Surrealism was one of the most interesting and influential at movements of the 20th century. A collective adventure begun by a small group of intellectuals in Paris in the early 1920s, amongst them Max Ernst, Rene Magritte and Salvador Dali, its influence was felt through the rest of continental Europe and in Britain, the Americas, Mexico and Japan.

Published to accompany a major exhibition of his work, in Liverpool and St Petersburg, this study presents Salvador Dali's engagement with myth, legend and belief. Focusing mainly on the 1930s and early 1940s, during his involvement with the surrealist movement, it explores his illustration and adaptation of clasical, popular and Catholic narratives, his fascination with stories in collective ownership and his determined appropriation of them for the self-consciously orchestrated story of his own life.

Published to accompany the exhibition held at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 30 July - 25 September 2005, Scottish National Portrait Gallery, Edinburgh, 30 July - 11 September, Edinburgh Castle, Edinburgh, 29 July 2005.

An exploration of the unsettling collisions of art and culture in Georges Bataille's revolutionary journal and a new consideration of twentieth-century masterpieces by Picasso, Miró, Dalí, and others against the canvas of their renegade times. In the Paris art world of the 1920s, Georges Bataille and his journal DOCUMENTS represented a dissident branch of surrealism. Bataille—poet, philosopher, writer, and self-styled "enemy within" surrealism—used DOCUMENTS to put art into violent confrontation with popular culture, ethnography, film, and archaeology. Undercover Surrealism, taking the visual richness of DOCUMENTS as its starting point, recovers the explosive and vital intellectual context of works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Giacometti, and others in 1920s Paris. Featuring 180 color images and translations of original texts from DOCUMENTS accompanied by essays and shorter descriptive texts, Undercover Surrealism recreates and recontextualizes Bataille's still unsettling approach to culture. Putting Picasso's Three Dancers back into its original context of sex, sacrifice, and violence, for example, then juxtaposing it with images of gang wars, tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Hollywood musicals, and jazz, makes the urgency and excitement of Bataille's radical ideas startlingly vivid to a twenty-first-century reader. Copublished by Hayward Gallery Publishing, London

Fotografier.

Unorthodox materials such as over-the-counter remedies, medicinal herbs, prescription pills and psychoactive plants are just some of the materials that make up artist Fred Tomaselli's collaged paintings. Others include cut-out photographs of flowers, insects and leaves from field guides and seed catalogues that jostle for attention with their carefully-pressed and preserved real-life counterparts. Whole figures crafted from magazine cut-outs of animals and body parts--nightmarish Archimboldo-esque hybrids--present Tomaselli's intensely personal vision of the universe. Moving between abstractions and figurations, Monsters of Paradise presents 32 visually exuberant works reproduced in glorious color, and provides a comprehensive view of Tomaselli's work from 1995 to today.

Published to accompany exhibition held at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 22 May - 19 July 2004.

After a career spanning nearly half a centuury, Paula Rego is acknowledged to be one of the leading figurative artists at work today. Drawing on literature, fairy tales, myths, religious stories and the cartoons of Walt Disney, among other sources, she creates strongly narrative works imbued with a sense of subversive mystery. Writer and curator Fiona Bradley provides a key to understanding Rego's imagery through her searching account ogf the artist's life and working practices.