wedding dress, opening a window on the creative process and capturing Kenzo's energy, vision, and presence. Superbly illustrated throughout with pencilled and hand colored sketches, swatched drawings, and previously unpublished archival photographs, the authors explore Kenzo's career, tracing the evolution of his cult label in a look-book of visual exuberance."
Book of the Day Posted Apr 04, 2019

Book of the day > I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating - Alec Soth

Book of the day > I Know How Furiously Your Heart Is Beating - Alec Soth. Published by @MACK_books. (purchase here).  

“Taking its name from a line in the Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Gray Room,” Alec Soth’s latest book is a lyrical exploration of the limitations of photographic representation. While these large-format color photographs are made all over the world, they aren’t about any particular place or population. By a process of intimate and often extended engagement, Soth’s portraits and images of his subject’s surroundings involve an enquiry into the extent to which a photographic likeness can depict more than the outer surface of an individual, and perhaps even plumb the depths of something unknowable about both the sitter and the photographer.
 
 “After the publication of my last book about social life in America, Songbook, and a retrospective of my four, large scale American projects, Gathered Leaves, I went through a long period of rethinking my creative process. For over a year I stopped traveling and photographing people. I barely took any pictures at all.
 
When I returned to photography, I wanted to strip the medium down to its primary elements. Rather than trying to make some sort of epic narrative about America, I wanted to simply spend time looking at other people and, hopefully, briefly glimpse their interior life.
 
In order to try and access these lives, I made all of the photographs in interior spaces. While these rooms often exist in far-flung places, it’s only to emphasize that these pictures aren’t about any place in particular. Whether a picture is made in Odessa or Minneapolis, my goal was the same: to simply spend time in the presence of another beating heart.” – Alec Soth @littlebrownmushroom.

 

Book of the Day Posted Apr 03, 2019

Book of the Day > Albarrán Cabrera: Remembering the Future

Book of the Day > Albarrán Cabrera: Remembering the Future. Published by Editorial RM. "For years, Barcelona-based Angel Albarrán (born 1969) and Anna Cabrera (born 1969) have been the preferred printers for museums and world-renowned photographers. Recently they have branched out as artists themselves, experimenting with new and traditional print techniques and exhibiting worldwide. In addition to mastering traditional techniques such as platinum prints and cyanotypes, they have developed a unique print technology: printing photographs with pigments on thin Japanese paper, which is then placed over gold leaf, imbuing the images with an otherworldly quality. One of the most gorgeously produced volumes of recent years, Albarrán Cabrera: Remembering the Future demonstrates the extraordinary beauty of the duo's masterful photographic and printing techniques. Frequent trips to Japan inform the content of these photographs, which are often beautifully abstracted by their print treatment."
Book of the Day Posted Apr 02, 2019

Book of the Day > A History of America in 100 Maps

Book of the Day > A History of America in 100 Maps. Published by University of Chicago Press.

"Throughout its history, America has been defined through maps. Whether made for military strategy or urban reform, to encourage settlement or to investigate disease, maps invest information with meaning by translating it into visual form. They capture what people knew, what they thought they knew, what they hoped for, and what they feared. As such they offer unrivaled windows onto the past.

In this book Susan Schulten uses maps to explore five centuries of American history, from the voyages of European discovery to the digital age. With stunning visual clarity, A History of America in 100 Maps showcases the power of cartography to illuminate and complicate our understanding of the past."

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