Fernando Oliva – författare

A radical reconception of Degas’ sculpture through the lens of gender, labor and more, with new photography of the worksPublished with Museu de Arte de São Paulo.This substantial new monograph on the work of Edgar Degas (1834–1917), one of the most significant artists of the 19th and 20th centuries, is a decisive contribution to the literature on the French Impressionist artist. An innovative and groundbreaking book, with underlying discussions related to “dance, politics and society,” it pays special attention to issues of gender, identity, labor, race and the representation of women. Degas worked in various mediums, and, at the end of his life, left around 6,000 works, including 2,000 related to the world of dance and ballet. The contradictions and ambiguities of his art, especially the way he straddles both tradition and modernity, reaffirm both his uniqueness and significance in the history of Western art.Degas: Dance, Politics and Society includes ten essays, never before published, by experts around the world, and also features a visual essay of black-and-white photographs of the bronze sculptures, including Little Dancer Aged Fourteen, by the Brazilian artist Sofia Borges. Through her camera, Borges reinterprets and conceives new images of Degas' most cherished and classic sculptures. Borges’ extraordinary photographs reveal, transform and revisit Degas’ works in an innovative and radical manner.

Otherness and exploitation in the fraught oeuvre of Post-Impressionism's canonical painterThis book accompanies the first exhibition to investigate Paul Gauguin’s (1848–1903) relationship with the question of alterity and the exoticizing of otherness in his paintings. Adopting an engagingly critical tone, Paul Gauguin: The Other and I deals with central questions within the celebrated Post-Impressionist’s oeuvre, focusing on both his self-portraits and his works produced in Tahiti.Alongside reproductions of relevant works, the book also features essays that examine the tensions between Gauguin’s biography and the image that the artist assiduously created of himself, as well as the way in which his oeuvre reinforced an imaginary about otherness, addressing crucial and current issues such as the notion of primitivism, the "exotic" and the "tropics," and cultural appropriation, as well as matters related to the erotization of the female body, sexuality and androgyny.

The first book to examine Monet's landscapes as ecological systems and intricate microcosms of nature and societyKnown almost as much for his gardens as for his paintings, the Impressionist Claude Monet (1840–1926) held a fascination with nature that only deepened as his career progressed. Monet's Ecology is the first exhibition to investigate the artist's relationship to ecology and the environment. Illustrated with a dazzling array of landscapes, from his early coastal views of Le Havre to his "impressions" of Westminster Bridge and Gare Saint-Lazare, his Rouen Cathedral series and finally Water Lilies, each curatorial essay in the catalog examines a different aspect of Monet's "ecologies"—from the industrial biomes of London and Paris to the pastoralism of middle-class leisure and contemporary protests against climate change that directly invoke Monet's Giverny scenes—arguing that Monet's radical engagement with the natural world positioned him at the forefront of ecological awareness.