An illustrated examination of Philip Guston's comic and complex painting The Studio. Throughout his career, Philip Guston's work metamorphosed from figural to abstract and back to figural. In the 1950s, Guston (1913–1980) produced a body of shimmering abstract paintings that made him—along with Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline—an influential abstract expressionist of the “gestural” tendency. In the late 1960s, with works like The Studio came his most radical shift. Drawing from the imagery of his early murals and from elements in his later drawings, ignoring the prevailing “coolness” of Minimalism and antiform abstraction, Guston invented for these late works a cast of cartoon-like characters to articulate a vision that was at once comic, crude, and complex. In The Studio, Guston offers a darkly comic portrait of the artist as a hooded Ku Klux Klansman, painting a self-portrait. In this concise and generously illustrated book, Craig Burnett examines The Studio in detail. He describes the historical and personal motivations for Guston's return to figuration and the (mostly negative) critical reaction to the work from Hilton Kramer and others. He looks closely at the structure of The Studio, and at the influence of Piero della Francesca, Manet, and Krazy Kat, among others; and he considers the importance of the column of smoke in the painting—as a compositional device and as a ghost of abstraction and metaphysics. The Studio signals not only Guston's own artistic evolution but a broader shift, from the medium-centric and teleological claim of modernism to the discursive, carnivalesque, and mucky world of postmodernism.

Critical of American society, this work addresses themes of race, religion, sex, mortality and war. It is published to accompany the exhibition of works by Edward and Nancy Kienholz at Haunch of Venison, London, 7 Oct. - 9 Nov. 2005.

This installation consists of five sculptural elements and is a fusion of design, science and the history of art.

Overzicht van het werk van de Amerikaanse fotograaf (1962) met als decor het Amerikaanse suburbia waarin de wereld als cinematografische droom wordt weergegeven.

Although these series illustrate distinct subject matter, they share Crewdson's unique preoccupations and compelling aesthetic. "Fireflies" is the result of two solitary summer months spent photographing the fireflies that came alive at dusk each evening. "Beneath the Roses" depicts the homes, streets, and forests of unnamed small towns, revealing emotionally charged moments in the lives of seemingly ordinary individuals. In "Sanctuary," haunting images of the legendary Italian film studio Cinecitta capture the beauty of the decaying film sets. Texts from curators of the exhibition and Crewdson himself offer fresh insight and examine the parallels between these seemingly disparate subjects. Celebrating some of the artist's greatest work, this volume is a must-have for any Crewdson fan and the perfect introduction to those discovering him for the first time. Praise for Gregory Crewdson: In a Lonely Place "Whether one is exploring Crewdson's work for the first time, or revisiting his images, text from both the artist himself and the curators involved gives the reader a personal interaction with Crewdson that illustrates his passion for capturing the lives of others." --Huffington Post

In 'The Centrifugal Soul', Mat Collishaw's forthcoming exhibition at Blain/Southern, the artist presents new sculpture, installation and paintings. Drawing on various forms of illusion, the exhibition explores ideas of superficial truth and the erosive effect of our primal urges for visual supremacy. Collishaw worked with evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller - whose theory is that the origins of art stem from natural instincts of courtship and reproduction - to produce the title work and centrepiece of the exhibition. 'The Centrifugal Soul' is a sculpture in the form of a zoetrope, a pre-film animation device that produces the illusion of motion through rapid rotation and stroboscopic light. Throughout his work, Collishaw has examined the way in which we consume imagery and how our biology has conditioned us to respond. The exhibition reflects the consistent themes addressed in the artist's practice and the diversity of his chosen mediums. Moreover, it questions how much choice we have in accepting what seems to be a natural preoccupation with self-image.

Eberhard Havekost makes dense, anti-gestural paintings that explore the tension between a highly mediated image and the visceral immediacy of a seductively painted surface. Working from shots from TV and video, images from magazines and catalogues and his own photographs, he selects subjects ranging from anonymous buildings, trains and trailers, and modifies them - sometimes just painting a section of the image - to make inkjet prints as the departure point for his paintings.