Bøker utgitt av Skira

In this new collection, the internationally exhibited and award-winning documentary and fine art photographer, David Lurie returns to the terrain of the city, but this time with a specific visual agenda in mind which he shapes with the eye for a carefully composed frame of both a documentarist and a fine artist. Lurie¿s new collection strikes at the very heart of the dilemma of unequal access to the technological means of production ¿ the digital sphere, usually reached via the ubiquitous smartphone. With his aesthetic eye, skilful sense of composition, lighting and colour and, most importantly, a keen sense of the topicality and socio-political importance of what is contained within his frames, in his new project Lurie visually dramatizes the explosion of cheap and available camera technology built into smartphones, which has coincided with a corresponding explosion of the platforms on which their images can be seen ¿ social media. This seemingly extreme democratisation of image making in fact also disempowers, by turning the data inherent in all images ¿ locations, faces, frequency of images, likes and dislikes ¿ into monetisable information to be harvested and deployed by social media corporations. Street photography started out as a means to document and thereby understand new ways of living that rapid urbanisation and industrial work and leisure practices had brought about. As a medium, street photography focused on popular culture and the working classes as a result. The novelty of having one¿s lifestyle and values disseminated photographically is a mainstay of the street photography idiom ¿ one that is now overshadowed by the ubiquity of its post-capitalist, self-initiated forms. This very ubiquity conceals the ideology behind a variable and radically unequal access to digital culture, still very much organised along class and racial lines.

UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2001, Villa d¿Este is an Italian garden masterpiece with an outstanding array of fountains, nymphaea, grottoes, water features and sound effects. Following the disappointment for not having been elected Pope, Cardinal Ippolito II d¿Este in this villa revived the splendour of the courts of Ferrara, Rome and Fontainebleau, echoing the magnificence of Villa Adriana. Governor of Tivoli from 1550, the Cardinal immediately envisioned the creation of a garden on the slopes of the valley known as Valle Gaudente. But it was only after 1560 that the Villäs architectural and iconological programme was defined by painter-archaeologist-architect Pirro Ligorio and executed by court architect Alberto Galvani. The palace was decorated by the leading exponents of late Roman Mannerism. When Ippolito d¿Este died in 1572 the villa was almost completed. Further 17th-century interventions were followed by a period of decline, until Cardinal Gustav Adolf von Hohenlohe infused new life into the property also welcoming the musician Franz Liszt (1811¿1886). Acquired by the Italian State, Villa d¿Este was restored and opened to the public in the 1920s and 1930s.

Published to mark the 20th anniversary of September 11, 2001, Fulvio Roiter: High-Rise New York celebrates the city and people of New York. Consisting of over 60 colour photographs taken during 1984-1998 by the internationally-acclaimed Italian photographer Fulvio Roiter (1926-2016), they illustrate the traits of beauty, strength, resilience and hope with a sense of poignant immediacy and timeless elegance. They recall a New York that once was, its instantly recognizable skyline irreparably and arbitrarily altered by the tragic set of events that unfolded just a few years afterwards. They collectively present a New York City over an imaginary 24-hour period, key historical events such as the immigration surge of the late 19th century and the 9/11 attacks subtly woven into the volume's poetic narrative with sensitivity and respect. As New York emerges from yet another life-changing experience caused by the Covid-19 global pandemic, Roiter's intimate portrait of New York and its inhabitants stands as a stoic reminder of life after death, of light after darkness.

The result of an over fourteen-year research conducted by Archivio Mario Schifano, the publication is divided in four volumes, each dedicated to a single decade. This first volume presents the works the artists created from 1960 to 1969 with 500 high-resolution pictures and about 300 mainly so-far unpublished photographs from Mario Schifano's personal archive, Achivio Ugo Mulas, and the Camilla and Earl McGrath Foundation. The son of an archaeologist head of the Leptis Magna excavations in Libya, Mario Schifano carried out his apprenticeship at the Etruscan Museum of Villa Giulia, and made his artistic debut in 1960 with an exhibition in Rome presented by Pierre Restany; Schifano immediately captured the critics' interest with his monochrome paintings evocative of the photographic screens that would later incorporate numbers, letters, road signs, and Esso and Coca Cola logos. In 1963 he travelled to the United States for the first time and met Frank O'Hara, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol. His works started to include quotations from the history of Italian art and Futurism. In this period he painted his first Paesaggi anemici and in 1966-1967 he began the Ossigeno ossigeno, Tuttestelle, Oasi, and Compagni, compagni series. Besides his solo shows and his participation in national and international group exhibitions, during the 1960s Schifano also worked on full-length films, directed three experimental films, and col laborated with a psychedelic rock band. An ideological and existential crisis forced him to isolate in his studio for periods of time during which his production focused on the reinterpretation of the art of Magritte, De Chirico, Boccioni, Cézanne, and Picabia.

