Readings staff customerservice@readings.com.au http://www.readings.com.au/feed/collection/readings-recommends-visual-arts 2008-01-03T06:09:40Z 9780522853759 <p>This is an expertly designed and packaged title on a somewhat controversial topic – that of graffiti. The photographs are from all over Australia from Alice Springs to Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Brisbane.</p> <p>This is the first book to look at graffiti and stencil art across Australia. There have been two other publications focusing on graffiti and stencil art recently, but all are Melbourne-centric.</p> <p>The book is beautifully illustrated and offers an insight into how graffiti and street artists work and the connections to international movements, in particular American subculture and how it has been adopted here.</p> <p>There are also artist profiles of Australia's internationally renowned artists.</p> <p>Graffiti, stencil and street art are increasingly seen as a potent art form worldwide and raises many questions about the nature of graffiti – is it vandalism? Is it art? How do we define art and is graffiti art or not?</p> <p><i>Uncommissioned Art</i> also targets academic fields of interest, including cultural studies, policy makers in youth studies, urban planning, visual culture, public policy, criminology, art and contemporary culture, social environment and the built environment.</p> 9780714847894 <p><em>30,000 Years of Art</em> presents 1000 great works of art from all periods and regions in the world, arranged in chronological order for a general readership. Breaking through the usual geographical and cultural boundaries of art history, it celebrates the vast range of human artistry across time and space. Each work is accompanied by key caption information (date, title, place of origin, style or culture, medium, dimensions etc.), and a short text providing more information and explaining the art historical context. The book presents art in a way different from other art history compendia, revealing the huge diversity, or in many cases similarity, of man's artistic achievements through time and around the globe. Ordered chronologically, the resulting timeline of works leads to compelling browsing: surprising juxtapositions offer intellectual pleasure and a sense of wonder and discovery. The selection of works from across the world, arranged in the sequence in which they were made, take the reader on a global and historical journey, as a Chinese Shang urn stands next to a Mycenaean vase, and Michelangelo's Slave is followed by a contemporaneous male sculpture from Nigeria. The chronological arrangement responds to such questions as where does the earliest art appear? What were artists creating in China or Africa while Rembrandt was painting self-portraits in Leyden? How were similar subjects - equestrian themes, landscapes, religious scenes - manipulated by artists in Aztec Mexico and Medieval Europe? Although the sequence of works in the book is strictly chronological, the selection of entries for an individual culture comprises an abbreviated history of the art of that people. Thus, while artworks from ancient Greece or the European Renaissance or pre-Columbian Americas are interspersed with contemporaneous works created in Africa, India or Japan, an extraction of the Greek or Renaissance or American works could stand alone as an essential abridgement of the finest art of that period or culture.</p> 9780847830039 <p>Takashi Murakami is one of contemporary art’s most innovative and important figures. Drawing from street culture, high art, and traditional Japanese painting, Murakami takes the contemporary art trend of mixing high and low to an unprecedented level (critics call him the new Warhol), producing original paintings and sculptures as well as mass-produced consumer objects such as toys, books, and most famously, a line of handbags for Louis Vuitton. In conjunction with the first major retrospective of his work, Murakami traces Murakami’s global impact socially, culturally, and art historically.</p> 9780724102907 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9788890205910 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780500238370 <p>What is art and where did it begin? Why do we make it and why does it change? These are some of the many questions that Julian Bell considers in this new story of art for the 21st century.From humans' first impulses to create form out of raw materials to the most modern of gallery installations, people around the world have always been drawn to image-making. Styles and periods have come and gone, and yet intriguing links between seemingly unconnected traditions remain to be discovered. Bell, himself a painter, uses a wide range of objects - both familiar and less well known - to reveal how art is a product of our shared experience; how, like a mirror, it can reflect the human condition and our most basic cultural preoccupations. Avoiding the route taken by previous histories, Bell has carefully chosen a global perspective, setting up juxtapositions that will challenge and enlighten the reader: dancing bronze figures from southern India, Romanesque sculptures, Baroque ceilings and jewel-like Persian manuscripts are discussed side by side as extraordinary testaments to our universal creative instinct.With an insider's knowledge and an unerring touch, Bell draws these diverse strands</p> 9780955339882 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9781921410123 <p>NYP No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780520251267 <p>Art museums, oases of beauty and calm in a fast-paced world, have emerged in recent decades as the most vibrant and popular of all cultural institutions. But as they have become more popular, their direction and values have been contested as never before. This engaging thematic history of the art museum from its inception in the 18th Century to the present offers an essential framework for understanding contemporary debates as they have evolved in Europe and the United States.</p> 9780810994430 <p>Discovered in tombs dating from the Han Dynasty (206 BC - 8 AD) were 4 bamboo scrolls, on which were some of the oldest existing treatises written on the subject of sexuality. All contain recurring themes of Taoism: What is the correct way to live according to the rhythm of the seasons? How does one harmonise with the flow of Yin and Yang?</p> 9782080300485 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780375711503 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780500238448 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780847829255 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780500238424 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9781854376879 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780947349523 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 138385 <p>Beautiful. More than 700 objects, ranging from tennis balls and Tupperware, to shoes and plastic spoons, have been collected by this Amsterdam based artist over the last two years. Out of each object a butterfly has been painstakingly sawn out, and consequently ordered into a unique collection that plays with the long tradition of collecting, obsessions, associations, colour, materials and design. This well conceived artist's catalogue explores the project and includes an impressive poster documenting the entire butterfly collection.