Category Archives: Art

Daniel Buren Underground

Edited by Eleanor Pinfield
Foreword by Mark Wild
Texts by Tamsin Dillon, Eleanor Pinfield, Hans Ulrich Obrist
Interview by Tim Marlow

This book tells the story of the first permanent art work in Britain by Daniel Buren, widely considered France’s greatest living artist and one of the pioneers of conceptual art. Commissioned by Art on the Underground, Buren has created an expansive installation within Tottenham Court Road station in central London, taking over the space with a deceptively simple combination of shapes, colours and his trademark stripes.

Published to coincide with the unveiling of the completed commission, the book includes stunning installation shots of the work in situ, behind-the-scenes photos of the project in progress, architects’ drawings and plans, and the artist’s notes and sketches. Texts by Eleanor Pinfield and Tamsin Dillon provide the background to the commission, while an essay by Hans Ulrich Obrist places the work in the context of Buren’s wider practice since the 1960s. In a conversation with Tim Marlow, the artist walks the reader through the Tottenham Court Road installation and discusses the work alongside his other transport commissions.

More than a rare monograph in English on one of the most influential international artists of recent decades, this volume also takes the reader on the fascinating journey from initial artistic concept through to realized physical form in the public realm.

Tamsin Dillon is an independent curator and the former Head of Art on the Underground.

Tim Marlow is Director of the Design Museum in London, the former Artistic Director at the Royal Academy of Arts, and a member of the Art on the Underground Advisory Panel. 

Hans Ulrich Obrist is Artistic Director of the Serpentine Gallery, London.

Eleanor Pinfield is Head of Art on the Underground.

Mark Wild is Managing Director of London Underground.

Gillian Ayres

Foreword by Andrew Marr
Texts by Martin Gayford and David Cleaton-Roberts
Designed by Tim Harvey

This book is the definitive monograph on an artist described by many commentators as Britain’s finest abstract painter. For more than six decades, the late Gillian Ayres (1930–2018) has been celebrated for her use of vibrant colour and bold forms to create exuberant compositions full of movement and energy. Unconventional in life and in work, she forged her own individual path regardless of fashion or opinion. Not wishing to conform or to be categorized in any way, she adopted a variety of styles and techniques throughout her career. In the 1950s, she applied oils and household paint with rags and brushes, and by pouring and squirting, in gestural works reminiscent of tachiste painting and Abstract Expressionism. In the 1960s, she created light-filled images in oils and acrylics in keeping with the hedonistic and optimistic mood of that age. In the 1970s, she approached the canvas as an expanse to be filled with an extreme and painterly alloverness. Later in that decade and into the 1980s, she began to use thick and heavy impasto in carefully designed arrangements; and in recent decades, she developed a distinctive style of simplified organic motifs and areas of flat yet intense colour. At all times, Ayres explored the mysterious territory that lies between abstraction and representation, attempting to discover, as she puts it, ‘what painting is, and what can be done with paint’.

Coinciding with a major retrospective exhibition at the National Museum Wales in Cardiff, this beautifully produced volume spans Ayres’ long career, from her student days to the very latest works. It includes all of her major paintings, with a dedicated section on her substantial body of prints. The book also features many photographs of the artist in the studio and at home and other ephemeral materials, making the publication the complete word on this acclaimed and original artist’s life and work.

David Cleaton-Roberts is a director of Alan Cristea Gallery, London. He has written extensively on printmaking, including catalogues o­­­n Gillian Ayres, Tom Wesselmann, Ian Davenport and Jan Dibbets, and articles for Art Review and Printmaking Today. He is currently the vice-president and European representative for the International Fine Print Dealers Association and a patron of the Jerwood Gallery in Hastings.

Martin Gayford is art critic for the Spectator and has held similar posts with the Sunday Telegraph and Bloomberg News. He is the acclaimed author of Man with a Blue Scarf: On Sitting for a Portrait by Lucian Freud; A Bigger Message: Conversations with David Hockney; Michelangelo: His Epic Life; The Yellow House: Van Gogh, Gauguin and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles; and Constable in Love: Love, Landscape, Money and the Making of a Great Painter. He is also the co-author with David Hockney of A History of Pictures: From Cave to Computer Screen, and with Philippe de Montebello of Rendez-Vous with Art.

