Bøker utgitt av Editions Skira Paris

¿Monet is for me one of the greatest painters who ever existed. He went his way of exploring light relentlessly [...] the viscera of light became visible.¿ A major artist of the Viennese Actionist movement, of which he was one of the founders, Hermann Nitsch, born in Vienna in 1938, died in Mistelbach in April 2022. Internationally recognised as the master of Austrian performance art, the artist developed a powerfully expressive body of work, borrowing from religious dramaturgy to develop a total art that culminated every year since the 1950s in his ¿Orgien Mysterien Theater¿, where he invited friends and audiences to six days of uninterrupted festivities and performances. At the end of his career, Hermann Nitsch developed a painting of great vitality, increasingly colourful, always closely linked to his performative acts. Fascinated by Monet¿s Nympheas, the artist engaged in a dialogue with this masterpiece of Impressionism, whose proximity to his art he emphasised: ¿In my performances, my expressive and religious painting has become a finished drama, an analytical dramaturgy. What remains to be seen is a frenzy of colour and form that stands out far beyond its content, like the ecstasies of colour in Monet¿s Water Lilies¿. The book will bring together a collection of paintings and graphic works produced shortly before his death, chosen directly from the artist¿s studio.

Leonardo da Vinci and Anatomy: all the power and relevance of this great Renaissance mind. This exhibition catalogue on Leonardo da Vinci the anatomist highlights the mystery of a thought that was both anchored in its time and, combined with a totally new practice (dissection), leading to a new understanding of the nature of life. Da Vinci was not content with a passive description of the human body; he sought to penetrate the secrets of its functioning by first studying the mechanics of humans (bones, muscles, tendons), then the logic of the senses, and finally all the bodily functions (digestion, respiration, blood circulation, reproduction), which made him to use qualitative reasoning. Contrary to popular belief, Leonardo did not carry out his dissections in secret, but in complete agreement with the political and religious authorities, until his materialistic ideas came into conflict with the pontifical authorities, particularly with regard to embryology. The originality of the book is to show how Leonardös work as an anatomist and his work as a painter are inseparable. The book thus links a work such as the Last Supper in Milan with the knowledge gathered in the medical field. The book brings together originals or copies of Leonardös sheets with objects (anatomical waxes, facsimiles of dissecting instruments), books studied by the artist, interviews with specialists and animated 3D reconstructions.

The first monograph in English on a major Polish painter. Józef Halas (1927-2015) is one of the major Polish painters of his generation. Active in Wroclaw from 1949 until his death, first as a student and then as an artist and teacher, he left a unique body of work that, like many of those built largely during the Cold War, remained long unrecognized in Western Europe and North America. The Mountain series, which occupied most of his activity during the 1960s, marks both a strong connection with nature and a distance from the landscape painting tradition. The following series, Oppositions, Partitions, Verticals, Obliques, Levels and Interiors, constitute the pinnacle of his production and testify to a poetics of contradiction which is embodied in multiple and successful ways. The Pocket Gouaches, begun in the late 1970s, reveal an artist who has always remained open to experimentation. For a decade, the history of art has fortunately opened its field of investigation, modernity has become plural and its actors have become more numerous. There is no doubt that Józef Halas must now be counted as one of the important players in this global history. This monograph, with texts by Michel Gauthier, curator at the Centre Pompidou, Magdalena Howorus-Czajka, professor at the University of Gdansk, and Marjolaine Lévy, art critic, aims to contribute to the knowledge of Halas¿s work beyond Poland and by placing it in an international context.

