Ridinghouse – serie

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.

"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 A detailed account of artistic activity in the decade 1967–77 is accompanied by extensive and previously unpublished data, charting the exhibitions and sales of conceptual works.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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

This publication celebrates an extraordinary collection of drawings and prints by Paul Cézanne that has been gifted and placed on long-term loan to the Whitworth Gallery in Manchester, by gallerist, collector, author and founder of Ridinghouse, Karsten Schubert. This important act of generosity means that the Whitworth now holds the best collection of Cézanne works on paper in the United Kingdom, including a version of every print produced by the artist. These works will significantly expand the research potential of the Whitworth’s important collection of late 19th-century French and Dutch drawings by artists including Van Gogh, Seurat, Gauguin and Pissarro – whose portrait of Cézanne is included in this publication. The book also draws together other artistic copies: Raimondi’s copy of Raphael’s Judgement of Paris and, bringing us to the present day, Michael Landy’s Cézanne Bathers. The publication features a lead essay by renowned Impressionist scholar Richard Thomson on the significance of the bequest, a biographical essay on Karsten Schubert by Richard Shone, an interview with Schubert by Yuval Etgar on the bequest, and an essay by Christopher Lloyd on how these works relate to Cézanne’s output as a draughtsman. It also includes a detailed catalogue section on all works in the exhibition, with contributions by Elizabeth Cowling, Rosalind McKever, Colin Wiggins and Edward Wouk.

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.

Lumen, a survey of the four-decade career of British-Indian artist Sutapa Biswas, accompanies two solo exhibitions of the artist’s work held in 2021–22. Biswas emigrated from India to the UK with her family in the 1960s. Taking the long histories of colonialism together with personal memories, Biswas’s art meditates on questions of migration, identity and belonging. Her practice has consistently interrogated Western tradition and discourse, pushing past absences, exclusions and limited representations to make evident the entwined histories of culture and politics. This publication details Biswas’s career from its origins in the Black Arts Movement in the 1980s to her important photographic installations of the 1990s and her subsequent major moving-image works, including her newly commissioned film Lumen. The first substantial publication on the artist in over 17 years, it features two new conversations with the artist and two commissioned essays. It also includes a republication of Griselda Pollock’s important text on Biswas’s work, along with a postface reflecting on their relationship in the decades since the essay’s original publication. Published on the occasion of the exhibition: Sutapa Biswas: Lumen BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, Gateshead (26 June 2021–22 March 2022) and Kettle’s Yard, University of Cambridge (16 October 2021–30 January 2022).

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.

This first monograph on Phillip Lai (b.1969, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia) charts the artist’s sculptural development over the course of the last two decades. From a basement soy-sauce factory to the Hepworth Prize for Sculpture, the publication surveys several of the artist’s exhibitions across London, Wakefield, Turin, Berlin and Hong Kong. The nine chapters explore an evolving oeuvre that finds form in materials like aluminium, pewter, concrete, resin, rice, cooking pots, textiles and film. It is through these technologies that Lai broaches the material limits of the everyday world, often working with casting processes that see the abstraction and changing stability of materials as they transition from fluid to solid. What comes into focus is a fascination with how objects can relieve or modulate primal human urges to food and water and how, by extension, a material world might be re-envisioned around concerns of depletion and survival. This publication includes an essay by critic and writer Jan Verwoert, with bilingual text in English and Chinese throughout.

Frank Bowling (b.1934, Bartica, Guyana) is attracting ever-growing international recognition as an abstract painter. This is the first publication to examine Bowling’s art and ideas in relation to sculpture. Lavishly illustrated, it features an extended essay by curator Sam Cornish charting Bowling’s interactions with sculpture since the 1960s. The book asks how seeing Bowling’s sculpture, and thinking about sculpture more broadly, may extend our understanding of his pictorial language. Considering this relationship also highlights the importance of sculpture to High Modernism, from within which Bowling’s mature art emerged. Also included are an in-conversation between Allie Biswas and sculptor Thomas J. Price, and a poem dedicated to Bowling by sculptor and author Barbara Chase-Riboud.

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.