Andrew Marr is an award-winning British author, broadcaster and journalist. His many books include The Making of Modern Britain (2009) and A History of the World (2012).

 

Fourth Plinth

How London Created the Smallest Sculpture Park in the World

Foreword by Grayson Perry
Texts by Isabel de Vasconcellos

‘Since 1999, the plinth has acted as the smallest but most prominent sculpture park in the world.… It’s a strange and lovely thing.’ — Sunday Times

A marble statue of a heavily pregnant disabled woman, a model of Nelson’s HMS Victory inside a huge bottle, a giant blue cockerel, and a great big bronze thumbs up. These are just some of the eye-catching art works that have adorned the empty stone pedestal in London’s Trafalgar Square known as the Fourth Plinth. Since 1999, many leading international artists such as Antony Gormley, Hans Haacke, Rachel Whiteread, Mark Wallinger, Yinka Shonibare, Elmgreen and Dragset have been invited to propose works for the space. The results have divided opinion across the capital and beyond, prompting debate not only about the merits of each commission, but also about the value of art in the public realm. 

This book tells the story of every commission that has stood upon the plinth, including the very latest, David Shrigley’s Really Good, unveiled in September 2016. Individual chapters present the background and genesis of each work, with behind-the-scenes views of the fabrication, contributions from those involved, and in situ shots of all the installed works. And just as each commission reflects aspects of London’s past and present, the book celebrates the impact of art on today’s creative and multicultured city.

Grayson Perry CBE RA is an internationally celebrated artist, writer and broadcaster. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 2003 and was elected a Royal Academician in 2012; the following year, he received a CBE in the Queen’s Birthday Honours List, and in 2015 was appointed a Trustee of the British Museum and Chancellor of the University of the Arts London. Playing to the Gallery, the book of his 2013 Reith Lectures, is published by Penguin. He was a member of the Fourth Plinth Commissioning Group from 2009 to 2016.

Isabel de Vasconcellos is a writer, curator and arts advisor based in London.

 

Could Have, Would Have, Should Have

Inside the World of the Art Collector

Tiqui Atencio
with illustrations by Pablo Helguera

‘A fascinating insider’s guide to collecting art’ — Jeffrey Deitch, former director, MOCA LA, art dealer and advisor
‘The best book I know on this subject’— Benedikt Taschen, publisher
‘An inspiring summary for new collectors and old’ — Laurence Graff, jeweller and collector
‘A must-read for anyone starting an art collection’ — Evening Standard
‘Reads beautifully and extremely interesting’ — Bob Colacello, author and special correspondent, Vanity Fair
‘Thoroughly enjoyable’ — Financial Times
‘A fascinating read filled with reflections from some of the legendary names in collecting today’ — Sotheby’s Magazine
‘Tiqui Atencio has amassed a vivid and engrossing collection of collectors for this fun and informative book.’ — Patricia Phelps de Cisneros, collector
‘The list of featured collectors is staggering’ — fineartmultiple.com
‘Unputdownable’ — Lekha Poddar, co-founder, Devi Art Foundation, Delhi
‘Tiqui Atencio … is a sage observer of the art world, and as this book demonstrates, possesses both acute vision and admirable empathy.’ — Richard Armstrong, director, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

What does it take to be a serious art collector? What drives someone to go after a particular work regardless of the cost? What form of addiction or compulsion causes an individual to devote vast amounts of time, money and emotional energy in pursuit of something that is unobtainable to most people? Tiqui Atencio has been collecting since she was eighteen years old. Decades later, she is one of the most prominent collectors of contemporary art, on the boards of international museums and art-world power lists. For Could Have, Would Have, Should Have, she has interviewed almost one hundred of the world’s most influential collectors – from financiers to artists – and asked them to tell their own story of how they started to collect and what continues to motivate them.

In chapters such as ‘Ways of collecting’, ‘Dealing with dealers’, ‘Living with art’, ‘But it doesn’t fit!’ and ‘What was I thinking?’, they reveal their highs and lows, the successes and regrets, the shared passions and intense rivalries, the works that got away … and the ones that perhaps should have done. Their anecdotes and recollections reveal the many practical and emotional aspects of collecting art, all the unexpected pleasures and challenges. What emerges is a frank and honest, surprising and eye-opening, and at times hilarious account of a lifelong dedication that is described by some as a heroic commitment and by others as a crazy sickness. Cartoons by celebrated artist and satirist Pablo Helguera complement the entertaining text and provide an alternative view onto the world of collectors and collecting.