The catalogue raisonné of the artist's complete works, featuring his famous seascapes and other lesser-known works. Jacques Cordier (1937-1975) was a French painter with a versatile artistic technique: when he wasn¿t using oil paint, he painted in watercolor or drew in Indian ink. Despite his short life, Cordier produced a multitude of works, listed here in this catalogue raisonné with over 1,200 illustrations. The book also includes a selection of letters and testimonials written by personalities such as Françoise Sagan, Bernard Buffet and François Cheng. The catalogue covers his entire body of work, from his first works in 1953, when he was just 16, to the year of his death in 1975 ¿ which is more than 20 years of creation. Grandson of sculptor Charles Cordier, Jacques discovered his vocation as an artist at an early age. At just 19, he exhibited his first drawings alongside those of Bernard Buffet. Initially, his muse was none other than Paris, which he portrayed in all its grandeur. From 1962 onwards, due to his military service in the navy, the artist created luminous works imbued with reverie, depicting the magnificent landscapes of the Mediterranean. A colorist¿s temperament is revealed in contact with the light of the South and the color of the ocean. In the latter part of his life, the influence of William Turner is felt in his art. During his lifetime, Jacques Cordier exhibited in France, the United States and Italy.

After more than three decades devoted to intercultural mediation, Brahim Alaoui, former director of the museum of the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris, looks back on his encounters with Arab artists in their home countries or in exile. He brings knowledge and a sensitive look at the work of a generation of modern artists, who were often trained in post-war Europe and then went back to their country to reflect on their identity and develop a post-colonial modernity. Alaoui then presents a selection of contemporary artists who have emancipated themselves from the classical ways of representation at the turn of the 21st century, exploring new mediums and bringing an original contribution to the global dynamics of international artistic networks. Through fifty portraits, we come across the history of art and the debates of different ideas in the Arab world, since the beginning of the twentieth century until today. The book displays numerous portraits of artists in their homes or their studios. An important interview with the art critic Pascale Le Thorel allows us to contextualize Alaoui's encounters with the various artists. A publication that also contributes to the reflection on ¿modernity¿, rethought in its plurality, in the light of new values brought by cultural globalization.

Pascal Haudressy was a French visual artist of Tartar origin. After ten years at UNESCO as a cultural project manager, Haudressy decided to devote himself to artistic production in 2005. He develops his aesthetic style by combining different media: videos, sculptures, and paintings to reconcile the past and the future, materiality and immateriality or even science and myth. After a first monograph published by Skira in 2011, this book offers a rediscovery of Pascal Haudressy¿s artistic practice, especially through an essay by Françoise Paviot on the piece Heart. This major work was exhibited at the Centre Pompidou in 2019 and at the Sainte Eustache church for three years (2017-2020). According to the artist, "[...] it is truly a sculpture, animated by a random process," based on the sabotage of the machine and creating a work between figuration and abstraction. The artist has participated in several solo and group exhibitions in France and internationally, including a notable participation in the exhibition Artists & Robots at the Grand Palais in 2018 with the piece Brain. An essay by Jérôme Neutres, curator and independent art producer, will provide insight into this piece. His artworks have joined the collections of FRAC Nord Pas-de-Calais and agnès b.

Ba's densely textured paintings intertwine African and European histories to explore the corrupting effects of wealth and power and their impacts on communitiesThis is the first monograph on Dakar- and New York-based mixed-media painter Omar Ba (born 1977), whose surreal scenes of violence and fantasy draw from a wide and often dark portfolio of themes: despotic warlords of the present, traditional folklore, colonial oppression and the pharaohs of ancient Egypt. His most abiding theme is the experiences of Black communities, both within America and across the globe. Ba articulates all these narrative threads through a densely textured visual language, applying oil, gouache, crayon and India ink onto rough, readymade surfaces such as corrugated cardboard. After preparing uniform backgrounds rendered in black paint, Ba populates the scenes with an abundance of fantastical beings--part human, part animal or plant.

For the 59th edition of the Venice Biennale, the Lebanese Pavilion exhibits two Lebanese contemporary artists, Danielle Arbid and Ayman Baalbaki, in the exhibition The World in the Image of Man. The dialogue between these two artists is characterized by different geographical and aesthetic points of view: the video Allô Chérie by Danielle Arbid, a filmmaker and video artist who emigrated to Paris, interacts with Janus Gate by Ayman Baalbaki, a painter who lives and works in Beirut. Within his monumental installation, Ayman Baalbaki creates a work embodying the process of fragmentation suffered by the city of Beirut due to the return of barriers and barricades in its streets. The movement of the door of Janus, which is alternately wide open, shuttered or closed, responds to the mother of the artist's frantic race car through Beirut. The video is organized in a split screen, enhancing the impression of a divided city. The soundtrack is composed of snatches of negotiations on the phone accounting for a fractured city in the midst of uncertainty. The catalogue gathers several articles facilitating the apprehension of these two artists and marks the return of the Lebanese Pavilion to the Venice Biennale after 5 years of absence.