From the first championship, won by Nino Farina with his Alfa and his famous cigar between his lips, to Hamilton's heroic exploits, taking in en route all the legends of Formula 1: Ascari, Fangio, Lauda, Senna, Prost and Schumacher are just some of the protagonists in this book. A spectacular account of the winners, their extraordinary cars and their duels, but also a story of big defeats and great heroes who, while they didn't win the championship, still became legends: Gilles Villeneuve above all.

In the eighth decade of her life, Mira Lehr is in her studio creating work daily. Her work can be found in many public and private collections. Born in pre feminist times, well educated at Vassar, majoring in art history and philosophy, Mira might have been one of the countless female artists whose art became subservient to the expectations of women in the 1950's. However, Mira did it all. She married, raised a family and continued with her artistic training studying with leading figures of the time such as Motherwell and Hoffman. Mira has spent the last 40 years living in Miami. She was responsible for bringing many well-known artists to lecture and inspire and emboldened other women artists in cities like Miami. In 1969, Mira was selected by Buckminster Fuller to participate in the World Game Project. The agenda was to investigate scenarios for making human life sustainable on the planet. This sparked a new direction for Mira and she found her voice. Lehr notes, "I got the feeling we are meant to survive and to survive well." Mira Lehr believes in nature. She believes in its beauty, its force, its strength, its vulnerability and its need for ecology. It is said that art is visual philosophy. Mira Lehr understands this and takes us on a beautiful journey through the longevity of her work interspersed with notable essays and interviews. In 1995, the first book on Mira Lehr, Arc of Nature, was published. This new book, which is Mira's first international monograph, includes this 1995 book and then her subsequent years of her artistic practice.

The photography of German artist Hans Georg Berger has always focused on investigating identity, whether personal or cultural; here it is represented through 145 fine quality black and white photographs, printed using the silver gelatin process on baryta paper, starting with the negatives from the artist's Berlin archive. The title "Discipline and Senses" brings together in a single theme the artist's profound intellectual experiences and the studies he carried out over the course of almost fifty years, from the 1970s to today. Berger's approach is based on the ethical, not just aesthetic, centrality of the subject of the photograph. It is a remarkable and probably unique journey into great contemporary photography.

Ahmed Morsi: A Dialogic Imagination discusses the places, people, texts, ideas, and materials that have shaped the unique practice of the New York-based Egyptian artist Ahmed Morsi. A painter, poet, printmaker, and critic, Morsi has created a diverse body of work abundant in mythic beauty. After coming of age in the 1940s as part of the Alexandria School, a movement led by free thinkers and artists that marked the city's emergence as a postwar Mediterranean cultural entrepot, Morsi spent time in Baghdad, where he benefited from the city's vibrant literary renaissance of the 1960s, as an art critic and translator, before settling in Cairo, and eventually immigrating to New York in the mid-1970s. In Cairo, Morsi helped lead the journal, Galerie 68, which became the voice of the Egyptian avant-garde, while experimenting with theatrical set design and artist's books. This volume highlights the rich interplay between Morsi's poetry and paintings and emphasizes the way his multivalent practice conducts a dialogue with the wider world.

The retrospective dedicated to the great Italian artist Alberto Burri (1915- 1995) seeks to explore the beauty and complexity of the creative process that underlies all his work. The exhibition is curated by Bruno Corà, president of the Fondazione Palazzo Albizzini Collezione Burri in Città di Castello. The title La poesia della materia (The Poetry of the Material) evokes what Burri managed to produce, working with the most varied materials and recycling anything that happened to come into his hands with an inexhaustible creative energy. Tar, paper, fabric, jute sacks, combustions of plastic, wood and iron with their welds: ¿Burri ennobled even the poorest and most ordinary materials, bringing them into the dimension of beauty, which, to be authentic, must always be reconquered.¿ Although he is one of the most important and internationally well-known Italian artists of the second half of the 20th century, Burri¿s work still holds many secrets in store, which this exhibition, and the accompanying catalogue, hope to shed light on.