Tiqui Atencio is a prominent collector of Latin American, pre-Columbian, and modern and contemporary art. She was born in Maracaibo, Venezuela, and studied in Italy, the United States and France. Between 1998 and 2004, she was on the advisory board of the Art Institutes International. Since 2005, she has been an ex-officio trustee of the Guggenheim Museum and is chair of the museum’s International Director’s Council. In 2003, she founded Tate’s Latin American Acquisition Committee and has been its chair since then. She is also a member of the museum’s International Executive Committee and an ex-officio trustee of Tate America’s Foundation. She is on the board of advisors of Art at Auction magazine and performed the same role for the UBS Art Collection. She is a member of the Société des Amis du Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and of the Monaco Projects for the Arts.

Pablo Helguera is a visual and performance artist living in New York. He is the author of more than twenty books, including Artoons, Education for Socially Engaged Art and The Parable Conference.

Interviewees: Basma Al Sulaiman; Ann and Steven Ames; Prince Pierre d’Arenberg; Richard Armstrong; Ara Arslanian; Monique Barbier-Mueller; Bill Bell Jr; Poonam Bhagat; Ivor Braka; Irma and Norman Braman; Peter Brant; Eli Broad; Estrellita Brodsky; Clarissa Bronfman; Trudy and Paul Cejas; Adrian Cheng; Michael Chow; Bob Colacello; Halit Cıngıllıoglu; Kemal Cıngıllıoglu; George Condo; Dimitris Daskalopoulos; Hélène David-Weill; Jeffrey Deitch; Ago Demirdjian; Beth Rudin DeWoody; Negar and Kamran Diba; Ulla Dreyfus-Best; Stefan Edlis and Gael Neeson; Sevda Elgiz; Kim Esteve; Wendy Fisher; Lady Elena Foster; Glenn Fuhrman; Laurence Graff; Agnes Gund; Terry de Gunzburg; James Hedges IV; J. Tomilson Hill; Damien Hirst; Maja Hoffmann; Jane Holzer; Dakis Joannou; Pearl Lam; Rachel Lehmann; Dominique and Sylvain Levy; Karen Levy; Adam Lindemann; Fatima and Eskandar Maleki; Jean-Claude and Nicole Marian; Nada and Taha Mikati; Lady Alison Myners; David Nahmad; Helly Nahmad; Gwen and Peter Norton; Anthony d’Offay; Paulina Palacios Leroy; Sagrario Pérez Soto de Atencio; Catherine Petitgas; Patricia Phelps de Cisneros; Jean Pigozzi; Lekha Poddar; Eugenio Re Rebaudengo; Almine Rech; Ursula von Rydingsvard; Rolf Sachs; Muriel and Freddy Salem; Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo; Denise Saul; Kenny Schachter; Uli Sigg; Jennifer Blei Stockman; Norah and Norman Stone; Mercedes Stoutzker; Benedikt Taschen; David Teiger; Samir Traboulsi; Igor Tsukanov; Axel Vervoordt; Paulo Vieira; Angela Westwater and David Meitus; Andrea Wild Botero; Juan Yarur; Neda Young; Anita Zabludowicz; and other collectors who chose to remain anonymous.

Lament

Bettina von Zwehl and Josh Cohen

Winner of the 2016 Antalis Grand Print Master Award

‘With its handsome layout, words and haunting visual images, Lament is one of the most engaging volumes it has been my pleasure to read, look at and ponder.’ — Times Higher Education
‘A delicate and in-depth exploration of grief, loss and friendship’ — LensCulture
‘In its theme, light and dark, echoing the rhythm of life and death, the book goes back to the foundations of photography.’ — Photomonitor

Published to coincide with an exhibition at the Freud Museum in London, this beautiful, original and affecting volume is the result of a unique collaboration between the artist Bettina von Zwehl and the psychoanalyst and academic Josh Cohen. Two series of images by von Zwehl – fifteen black-and-white silhouette portraits of women in near darkness, and fifty fragments of a single repeated photo of a young girl – appear alongside and within two parallel pieces of writing by Cohen – one a critical reflection on light and shadow, truth and lies, the other a short story inspired by the torn fragments – to create an extraordinary hybrid work of art and letters.

