Сборники работ по искусству

Mythologies for the Future. The powerful world of HR Giger

“At its essence, Giger’s art digs down into our psyches and touches our very deepest primal instincts and fears. His art stands in a category of its own. The proof of this lies in the intensity of his work and imagination, which I can only compare to Hieronymus Bosch and Francis Bacon in their powers to provoke and disturb.” — Ridley Scott

Swiss artist HR Giger (1940–2014) is most famous for his creation of the space monster in Ridley Scott’s 1979 horror sci-fi film Alien, which earned him an Oscar. Yet this was just one of the most popular expressions of Giger’s biomechanical arsenal of creatures, which consistently merged hybrids of human and machine into images of haunting power and dark psychedelia. The visions drew on demons of the past, as well as evoking mythologies for the future. Above all, they gave expression to the collective fears and fantasies of his age: fear of the atom, of pollution and wasted resources, and of a future in which our bodies depend on machines for survival.

Following the SUMO-sized monograph which was begun shortly before the artist's unexpected death, this affordable anniversary edition pays homage to Giger’s unique vision. The book shows the complete story of Giger’s life and art, his sculptures, film design, and iconic album covers as well as the heritage he left us in his own artist’s museum and self-designed bar in the Swiss Alps. In an in-depth essay, Giger scholar Andreas J. Hirsch plunges into the themes of the artist’s oeuvre while an extensive biography draws on contemporary quotes and Giger’s own statements.

The artist

HR Giger (1940–2014) was a Swiss painter, sculptor, and designer, who combined surrealist influences and dark fantasies to create his very own biomechanical universe. He first received acclaim in the 1960s with his airbrushed fantasies of post-apocalyptic creatures and landscapes and rose to fame through high profile movie work, most notably the creation of the monster in Alien, which won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. HR Giger was named in the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 2013.

The editor

Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include the Collector’s Editions Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Ai Weiwei, and the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs like the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat.

The author

Andreas J. Hirsch, born in 1961 in Vienna, is an author, curator and artistic photographer. His writings include books on Pablo Picasso, Tina Modotti, Friedensreich Hundertwasser and HR Giger. From 2009 to 2014, he was curator at the KunstHausWien and organized exhibitions on Henri Cartier-Bresson, Linda McCartney and HR Giger, among others.

About the series:

TASCHEN is 40! Since we started our work as cultural archaeologists in 1980, TASCHEN has become synonymous with accessible publishing, helping bookworms around the world curate their own library of art, anthropology, and aphrodisia at an unbeatable price. Today we celebrate 40 years of incredible books by staying true to our company credo. The 40 series presents new editions of some of the stars of our program—now more compact, friendly in price, and still realized with the same commitment to impeccable production.

Friedrich Stowasser (1928, Vienna – 2000, New Zealand), better known by the name of Friedrich Hundertwasser, was a painter, thinker, and architect, or rather a “doctor of architecture", as he declared in his manifesto of the 24th of January 1990.

His architectural creations, organic and full of imagination, may have been influenced by the works of Antoni Gaudí. Yet, Hundertwasser was more radical in his philosophy. As expressed in his remarkable eco-artistic manifestos, and other achievements (paintings, posters, stamps, houses, and architectural designs), his message remains profoundly and viscerally ecological.

His pictorial work is characterised by an organic abundance of forms and by the brilliance of its colours.
Hundertwasser is an artist who is difficult to classify. With his tremendous love of nature, he is one of the pioneers of humanist and environmentalist architecture, which attempted to reconcile creativity and ecology. This vision has been shared by many young artists all over the world and by the founders of eco-villages.

The Author:

Pierre Restany remains the most influential French art critic of the second half of the 20th century. A witness to the dynamic New York art scene, he founded, along with Yves Klein, the “New Realism" an artistic movement created in reaction to Pop Art, which expressed the distress of the post-war period.
Always alert and on the look-out for a new artistic creation, this eminent art critic became interested in Hundertwasser’s fascinating work and ecological theory. They met on several occasions: in Paris in 1957, and also in Vienna, where they spent three days together. This text is an account of the encounters between two exalted giants of the artistic scene, as well as the homage of a critic to the great Austrian artist.