</p> 9780714845142 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780300126860 <p>South African artist William Kentridge (b. 1955) has produced an outstanding body of work in multiple mediums—drawings, animations, sculptures, theater and stage design—all of which trace the fraught political and cultural history of South Africa. This book is the first to explore Kentridge’s extraordinary new series of seventeen large-scale tapestries, created under his artistic direction by a team of South African weavers between 2001 and 2007. The tapestries depict shadowy figures that resonate with his collages of itinerant characters set against the weblike backgrounds of 19th-century maps of Europe and Johannesburg.</p> 9780977532551 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9781921034206 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780300111620 <p>Joseph Cornell (1903-1972) was a self-taught yet highly sophisticated artist who is celebrated for his pioneering achievement in collage, assemblage, and film. Cornell’s lyrical compositions combine found materials in ways that reflect a very personal exploration of art and culture and that represent his belief in art as an uplifting voyage into the imagination. This stunning book is published to accompany the first retrospective of the artist’s work in twenty-six years. In her essay, Cornell scholar Lynda Roscoe Hartigan focuses on the seminal experiences and concepts that shaped Cornell’s evolution as an American artist with a singular style of seeing. His transformation of found materials, distillation of far-flung ideas and traditions, and mingling of the vernacular and the erudite resonate with the spirit of synthetic innovation associated with American art and culture. Additionally, eight thematic sections––Navigating a Career, Cabinets of Curiosity, Dream Machines, Bouquets of Homage, Nature’s Theater, Geographies of the Heavens, Crystal Cages, and Chambers of Time––explore the major ideas that recur in his work. The book also includes a bibliography, numerous illustrations of the artist’s source material and previously unpublished works, and much more.</p> 9780300138917 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780300136890 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9780300121926 <p>From the screaming heads and snarling chimpanzees of the late 1940s to the anonymous figures trapped in tortured isolation some ten years later, British artist Francis Bacon during one crucial decade created many of the most central and memorable images of his entire career. The artist enters the decade of the 1950s in search of himself and his true subject; he finishes ten years later having completed some of his great masterpieces and having acquired technical mastery over one of the most disturbing and revealing visions of the twentieth century. This book brings both Bacon the man and Bacon the painter vividly to life, focusing for the first time on this key period in his development. Michael Peppiatt, the leading authority on Bacon and a close friend of the artist for thirty years, offers a groundbreaking study that reveals essential keys to understanding Bacon's mysterious and subversive art. The book presents a wide range of paintings (many of them rarely seen before) representing all of Bacon's major themes during the 1950s, analyzes the significant developments in his art, and assesses the particular importance of key works. Also included is the most comprehensive account of the artist's life in the 1950s ever written and a series of fascinating and revealing conversations between Peppiatt and Bacon in 1964, 1987, and 1989. It is published in association with the Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts at the University of East Anglia, Norwich.</p> 9783822848272 <p>Hiroshige (1797-1858) was one of the last great artists in the ukiyo-e tradition. Though he captured a variety of subjects, his greatest talent was in creating landscapes of his native Edo (modern-day Tokyo) and his final masterpiece was a series known as "One Hundred Famous Views of Edo" (1856-1858). This resplendent complete reprint pairs each of the 120 large-scale illustrations with a description, allowing readers to plunge themselves into Hiroshige’s beautifully vibrant landscapes.</p> 9780955215452 <p>No extra details available for this item.</p> 9781854377845 <p>Niki de Saint Phalle burst upon the art world in the 1960s as a beautiful, provocative and fiercely independent artist whose life and work were equally flamboyant. This is the catalogue of the Tate exhibition which spans her entire career, over five decades, and reveals consistent preoccupations in her work including femininity, mythology and fairytales, violence, personal anxiety and international political conflict. De Saint Phalle was self-taught and her life and work were inextricably linked. Through painting, sculpture and assemblage she found a way to manage the complex emotions that had emerged from her childhood and yet still make manifest her exuberant love of life. Her work was in constant metamorphosis with each new phase in her life leading to a new style or concern. She was passionate and relentless in her pursuit of freedom against the conventional constraints of the world around her, be they political, sexual, or aesthetic. Born in France, Saint Phalle grew up in New York. She moved to Europe in the 1950s with her first husband, Harry Mathews, and continued to live and work there, settling mainly in Paris. In the early 1960s she became the only female member of the avant-garde Nouveau Réalistes, and collaborated with many of the leading artists of the day. She married the sculptor Jean Tinguely in 1971 and continued to work with him for the rest of his life. This exhibition brings together many of her most important works, including some that have been little seen, demonstrating her to be amongst the most original and distinctive artists of the twentieth-century.</p> 9783037781258 <p>The Pars Foundation was founded from the conviction that art and science are both essentially creative processes. Artists begin with an idea that is ultimately expressed in the form of music, images, or words. Scientists begin with a hypothesis, sketch an idea, and then test and describe it. Every year Pars invites artists and scientists to make a contribution to creative thinking. The current topic, 'Ice', is situated in a wide variety of contexts: in connection with greenhouse effect, the rise in sea level, or a dancers muscles before making his first move. Ice absorbs sounds, reflects heat, and cools drinks. Pars Findings demonstrates a variety of different perspectives and ideas by artists and scientists. The book Pars Findings on Ice functions as a visual and textual introduction to the ideas and visions of the artist and scientists who have a strong influence on our perception of today's world.</p> 9781854377821 <p>Peter Doig's highly distinctive paintings have been exhibited in major museums and galleries worldwide to international acclaim. In each work, Doig seeks to create an atmosphere that will draw the viewer into an intense and beguiling perceptual experience. Derived from photographic sources or quasi memories, tp form gramd and magical tableaux, his pictorial world has also been shaped by the different places he has lived.</p>