Each series of photographs and text can be read separately, but it is through the combination and interplay of word and image that a new narrative emerges and an additional layer of meaning appears in the gaps, folds and blurred edges between the two. The result is a powerful and moving meditation on the themes of light and dark, love and loss, life and death.

Von Zwehl produced the silhouette portraits of women – which she called Laments – following a residency at the Freud Museum in 2013 / 14. Inspired by Anna Freud’s passionate letters with women friends, they are an expression of the female bonds in the artist’s own life after the sudden death of a close friend.

She also made the fifty torn ­­fragments in response to her study of the life and legacy of Anna Freud, as well as her own experience of psychoanalysis. Their title – The Sessions – refers to the patient’s fifty-minute session with the analyst, the artist’s sessions with the child, and her many sessions in the darkroom as she sought the essence of both image and subject. She made each piece by first tearing the photographic paper and then exposing the chosen negative onto it. By breaking down one moment repeatedly and obsessively in this way, infinite possibilities, failures and associations are opened up. At the same time, the torn fragments form an archive of scraps and ‘mistakes’ that echoes the seemingly ‘unimportant’ material stored in the mind of the analysand – material that has the potential to illuminate the patient’s deepest issues.

Cohen’s short story ‘The Arrivals’ was written as a response to these fragments, while also evoking various ideas and scenes he had himself encountered in analysis. His parallel essay, ‘Invitation to Frequent the Shadows’, is a critical reflection on light and shadow, art and artifice, and truth and lies prompted by his reading of the Laments portraits, and it continues his ongoing investigations into darkness, privacy and the hidden self.

Bettina von Zwehl is an artist living and working in London. She has built an international reputation for her subtle and unnerving photographic portraits. From early works in which she photographed subjects under a range of exacting conditions to more recent projects that reprise the traditions of the painted miniature, she has consistently explored the nature and limits of portraiture. She was artist-in-residence at the Victoria & Albert Museum in 2011 and had a five-month residency at the Freud Museum in London in 2013–14. Solo exhibitions of her work have been held at a number of leading European and American museums and galleries, including the Sigmund Freud Museum (Vienna, 2016), Freud Museum (London, 2016), Fotogaleriet (Oslo, 2014) National Portrait Gallery (London, 2014), Centrum Kultury Zamek (Poznan, 2011), V&A Museum of Childhood (London, 2009), The Photographers’ Gallery (London 2005) and Lombard Freid Gallery (New York, 2004). Her photographs are held in the collections of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Mint Museum, Charlotte, North Carolina; Victoria and Albert Museum, Arts Council Collection, London; National Portrait Gallery, London; the Rubell Family Collection, Miami, Florida; and Pier 24 Photography, San Francisco

Josh Cohen is a psychoanalyst and writer and teaches at Goldsmiths University of London. He is the author of The Private Life: Why We Remain in the Dark (2013), which won the BMA Board of Science Chair’s Choice Award for 2014 and was longlisted for the JQ/Wingate Literary Award; How to Read Freud (2005); Interrupting Auschwitz: Art, Religion, Philosophy (2003); and Spectacular Allegories: Postmodern American Writing and the Politics of Seeing (1998), as well as numerous reviews and articles on modern literature, philosophy and psychoanalysis. He was a finalist in the 2015 Notting Hill Editions Essay Prize for ‘The Incurious Rabbit’, part of a book in progress on inertia in psychic and cultural life. He appears regularly in the TLS, Guardian and New Statesman. He is a Fellow of the British Psychoanalytical Society.

Strand

Stuart Haygarth
Texts by Robert Macfarlane and Deyan Sudjic

In February 2011, artist Stuart Haygarth did an unusual thing: he started to walk along the entire coast of southern England, with the goal of collecting every man-made item that he came across. He had a purpose in mind, for Haygarth gathers discarded or overlooked objects and elevates them into art, making exquisite artefacts and stunning installations out of common detritus and everyday waste. Yet his practice is as much about the process of collecting and collating materials as it is about the creation of value or beauty. For Strand – the Old English and German word for ‘beach’ – he walked from Gravesend to Land’s End and picked up the thousands of synthetic items left washed up on the shore. Combs, lighters and baby dolls, plastic balls, toys, containers and shoes were just some of the many objects he found on the 500-mile trip. Back in the studio, he categorized each one by type and colour before arranging them into precise compositions and photographing them.

