A detail from a work by Bridget Riley, titled Study for Measure for Measure Dark 2, dated 2019.

Portrait of Bridget Riley, 2021. Photo by Yuki Shima

Robert Kudielka

Richard Shone

Neil MacGregor

E.H. Gombrich

Michael Craig-Martin

Andrew Graham-Dixon

Bryan Robertson

Edited by Robert Kudielka. Introduction by Richard Shone. Conversations with Bridget Riley, Neil MacGregor, E.H. Gombrich, Michael Craig-Martin, Andrew Graham-Dixon, Bryan Robertson

Bridget Riley is one of the outstanding figures of modern painting. She has pursued a course of rigorous abstraction for over fifty years, from her celebrated black and white Op Art works in the 1960s to the complex color paintings of the 1990s. On the occasion of a major exhibition of her work in 1992 at London’s Hayward Gallery, BBC Radio broadcast a series of five dialogues, each one between Riley and a well-known figure from the art world. These encounters, edited by an art historian, are contained in this book. With Neil MacGregor, Riley discusses the art of the past in relation to the art of the present; with Sir Ernst Gombrich the perception of color in painting; with the artist Michael Craig-Martin, the theory and practice of abstraction; and with the critics Bryan Robertson and Andrew Graham-Dixon, she talks about events and travels that have influenced her as an artist. Taken as a whole, this series forms an excellent introduction to the work and ideas of one of the most creative minds of today.

Bridget Riley: Dialogues on Art

Michael Bracewell

Éric de Chassey

John Elderfield

Dave Hickey

Text by Michael Bracewell, Éric de Chassey, John Elderfield, Dave Hickey, Robert Kudielka, Bridget Riley, Richard Shiff, Frances Spalding, David Sylvester, and David Thompson. Foreword by Dr Simon Groom, Sir John Leighton, and Ralph Rugoff

A landmark exhibition catalogue reflects on almost 70 years of works by Bridget Riley, 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.

Includes a selection of critical writings, statements and conversations specially selected by the artist as well as her own writings. The book starts with David Sylvester’s review of her first exhibition in 1962 and ends with Éric de Chassey’s newly commissioned 2019 essay.

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, and also examine the notable influence that other artists such as Georges Seurat and Piet Mondrian have had on Riley’s work.

Bridget Riley

Detail view of Alice Neel's 1967 painting titled Richard

Helen Molesworth

Ginny Neel

Text by Helen Molesworth. Introduction by Ginny Neel. Contribution by Marlene Dumas

One of the foremost American figurative painters of the twentieth century, it is not surprising that Alice Neel was a humanist—she was fascinated by people.

Known for her daringly honest portraits, Neel loved to paint people in all their complexities—to penetrate and reveal their fears and anxieties. She also loved to paint the unadorned human figure. Her nudes, in particular, explore the body with frankness while celebrating the individuality of each of her subjects, and they exemplify the freedom and courage with which she approached her work and her life.

Through her paintings and works on paper, Neel was able to free herself from the expected inhibitions and crippling taboos that were placed on women and focus on the beauty and nuanced complexity of flesh and the human body. In their mastery of form, color, and implied social commentary, her nudes are as relevant today as when they were painted.

 documents the solo exhibition of the artist’s work at David Zwirner in New York in 2019. Including works that span the 1920s to the 1980s, this presentation focuses primarily on the nude figure—whether male or female, adult or child—and demonstrates how Neel rebelled against and challenged the traditional perceptions of sexuality, motherhood, and beauty in our society. The catalogue includes newly commissioned scholarship by Helen Molesworth and an introduction by Ginny Neel of The Estate of Alice Neel.

Learn more about the artist 

Alice Neel: Freedom

A sculpture by Ruth Asawa, called Untitled (S.175, Hanging Single-Lobed, Four-Layer Continuous Form within a Form), dated c. 1992.

Ruth Asawa with hanging wire sculpture, 1951. Photo © Imogen Cunningham Trust

This lushly illustrated book by collage artist Andrea D'Aquino brings Asawa's creative journey to life, detailing the influence of her childhood in a farming family, and her education at Black Mountain College where she pursued an experimental course of education with leading avant-garde artists and thinkers such as Anni and Josef Albers, Buckminster Fuller, Merce Cunningham, and Robert Rauschenberg. Delightful and substantial, this engaging title for young art lovers includes a page of teaching tools for parents and educators.

