Skira Editore – serie

A monograph surveying the past twenty years works of the “celebrity photographer” Uli Weber, one of the most accomplished photographers of his generation. Some photographers build a global reputation specialising in fashion. Others excel in portraiture, travel or the commercial world of advertising. Most photographers seek to master just one genre but, over the past 20 years, a rare few have excelled in all those disciplines, one of them is Uli Weber. From teenagers’ bedroom walls to the halls of The Victoria and Albert Museum, Uli Weber is one of the most accomplished and accessible photographers of his generation. When he started twenty years ago, it was his aim to “create beautiful pictures that are always relevant.” The beauty of them is obvious to even the most untutored eye. This book features a fine collection of works that has an unusually wide span.

The first monograph on Kata Legrady’s works presenting a collection of drawings, photographs, sculptures and video-installations. Kata Legrady (Hungary 1974) belongs to that long line of artists for whom an object offers the stimulus for artistic thought. Her approach takes the form of a symbolic encounter between weapons of war and confectionery. The Smarties are used to decorate weapons so that in her hands machine guns, grenades and knives become strange and colourful, almost beautiful and appealing. The series Bombs and Candies began in 2008 and forms a corpus of great formal and conceptual coherence. At first sight there is no precise message, no hidden aspect. We are not dealing with complex and stratified arrangements of images or objects but with restrained, frontal and simplified compositions. They are carriers that, as Jeff Koons put it so well, are there “to stimulate and activate the viewer’s mental and physical state”.

The first complete monograph devoted to Luciano Rigolini's photography Alongside his work in cinema and documentary, Luciano Rigolini has also carried out intense and rigorous research in the field of photography. Between 1990 and 2002 he photographed the urban landscapes and architectural details of European and American cities. These black and white images are uniform in size (140 x 140 cm), and immediately reveal their aesthetic and conceptual roots in the historical avant-garde, especially constructivism and German objectivity. At the same time he began to collect vintage stereoscopic plates, nineteenth century photographic prints and anonymous amateur images dating from the eighties of last century. A synthesis of these elements gave rise to an exhibition entitled La forma dello sguardo held in Spring 2001 at the Museo Cantonale d’Arte in Lugano; a substantial catalogue was also published. This was followed in 2008 by the exhibition Fotostiftung Schweiz di Winterthur “What you see”, which was centred around anonymous works by 107 amateur photographers. This new work focuses in particular on the relationship between photography, painting and the role played by digital technology. Among other things, it presents a wealth of hitherto unpublished large format works, a reinterpretation of anonymous photographs and documents uncovered in forgotten archives, at flea markets or purchased from antique dealers or on the Internet. These images, originally created with no artistic pretensions, restored or re-elaborated using specific digital processes and printed in large format, reveal surprising sculptural, pictorial and formal qualities.

An acclaimed fashion photographer provides a personal, luminous, and moving account of post-tsunami Japan. This volume is an extraordinary photographic report by the famous Japanese fashion photographer Yasushi Handa, taken a few weeks after the terrible earthquake and tsunami that battered the eastern coastline of Japan in March 2011. It includes the detailed history of the provinces affected by the disaster, an accessible scientific explanation of the reasons why such an event can occur, and a look to the future that talks clearly about how damage can be limited and how nuclear disasters can be prevented. The book also reveals the composure of the Japanese people and their incredible capacity to resurrect themselves. The photographs were exhibited in Tokyo, Kobe, and Okinawa between January and March 2012 and were admired by a great number of visitors.

Published on the occasion of his major anthology at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini in Venice, this catalogue gathers a number of works by the renowned British artist. “A journey from the origins of life” that, according to the artist, through very powerful works celebrates “the awe and wonder of the world in which we live.” Marc Quinn began his career exploring issues such as the relation between art and science, the human body and its survival mechanisms, life and its preservation, beauty and death. Through an essay-interview of the artist with Germano Celant, the volume offers in-depth insight into Quinn’s conceptual practice that incorporates sculpture, painting and installations. The artist’s preoccupation with the metamorphic ability of both human life and nature points to his fascination with our innate spirituality. Quinn transforms the very act of seeing by forcing viewers to question what is around them, pushing them into the unknown in order to rediscover life.

