Thomas Marks – författare

Hughie O’Donoghue (b. 1953) explores themes of universal human experience, ideas of truth and the relationship between memory and identity. Often standing apart from his contemporaries in the scale and ambition of his paintings, O’Donoghue’s work addresses the need to learn the lessons and complexities of recent history through the lens of the often overlooked and anonymous individual.Beautifully illustrated, encompassing four decades of work, this major publication is the broadest survey of the artist to date. Including new writing from the artist alongside four commissioned essays by leading art historians and critics, with a preface by the poet Tom Paulin, this comprehensive book documents O’Donoghue’s ambitious vision.

Anna Freeman Bentley’s paintings use architectural imagery to explore the emotive potential of space. Grounded in an interest in the baroque her source material includes junk shops, restaurants, private members clubs, flea markets and designed interiors. Central to her work is an investigation into surface, tension and the atmosphere evoked by these different interior surroundings. The spaces she depicts are empty, yet visual signifiers point to evidence of people and social happenings.This, Freeman Bentley’s third publication to date, is centred on the relationship between painting and cinema and is divided into sections dedicated to major paintings on canvas and panel, and a number of works on paper (all works 2021–22). Freeman Bentley’s work here is focused on sets from 'The Colour Room' (2021), a film that tells the story of the early career of celebrated British ceramicist Clarice Cliff (1899–1972). The foreword to the book is written by Rollo Campbell and Matt Incledon of Frestonian Gallery. An essay by writer and critic Thomas Marks draws out the importance to her work of historic and contemporary cinema and temporary architecture. Marks notes a change in palette in these new paintings, with Freeman Bentley embracing pastels and tracing parallels between the artist herself and Cliff. An interview with Georgie Paget, co-founder of Caspian Films, production company for 'The Colour Room', meanwhile, provides insight into the artist’s particular interest in the artifice of film props and of the film set as a layered space ‘steeped in meaning, purpose and potential.’ The two discuss the reciprocity of painting and cinema in detail, recounting Freeman Bentley’s experiences on the film’s sets and discussing her working processes, beginning with taking photographs on set, through to oil sketches and the later development of large-scale canvases.The publication is edited by Matt Incledon and Matt Price. It is designed by Joe Gilmore, printed and bound by Gomer, Wales, and co-published by Frestonian Gallery, London, and Anomie Publishing, London. The publication coincides with the second solo show by Anna Freeman Bentley at Frestonian Gallery, by whom the artist is represented. The exhibition, also titled ‘make believe’ is divided between two sites: the 2022 Armory Show, New York, and Frestonian Gallery, London. Anna Freeman Bentley studied Painting at Chelsea College of Art, Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee and the Royal College of Art. Awards and residencies include Palazzo Monti Residency, Brescia, Italy, 2019; The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant 2019 and 2017, and Artist in Restaurant residency at Michelin-starred restaurant Pied à Terre, London, 2012. Selected exhibitions (* denotes solo) include DENK Gallery, Los Angeles, 2019*, Ahmanson Gallery, Irvine, 2018*; Space K, Seoul, 2017; 68projects, Berlin, 2017; the East London Painting Prize 2014 and 2015; Workshop Gallery, Venice, 2012*; MAC Birmingham, 2011; Prague Biennale, 2011, and the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, 2009. Her work is part of the Hotel Crillon collection, Paris; Saatchi Collection, London; Hogan Lovells Collection, London; the Ahmanson Collection, California, and numerous private collections worldwide.

_Smickel Inn_ is a publication of works by London-based Anglo-Dutch artist Nick Goss, produced by Ingleby, Edinburgh, and co-published with Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, and Anomie Publishing, London. Along with around sixty plates and illustrations, the publication features an essay by writer, journalist and critic Hettie Judah, and an in-conversation between Goss, fellow painter Michael Armitage and writer Thomas Marks. ‘Smickel Inn is a real place in an unreal place,’ writes Judah, ‘a snack bar on an outer extremity of the port of Rotterdam.’ It’s a venue that is popular with port workers and sailors—a clientele of regular and transitory people often involved in sea freight or oil shipping, though their lives, personalities and stories are largely played out in Goss’s mixed-media paintings through the bar’s interior décor: an old vase with fresh flowers, a stack of glass ashtrays, a well-worn piano with a pile of books on top, an eclectic selection of picture frames with faded scenes and a clock that might only be right twice a day.Filtered through Goss’s imagination, Smickel Inn carries its history with it, much of it decorating the countertop; it’s a venue that charms with its informality—a place that knows itself, and its disparate customers. In real life, the bar has a cinematic view of the port and the North Sea, translated here, through Goss’s creative process of painting and silk-screening, into a scene from an engraving of seventeenth-century Sicily. Fragments from different places and eras infiltrate his images, creating a patina of palimpsests, visual echoes, perhaps, of memories of travellers coming through the port. The body of work takes us around the wider Dutch coastline and beyond—we see passengers on foot disembarking a ferry, have a backseat view of a car ride around the village of Stavenisse, and join a night-time campfire on the beach at Scheveningen, among other more mysterious, if not abstruse, locations and scenarios. Observation from contemporary life mingles with visual culture spanning centuries and continents in Goss’s oeuvre, creating lyrical yet strangely haunting and melancholic paintings, trapped in time somewhere between personal experience and collective memory.Nick Goss is an Anglo-Dutch painter, born in Bristol in 1981\. He studied first at the Slade School of Art (2002–06) and then at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2006–09). He has exhibited widely in Europe and America, including solo exhibitions with Josh Lilley, London, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, Simon Preston, New York, and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin. His first institutional survey, Morley’s Mirror, was presented in 2019 at Pallant House, Chichester, UK. _Smickel Inn_ is published to coincide with Goss’s first exhibition at Ingleby, Edinburgh, in the autumn of 2023.