Displaying the formal rigour of the designer and the aesthetic eye of the artist, the resulting images seduce with their beauty and visual immediacy. The objects form an archive of sorts, a fragmented narrative of unknown people’s lives, as well as a material document of Haygarth’s journey. But his beautiful pictures tell another tale too: the story of our reckless pollution of the environment, for each of these manufactured objects has been thrown away and carried by the world’s oceans and seas. They are the flotsam and jetsam of daily life.

Award-winning academic and nature writer Robert Macfarlane considers the photographs of Strand as evidence of our pollution of the planet with ever-growing mountains of plastic waste, while Deyan Sudjic, director of the Design Museum, discusses Haygarth’s work as part of the tradition of artists, including Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol and Joseph Cornell, who collected found objects in order to make art.  

Stuart Haygarth is an award-winning British artist and designer. Originally trained as an illustrator and photographer, he began to make art works from found and collected objects in 2004. Since then, he has had numerous exhibitions and commissions in the United Kingdom, United States, France, Italy, Germany and Japan. He has won design awards from Wallpaper*, Arena and Elle Décor magazines. He is represented by Carpenters Workshop Gallery in London, Paris and New York, and his works have appeared in the Venice Biennale and Design Miami.

Robert Macfarlane is the author of a series of award-winning and internationally best-selling books about landscape, imagination and nature, including Mountains of the Mind (2003), The Wild Places (2007), The Old Ways (2012) and Landmarks (2015). His essays and articles have appeared in venues including Granta, the New York Times, and the Guardian, and his work has been widely adapted for television, film and radio. He is a Fellow of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Deyan Sudjic is the former director of the Design Museum in London. His career has spanned journalism, teaching and writing. He was director of Glasgow UK City of Architecture in 1999, and in 2002 he was the director of the Venice Architecture Biennale. He was editor of Domus magazine from 2000 to 2004, and was founding editor of Blueprint magazine from 1983 to 1996. Sudjic has published many books on design and architecture, including, most recently, B is for Bauhaus (2014).

 

  

Clare Woods

Strange Meetings

Foreword by Andrew Marr
Texts by Michael Bracewell, Rebecca Daniels, Jennifer Higgie and Simon Martin

Clare Woods is internationally regarded as one of the most significant painters working today. Her highly colouristic paintings hover between abstraction and representation, expressing both a poetic romanticism and an unnerving psychic charge. This beautifully designed volume presents all the major works from her career to date, from small-scale intimate paintings in oil and enamel to ambitious public commissions and architectural projects. The dynamic layout of the book, with a varied mix of close-up details and installation shots, gives the reader a strong sense of the diverse scale and immersive, push-pull nature of the work. Five prominent writers consider various aspects of Woods’ practice, including her painting technique and use of photographic source material; her engagement with the traditions of landscape and figurative art; the influence of artistic forebears such as Francis Bacon, Barbara Hepworth, Graham Sutherland and Eduardo Paolozzi; and the connections between her life and work.

Clare Woods completed her MA at Goldsmith’s College, London in 1999, following a BA at Bath School of Art in 1994. Recent solo shows include a touring exhibition organized by Oriel Davies Gallery, Powys, Wales (2014–16); Martin Asbaek Gallery, Copenhagen (2015); Rebecca Chami Gallery, Athens (2014); Buchmann Galerie, Berlin (2014); New Art Centre, Salisbury (2013); Harewood House, Leeds (2013); Southampton City Art Gallery (2012); and The Hepworth Wakefield (2011). In 2012, she was commissioned to create a permanent ceramic mural for the London 2012 Olympic Park, and in 2015 she produced a 15 x 8 metre painting for Aarhus VIA University College, Denmark. Other public commissions include a vast facade for a residential building in Chelsea, London (2005–7); a permanent ceramic mural at Hampstead Heath Station (2010–11); and a large-scale painting for The Hive library, Worcester (2012). Her work is included in the collection of the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, USA; Arken Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; Arts Council Collection; British Council; CCA Andratx, Mallorca, Spain; Government Art Collection; National Museum Wales, Cardiff; Southampton City Art Gallery; and Tullie House Gallery, Carlisle. She is represented by Buchmann Galerie, Berlin and Lugano, and Martin Asbæk Gallery, Copenhagen.