The Story of Ruth Asawa

A Life Made by Hand

Patrick Modiano

Dominique Zehrfuss

Damion Searls

ekphrasis

Poems by Patrick Modiano. Illustrated by Dominique Zehrfuss. Translated with an introduction by Damion Searls

Published in English for the first time, 

 is the marriage of prose and painting by Nobel-prize winning author Patrick Modiano and his partner, the illustrator Dominique Zehrfuss.

 is a rare book: it reveals not only the individual talents of the authors, Modiano and Zehrfuss, but also the depth of the couple’s creative union. Sensitively translated into English for the first time by Damion Searls, 

 captures the exquisite sadness of waking from a beautiful dream. There are twenty-eight dreams in this book, or perhaps one dream in twenty-eight parts—visions of paradise imagined by Zehrfuss during a time of deep sadness. Captured first in Zehrfuss’s brightly colored gouaches, each paradise was then refashioned as a poem by Modiano.

Zehrfuss’s paintings are Edens in miniature, and rather than describe them outright, Modiano dreams himself into these reveries in quiet, understated verse. The reader enters this shared realm in an experience less like paging through a book and more like slipping into a shared world. These paradises are wishes for moments when a painting, or a poem, or a lover—perhaps they are not so different—relieves the loneliness of being human. As Modiano writes with a touch of wistfulness, “The Lilliputian painted her paradises / And I / Next to her / Wrote a poem.” A pure example of ekphrastic writing—poetry inspired by paintings—this book shows how writing and visual art can together create a unique emotional experience.

First published by Editions de l’Olivier/ Le Seuil in 2005

28 Paradises

Yun Hyong-keun (1928–2007) was one of the most prominent abstract monochromists. Internationally admired during his life (Donald Judd was an advocate and friend), he belongs to a generation of artists whose influence has been crucial since the end of the Korean War. Both the war itself and its aftermath deeply affected the artist. In the 1970s Yun Hyong-keun joined the Dansaekhwa movement, a leading group of Korean artists whose monochromatic paintings intensively explored the effects and nature of color.

This handsomely produced volume, accompanying a major exhibition at the Palazzo Fortuny in Venice, offers a cornucopia of artistic and personal materials from the artist’s estate, which together provide great insight into the life and work of one of the 20th century’s most important abstractionists.

Yun Hyong-keun (Palazzo Fortuny)

Portrait of Chris Ofili, 2017. Photo by Carlos Arias

Fred Moten

Seeing Shakespeare

By William Shakespeare. Illustrated by Chris Ofili. Introduction by Fred Moten

 remains one of Shakespeare’s most contemporary and moving plays, with its emphasis on race, revenge, murder, and lost love. Chris Ofili’s new edition highlights the tragedy of Othello’s plight in ways no other volume of this play has.

In the twelve etchings Ofili has produced to illustrate this play, Othello is depicted with tears in his eyes, which flow below various scenes visualized in his forehead. Ofili asks us to see in 

 the great injustices that still plague the world today. These images add feeling to Shakespeare’s words, and together they form their own hybrid object—something between a book and a visual retelling of the tragedy. With a foreword by the renowned critic Fred Moten, this edition is the first of its kind and puts Othello’s blackness and interiority front and center, forcing us to confront the complex world that ultimately dooms him.

Dialogues:
The David Zwirner Podcast
Chris Ofili and Emily Wilson

 in front of an audience at the 69th Street gallery in New York, artist Chris Ofili and classicist Emily Wilson encounter religion, art, personal history, gender issues, Trinidad, Greece, truth, and lies.

William Shakespeare × Chris Ofili: Othello

A painting by Marlene Dumas, titled Longing, dated 2018.

Hafid Bouazza

Marlene Dumas

By William Shakespeare. Translated by Hafid Bouazza. Illustrated by Marlene Dumas

 (1593) is a poem by William Shakespeare based on passages from Ovid’s 

. This new translation by Hafid Bouazza of Shakespeare’s text is illustrated by Marlene Dumas, the renowned painter celebrated around the world for her highly charged depictions of the human form.

Through a series of expressive ink washes, Dumas paints new passion into the poem—bodies bleed into one another, lips part in sighs of passion, a flower blooms to life. Desire in all its heady intensity is evocatively washed over the pages. As with Dumas’s wider body of work, however, tragedy is not forgotten and is frighteningly played out with equal intensity. The owl, “night’s herald,” as Shakespeare writes, flies jet black across the sky; a wild boar looms like a shadow over Adonis’s suffering, wounded body; black dissolves into gray; and bodies are lost in a sea of ink.

