Goldsworthy, Paula Rego, Bontecou, Modigliani & Holzer

Andy Goldsworthy

An account of a cairn built on the crest of a small hill at the entrance to the village in Scotland where Andy Goldsworthy lives reveals the importance of his work close to home, which is the inspiration for so much that he then creates elsewhere.
A series of works involving elm trees made near Goldsworthy's home exemplifies his work's beauty as well as its association with death and decay, here made more poignant by the knowledge that so few elms survive since disease wiped out hundreds of thousands of trees.
Passage also includes Andy Goldsworthy's most recent commission, Garden of Stones, a Holocaust memorial at the Museum of Jewish Heritage in New York. Here eighteen oak trees were planted through small holes, in hollowed-out, earth-filled boulders. Growing in an almost impossible circumstances, the trees carry powerful symbolic meaning. Documenting these and other recent works, Passage is a testament to Andy Goldsworthy's determination to both deepen and extent his understanding of the world around him and his and his relationship with it through his art.
Passage by Andy Goldsworthy
ISBN: 0810955865

Paula Rego by Fiona Bradley

Paula Rego draws on well-known sources, including literature, fairy tales, religious stories and cartoons, to give her paintings strong narrative element that draws in the viewer. However, the stories being told are often hard to read as they are subverted to produce an enigmatic, dreamlike atmosphere, influenced by Paula Rego's interest in surrealism. Multiple levels of reference and symbolism both build up and frustrate expectations.
Key motifs (dogs, young girls, dominant father figures, claustrophobic family scenes) recur, creating a uniquely personal iconography. Paula Rego is widely regarded as one of the leading representational artists working today. This book provides a chronological survey of Paula Rego's life and pictorial concerns, drawing heavily on her own assessments of works as revealed in recent interviews. Certain works, illustrating key moments in the development of her practice, are discussed individually, in depth.
Making use of her extensive professional and personal involvement with Paula Rego and her work, Fiona Bradley provides the essential key to this mysterious yet hugely popular artist. This title forms part of Tate Publishing's new Modern Artists series. Paula Rego by Fiona Bradley
ISBN: 1854373889

Lee Bontecou

One of the leading female artists of the late 20th century, Lee Bontecou (b. 1931) became widely known for her welded steel sculptures and plastic and epoxy molded assemblages from the 1960s and 1970s. Her powerful and original constructions, which were both critically acclaimed and actively collected, evoked natural phenomena and organic biological life even as they grew more abstract.
This monograph-the first extensive analysis of her art-presents some fifty sculptures and more than hundred drawings, including her celebrated early works as well as later pieces that are little known and have never been publicly exhibited or published. Along with four original essays, this volume also includes a reprint of Donald Judd's influential 1965 Arts Magazine article on Lee Bontecou.
At last, through this major survey of her work-which accompanies an exhibition organized by the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and ULCA Hammer Museum-we are able to reevaluate the career of an artist who has become legendary in the art world because of the impact of her striking early work and the enormous influence she continues to have on younger artists.
Lee Bontecou: A Retrospective of Sculpture and Drawing, 1958-2000 by Elizabeth A.T. Smith
ISBN: 0810946181

Lucian Freud Paintings

The critic Robert Hughes describes Lucian Freud's quest for a reality beyond naturalism, which has produced some of the most powerful and moving paintings - particularly portraits - of recent decades. Hughes is also author of "The Shock of the New", the book of the television series.
Lucian Freud Paintings by Robert Hughes
ISBN: 0500275351

Amedeo Modigliani

A stunning volume accompanies the largest retrospective of this modernist master ever mounted, an exhibit, opening at the Musée du Luxembourg in Paris in October 2002 and running through March 2003, will be a comprehensive survey of Amedeo Modigliani's career, from his earliest days as a painter in search of a style to his premature death in 1920. The exhibit presents Amedeo Modigliani's paintings, sculptures, drawings, and never before seen masterpieces, selected from major international museums and private collections.
Amedeo Modigliani's relatively short working life was enriched by associations with Toulouse-Lautrec, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Cezanne, and Brancusi. This book offers students of modernism the opportunity to view as a continuity the monumental work of a primary artist of Fauvism and Cubism.
Amedeo Modigliani: the Melancholy Angel by Marc Restellini
ISBN: 8884912601

Jenny Holzer

Jenny Holzer is an artist who works with new media, in locations ranging from baseball stadiums to public transportation systems. This book surveys all her installations, including her celebrated marble benches and electronic boards at the DIA Foundation New York, street and gallery based exhibitions, permanent public monuments, and works on the World Wide Web.
Starting on the streets of New York with simple fly-posters, Jenny Holzer has gone on to disseminate her truisms, slogans, memorials and poems through a variety of media. They are enunciated by an unstable register of personae be it ad man, stand up comic, torturer, victim or evangelist. The sites for her work range from T shirts and golf balls, to dazzling electronic signboards at baseball stadiums or the Internet. The work of Jenny Holzer uses language to investigate ideologies, conscious and unconscious formations about identity and experience.
The complex and poetic texts can be shocking, humorous and intriguing in content; at the same time she draws on Minimalism's use of industrial materials, and deploys scale, movement and light to create art of great formal power and beauty.
The book is part of a series of studies of important artists of the late-20th century. Each title offers a comprehensive survey of the artist's work, providing analyses and multiple perspectives on contemporary art and its inspiration.
Jenny Holzer by Joan Simon, David Joselit, Renata Salecl
ISBN: 0714837547