Marsilio Arte – serie

A concise and affordable overview of Dumas’ existential portraiture, with previously unseen worksAn engrossing compendium of more than 100 works from 1984 to the present day by South African painter Marlene Dumas (born 1954), Open-End offers a selective overview of her career to date, and a first look at pieces created over the course of the last few years.Of her work, Dumas says: “I am an artist who uses second-hand images and first-hand emotions.” While in the early years of her career she was known for her collages and accompanying texts, today Dumas works chiefly in oil on canvas and ink on paper. The majority of her production is made up of portraits of people in states of suffering, ecstasy, fear and despair. A crucial moment in the development of Dumas’ style came with her use of images from newspapers and magazines, stills from films and Polaroids.Open-End brings together pieces from international museums and private collections to provide new insight into Dumas’ work and methods.

New spatial and architectural works from the influential American multimedia pioneerPublished in conjunction with the exhibition at Pirelli HangarBicocca in Milan, this monograph presents the most up-to-date compilation of the spatial and architectural works of New Mexico–based artist Bruce Nauman (born 1941). Through his neons, corridors and room installations, Nauman accentuates the contrast between the perceptual and physical experience of space. Perception itself can be interpreted as the subject matter of his work; the aesthetic experience of entering a narrow corridor or an empty room flooded with neon light supersedes the art “objects” in the viewer’s experience.The volume includes newly commissioned essays on Nauman's conceptual developments and formal variations by scholars, conservators and curators such as Joan Simon, Francesca Esmay and Gloria Sutton, and a text by the exhibition curators. Alongside rich photographic documentation of the show, the publication also features entries for the 30 works on display written by researchers from international institutions.

A painterly dialogue with humanist values at the Doge’s Palace in VeniceCan there be such a thing as a public art founded on universal values? This was the question that the German artist Anselm Kiefer (born 1945) tackled while conceiving his installation for the Doge’s Palace in Venice. Invited to participate in the celebration of the city’s 1600th anniversary, Kiefer developed a project specifically for the Chamber of the Ballot, an immense room inside the Gothic palace: a series of paintings in dialogue with the heroic values inscribed in the chamber’s 33 artworks by the Italian masters Tintoretto, Andrea Vicentino and Palma the Giovane. The series, These writings, when burned, will finally cast a little light, takes its title from the writings of the Venetian philosopher Andrea Emo.This volume gathers a series of philosophical and art historical responses to Kiefer’s installation, featuring essays by Janne Sirén, Gabriella Belli and Hans Ulrich Obrist, among others.

Chronicling an extraordinary decade in Italy’s history as a creative hub for some of the 20th century’s greatest artistsConceived of as a chronological journey through three Italian cities—Turin, Rome and Naples—this volume presents a photographic history of the extraordinary decade during which Italy was a hotbed of creative experimentation, frequented by the foremost pioneering artists of the day, from Jannis Kounellis to Andy Warhol.

Highlights from an important and wide-ranging contemporary art collectionThis survey chronicles over 80 works from the contemporary art collection of Patrizia Sandretto Re Rebaudengo. Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, photography, video and performance, the collection includes examples from Maurizio Cattelan, Sarah Lucas, Damien Hirst, Cindy Sherman, William Kentridge and many more.

This volume is published for the largest exhibition to date on Chinese painter Yan Pei-Ming (born 1960), who is known for his history paintings and monumental gestural portraits of intimate subjects as well as public figures such as Mao, Putin and the Pope.

The story of the famous English critic's long and fruitful love affair with the city of VeniceJohn Ruskin visited Venice numerous times over the course of his life, starting in 1835, and after long stays in the city he published his three-volume masterpiece The Stones of Venice—a gorgeous paean to the beauty, uniqueness and fragility of this city that was destined to become a cornerstone of English culture and mark the beginning of the Gothic Revival. Venice, in Ruskin’s drawings and watercolors, is a theater of "lost time" that builds up traces of historical time even as it is subject to erasure and destruction.In Venice with Ruskin is a meditation on the city, its architecture, its bittersweet relationship with nature, Ruskin’s dialogue with the great Venetian artists whose works he reproduced, the curiosity that prompted him to explore it and the imagination with which he captured its essence on paper.

Representative sculptural works that probe the limits and potential of our relationship with the worldThis monograph features 30 fundamental works by acclaimed Indian artist Anish Kapoor (born 1954) from the 1980s to the present day, spanning practically the entirety of his long and distinguished career.One of the most notable features of Kapoor’s works is the way they transcend their materiality. Pigment, stone, steel, wax and silicone are manipulated—carved, polished, saturated and molded—to the point of a dissolution of boundaries between the plastic and the immaterial. Color in Kapoor’s hands becomes an immersive phenomenon, containing its own spatial and illusive volume. Kapoor seeks estrangement, the erasure of ordinary references, in order to undermine the way that we are accustomed to see things and set them in a completely different perspective, creating works that act as catalysts of energy. This volume reveals the genesis of his artistic practice and investigates its language, providing new keys to its interpretation.