The poem tells the story of Venus, the goddess of love, and her attempts to seduce the hunter Adonis. It is a complex, kaleidoscopic work in which love takes center stage—Venus’s lustful yearning for Adonis ripples throughout, each stanza and line tinged with unrequited longing. As Venus declares, “Graze on my lips, and if those hills be dry, / Stray lower, where the pleasant fountains lie.” Like Shakespeare before her, Dumas opens up a seemingly unending flow between light and dark, love and death, pleasure and pain.

Dumas’s complete suite of thirty-two works on paper is reproduced in this volume, exactingly placed by the artist throughout Shakespeare’s text. Copublished by Athenaeum and David Zwirner Books as an English/Dutch edition, the book is a striking yet beautiful paradox—a marriage of text and image that is as sensual, fleshy, and carnal as it is unnerving and disturbing.

Venus & Adonis

Claire Messud

Marlene Dumas’s works respond more than ever to the uncertainty and sensuality of the painting process itself. Allowing the structure of the canvases and the materiality of the paint greater freedom to inform the development of her compositions, the artist has likened the creation of these works to the act of falling in love: an unpredictable and open-ended process that is as filled with awkwardness and anxiety as it is with bliss and discovery.

 documents a selection of paintings—debuted in the spring of 2018 at David Zwirner, New York—ranging from monumental nude figures to intimately scaled canvases that present details of bodily parts and facial features. Several nearly ten-foot-tall paintings focus on individual figures, including a number of male and female nudes and a seemingly solemn bride, whose expression is obscured behind a floor-length veil. Like the Greek gods and goddesses, the figures in these paintings are at once larger than life and overwhelmingly human. The smaller-scale paintings—referred to by the artist as “erotic landscapes”—present a variety of fragmentary images: eyes, lips, nipples, or lovers locked in a kiss. Evident across all of these works is the artist’s uniquely sensitive treatment of the human form and her constantly evolving experimentation with color and texture.

Alongside these paintings, Dumas presents an expansive series of thirty-two works on paper originally created for a Dutch translation of William Shakespeare’s narrative poem 

 is accompanied by new scholarship on the artist by Claire Messud and a text by Dumas herself.

Marlene Dumas: Myths & Mortals

Luc Tuymans in his studio, 2022. Photo by Otman Q

Eva Meyer-Hermann

Over the course of four decades, Belgian painter Luc Tuymans has created his own distinctive vernacular, a new visual vocabulary. The second volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly two hundred works, including some of his most iconic canvases.

Between the years 1995 and 2006, Tuymans’s work trended toward ideas of national and collective memory. In 1996, the artist created a group of ten paintings entitled 

, for which he transformed familiar images of American life, such as Mount Rushmore, baseball caps, and the United States flag, into unsettling visions, addressing the country’s perceived vulnerability, both physical and psychological, following the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing. Paintings from 

, his seminal body of work that was first shown at David Zwirner, New York, in 2000, after which he expanded the series for his presentation for the Belgian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 2001, depict imagery derived from the fraught history of Belgian colonial rule of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Also included is one of Tuymans’s best-known paintings, 

 (2005), a powerful yet seemingly vulnerable portrayal of Condoleezza Rice, which conjures the long history of racial and sexual prejudice in the United States, not as something that has been overcome, but as an active force shaping our reality.

This volume includes an editor’s note by Eva Meyer-Hermann and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation views of the featured works. It also presents brilliant color reproductions of each painting from this period. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1995–2006

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 2

Foreword by Frances Morris. Introduction by Mark Godfrey and Christine Macel. Texts by Monika Bayer-Wermuth, Christine Macel, Martin Prinzhorn, and Mark Godfrey

An anarchic free spirit, self-taught until the age of thirty, Franz West remained in the shadows of the Viennese art scene for nearly fifteen years before becoming known in the international art world in the 1980s. Today he is regarded as a pivotal figure of contemporary art, whose work continues to inspire younger artists. West's output ranged from lumpy papier mâché objects to installations of divans for viewers to lounge on, from painted collages to outdoor sculptures shaped like intestines and turds. It was at once popular and esoteric, active and contemplative, corporeal and intellectual, philosophical and playful.

