Ridinghouse – förlag

From the opening of The Louvre to the launch of Tate Modern and beyond, this accessible and succinct publication traces the development of the museum concept – encompassing curatorial, scholarly, political and cultural spheres – and its evolving role within society. In the first section, Schubert looks at the complex history of the museum in specific cities at critical moments, for instance New York between 1930 and 1950 as the Metropolitan Museum of Art expanded and the Museum of Modern Art was founded. The second section focuses on the success and unprecedented development of the museum in the 1980s and 1990s in Europe and the United States, highlighting the need for cities and institutions to revise their programmes in response to a surge of interest in the arts. The final section looks at the museum’s predicament nearly a decade after The Curator’s Egg was originally published in 2000, exploring the museum's evolution in a post-9/11 environment.

In the decade before his death in 2011, John Hoyland began to reckon with mortality. Confronting his own demise, he painted elegies to departed artist friends and tributes to illustrious artistic forebears. Imagery of the void looms large, but it is a void faced with defiance and vitality, less a rumination on the end than a celebration of life. This publication explores the paintings Hoyland made in this decade, including his final series, the Mysteries.Essays by Natalie Adamson, David Anfam, Matthew Collings and Mel Gooding offer a rich and multifaceted account of a complex body of work. Hoyland’s veneration of Vincent van Gogh, his connections to J.M.W. Turner, the use of black as a colour, his deployment of risk and attempts to subvert his own taste, and his development of the cosmic visual language of the Abstract Expressionists are all discussed. Richly illustrated, the book extends our understanding of Hoyland’s late work within the story of modern painting as a whole.

Simon Moretti is known for his enigmatic exhibition works, presenting displays that engage with questions of agency, temporality, automatism, desire and masculinity. Incorporating appropriated images and archives as well as curatorial and publishing projects, often made in collaboration with other artists, his work addresses the role of ‘curating as practice’.Presented as a non-chronological visual essay, this publication surveys 10 years of collage works by Moretti. It includes text contributions from writer Craig Burnett, curator and art historian Yuval Etgar, novelists Deborah Levy and Chloe Aridjis, and a conversation with Andrew Durbin, editor-in-chief of frieze magazine.

The novelist, writer, curator and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell has written extensively for museums and galleries, along with art publications as diverse as Frieze and The Burlington Magazine, approaching visual art through its cultural context, the lens of the recent past and prolonged looking. Bracewell’s art writing focuses on detailed descriptions of works of art, expanding their interpretation to include media, politics, music, poetry and other areas of cultural production. By exploring connections between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and subcultures, while appraising the vision and ideas of individual artists, he relates their work to its broader cultural context. This collection of texts reads like a history of British art (and the UK itself) from the 1950s to the 2010s, featuring artists such as Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Gilbert & George, John Stezaker, Wolfgang Tillmans, Leigh Bowery, Glenn Brown and Damien Hirst. Each essay is accompanied by an illustration selected by Bracewell, and the publication concludes with a body of autobiographical writings.

Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, exhibition catalogue on the internationally renowned Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) in which new and existing work will be shown alongside historic Chinese objects. The exhibition will explore notions of truth, authenticity and value, as well as globalisation, the coronavirus pandemic and the current geopolitical crisis. Ai Weiwei will reflect upon the liberty in the West, in contrast to China and other authoritarian regimes, to question truth and authority, express doubt and seek transparency in political matters. However, in relation to art appreciation, the Chinese have a long tradition of a more fluid and less fixed view in relation to authenticity than is the case in the West, often valuing the act of copying.

"The book is an impressive work of scholarship" – Studio International "Richard set about to produce a study of distribution networks, and achieved this through immaculate and thorough research. It is no criticism of the book to say that there are many questions left unexplored ... As scholars of the future think through these and other questions, they will remain grateful to Richard’s extraordinary and meticulous scholarship." – Mark Godfrey, Frieze Emerging in the late 1960s, conceptual art was spurred by a network of artists, dealers, curators and critics. These little-known connections are detailed for the first time in this highly significant volume. By focusing on 15 artists – including Marcel Broodthaers, Richard Long, Lawrence Weiner, Hanne Darboven and Daniel Buren – and a specific network of dealer-galleries, private and public institutions and collectors around them, author Sophie Richard documents the role of art dealers in the development of conceptual art – which ultimately led to the structure of today's art world. We learn how conceptual artworks entered private collections and public institutions, how value was conferred to them, and the distribution networks that drove these artists' success. A detailed account of artistic activity in the decade 1967–77 is accompanied by extensive and previously unpublished data, charting the exhibitions and sales of conceptual works. The relationships, support structures and strategies of dealer-galleries – such as Konrad Fischer, Wide White Space and Lisson Gallery – are revealed and make fascinating reading. Including numerous interviews with key figures of the period, 'Unconcealed' exposes the new dealing, curatorial, collecting and teaching methods formed in this decade that continue to be critical to today’s art world.