From Hogarth to Reynolds, from Gainsborough to Turner, the great protagonists of English painting between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This is the first comprehensive overview of the extraordinary development of British painting during the eighteenth century, which anticipated themes, styles and techniques that later became paradigms of modernity. This volume focuses on the English context at a time when the growth of artistic standing was accompanied by the country’s conquest of hegemony on a historical, political and economic plane. The volume is arranged chronologically in seven sections, which include a selection of over 100 masterpieces by the most significant English painters. The main objective is to enable readers to rediscover the genres of portrait and landscape, which have always characterized English art. Readers can admire the work of artists like William Hogarth, Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli), Sir Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Gainsborough, Joseph Wright of Derby, George Stubbs, John Constable and William Turner, who offer a completely original cross-section of eighteenthand early nineteenth-century painting in Great Britain.

Jan Fabre has created a monumental new cycle of his mosaics for the PinchukArtCentre in Kiev. This publication presents the two grand series—Tribute to Belgian Congo and Tribute to Hieronymus Bosch in Congo, where the artist again grapples artistically with his country’s colonial past. All works from both series impress by their large size, but above all by the use of millions upon millions of jewel beetle wing cases. Utilizing the various colour tones of this iridescent material, Jan Fabre takes us into an indeterminate zone, between Paradise and the Belgian Congo. The first volume Tribute to Belgian Congo presents the artist’s final step in dealing with Belgium’s colonial past, presenting 23 single mosaics and one triptych, elaborating his critical reflections on the history of Belgian Congo. The work is inspired by the enslavement of millions of Congolese and the atrocities committed against them as well as the greed of the colonialists, who stole as much as possible of the natural riches the country had to offer. Fabre depicts the brand logos and products of companies that co-organized the horrors in the name of profit, the whole pride of Belgian industrialists of the late 19th century. The second book, Tribute to Hiëronymus Bosch in Congo, deals with the absurdity and horror of what happened in the country in a more symbolical way, using both the iconography and imagery of paintings by Hiëronymus Bosch. The works give artistic form to evil deeds and stand as an arresting critique of the folly that ensues when men lose their bearings in life. Both volumes are presented by Eckhard Schneider, general director of the PinchukArtCentre and are introduced by a specialist on the subject, with a collection of texts by more than thirty international art professionals.

Jennifer Montagu is a world-renowned art historian whose name has become synonymous with the study of Italian Baroque sculpture. In honor of Jennifer Montagu’s immeasurable contribution to the field of Italian Baroque sculpture, sixty-two of the foremost scholars of European sculpture have been invited to participate in a symposium in her honor on 6 - 7 September 2013 at the Wallace Collection, London. Thirty of the papers presented there were selected for the publication as a tribute to this generous colleague and friend who has inspired and mentored dozens of younger historians in European art. Dr. Montagu’s academic work began in Political Science at Oxford, but conversations with Ernst Gombrich led her to pursue an advanced degree in art history instead. In 1963, long before the study of Italian bronze statuettes reached the level of interest that it enjoys today, her classic survey, simply titled Bronzes, was met with great enthusiasm, eventually being printed in five languages. Montagu taught at the University of Reading until 1964, when she became an assistant curator of the Photographic Collection at the Warburg Institute. In 1971 she became a full curator of the collection, a position she held until 1991. During these years she published at an indefatigable rate, and following her retirement from that post, her productivity only increased. Montagu was a Slade Professor of Fine Art at Cambridge University, a Mellon Professor at the Center for Advanced Study in the Visual Arts (National Gallery of Art,Washington, D.C.), and a visiting professor at the Collège de France. Montagu’s numerous publications include her monumental study of Alessandro Algardi (Yale University Press, 1985), Roman Baroque Sculpture: the Industry of Art (Yale, 1989) and Gold, Silver and Bronze: Metal Sculpture of the Italian Baroque (Mellon Lectures, CASVA; Yale University Press, 1996). She was appointed LVO (Royal Victorian Order) in 2006 for services to the Royal Collection and CBE (Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) in 2012 for her contribution to the history of art.