The dream of a world of peace

"A world full of color," says Friedensreich Hundertwasser, "is synonymous with paradise." With his demonstrations and actions, his manifestos for nature, for more human-oriented architecture and for the improvement of the quality of life and living conditions, Friedensreich Hundertwasser is one of the most fascinating artists of the 20th century. He became a symbolic figure, not only as a painter but also as an architect, ecologist and philosopher, in particular for all those who are searching for a life tuned to the natural and the human.

This anniversary edition consists of the first volume of TASCHEN’s limited edition Friedensreich Hundertwasser, 1928–2000, and offers a complete presentation of Hundertwasser's work, personality and life, with detailed texts by Hundertwasser's longtime friend Wieland Schmied.

The author:
Wieland Schmied has been President of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts in Munich since 1995. He has organised over one hundred art exhibitions and is the author of many books on 19th- and 20th century art, including monographs on Caspar David Friedrich, Alfred Kubin, Giorgio de Chirico, Edward Hopper and Francis Bacon.

Although books on Hundertwasser's work abound, few are as satisfying as this luxuriously designed, one of a kind volume that was originally created as an exhibition catalog. Bound in black linen, foil-embossed, and printed in six colors with impeccable attention to detail, this gem of a book contains ninety-eight color illustrations featuring a selection of Hundertwasser's graphic works along with critical texts and commentary by the artist. A short introduction, an essay on the artist's graphic work and an up-to-date biography make this an indispensable book for fans of Hundertwasser and lovers of beauty.

Friedrich Stowasser (1928, Vienna – 2000, New Zealand), better known by the name of Friedrich Hundertwasser, was a painter, thinker, and architect, or rather a "doctor of architecture", as he declared in his manifesto of the 24th of January 1990.

His architectural creations, organic and full of imagination, may have been influenced by the works of Antoni Gaudí. Yet, Hundertwasser was more radical in his philosophy. As expressed in his remarkable eco-artistic manifestos, and other achievements (paintings, posters, stamps, houses, and architectural designs), his message remains profoundly and viscerally ecological.

His pictorial work is characterised by an organic abundance of forms and by the brilliance of its colours.
Hundertwasser is an artist who is difficult to classify. With his tremendous love of nature, he is one of the pioneers of humanist and environmentalist architecture, which attempted to reconcile creativity and ecology. This vision has been shared by many young artists all over the world and by the founders of eco-villages.

Isaak Levitan (1860-1900) was born into a poor Jewish family in Lithuania and was able to enrol at the Moscow School of Painting in 1873. He made rapid progress, the great merchant collector Pavel Tretyakov buying one of his paintings when he was only nineteen. In 1886 Levitan sketched in the Crimea and from 1887 he spent several summers painting in the Volga region. These years saw the development of his great friendship with the future playwright Anton Chekhov and the creation of his first 'mood landscapes'. Levitan travelled extensively, if briefly, in Europe, visiting Berlin, Paris, the Riviera, Italy, Switzerland, Munich and Vienna. He was thus, unlike many of his contemporaries, well aware of artistic trends in the west, his experience of European art adding to the breadth of his vision. In both his joyful commemorations of the Russian spring and his quiet scenes of fields and forests, lakes and rivers, often seen at twilight, Levitan employed simple, well-loved motifs of the Russian countryside, an expressive brushwork and a subtle tonality. His work was greatly admired by Diaghilev, the revolutionary theatre manager Stanislavsky and the great operatic singer Chaliapin. Towards the end of his short life Levitan, exhibiting with the Wanderers (the Russian association for travelling exhibitions) and the Munich Secession, was responsible for revitalising the teaching of landscape in Moscow. This revised edition of the author's Isaak Levitan Lyrical Landscape (2004 and 2006), also focuses on Levitan's still lifes, portraits and cityscapes. The creative thinking behind some of his most outstanding works is explored and certain parallels are drawn with the landscapes of Monet, who, while Levitan painted on the shores of the Volga, lived and worked near the river Seine. AUTHOR: Averil King is an independent art historian with a particular interest in the art of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Her previously published books are Isaak Levitan Lyrical Landscape, 2004, re-issued 2006, Newlyn Flowers: the Floral Art of Dod Procter, RA, 2005 (both Philip Wilson Publishers), and Paula Modersohn-Becker, 2009 (Antique Collectors' Club).