This significant new monograph on Romanian painter Marius Bercea (b. 1979) presents a selection of his work from 2020 to 2025, offering an in-depth view of his recent practice through both critical and personal perspectives. The publication features a new essay by curator and critic Diana Marincu, a conversation with the British painter Nick Goss, chaired by Thomas Marks, an interview with art historian and curator Liviana Dan, and a foreword by Matt Price. The book is published by Anomie Publishing, London, with the support of Jecza Gallery and UniCredit Bank Romania.Bercea is widely recognised as a leading figure of the Cluj School of Painting – a group of artists who emerged in Cluj-Napoca following the 1989 Romanian Revolution. Drawing on his experiences growing up in Communist Romania and his encounters with American culture, particularly during his many visits to Los Angeles, Bercea creates paintings that navigate the intersections of personal and collective memory, history and cultural identity. In recent years, Bercea has focused his portraiture on a generation of young Romanians, specifically those born around 1989, exploring their unique sense of historical memory and their collaged experience of liberal democracy and the free market. In her essay, Diana Marincu examines recurring figures and motifs in Bercea’s recent work. She considers how his painted spaces often function like the scene of a film or the stage of a live performance, populated by characters who seem to await the finished script. Marincu traces the interplay of nostalgia, temporality and imagination in Bercea’s compositions, considering how his paintings negotiate the tension between personal experience and collective history.In a conversation with friend and fellow artist Nick Goss, chaired by Thomas Marks, Bercea discusses his studio practice, techniques and the literary and art-historical references that inform his work. They consider Bercea’s engagement with American modernism, the interplay of interior and exterior spaces and the careful attention paid to the details of his subjects and environments. The dialogue emphasises how memory, storytelling and cinematic imagination converge in Bercea’s paintings. They also discuss their respective art educations and upbringings and how they inform their practices and the overlap between personal and cultural memory. Bercea’s interview with Liviana Dan foregrounds the artist’s intellectual and emotional engagement with painting and its history, tracing the influence of masters from Poussin and Titian to Cézanne and Gerhard Richter. They discuss his approach to portraiture, domestic interiors, colour and geometry, as well as the ways in which his biography and personal life intersect with his artmaking.

This important book presents the work of the fascinating and singular artist Luigi Pericle (1916–2001). Pericle was a painter, illustrator and scholar, as well as a leading figure in the story of art in the second half of the twentieth century.The artist initially found fame as an illustrator, gaining widespread renown in the 1950s as the inventor of the character Max the Marmot. But his intense, enigmatic and multi-layered paintings increasingly drew the attention of the art world, with works that reflect his personal, metaphysical take on post-war abstraction exhibited at numerous venues in Britain during the 1960s. Pericle then abruptly retreatedfrom the art system, and for the rest of his life continued to paint, write and to study esoteric philosophy in the secluded house he shared with his wife Orsolina on Monte Verit  in the Ticino region of Switzerland. The artist’s work was dramatically rediscovered in 2016 when the contents of his former residence were revealed. The process of restoring, cataloguing and researching his vast oeuvre is ongoing, and is overseen by Ascona’s Archivio Luigi Pericle, with which the exhibition has been organised.This beautifully illustrated publication, which accompanies an exhibition at the Estorick Collection, London, includes a full catalogue of the works, as well as essays by noted scholars.

If time were condensed into a single moment, the world might look like one of Idris Khan’s works of art. Born in Birmingham in 1978, the artist, who’s currently rising rapidly in the art world, works with photographs, sculptures, installations, paintings, and film. He always layers various media—for example, every page of the Quran, the scores for every Beethoven sonata, or every JMW Turner postcard from the Tate Britain—in a way that condenses the colors and shapes so much that they become abstract. The British newspaper The Guardian describes Khan’s works as “experiments in compressed memories.” The catalogue from The New Art Gallery Walsall illustrates the whole palette of Khan’s art and shows the meditative, yet monumental character of his work. Exhibition: 3 February — 7 May 2017, The New Art Gallery Walsall