Michael Bracewell writes widely on modern and contemporary art and is a contributor to frieze, The Burlington and Parkett magazines. His recent publications include Modern World: The Art of Richard Hamilton (2021); Souvenir (2021);  Richard Hamilton: Late Works (2012); Lucy McKenzie (2013); Damien Hirst: The Complete Psalm Paintings (2014); and Kai Althoff (2015). His selected writings on art, The Space Between, were published in 2012.

Rebecca Daniels is the art-historical researcher on the forthcoming Francis Bacon catalogue raisonné. She completed a doctorate on Walter Sickert at the University of Oxford, and while there catalogued the furniture collection in the Ashmolean Museum. She has published extensively on Sickert and Bacon and recently on Henri Matisse. She is a trustee of the Sidney Nolan Trust.

Jennifer Higgie is a writer living in London. She is co-editor of frieze and editor of frieze masters magazine. She has edited and contributed to many books on contemporary art, and her novel Bedlam, which she has recently adapted for the screen, was published in 2006.

Simon Martin is a writer, curator and art historian. He is the Director of Pallant House Gallery in Chichester, where he has curated many exhibitions of modern British and contemporary art. His publications include numerous catalogues and artist monographs, as well as Poets in the Landscape: The Romantic Spirit in British Art (2007) and Conflict and Conscience: British Artists and the Spanish Civil War (2014). He is a trustee of the Charleston Trust and HOUSE Festival, and a member of the Churches Conservation Trust Arts Advisory Panel and the Chichester Cathedral Fabric Advisory Committee.

Andrew Marr is an award-winning broadcaster, journalist and writer. After an extensive career in print journalism, he became the BBC’s political editor in 2000, a position he held for five years. He has written and presented several acclaimed television and radio series for the BBC. His many books include The Battle for Scotland (1992); Ruling Britannia (1996); The Day Britain Died (2000); A History of Modern Britain (2007); The Diamond Queen: Elizabeth II and Her People (2011); and A History of the World (2012).

 

  

Dough Portraits

Søren Dahlgaard
With texts by Raimer Stange et al

‘Here’s an artist who does things a little differently – and his perversely brilliant work is all the better for it’ – We Heart
‘Dahlgaard upturns portraiture by taking away that crucial indicator of race, age, gender and, more subtly, character and culture: the face.’ — Sydney Morning Herald
‘Dahlgaard’s photographs are remarkably effective in their interrogation of portraiture, challenging our preconceptions about the relationships between artist, subject and viewer. [The] book documenting this ongoing project reveals the dough portraits as silly, sensitive, insightful and clever’ — The Arts Desk
‘Rich … full of insights’ — Weekendavisen
‘A pleasure walk through this highly alternative portraiture’ — Kunsten.nu
‘Coming across Danish artist Søren Dahlgaard’s series of Dough Portraits is like one of those moments where the skies open, sunlight beams down upon us, and the opera “aahh’s” chime in’ – Lost at E Minor
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This visually stunning, hilarious and outlandish book presents Danish performance and conceptual artist Søren Dahlgaard’s ongoing series of Dough Portraits, in which he creates absurdist portraits of people with their heads encased in dough. Invited by art galleries, museums, biennales and institutions from all over the world to undertake commissions, he has photographed more than two thousand sitters of all ages and backgrounds in diverse settings in countries as far afield as Canada and the United States, Denmark, Brazil, the Maldives, Finland, Kosovo, China, South Korea and Australia. Collaboration, process and performance are as much elements of the work as the finished image itself, with each participant ‘co-creating’ their own portrait, first by kneading the dough, then by placing it on their head, and then by carefully selecting a pose – all before of an audience of amused or bemused onlookers. As a result, while their faces might be covered, their individual personalities shine through, these sticky lumpen masks revealing as much as they conceal. Humorous and ridiculous as the pictures are, they also carry a darker sense of the uncanny and the sinister. They also allude to the ways we define ourselves and express our own unique identities, as well how we measure the stranger in an age when the covered face is so contested politically and ethically.