In December 2003 the painter Jack Vettriano, a coalminer's son, met his parents off the train from Scotland on his way to collect an OBE. Over the last few years Vettriano has had a meteoric rise to fame -- emerging from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields, unknown and untutored, he has become Scotland's most successful and controversial contemporary artist. Appearing on posters and cards, mugs and umbrellas, prints of his work outsell Van Gogh, Dali and Monet and his paintings have been acquired by celebrities around the world.

'The Singing Butler', Britain's most reproduced painting, fetched a record GBP744,800 at auction on April 2004.

Vettriano's images have an often mysterious narrative and are a gateway to an alluring yet sinister world. Daylight scenes of heady optimism, painted against backdrops of beaches and racetracks, are counterbalanced by more disquieting canvases of complex night-time liaisons in bars and clubs, bedrooms and ballrooms. Both sexes are clearly styled -- the men hard-edged and mysterious, the women seductive and enigmatic. Yet beneath the confident posturing, Vettriano recognizes our inherent human frailty, that there is no victor in the struggle between duplicity and desire. Men and women are ultimately trapped by the machinations of intense love and passion with little control over their destiny.

'Jack Vettriano: A Life' presents about thirty new images, as well as some recently surfaced works, plus the best of the paintings previously published in 'Lovers and Other Strangers' and 'Fallen Angels', also by Pavilion.

In December 2003 the painter Jack Vettriano, a coalminer's son, met his parents off the train from Scotland on his way to collect an OBE. Over the last few years Vettriano has had a meteoric rise to fame -- emerging from the unlikely background of the Scottish coalfields, unknown and untutored, he has become Scotland's most successful and controversial contemporary artist. Appearing on posters and cards, mugs and umbrellas, prints of his work outsell Van Gogh, Dali and Monet and his paintings have been acquired by celebrities around the world.

'The Singing Butler', Britain's most reproduced painting, fetched a record GBP744,800 at auction on April 2004.

Vettriano's images have an often mysterious narrative and are a gateway to an alluring yet sinister world. Daylight scenes of heady optimism, painted against backdrops of beaches and racetracks, are counterbalanced by more disquieting canvases of complex night-time liaisons in bars and clubs, bedrooms and ballrooms. Both sexes are clearly styled -- the men hard-edged and mysterious, the women seductive and enigmatic. Yet beneath the confident posturing, Vettriano recognizes our inherent human frailty, that there is no victor in the struggle between duplicity and desire. Men and women are ultimately trapped by the machinations of intense love and passion with little control over their destiny.

'Jack Vettriano: A Life' presents about thirty new images, as well as some recently surfaced works, plus the best of the paintings previously published in 'Lovers and Other Strangers' and 'Fallen Angels', also by Pavilion. In March 2004 Melvin Bragg's The South Bank Show broadcast a programme dedicated to Jack entitled Jack Vettriano: The People's Painter.
Now reissued in smaller user-friendly format.

Jack Vettriano was born in Scotland in 1954. He left school at fifteen, became an apprentice mechanical engineer the following year and worked for five years in the Fife coalfields. He began painting in his spare time at the age of 21. In 1989 he submitted two paintings to the Royal Scottish Academy annual exhibition: both pieces were accepted, hung and sold. This exposure led to his first solo exhibition in 1992 - since then he has had exhibitions in London, South Africa and Hong Kong. He has been featured in many radio programmes, including The Usual Suspects, Home Truths, Postscript and Midweek on Radio 4. His work was featured in BBC 2's coverage of the 1995 Edinburgh Festival, Edinburgh Nights.

Jack Vettriano’s erotic, provocative and emotionally charged paintings have made him one of Britain”s most successful contemporary artists. 

Collected by celebrities the world over, his exhibitions have regularly sold out and paintings now change hands for millions of pounds. 