Best-known for her ambitious sculptural works, this volume explores how Alison Wilding’s compelling drawing and extensive use of collage have been integral to her development for five decades. Whilst sharing affiliations with Wilding’s three-dimensional work, the artist’s drawings – often in series – expand upon her investigation of surface by using a distinctive formal language. The works are characterised by a strong interplay between representation and metaphor, incorporating a range of materials – from ink to silicone fluid – to visualise and test ideas of mass and depth.Alongside essays by Anna Lovatt and Penelope Curtis, and an in-conversation with the artist by Rosie Cooper, this full-colour survey of over 300 illustrations offers the opportunity to track subtle correspondences in forms and concepts between historic and recent series of works. This publication was conceived by gallerist and Ridinghouse founder Karsten Schubert.

This book comprises a timely and controversial assertion of beauty as vital to the energy of contemporary art. As such it surveys work by an international group of artists who share an intense and highly individualistic focus on the processes of making, authorship and aesthetic poise. An essay by Michael Bracewell shares with its subjects the return of aesthetics to the science of feelings; to the individual as opposed to ‘identity’; and to a sensibility in visual art that is literary, flees the stereotype and rejects sociopolitical verbiage. It is a concept of beauty in some recent art that is less about representation than it is about memoir, fictional devices, cultural connoisseurship as praxis and the profundity of human relationships.

This publication spotlights the celebrated modern artist Piet Mondrian’s early career, a prolific period that saw the artist focus on figurative landscape painting. Primarily made during the artist’s time in Amsterdam at the turn of the twentieth century, Mondrian's dense, small-scale paintings depict the surrounding Dutch landscape – notably irrigation ditches, canals and farm buildings. The compositions are characterised by complex interactions of light and dark planes, which the artist forms through thick, pigmented strokes of green and brown paint. Marking the last decade of the artist’s engagement with figurative painting, Mondrian's exploration of the interrelationships between colour and space during this period forms the basis for his subsequent abstract works, whilst reflecting the artist’s lifelong interest in nature.

Stripped of their typical narrative and commercial contexts, the fragmented collages of this collection act as visually tantalizing ciphers, reflecting the desires and imaginings of the beholder.' – Jennie Waldow, Brooklyn Rail This beautifully illustrated catalogue showcases works by British artist John Stezaker made between 1976 and 2017 and brought together in the 2018 show “Love” at The Approach, London. Stezaker is celebrated for his distinctive collage works: interruptions of, and interventions into, found images dating mostly from the mid-20th century – products of modernist culture such as film stills, press and publicity photographs, magazines and postcards. His works engage with themes such as psychological archetypes, fragmentation, identity, self and other, desire, inscrutability and enigma, glamour, fantasy, dreams and the gaze. A sense of romance pervades Stezaker’s imagery. As demonstrated most dramatically by the artist’s 'Love' series (2016), his work seduces and ensnares the viewer’s gaze, arresting their perceptual expectations. Disquieting, poetic, compelling, glamorous and strange, the anatomies of love and desire comprising 'Love' resemble a visual encyclopaedia of human consciousness. Featuring essays by Michael Bracewell and Craig Burnett.

'"As Paul Moorhouse shows in this thorough and sensitive first biography, which concentrates on [Riley's] early years up to the age of thirty-four, it was only after many false starts, bracing shocks and firm decisions that Riley found her way as an abstract painter in the early 1960s with her eye-dazzling lines, squares, curves ... in ultra-hard-edged black-and-white". –Times Literary Supplement"In “Bridget Riley: A Very Very Person – The Early Years,” Paul Moorhouse ... homes in on the period between the artist’s childhood and her earliest success, and makes a surprising but compelling case for the influence of landscape on Ms Riley’s distinctive style." –Wall Street Journal"An entertaining and informative text that adds greatly to our understanding of a very prominent and still highly intriguing British artist." –HyperallergicIn January 1965 the international art world converged on New York to pay homage to a brilliant new star. The glittering opening of The Responsive Eye, a major exhibition of abstract painting at the Museum of Modern Art, signalled the latest phenomenon, op art – and its centre of attention was a young painter named Bridget Riley, whose dazzling painting Current appeared on the cover of the catalogue. Riley’s first solo show in New York sold out, and, following a feature in Vogue magazine, the Riley 'look' became a fashion craze. Overnight, she had become a sensation, yet only three years earlier, she was a virtual unknown. How did success arrive so suddenly?Authored by the acclaimed curator and writer Paul Moorhouse, A Very Very Person is the first biography of Bridget Riley and addresses that tantalising question. Focusing on her early years, it tells the story of a remarkable woman whose art and life were entwined in surprising ways. This intimate narrative explores Riley’s wartime childhood spent in the idyllic Cornish countryside, her subsequent struggles to find her way as an artist, and the personal challenges she faced before finally arriving as one of the world’s most celebrated artists in Swinging Sixties London.