Philippe Cognée is a French artist born in Nantes in 1957. Active since the 1980s, he is one of the artists who marked the return to painting in this period. Cognée is known for his practice of wax painting. He projects the photographed or filmed motifs onto the canvas and paints them on the support with encaustic paint. He then covers the canvas with a plastic film and uses an iron to liquefy the wax. The motifs begin to deform under the heat, creating an effect of blur and depth. This technique allows Cognée to dissolve the represented elements, often blurring the line between figurative painting and abstraction. Urban landscapes, views of supermarkets or slaughterhouses, Google Street View shots ¿ the painter finds his inspiration in what surrounds him. While drawing subjects from everyday life and thanks to his atypical technique, Cognée creates original works in which, through the distortion of reality, he shows a poetic vision of the world.

Having exhibited the most iconic works made by famous designers ¿ from Charlotte Perriand, Serge Mouille, Jean Prouvé, Le Corbusier and Ettore Sottsass to Ron Arad, Isamu Noguchi and Choï Byung ¿ the gallery has imposed itself locally and internationally as a major reference in design. Focusing on showing a selection of the best objects and pieces of furniture ever designed, this book also testifies to the high-level quality of curation at Laffanour Galerie Downtown Paris. With exhibitions recreating entire spaces of living, smart staging allows a wonderful immersive experience through the most refined interiors. The gallery participates to the most renowned art fairs: pictures of the gallery¿s booths will also be displayed in the book.

Today, the word "pullman" has come to mean "a railroad passenger car with especially comfortable furnishings for day or especially for night travel". But before the word entered the mainstream, it was a name, that of George Mortimer Pullman, a serial entrepreneur, an extraordinary innovator and one of the cleverest businessmen of America's Gilded Age. Pullman gave his name first to a coach, then to a train and finally to a notion, that of luxury travel. This book will retrace the history of Pullman, from the genius innovation of overnight travel, dining wagons and sleeper beds, to a globally recognized brand synonymous with pioneer engineering, premium mobility and lavish "hotels on wheels". Pullman's history is closely tied with the history of 20th century USA, yet it extended its influence across the world. George Mortimer Pullman (1831-1897) was an American engineer and industrialist. He designed and manufactured the Pullman sleeping car, a luxurious railroad coach designed for overnight travel, and founded a company town, Pullman, for the workers who manufactured it. In 1894 workers at his Pullman's Palace Car Company initiated the Pullman Strike, which severely disrupted rail travel in the midwestern United States and established the use of the injunction as a means of strikebreaking. In 1898, the Supreme Court of Illinois ordered the Pullman Company to divest itself of the town, which became a neighborhood of the city of Chicago.

L¿Atlas is a Parisian artist born in 1978. Fascinated by handwriting from an early age, he moves to different Arabic countries in the 1990s to study calligraphy. In France, he starts by graffiti art, which he combines with his great passion for writing. A balance between form and letter is since then at the heart of his practice. He uses spray paint, scotch tape or gaffer on various supports: canvas, pavement, buildings¿ facades, etc. and is also well-known for his performances. L¿Atlas creates his own labirynthical alphabet which, inked in the city, invites us to question the universality of the language and the limits of illegibility. This monograph presents many variations of artist¿s codified language. Between Optical Art, abstraction, street art, Pop Art and Minimalism, L¿Atlas¿ art is multifaceted.