West produced thousands of works over forty years, and this fully illustrated catalogue provides a remarkable picture of the artist's exceptionally rich career. Further insight into West's practice is provided through essays by Mark Godfrey, Christine Macel and Martin Prinzhorn, an illustrated chronology, and some thirty previously unpublished testimonies from close associates and friends of the artist, from Kasper König to Bice Curiger and Sarah Lucas.

Franz West (Tate)

14.08.041_mama-mummy-and-mamma-predecessors-2_splash_1

Portrait of Njideka Akunyili Crosby. Photo by Stefan Ruiz

Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s colorful collage-paintings lay bare the complexities of the African and diasporic experience

Nigerian-born, Los Angeles–based artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby's figurative paintings at first appear to be paintings of quotidian indoor scenes inspired by the artist's personal photographs of friends and family in Nigeria. But on closer inspection, it becomes clear that large segments of these paintings are composed of collages, themselves created from personal photos and images taken from Nigerian magazines.

This richly textured appearance conveys the complexities of the African and diasporic experiences of Akunyili Crosby and of the people whose likenesses she captures in her paintings. In her series 

, Akunyili Crosby paints Nigerian children as they appear in everyday life, posing in a classroom or standing pajama-clad next to the TV. This book features full-color reproductions of the paintings with detail shots that allow the reader to see the collage work up close, as well as an introductory essay by the well-known art writer Siddhartha Mitter.

Out of stock

Njideka Akunyili Crosby: The Beautyful Ones

An installation view of an exhibition titled Andra Ursuta: Void Fill at David Zwirner, Paris, in 2021.

Edited by Karen Marta, Massimiliano Gioni. Text by Ali Subotnick.

Imbued with the collective memories of Romanian culture, Andra Ursuta's work uses her grim past to tackle our harsh present. This book includes an essay by Ali Subotnik on Ursuta's stark recreations of cultural turmoil.

Andra Ursuta: 2000 Words

This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works from the vital early years of his career

Credited with a key role in the revival of painting in the 1990s, Belgian artist Luc Tuymans (b. 1958) continues to produce subtle, and at times unsettling, works that engage with history, technology, and everyday life. This first volume in a catalogue raisonné of Tuymans’s paintings surveys nearly 200 works that were vital to his artistic development. The years 1972 to 1994 witnessed the maturation of his signature method of painting from preexisting imagery—such as magazine images, Polaroids, and television footage—as well as his first solo exhibition. Also dating from this period are many of his seminal canvases, along with ten poignant portraits of the ailing human body and the enigmatic series Superstition that comprised his first works exhibited in the United States.

The catalogue features brilliant new photography of each of the paintings and an illustrated chronology with archival images and installation shots of the works in this volume. This publication is a testament to Tuymans’s persistent assertion of the relevance and importance of painting—a conviction that he maintains even in today’s digital world, when his work continues to be a touchstone for artists and scholars.

1972–1994

Luc Tuymans Catalogue Raisonné of Paintings: Volume 1

A detail from a painting by Katherine Bernhardt, titled Escape from New York, dated 2020.

Vivid paintings of Swatch watches from the collection of Katherine Bernhardt

New York painter Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975) began collecting Swatch watches as a teenager in suburban Saint Louis. Obsessed by their shapes, variety of graphics and their air of pop sophistication, they became a constant in Bernhardt's visual life. She has completed numerous paintings of Swatches over the last decade, and this volume, published on the occasion of her Swatch-focused exhibition in August 2017 at Karma, pictures her original Swatch collection, kept for all these years, as well as a generous selection of her Swatch-themed paintings.

Katherine Bernhardt: Swatches

This book collects drawings, supplemented by her own photographs, by artist Katherine Bernhardt (born 1975), of midcentury modern houses in the Hamptons, Fire Island and Martha's Vineyard. Bernhardt spent the summer of 2017 living at Elaine de Kooning House in East Hampton. She and her son embarked on bike rides around the area, and Bernhardt became fascinated by, as she writes, "huge and small wonderful wood and glass masterpieces, some with crazy window shapes, some A-frames, some with concrete, all interesting designs ... I started making fast black ink sumi-e-like drawings of the houses, breaking down the houses to their basic forms of line." Featuring an introductory text by the artist and a historical overview by David Sokol of architecture in the Hamptons, 

 offers a unique, personal account of the forms and structures of modernist vacation homes.

Katherine Bernhardt: Houses

A detail of a photograph by Wolfgang Tillmans titled Sicily Morning, dated 2018.