Selected portraits from all the main projects in the series are reproduced in colourful splendour and surreal detail, alongside photos and video stills of the shoots as they took place. Commentaries by some of those who commissioned the work, as well as others who were smothered in dough and then photographed or who merely witnessed the events unfold, recount their experiences and reflect on the aesthetic, ethical and social issues raised by Dahlgaard’s transformation of this everyday and universal material into the stuff of art.

Søren Dahlgaard is a Danish artist currrently living in Melbourne, Australia. A graduate of the Slade School of Art in London, he has participated in numerous group exhibitions and had solo shows, projects and commissions at prestigious institutions and biennales all over the world, including Venice Biennale; National Art Gallery, Copenhagen; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; ECCO – Espaço Cultural Contemporâneo, Brasília; Photographers’ Gallery, London; Gwangju Biennale, South Korea; Vancouver Biennale; Lianzhou International Photography Festival, China; HKW Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; CCA Andratx Contemporary Art Center Mallorca; Tate Modern, London; and MoMA PS1, New York.

Another Green World

Linn Botanic Gardens
Encounters with a Scottish Arcadia

Alison Turnbull with Philip Hoare
With a text by Ian Edwards, photographs by Ruth Clark, and plant list by Jamie Taggart

FINALIST British Book Design & Production Awards 2016

SOLD OUT

‘A hidden gem … a magical place where the air seems almost green’ — Guardian
‘Scotland’s most extraordinary garden … [a] horticultural wonder, certainly one of the most biodiverse places in Scotland … a magical feast for all five senses … [the] beautiful new book is a work of art in itself’ – Herald
‘An emotionally charged book … a beautifully crafted artwork’ — Times Higher Education
‘A beautifully produced book … a poignant description of a love of place and plants … [It is] through the book’s fine photographs of the garden, its environment and the nineteenth-century house it surrounds that readers become vicariously acquainted with Linn.’ — Times Literary Supplement
‘A slice of deep horticultural magic’ — Guardian ‘Best Books for the Summer 2016’

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Linn Botanic Gardens is a place like no other: a magical, idiosyncratic, verdant haven created by the shared passion of a father and son. Situated beside a Scottish loch, Linn is a horticultural treasure trove that is home to thousands of exotic plants from all over the world, making it one of the most biodiverse places in Scotland. Constructed over forty years by Jim and Jamie Taggart, the garden is shaped by the subtle interplay of science and art, botany and design, mathematics and colour. At its heart, like a mysterious presence that looms over the surrounding land while being slowly consumed by the ceaseless spread of nature, stands Linn Villa, the out-of-bounds Victorian house that appears to have lain untouched for decades.

Another Green World is artist Alison Turnbull and writer Philip Hoare’s lyrical portrait of this enchanting place. Conceived and compiled by Turnbull, this exquisite artist’s book captures not only the beauty but also the spirit of Linn. Hoare’s evocative text and Turnbull’s delicate photographs, drawings, and charts, complemented by photographer Ruth Clark’s stunning double-page images, lead us through the garden and the Victorian house in its midst as if we were actually there. Completing this unique and beautiful volume are ecologist Ian Edwards’ appreciation of Linn as an important reserve of rare rhododendrons and Jamie Taggart’s list of every species in the garden.

Alison Turnbull is an artist based in London. Her solo shows include exhibitions at the De La Warr Pavilion, Bexhill on Sea (2013) and Talbot Rice Gallery, Edinburgh (2012); ‘Observatory’ at Matt’s Gallery, London (2010); ‘World in a Chamber’, University of Oxford (2005); ‘Hospital’, Matt’s Gallery (2003); and ‘Houses into Flats’, Modern Art Oxford (2001) and Milton Keynes Gallery (2000). She had a visual arts residency at Cove Park in 2011. The previous year she was Artist-in-Residence in the Department of Entomology at the Natural History Museum, London; in 2009, she took part in the Gulbenkian Galápagos Artists Programme; and in 2005, she had a residency at the University of Oxford Botanic Garden. She is represented by Matt’s Gallery, London.