Pablo Atchugarry (b.1954), a Uruguayan of Italian origin, is one of the most acclaimed sculptors internationally, and for many years he has chosen Lombardy as his place of inspiration and production. Well-known in Europe and America - or rather, the Americas - the Uruguayan artist chose Lecco and its mountains to create his work and make it known around the world: his Foundation, established in Miami, not only contributes to his fame, but stages temporary exhibitions to introduce people to the world of art, particularly the art of South America, in a spirit of solidarity that is truly exceptional. The "modern" meaning of his sculpture, in the sense that could be attributed to the "tradition of the new", perfectly embodies its international flavour that has rewarded him with a slow, growing and inexorable success. Monumentality is one of the significant features of his art: a characteristic that emerges powerfully in his works of great impact, sited in squares and public places all over the world. The material concerned is marble, his main source of inspiration, the element from which the work takes shape, thanks to ceaseless physical effort, continuous in his devotion to discovery and exploration of what can emerge from the material volume worked with a chisel and by smoothing. This new large-scale, volume contains 48 pages with photos of the display of the works in the exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, with the central nucleus in the beautiful Sala delle Cariatidi, the site chosen by Picasso in 1953 to display his Guernica, after the Metropolitan in New York.

Toni Zuccheri (1936-2008) was an artist, architect, designer, sculptor and poet of glass and nature: the exhibition and catalogue retrace his incredible career The son of the animalist painter Luigi Zuccheri, he inherited his father's passion for animals, which feature frequently in his creations. Toni Zuccheri studied at the architecture faculty of the University of Venice under the guidance of Gardella, Albini, Scarpa and Samonà. He started collaborating with Venini in the 1960s: following family tradition, his first works in glass were animals made in polychrome glass using fine techniques such as "murrine". In 1965, he started collaborating with Gio Ponti, with whom he designed a new system of large glass windows, the "Vetrate Grosse". After this he expanded his glass production with new colours and subjects, participating in numerous exhibitions around the world.

The eminent artist and designer, Tapio Wirkkala, helped to make the Finnish school famous around the world: this exhibition and catalogue reveal his art and his creativity. When Wirkkala designed his first objects for Venini in the mid-1960s, he was already a figure of worldwide fame, with prominent projects in the various design sectors. His activities with Venini represented an interesting phase in his versatile career and, at the same time, had a profound influence on the Murano glass-making industry. It was Tapio Wirkkala who promoted the "Incalmo" technique that he often combined with "Mezzafiligrana" and "Murrine", thanks to the skills of the master glassmakers and the rich palette of colours. His works feature in major museums around the world.

Composed of series of twelve post-2020 civic architecture projects in twelve fames for twelve cities, alongside contributions by writers, historians and artists, Conceiving the Plan constructs a dialogue with the legacy of the late architect and long-time Cooper Union Professor Diane Lewis. It surfaces and questions how civic spaces are nuanced and conceived. For Diane Lewis the city was not only the result of a great number of historical, and ultimately inextricable, strata of form and memory; it was also greater than the sum of its individual architectures and a mental universe all its own. Apart from her drawings, models and built projects, she most effectively conveyed her insights through the medium of film, which captured her unique presence and unmistakable voice-among the most characteristic distillations of the architectural "message" of Cooper Union from the 1970s to the mid-2000s. Architectural historians Daniel Sherer and Barry Bergdoll converse about the themes and approach in a series of short films Lewis created in the final months of her life. The book touches on critical questions-narratological, ecological, social and metahistorical-providing and provoking spatial civic identities. Thus, the projects in the book also, are inseparable from deeply involved critical approaches to pedagogy in the architectural discipline.

Becky Suss (b. Philadelphia, PA in 1980; lives and works in Philadelphia, PA) explores ideas of intimacy, domesticity and memory. Her large-scale paintings of interiors are holistic representations of the sensory and remembered qualities of space, while her small paintings of objects and books become a library of charged personal items. Devoid of figures, Suss' style uses flattened architecture, exaggerated proportions, and distorted perspective to amplify the tension between the factual and the fictitious, mirroring the plasticity of memory, continually reformed and revised. What resonates is how a dwelling, despite its rigid physical structure, can adapt, welcoming the day to-day histories, eccentricities, and impressions of the people who move between its walls. Suss' work often questions the stereotypes of domesticity especially as they relate to the lives of women in America. She is fascinated by American culture's dismissal and dependence on homemaking and homemakers, and inspired by her own personal heritage, the generations of women in her family who managed the domestic sphere without recognition. She aspires to elevate these historically female private spaces that have long been dismissed as unimportant, though in reality are places where family and identity are created and defined. She often draws inspiration from memories of her own grandparents' home and, after becoming a parent herself, she has found inspiration through returning to the literature of her childhood and the memories of these imagined narratives.