Bringing together over 20 gouache studies by the celebrated British Op artist Bridget Riley, this exhibition catalogue reveals something of Riley’s process. Originally published to accompany an exhibition at Karsten Schubert, London, the studies explore the results of Riley setting circles of colours – such as turquoise, cerise and ochre – at different distances. The images are accompanied by an interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka from 1972, just following the creation of these works. In the discussion, Riley touches upon the role of her studies and the effects of her colour choices on light and movement in the picture plane.

An overview of John Stezaker’s film still collages, this book showcases the evolution of the artist’s relationship with a specific material.Leading British collage and appropriation artist John Stezaker began his ongoing series of film still collages in 1979 – the result of a period that marked a crucial change in the direction of the artist’s work, which had previously been centered around a text-based ‘conceptualism’.The series moves with Stezaker’s changing interests, using stills from classic American-period Hitchcock films as raw material before shifting towards the undistinguishable mass of 1940s and early 1950s low-budget studio films. Featuring collages based on a combination of film still excisions and superimpositions, this ongoing series is catalogued comprehensively for the first time in this volume, which brings together Stezaker’s earliest film still collages with his most recent.Full-colour illustrations are accompanied by an essay by David Campany and a conversation between the critic and the artist. John Stezaker (b.1949, Worcester) is one of the leading artists in contemporary photographic collage and appropriation. Employing vintage photographs, old Hollywood film stills, travel postcards and other printed matter, Stezaker creates small-format collages that bear qualities of Surrealism, Dada and found art. Stezaker studied at the Slade School of Art and has taught at the Royal College of Art and Central Saint Martins School of Art, London. In 2012 he was awarded the Deutsche Börse photography prize following a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London. His work has been exhibited internationally since the 1990s and is held in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Arts Council England; and Tate.

This popular collection of the best of Art Monthly's interviews since the magazine's inception in the early 1970s provides a supplementary history of twentieth-century art, from over 150 perspectives, through discussions between artists and critics.The interviews provide the most immediate access to an artist's thought processes and offer compelling narratives of changing creative activities. Many leading practitioners – from Naum Gabo to Douglas Gordon – have been interviewed, often at highly significant moments in their careers.The artist interview has occupied an important position in Art Monthly since its first issue, and the book was first published as part of the magazine's 30th anniversary celebrations in 2007.

Art historian and curator Dawn Ades is a leading voice on Dada, Surrealism, abstraction and art from Latin America. This volume collects her important essays for the first time, addressing themes fundamental to the history of modern art and the avant-garde. Arranged thematically, this collection of essays represents the breadth of Ades’s critical and curatorial interests, ranging from avant-garde poster design, to photomontage, to the representation of the female in Mexico, but with an overarching foundation in abstraction, identity and the influence of new mediums. As well as working as a professor and curator – which earned her an OBE for her services to art history – Ades has written on a wide range of artists since 1980. Spanning the likes of Francis Bacon, Richard Deacon, Salvador Dalí and Hannah Höch, this body of essays is ingrained with Ades’s consistently clear and intellectually stimulating observations. To introduce the book, Ades is interviewed by Doro Globus, who explores the writer’s relationship to curating, teaching and art history.