Allie Biswas

Spotlight Series

Interview with the artist by Allie Biswas

Presenting recent developments in Wolfgang Tillmans’s portraiture and still lifes, 

 features a broad selection of new and recent works that respond to their surroundings while at the same time embodying a self-contained environment.

Few artists have shaped the scope of contemporary art and influenced a younger generation more than Wolfgang Tillmans. Since the early 1990s, his works have epitomized a new kind of subjectivity in photography, pairing intimacy and playfulness with social critique and the persistent questioning of existing values and hierarchies. Through his seamless integration of genres, subjects, techniques, and exhibition strategies, he has expanded conventional ways of approaching the medium, and his practice continues to address the fundamental question of what it means to create pictures in an increasingly image-saturated world.

Published on the occasion of Tillmans’s exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong in 2018, this fully bilingual catalogue juxtaposes pictures of intimacy and friendship with views and angles of the world at large. An aerial view of the Sahara desert displays almost infinite detail while being monochromatic and near-abstract in appearance. In line with Tillmans’s interest in exhibitions as amplifiers of a particular, underlying perspective, each of the works engages in an intricate system of relationships between its aesthetic elements, subject, and institutional setting. Seen together, they implicate the viewer as an active part of the dialogue. The 2016 interview with author Allie Biswas of 

 has been edited and expanded by the artist for this catalogue.

Wolfgang Tillmans: DZHK Book 2018

Texts by James Rondeau, Kate Nesin, and Juliane Rebentisch

This publication examines both the art-historical framework of Tomma Abts’s painting as well as its deep philosophical and psychological dimensions.

With a rigorous approach and self-imposed limitations to both scale and composition, Tomma Abts (b. 1967) has reinvigorated painterly abstraction and its relevance within contemporary art. Using a fixed canvas size and a vertical format, Abts deploys basic formal elements such as arcs, circles, planes, and stripes to create powerful works that are at once subtle and eccentric. This extraordinary book, designed in collaboration with the artist herself, is a substantial and deeply insightful treatment of her career to date and features sixty works made over the past decade. Essays not only contextualize Abts’s work within an art-historical framework of methods, process, and style, but also examine her paintings’ philosophical and psychological dimensions and their embodiment of a creative process that transcends the specifics of any particular work.

Tomma Abts

Vernon Lee

Dylan Kenny

An openly lesbian, feminist writer, Vernon Lee—a pseudonym of Violet Paget—is the most important female aesthetician to come out of nineteenth century England.

Though she was widely known for her supernatural fictions, Lee hasn’t gained the recognition she so clearly deserves for her contributions in the fields of aesthetics, philosophy of empathy, and art criticism. An early follower of Walter Pater, her work is characterized by extreme attention to her own responses to artworks, and a level of psychological sensitivity rarely seen in any aesthetic writing. Today, she is largely overlooked in curriculums, her aesthetic works long out of print.

David Zwirner Books is reintroducing Lee’s writing through the first-ever English publication of "Psychology of an Art Writer" (1903) along with selections from her groundbreaking "Gallery Diaries" (1901–1904), breathtaking accounts of Lee’s own experiences with the great paintings and sculptures she traveled to see. Ranging from deeply felt assessments of the way mood affects our ability to appreciate art, to detailed descriptions of some of the most powerful personal experiences with artworks, these writings provide profound insights into the fields of psychology and aesthetics. Her philosophical inquiries in 

leave no stone unturned, combining fine-grained ekphrases with high fancy and dense abstraction. The diaries, in turn, establish Lee as one of the most sensitive writers about art in any language.

With a foreword by Berkeley classicist Dylan Kenny, which guides the reader through these writings and contextualizes these texts within Lee’s other work, this is the quintessential introduction to her astonishing and complex oeuvre.

The Psychology of an Art Writer

Sherrie Levine, Dark Blue Moonlight After Man Ray: 11, 2016

Diaries and journals have a long, complex history within visual culture. American artist Sherrie Levine continues the tradition with 

Inspired by Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz’s 

 and its famed opening entries, written in 1953— “Monday: Me. Tuesday: Me. Wednesday: Me. Thursday: Me.”—Levine prints the word “ME.” on each calendar page in 

. Levine’s diary is a playful riff on autobiography amidst our narcissistic culture.

Sherrie Levine: Diary 2019

Tiffany Bell

Robert Storr

Known for her extensive body of intricate and dynamic wire sculptures, American sculptor, educator, and arts advocate Ruth Asawa challenged conventional notions of material and form through her emphasis on lightness and transparency.