This beautifully packaged gift-sized collection features Jack’s women – the mysterious, seductive, beautiful, languid, passionate and powerful. Inspired by his many muses, Jack”s paintings have frequently focused on women and they have formed the subject of some of his most popular and significant paintings, including the Singing Butler and Mad Dogs. 

Whether relaxing on a beach, reclining in a bar or dancing through the night, this book celebrates Jack”s vision of women and their importance in his work.

About the Author:

Jack Vettriano is entirely self-taught. A Scotsman of Italian descent, he left school at sixteen to become a mining engineer working down the Fife coalfields. For his twenty-first birthday, a girlfriend gave him a set of watercolour paints and from then on, he spent much of his spare time teaching himself to paint.

His first solo exhibition in Edinburgh was a sell-out and since then he has had solo exhibitions in London, Hong Kong and New York. Over the last twenty years, interest in Vettriano’s work has grown consistently. Vettriano’s best-known painting, The Singing Butler, was sold at Sotheby’s for close to £750,000.

He was awarded an OBE for Services to the Visual Arts. In 2013, a major twenty-year Retrospective exhibition of Vettriano’s work was staged at Kelvingrove art Gallery and Museum in Glasgow. He lives in Edinburgh.

A tragic icon of Abstract Expressionism, Jackson Pollock (1912-1956) took influences from Picasso and Mexican surrealism and developed his own way of seeing, interpreting, and expressing. Though his name inevitably conjures up images of the drip paintings for which he is most famous, this technique was only developed midway through his career. The progression from his earlier work to his final "action" paintings - a veritable revolution of painting as a concept - reveals the genius of this tortured artist whom many call the greatest modern American painter.

About the Series:
Every book in TASCHEN's Basic Art Series features:
* a detailed chronological summary of the artist's life and work, covering the cultural and historical importance of the artist
* approximately 100 color illustrations with explanatory captions
* a concise biography

Jackson Pollock (1912–1956) was a major figure in the abstract expressionist movement and the most influential American painter of the twentieth century. Although he died at the age of 44, he left an unsurpassed body of work.Throughout his life, Pollock wrote very little about his own art or that of others. Nevertheless, in the few writings we do have, and in a few unpublished, undated notes – all of which are gathered together in this volume – the themes are remarkably similar. After acknowledging his initial debt to the Native American sand painters, who gave him the idea for putting the canvas on the floor and working it “in the round”, Pollock routinely referred to his interest in the unconscious as the source of modern art, as it enabled the direct expression of an “inner world,” of individual feeling and experience of the modern age. Moreover, it is clear from his statements that Pollock himself was open to the possibility of such a subjective approach to painting as an international enterprise. He never suggested that the modern world, characterized, in his words, by “the airplane, the atom bomb, the radio,” and which the modern artist had the responsibility to express, was specifically American, but rather that these were features of modern life in a much broader sense. In her in-depth essay, Nancy Jachec sketches an accurate profile of the artist and takes a closer look at his work, as well as detailing the enormous number of studies on the artist.

 1.029 illustrations, 845 in color

A large-format, four-color illustrated catalogue raisonné of the paintings of the eccentric Belgian.

Like Vincent van Gogh and Edvard Munch, James Ensor (1860–1949) was the avant-garde painter in northernEurope and harbinger of the German Expressionists and French Surrealists. A legend in his own time, he achieved fame as the “painter of masks,” bizarre still lifes, and grotesque carnival scenes in harsh, contrasting, brilliant colors, evolving out of the traditional Flemish Danse Macabre. Furthermore, Ensor was skilled in an extraordinary number of styles and continually explored and varied different themes and motifs—facts that make his work seem surprisingly modern to this very day. Now the reader can explore the Belgian painter’s oeuvre in this opulently illustrated, all-color catalogue raisonné. A comprehensive illustrated chronology provides additional details about the artist’s life and work and forms an integral part of this splendid, highly valuable contribution to art-historical research.