“As an art critic, [Hickey] doesn’t do what most people want from art criticism. He doesn’t provide his readers with a neat intellectual framework through which to view everything they see, like a Clement Greenberg or a Michael Fried, and he doesn’t really do beautiful description either ... Instead, Hickey gives you intricately structured argument and gorgeous prose ... Reading him you want to forget that the art market is a game of Hungry Hungry Hippos between Ukrainian oligarchs and Qatari princesses ... You want to be the thing you advocate; you want to ride the wave, mount the dais, and speak the truth.” – Los Angeles Review of BooksArguably one of the most astute critics working today, Dave Hickey's multi-decade career as a leading cultural commentator is characterised by his blend of high and mass culture and his fervent critique of the celebrity-driven culture of the 21st-century art world. Following his 2012 announcement of self-imposed exile from art criticism, this new body of essays once again questions and challenges the cultural status quo. With his trademark humour, Hickey has declared that: ‘I miss being an elitist and not having to talk to idiots’ in a field that, he believes, is defined by the commoditisation of art and the self-referential tendencies of criticism itself. This new body of shorter essays by the author of Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy and The Invisible Dragon: Four Essays on Beauty looks at more contemporary phenomena: super-collectors, the trope of the biennale and the loss of looking.

Filled with photographs of unpopulated studios, Paul Winstanley’s exploration of British art schools highlights their importance at a time when the art school system’s existence is more fraught than ever. For this series, Winstanley (b.1954) photographed undergraduate studio spaces in more than 50 art colleges across the United Kingdom over the summers of 2011 and 2012. These rough-and-ready, nearly neutral spaces are photographed as found; empty in the period between school years. Collectively, the works highlight the abstraction of the interiors with their temporary white walls, paint stains, neutral floors and open spaces. Photographed in this manner, their sterile nature is juxtaposed with their intended purpose of fostering intense creativity for a future generation of artists. Over 200 full-colour illustrations – which combine images from various schools to form their own abstract space – are accompanied by writings from two professors of fine art: a text by Jon Thompson and an interview with the artist by Maria Fusco.To commemorate the publication, Winstanley created a limited-edition digital print from the Art School series. Each edition is hand-finished by the artist and contained within a custom-made slipcase containing a signed copy of the book.

This volume documents a group of gouache studies by Bridget Riley from 1969 to 1972 that reflects a major reconfiguration of Riley’s style. The shapes formed in these gouaches are arranged from a limited selection of colours – namely violet, green and pink – to explore the visual relationship between 'contrast and harmony’.Accompanying full colour illustrations, a conversation between the artist and Robert Kudielka from 1972 posits the works within the context of Bridget Riley’s oeuvre.

Focusing on John Hilliard’s fascination with the monochrome and visual obstruction, this career-spanning volume draws together the artist’s diverse engagement with photography. Perhaps best known for iconic ‘photo-conceptual’ works produced during the 1970s, this British artist’s work explores the limits of the photographic medium. Using new and pioneering processes, such as overlaying prints and incorporating projector screens, the artist aims to disrupt the viewer’s relationship to the photograph. Hilliard’s focus on the monochrome ‘blanks out’ the picture to undermine the photograph’s usual expectations and draw the viewer’s attention to the context of its creation. Duncan Wooldridge provides a survey on Hilliard’s continuous challenge to photographic convention throughout his 40-year career, accompanied by texts by the artist and over 60 illustrations.

Recounting an art dealer’s recuperation from major surgery in the famous Claridge’s Hotel in London, this idiosyncratic (and semi-autobiographical) novel interweaves reality with fantasy. Room 225–6 follows the author-character ‘The Protagonist’ – accompanied by his beloved terrier ‘The Bitch’ – around London’s Mayfair as he hosts endless art world gatherings and tea parties for twenty, and visits a multitude of local galleries and shops.Incorporating multi-layered voices and devices, the distinctive narrative introduces the reader to a memorable host of characters – from the ‘The Political Prisoner’ to ‘The Little Mondrian’ – in a tale filled with humour of observation and incident. Bringing to life this frightening yet extraordinary period in one man’s life, it is at once honest, satirical, idiotic and bold. Room 225-6 is sold to benefit the Oracle Cancer Trust (oraclecancertrust.org), the UK’s leading national charity dedicated to funding head and neck cancer research.

During the mid-1980s, Riley introduced a new pictorial device, the rhomboid, to her then predominantly vertical stripes, developing her exploration of interplaying tones of green, yellow and orange. This allowed the artist to construct new visual relationships between divergent colours and forms, creating what she terms a ‘harmony of contrasts’ that animates the entire visual field. Tracking a transitional period in Riley’s career, the works on paper in this volume – studies produced between 1984 and 1995 – shift from a focus on the vertical stripe to increasingly complex diagonal compositions. Illustrated in full colour, the works are accompanied by a historic interview with the artist by Robert Kudielka and a text by Riley’s archivists Natalia Naish and Alexandra Tommasini, situating these studies in relation to major paintings produced during this period.