Georg Baselitz’s collected writings brings together more than 30 texts by, and interviews with, the artist – spanning the period 1961 to the present – including conversations with Michael Auping, Henry Geldzahler and Donald Kuspit. Known for his rebellious approach to Abstract Expressionism, Baselitz here discusses the impression his paintings convey, the act of painting, his biography and much more. The texts shift between these personal pieces – some of which have never before been published in English – to interviews conducted by a variety of respected critics and art historians. These conversations present a different voice as Baselitz responds to careful and critical questions about his work.

Eliseo Mattiacci: Sculpture in Action in Rome is a fresh examination of the developments in Mattiacci’s sculpture from the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, dates that embrace the two decades he spent living and working in Italy's vibrant capital. New research by the contributors to this book reveal how the exceptional constellation of studios, galleries and institutional spaces as well as the architectural and landscape settings Rome offered were the crucial factor in Mattiacci's rapid sophistication as an artist. In the mid-1960s the city was already a major centre for art, literature, theatre and cinema, and the setting for numerous avant-garde performative 'actions' and 'happenings'. The Piazza del Popolo district was crowded with bars and galleries, and Mattiacci soon became warmly acquainted with various gallerists and artists, including the Arte Povera practitioners Jannis Kounellis and Pino Pascali. In this challenging and competitive environment Mattiacci sought to establish his own distinctive exploratory style, investigating materials, forms, sounds, presentations and actions in endlessly novel and inventive ways. The extraordinary Tubo, the long flexible yellow coil of metallic tubing that could be endlessly rearranged and even carried out of a gallery into the streets by files of admirers, was first exhibited in 1967, and made his name. The following year he staged Lavori in corso, a trio of very popular performances, in the Circo Massimo, which involved spinning huge umbrellas in imitation of the Earth's rotations and revolutions. Percorso, in 1969, was Mattiacci again in action, this time driving a noisy roadroller into and around a gallery.In the 1970s – a difficult decade of political violence in Italy – Mattiacci continued to explore both outwardly and inwardly. He was increasingly fascinated by archaeology, antique alphabets and non-literate cultures, notably the USA's First Peoples, and he created actions and presentations that ranged from exhibitions of x-rays of his own inner organs to appearances encased in 'bandaging' and plaster. In 1981 he first showed the admired Roma, a collection of 50 large sinuous metal shapes inspired by the volutes of classical and Baroque architecture, once again an artwork that is endlessly rearrangeable, indoors or out. Sculpture in Action is the beautifully illustrated account of Mattiacci's artistic creativity in those decades.

Cecily Brown (b.1969, London) is one of the most acclaimed painters working today. Her inimitable style shifts effortlessly between abstraction and figuration, confounding our understanding of these painterly modes and conventions. Published on the occasion of an exhibition at Museo e Real Bosco di Capodimonte, Naples, this lavishly illustrated catalogue is an in-depth look at one of her most conceptually rich and expressive paintings. Cecily Brown: The Triumph of Death delves deep into this gigantic, multi-panel work, which features the figure of Death riding roughshod over a town and its residents. Inspired by a 1446 Italian fresco housed in the Palazzo Abatellis in Palermo, Italy, Brown’s The Triumph of Death is the culmination of a fascination with death that has permeated her work for several decades. With an introduction by Sylvain Bellenger and newly commissioned texts by Gavin Delahunty, Catherine Foulkrod and Sergio Risaliti, as well as featuring a set of related, previously unseen drawings, the book provides unparalleled analysis of this extraordinary work.Text in English and Italian.