150 illustrations

At a time when the dominant mode of painting, Abstract Expressionism, emphasized expressive drama through bold brushwork and largely abstract compositions, Johns’ paintings of
the American flag, targets, numbers and the alphabet demonstrated a decided departure from convention. Despite being painted with obvious care, they seemed emotionally reticent, cool and quiet, far from the emotional fireworks then fashionable. "It all began... with my painting a picture of an American flag. Using this design took care of a great deal for me because I didn’t have to design it. So I went on to similar things like the targets - things the mind already knows. That gave me room to work on other levels. For instance, I’ve always thought of painting as a surface; painting it in one color made this very clear. Then I decided that looking at a painting should not require a special kind of focus like going to church. A picture ought to be looked at the same way you look at a radiator.” Unlike most artists’ statements in New York during the 1950s, Johns’ remarks contained none of the familiar talk of doubt and angst, and his selection of subject matter appeared deliberate, thoughtful, and far removed from emotional attachments and desires. To younger artists his art seemed not so much cold and unfeeling as clear-eyed and honest after the excesses of Abstract Expressionism.
Furthermore, in selecting recognizable subjects, Johns seemed to reject prevailing abstract modes of painting, yet his subjects themselves - flags, targets, numbers - each possessed a vital characteristic of classic abstraction, namely, a flatness rendering them all but indistinguishable from the picture plane itself. This books underlines how Johns’ work made the polarity between abstraction and representation that had dominated debates about modern art for decades seem suddenly obsolete, opening up other ways of thinking about art’s relation to the world. It also tries to understand why since his first exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery, at the age of twenty-seven, he has remained one of the major artists of the contemporary artistic scene until today.

About the author:
Catherine Craft is an art historian specializing in modern and contemporary art. She earned her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin with a dissertation on the New York art world between 1951 and 1965. She is author of the forthcoming book An Audience of Artists: Dada, Neo-Dada, and the Emergence of Abstract Expressionism, 1945-1953 and has published numerous articles on Johns, Rauschenberg, Duchamp, Pollock, and other artists in such prestigious reviews as The Burlington Magazine. She has also lectured at important museums, including the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. She currently lives between Texas and Germany, where she works as an independent scholar.

The legend of Jean-Michel Basquiat is as strong as ever.

Synonymous with New York in the 1980s, the artist first appeared in the late 1970s under the tag name SAMO, spraying caustic comments and fragmented poems on the walls of the city. He appeared as part of a thriving underground scene of visual arts and graffiti, hip hop, post-punk, and DIY filmmaking, which met in a booming art world.

As a painter with a strong personal voice, Basquiat soon broke into the established milieu, exhibiting in galleries around the world. Basquiat's expressive style was based on raw figures and integrated words and phrases.

His work is inspired by a pantheon of luminaries from jazz, boxing, and basketball, with references to arcane history and the politics of street life-so when asked about his subject matter, Basquiat answered "royalty, heroism and the streets." In 1983 he started collaborating with the most famous of art stars, Andy Warhol, and in 1985 was on the cover of The New York Times Magazine. When Basquiat died at the age of 27, he had become one of the most successful artists of his time.

This book allows an unprecedented insight into Basquiat's art, with pristine reproductions of his most seminal paintings, drawings, and notebook sketches.

In large-scale format, the book offers vivid proximity to the artist's intricate marks and scribbled words, further illuminated by texts from writer and curator Carlo McCormick, a contemporary of Basquiat's on the New York scene, and curator and art historian Eleanor Nairne.

Richly illustrated year-by-year chapter breaks follow the artist's life and quote from his own statements and contemporary reviews to provide both personal background and historical context.

The editor:

Hans Werner Holzwarth is a book designer and editor specializing in contemporary art and photography. His TASCHEN publications include Collector’s Editions like Jeff Koons, Christopher Wool, Albert Oehlen, Ai Weiwei, and the David Hockney SUMO A Bigger Book, as well as monographs like the XXL-sized Jean-Michel Basquiat and survey books such as Modern Art and Art Now! Vols 3 and 4.

The author:

Eleanor Nairne is a curator at the Barbican Art Gallery. She has worked on a number of critically acclaimed exhibitions and publications, including Basquiat: Boom for Real (2017) and Imran Qureshi: Where the Shadows are so Deep (2016). Prior to the Barbican, she was curator of the Artangel Collection at Tate. She is a regular catalogue essayist, a writer for frieze, and a previous Jerwood Writer in Residence.