Founded in 1967, Stockwell Depot heralded the emergence of the London artists’ studio movement and gained international recognition as a centre for abstraction in Britain. For over 25 years, this disused former brewery in south London functioned as a cooperative studio and exhibition space. Artists associated with the Depot – Roland Brener, Jennifer Durrant, David Evison, Katherine Gili, Peter Hide and Roelof Louw, among many others – held differing and often competing attitudes towards art. The ambitious work made and shown at the Depot tells the story of late modernism in Britain, tracing a period full of formal experimentation and critical debate. Incorporating interviews with 10 artists alongside a major essay by Sam Cornish, this volume is the first to examine the artists’ activities within a historical context and to track their development through the Depot’s pivotal annual exhibitions. Published to coincide with the exhibition Stockwell Depot, 1967–79 at University of Greenwich Galleries, London, 24 July–12 September 2015.

"Object Lessons ... is a grand tour of the latest obsession of an indefatigable collector. For the last decade ... George Loudon has gathered some 200 extraordinary natural-history specimens, scientific models and botanical drawings from the Darwinian age. And the Boston photographer Rosamond Purcell has documented every last one of them in this thoughtfully compiled, scrapbook-style compendium." – The New York Times Style Magazine Assembling nearly 200 pieces from the collection of George Loudon, this volume encompasses a vast assortment of objects relating to nineteenth-century life sciences. Originally designed to capture the complex structures of nature, they range from books and illustrations to botanical specimens and anatomical models. Having lost most of their original pedagogical function over time, the objects are now open for contemporary reappraisal - acquiring new values that can inspire, seduce and even disorientate today’s viewer. Offering a unique perspective on the intersection of art and science, the historic curiosities in this collection reveal their creators’ remarkable capacity for artistic expression. Alongside new images by celebrated photographer Rosamond Purcell, explanatory texts on the objects by Loudon, an essay by Robert McCracken Peck, and a conversation between Loudon and art historian Lynne Cooke together offer insight into the objects’ original context and potential for new perspectives.

Originally published in Dutch to accompany a 2014 exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (now Kunstmuseum Den Haag), this important survey of a pivotal period in the life of Piet Mondrian is now available in English. Drawn to the Cubist work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, Mondrian spent two years in Paris, from 1912 to 1914, that led him to begin experimenting with an entirely original abstract style. Using a cubist palette of grey and ochre, the artist transformed the landscapes and architectural facades of his earlier figurative works into compositional structures of increasing complexity and abstraction. Upon his return to the Netherlands in 1914, the artist exhibited the 17 works he had painted during those two significant years in France. This volume maps Cubism’s influence on artists working in the Netherlands at that time, and demonstrates Mondrian’s central role in bridging the gap between the French Cubists and their Dutch contemporaries. Accompanying over 300 illustrations – including close details of key works – is a chronology by Mondrian expert Hans Janssen tracking the artist's development within the context of its time.

Charting Richard Long’s critical reception, this anthology of writings explores the artist’s radical rethinking of the relationship between art and landscape.Widely considered as one of the most influential British artists of his generation, Long’s practice stems from his deep love of nature and the experience of making solitary walks. He first came to prominence in the late 1960s and is part of a generation of international artists that extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials and methods.This volume includes a coherent span of over 30 essays and reviews on the artist from the late 1960s to the present, drawn together here for the first time. Featuring the writings of renowned art historians and critics Germano Celant, Richard Cork and Charles Harrison; Nicholas Serota, chair of Arts Council England; and award-winning nature writer Robert Macfarlane, among many others.The texts are accompanied by a selection of the artist’s own statements, key interviews, as well as an introductory essay by Clarrie Wallis that examines Long’s unique position within postwar art history.

This new collection of Richard Flood's written work from over the past 40 years reveals an original and rigorous connection to the world of ideas and beauty and the critical and aesthetic experience of our present times. Drawing from his broad knowledge of history, cinema, literature, poetry, design and architecture, Flood’s writings combine the autobiographical with the theoretical, presenting an intimate understanding of renowned contemporary artists.Throughout many of the essays, Flood draws on personal correspondence between himself and the artist, including an annotated conversation with Paul Thek discussing his fabricated works of wax ‘raw meat’ facsimiles embedded in luxurious Plexiglas cases; four interviews with Robert Gober during the 1990s, offering vivid accounts of his sculptural and creative process; and a detailed description of a portrait sitting at Michael Landy’s studio. Flood’s significant essay on Arte Povera, co-authored with Frances Morris, is also reproduced, providing evidence of his ability to write in multiple ways.