André Marfaing (1925-87) was a French non-figurative painter and printmaker associated with abstract art and informalism. This catalogue raisonné of is a complete repertory of his painted work, from his initial "youth" paintings (1948-52) until his last works completed in 1986. 1952, the year he took up non-figuration, was a fundamental step that led him very quickly to abstraction. His first forays into painting, his earlier figurative canvases, still lifes, landscapes and even his few portraits, live on as witnesses to his apprenticeship and as pointers to an artistic adventure that remained latent. The use of acrylic, which gained ground in 1970, led to formal inflections that reached into the heart of his painting.Marfaing probes what is deepest in others as well as his own private space, the confines of a nature within, a cosmos without landscape, a terrain whose contours and features he ceased depicting long ago. The present catalogue raisonné retraces such a path step by step, following up the clues and noting the silences, without ever dissipating the mystery that Marfaing knew how to fathom and to sustain. One must follow these traces as he himself proceeded - with humility, to come to him in the same way his painting calls us. His works, his writings, his friendships, his struggles form an inter woven and inextricable whole.

Two-dimensional Plensa Jaume Plensa is one of the major figures of contemporary sculpture, best known for his large-scale human figures in stainless steel. This monography presents the artist from another angle, showing his graphic works. The book offers an intimate insight into Plensäs universe. Characterised by a greater freedom, as they are not made to order and do not require assistants¿ help, the drawings are a form of reflexion and experimentation for Plensa. He works with various materials, such as plastic sheets, or thick glue on paper or Plexiglas, which allows him to play with light and transparency and gives his works an impression of volume. As in the case of the sculptures, the artist focuses on the human, representing a variety of figures, which he assembles with elements such as photos, letters from different alphabets or numbers. This monography brings to light the diversity of Plensäs creation and the richness of his artistic language. Far from being reduced to preparatory works, Plensa's drawings, often of very large dimensions, function as artworks in their own right, showing the diversity of Plensäs ideas.

Graffiti is like art: everyone thinks they know what it is, but things get complicated if you try to give a precise explanation. This book will trace a history of the art of graffiti through the evolution of Tilt's work. Graffiti writing, which is based on drawn and painted letters, is a movement many of today's graffiti artists - Tilt included - claim to be part of when they want to highlight their own singularity and resist the "street-art turn" of the visual artworks currently produced in public space. The artist painted his first tag as "Tilt" in 1990. He knew from then on that graffiti would be a lifelong passion. Graffiti conveys a libertarian, if not anarchistic and invasive, relationship with the city, against architectural and urban authoritarianism, the pervasiveness of advertising, and disfigured blocks. As far as Tilt is concerned, the content does not necessarily have to bear any explicit political message: the gesture itself embodies an activist form of intervention on the territory. From 2016 on, Tilt has been recreating a series of abstractions in his studio. His recent artwork tell its own story, just as strikingly surprising as a piece of graffiti you would happen to see in the city, they are both inscribed in the subversive origins of graffiti and in the history of painting. Whether it be vandalistic-in the streets, where it belongs to everybody - or a decorative object - as the first writers to enter New York City's art galleries as early as the 1970s had decided - graffiti is an ongoing story to tell - or rather, to write...

Slimen El Kamel was born in 1983 in Mazouna in the region of Sidi Bouzid in Tunisia. Nourished by popular stories, his childhood was shaped by the imagination of the rural environment where the tradition of storytelling and popular poetry flourished. His studies at the Higher Institute of Fine Arts in Tunis allowed him to crystallize this literary and intellectual heritage into a singular plastic practice. A practice whose genesis opens through a writing and draws its resources in his texts, sometimes poetic or literary, sometimes memorial or improvised. The daily scriptural exercise, as much as it circumscribes, extends the horizons of his plastic universe. Not far from the free figuration, the artist questions the relation of the real and the imaginary by the dramatization of the constellated image. The figure of a reality levitates in the space of an imagination and a proliferating abundance where a transfiguration of the social and popular fact in a surrealist vision is played. Images of the memory, images of a reality taken on the supports of the everyday life cross in a pictorial field where, to flower of painting, the rustle of a dialogue begins without end, not for the account of a fact, but for a festival of the accounts.