Asawa began her now iconic looped-wire works in the late 1940s while still a student at Black Mountain College. Their unique structure was inspired by a 1947 trip to Mexico, during which local craftsmen taught her how to create baskets out of wire. While seemingly unrelated to the lessons of color and composition taught in Josef Albers’s legendary Basic Design course, these works, as she explained, are firmly grounded in his teachings in their use of unexpected materials and their elision of figure and ground.

Presenting an important and timely overview of the artist’s work, this monograph brings together a broad selection of her sculptures, works on paper, and more. Together the body of work demonstrates the centrality of Asawa’s innovative practice to the art-historical legacy of the twentieth century. In addition to an incredible group of photographs of the artist and her work by Imogen Cunningham, a selection of rare archival materials will illustrate a chronology of the artist’s life and work. Featuring an extensive text by Tiffany Bell which explores the artist’s influences, history, and, most importantly, the work itself, as well as a significant essay by Robert Storr discussing Asawa’s work in relation to mid-twentieth century art history, culture, and scientific theory.

Ruth Asawa

Marilyn Monroe, Ronaldinho, and now Lolita—the layers of newspaper that line Rose Wylie’s studio floor are a frequent source of material for the artist. Drawing from such wide-ranging cultural areas as film, literature, mythology, news images, sports, and individuals she meets in her day-to-day life, Wylie paints colorful and exuberant compositions that are uniquely recognizable. This new limited-edition zine, titled 

, puts these larger-than-life works front and center, Wylie’s animated, vivacious strokes now canvassing the page.

Bold, wild, and continually humorous, Rose Wylie creates paintings and drawings that at first glance appear aesthetically simplistic, not seeming to align with any recognizable style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated mediations on the nature of visual representation itself. These works make use of an idiosyncratic visual lexicon, the directness of cartoonish figures, and a flattened perspective, but simultaneously betray a deep awareness of art history and painterly conventions.

, this zine presents a new series of paintings and works on paper made specifically for Wylie’s second solo exhibition at David Zwirner, London in 2018. Loosely referencing a house that was constructed across the street from Wylie’s residence in Kent, England, 

 continues the artist’s ongoing fascination with the shifting nature of memory and the multi-layered external associations that become attached to it over time.

Rose Wylie: Lolita's House

Clarrie Wallis

Rose Wylie trained as an artist in the 1950s, but it was her re-engagement with painting in the early 1980s, after a period spent raising a family, that marked the beginning of a remarkable career that continues to evolve and impress. This monograph, the first of its kind, follows Wylie\s fascinating artistic journey, celebrating her achievements while also examining her current practice.

Rose Wylie\s large-scale paintings are inspired by a wide range of visual culture. Her subject-matter ranges from contemporary Egyptian Hajj wall paintings and Persian miniatures to films, news stories, celebrity gossip and her observation of daily life. Often working from memory, she distills her subjects into succinct observations, using text to give additional emphasis to her recollections. In weaving together imagery from different sources with personal elements, Wylie's paintings offer a direct and wry commentary on contemporary culture. Her pictures refuse judgment but reveal a concern with the everyday that makes visible its enigmatic core.

Drawing on a series of extended interviews with the artist, Clarrie Wallis unpicks the complexities of Wylie's visual language, so providing an important contribution to our understanding and appreciation of a significant and increasingly celebrated figure in contemporary British art.

Rose Wylie

Hal Foster

Richard Serra

“The rhythm of the body moving through space has been the motivating source of most of my work.”—Richard Serra

Drawn from talks between celebrated artist Richard Serra and acclaimed art historian Hal Foster held over a fifteen-year period, this volume offers revelations into Serra’s prolific six-decade career and the ideas that have informed his working practice. 

 is both an intimate look at Serra’s life and work, with candid reflections on personal moments of discovery, and a provocative examination of sculptural form from antiquity to today. Serra and Foster explore such subjects as the artist’s work in steel mills as a young man; the impact of music, dance, and architecture on his art; the importance of materiality and site specificity to his aesthetic; the controversies and contradictions his work has faced; and his belief in sculpture as experience. They also discuss sources of inspiration—from Donatello and Brancusi to Japanese gardens and Machu Picchu—revealing a history of sculpture across time and culture through the eyes of one of the medium’s most brilliant figures.

Introduced with an insightful preface by Foster, this probing dialogue is beautifully illustrated with duotone images that bring to life both Serra's work and his key commitments.

Richard Serra: Conversations about Sculpture

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