The publication comprises the best of Art Monthly's interviews with some 65 artists, ranging from Marina Abramović to Artur Żmijewski, which together provide an entertaining and alternative history of art. Since it was founded in 1976 the magazine has consistently published interviews with leading contemporary artists. The collection brought together here offers unique insights into the thought processes and working practices of artists, as wellas evolution of the form of the interview.

British Conceptual artist John Stezaker (b. 1949) is known for his distinctive, often deceptively simple, collages. He has been making art since the 1970s, but achieved prominence relatively recently.In 2011, he had a retrospective at the Whitechapel Gallery, London, and, in 2012, he won the Deutsche Börse Photography Foundation Prize, even though he does not take photographs.Stezaker says collage is about ‘stuff that has lost its immediate relationship with the world’ and involves ‘a yearning for a lost world’. A collector, he works from an archive of out-of-date images — mostly old film stills, vintage actor head shots, and antique postcards. These images come in standard sizes and are highly conventionalised — all variations on themes.Art critic David Campany says, Stezaker ‘is drawn to that very slim space between convention and idiosyncrasy.’In addition to collages, Lost World includes poignant found-object-sculptures: a selection of antique mannequin hands, offering a repertoire of gestures. There’s also a film, Crowd, presenting hundreds of film stills of crowd scenes, each for one frame only, in a bewildering blur.

Artistic authorship is fundamental to how we interpret and value artworks. The figure of the solitary, creative genius underpins the symbolic and monetary values we ascribe to artworks; yet artistic authorship, like ownership, is often contested and unstable. This interdisciplinary collection of essays, written from legal, art historical and art market perspectives, critically examines the construction and iteration of the artist-author both during the lifetime of the artist and beyond – when artistic authorship is stewarded by others, including artists’ estates, foundations and museums.Drawing on current cases and past legal disputes, this important anthology addresses enduring issues that have become central to the contemporary art world, such as the collision between artists’ rights and the rights of the owners of artworks, the problems of authentication and who has the final authority to determine authenticity, and the role of artists’ estates as legacy guardians.

"The Outwardness of Art is a single-volume compendium of some of the best words ever written by this most subtle and wide-ranging of aesthetic theorists." - Michael Glover, Hyperallergic Immensely influential, and long beloved by artists, writers and theorists alike, Adrian Stokes (1902–1972) was at once the last of the great British amateur art writers and – as the first art theorist to substantially synthesise aesthetics and psychoanalysis – among the first of the moderns. Since the publication of his groundbreaking books The Quattro Cento and Stones of Rimini in the 1930s, Stokes’s writing has enjoyed a readership across disciplines from psychoanalysis to literature and art. Contemporary admirers ranged from Ernst Gombrich to Dore Ashton, Ben Nicholson to Philip Guston, Ezra Pound to John Ashbery – reflecting the diverse milieus in which Stokes moved. And yet it has been nearly 45 years since a broad introduction to his work has been commercially available. In the wake of a recent biography, new critical studies and reprintings of individual books, this volume presents a substantial selection from Stokes’s published writings – including important posthumously published texts as well as his superb ballet writings of the 1920s – highlighting him as a pioneering thinker on art and a virtuoso of the essay form.

Celebrated art critic and curator Guy Brett made a unique contribution to art criticism and exhibition making through his championing of experimental artists from across the world, writing seminal monographic essays on artists such as Susan Hiller, Rose Finn-Kelcey, Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, David Medalla, Rose English, Mona Hatoum, Takis and others. The 14 essays in this book bring together a unique gathering of artists, tracing their diversity and singularity. Many of these artists make works which arise out of their responses to the situation or the environment in which they find themselves, a process that draws on the countless interactions people have and the many ways that they connect.Brett’s writing has a unique tone – lucid and widely researched, free of a narrow academicism. He has published widely in the art press, addressing topics such as the relationship between art and life, ideas about the participation of the spectator, and the importance of a kind of visual wit to both artists and writers.