The Basilica of St. Francis of Assisi is a mother lode of paintings by artists such as Simone Martini, Pietro Lorenzetti, Cimabue and Giotto, reflecting the emergence of a new age in European art and offering an overwhelming multiplicity of imagery. Margaret Pont informs, provokes and enchants the reader in equal measure through her discussion of various selected visual vignettes represented in some of the frescoes. The distinct originality and diversity of these scenes are considered in their social, psychological and spiritual context. This book focuses on the exquisitely detailed beauty of these artworks and the town of Assisi, animating the profound humanism and affirmative energy which the radiant Francis brought to Umbria and Italy itself. Through an authoritative yet witty narrative, it guides our attention across key themes of the period accompanying the Franciscan phenomenon, which reflected a radical change in consciousness towards human relationships and one's rapport with Nature. The resonance between Christ and Francis is evidenced, as is the less well-known supportive role of women in both periods. Beautifully illustrated, this textured analysis aspires to evoke the artistically rich and innovative atmosphere and the complex medieval setting in which St. Francis, Giotto di Bondone and Dante Alighieri lived. Francis goes beyond personality; his universal vision connects us to the spirit world of cultures, such as the Druids and Buddhists. This book takes the reader on a journey back to find an eternal continuity and soulful pattern that relates to our own chaotic world.

Tom of Finland undoubtedly counts among the great and truly influential artists of the latter 20th century. Through his iconic images, he almost single-handedly changed the way gay men were perceived by society, and - maybe even more important - how gay men perceived themselves. The massive oeuvre that he produced over the course of a career spanning nearly six decades is devoted almost entirely to this one topic: men, their bodies, and their spirits. This extraordinary consistency in subject-matter was matched by a life-long passion for the supreme discipline of freehand drawing. All he needed to create a universe of dazzlingly gorgeous hunks was a pencil and a sheet of paper. And he most likely drew every day of his life. Drawing, it seems, was an exercise for his restless imagination and desire. Tom's world was populated by cowboys, mechanics, cops, punks and thugs - all indulging their desires with great camaraderie and without guilt or prejudice. This book assembles a cross-section of these characters as dreamt up by the artist in rough sketches or more carefully executed studies. Mostly they served as preliminary drawings for the highly finished works, many of which were intended for publication. The playful format of an imaginary sketch book lets the viewer take an intimate glance over the artist's shoulder and share in his exuberant joie de vivre.

This Italian artist, one of the greatest of his generation, has developed a significant and multi-faceted body of work over the years featuring lines of conjunction that are unique on the international panorama. Among these, the relationship that the artist has developed with the history of art is of clear importance. From the Italian Baroque tradition to impressionism, Quayola has conducted a dialogue through video installations, sculptures made by robotic arms, high definition prints, etc., using technology as a lens to explore the tensions and balances between apparently opposing forces: the real and the artificial, the figurative and the abstract, the old and the new. Classical sculpture, historic paintings and Baroque architecture are some of the aesthetics that serve as a point of departure for Quayola's abstract compositions. In addition to texts by important scholars and curators, the book will also develop as a journey through images, thus guiding the public on a fresh visual itinerary.

Nejat Sati, B.A., M.A., Dokuz Eylül University, Izmir, works as an independent professional artist in Istanbul and has participated artist-in-residences in programs in Turkey, Germany, and Nederland. Since the 2005s he has participated in numerous international exhibitions, biennials, and triennials. Nejat Sati's abstract work incorporates a variety of techniques and media, including painting, performance, drawings, sculpture, collaborative works and site-specific installations, often experimental materials. In his enigmatic painting Sati explores cultural hybridity and transculturality as basic conditions of our globalised lives. Sati's vibrant, large-scale recent works layer colour fragments with applications and scrapings of imposto and fosforic material, expressing complex psychological histories and emotions. The immersive nature of colour is fully illustrated. The book comprises of nearly hundred images from past ten years, with an emphasis on his most recent work series. These colour intensive works which could be perceived as reflections of the layers of the artist's subconsciousness, despite being produced simultaneously different time periods, are interconnected and in a continuous dialogue with each other.