Philip Hoare is an award-winning writer and broadcaster. He won the BBC Samuel Johnson Prize in 2009 for Leviathan or, The Whale (2008). He is also the author of The Sea Inside (2013), England’s Lost Eden: Adventures in a Victorian Utopia (2005), Spike Island: The Memory of a Military Hospital (2000), Wilde’s Last Stand: Decadence, Conspiracy, and the First World War (1997), Noel Coward: A Biography (1995), and Serious Pleasures: The Life of Stephen Tennant (1990). He is a visiting fellow at Southampton University, and is also the Leverhulme Artist-in-Residence at the Marine Institute, Plymouth University, which awarded him an honorary doctorate in 2011.

Ruth Clark is a photographer based on the Rosneath peninsula. She has photographed for many public and private art institutions and artists.

Dr Ian Edwards is an ecologist and currently Head of Public Engagement at the Royal Botanic Garden Edinburgh.

Jamie Taggart took over the running of Linn Botanic Gardens in 1997, assuming the role from his father, Dr Jim Taggart, who initiated the garden in 1971.

Gideon Rubin special edition

Texts by Gabriel Coxhead, Martin Herbert, Aya Lurie, Sarah Suzuki

Special edition presented in a slipcase with a unique gouache-on-cardboard painting, hand-made and signed by the artist, limited edition of only 100 copies (twenty each of five designs)

Coinciding with a touring exhibition of paintings and works on paper, this book is the first monograph on the acclaimed young Israeli painter Gideon Rubin.

After witnessing the events of 9/11 in New York first hand, Rubin turned his back on his realist way of working and embarked on a method that has become his signature style. Taking found images of strangers in twentieth-century family albums, newspapers, and magazines, he begins a process of visual reduction and obliteration that culminates in an eerie and compelling body of work that is at once enticing and poignant, seductive yet sinister. His small and intimate portraits of faceless figures, full of life but empty of expression, are charming and chilling in equal measure. They unsettle and unnerve, yet feel strangely familiar.

His tiny paintings on cardboard of blank-faced models, actors, pop stars, and politicians – from Che Guevara and Dominique Strauss-Kahn to Amy Winehouse and Cheryl Cole – all reduced to a generic equivalence and interchangeability, comment on the ephemeral nature of the news and the newsworthy and the disposability of our celebrity age.

These are works that evoke the selective and transformative processes of memory, but by drawing on Chinese propaganda pamphlets, celebrity magazines, the society pages of newspapers, as well as art history, they also lay bare the shared shorthands through which personality and desire are projected and read. In the age of Instagram and selfies, they remind us that photography, far from an unmediated and direct reflection of reality, is at its core unstable and subject to manipulation, be it in the interests of politics, commerce or diversion.

This exquisite book features high-quality reproductions of dozens of works and numerous photographs of the artist and the studio. Four international writers examine how Rubin both challenges and extends the traditions of European painted portraiture. They also consider how he employs the ancient and articulate medium of oil paint to stake a claim for the renewed relevance and enduring value of the hand-crafted picture, and to question the relative status of photography as the supposed carrier of ‘truth’.

Gideon Rubin is an Israeli artist based in London. He received his BFA from School of Visual Arts in New York and his MFA from Slade School of Art in London. He has had numerous international solo exhibitions and appeared in many group shows around the world, and his works are included in private collections in London, Hong Kong, New York, Paris and elsewhere. In 2014, he was awarded the Shifting Foundation Grant and spent time at the Da Wang Culture Highland artist residency near Shenzhen, China. In 2013, he undertook the Outset Israel Bialik Residency in Tel Aviv. He is represented by Galerie Karsten Greve Paris, Cologne and St Moritz; Rokeby, London; Hosfelt Gallery, San Franscisco; and Alon Segev Gallery, Tel Aviv.

Gabriel Coxhead is a writer, art critic and curator based in London. He is a regular contributor to Time Out London and has also written for the Guardian, Jewish Quarterly, Financial Times, Art Review and Cabinet magazine, among other publications.

Martin Herbert is a writer and critic based in Tunbridge Wells and Berlin. He is associate editor of Art Review and Modern Painters, and writes regularly for Art Monthly, Artforum and Frieze. He is the author of Mark Wallinger (T&H, 2011).

Aya Lurie is Director and Chief Curator of Herzliya Museum of Contemporary Art, Herzliya, Israel.

Sarah Suzuki is an associate curator in the Department of Prints and Illustrated Books, Museum of Modern Art, New York.