Joanne Gair is recognised as one of the world’s foremost makeup and body-painting artists. Using the human body as her canvas, she is a master of imagination and painted illusion. In 1992 she painted a suit on a naked Demi Moore for the front cover of Vanity fair. This image became an international icon. Gair’s extraordinary work has continued to grace magazine covers, music videos, and runways eversince.

From Demi Moore to Madonna, Elle Macpherson to Heidi Klum and Sports Illustrated to Vogue, Body Painting is a stunning celebration of Gair’s remarkable work to date.

Soweto is a thoughtful and provocative glimpse into a famous and infamous township. Bieber’s instinctive wandering throughout Soweto, and her astonishing yet careful study of the people, the place and the time, offers us an opportunity to reflect on the mistery of this changing space.

Jodi Bieber was the winner of 2009 Prix de le l’ Union Europeene at Recontres de Bamako Biennale Africaine de la Photographie. On South Africa’s most respected and critically acclaimed photographers, Bieber is the winner of eight World Presss Awards. Her portrait series ‘Real Beauty’ was the winner of the 2009 First Portrait Series at Picture of the Year International (POYi)

Accompanying a major touring exhibition, Picasso and Modern British Art is the first book to explore Pablo Picasso’s lifelong connections with the United Kingdom.

Picasso’s enormous impact on British modernism is examined through seven artists in particular for whom he proved an important stimulus: Duncan Grant, Wyndham Lewis, Ben Nicholson, Henry Moore, Francis Bacon, Graham Sutherland and David Hockney. Their responses to Picasso’s work are wide and varied: from Francis Bacon’s extraordinary Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944) that draws from Picasso’s paintings of figures on the beach at Dinard, works that Bacon said first inspired him to take up painting, to David Hockney’s pictorial ‘homages’ to Picasso after visiting the major Picasso retrospective exhibition at Tate eight times, the beginning of a life-long obsession with the artist. Such was Picasso’s status that it extended beyond the artistic to the political sphere, with the tour of his anti-Fascist work Guernica at the end of the 1930s and his presence at the Sheffield Peace Conference in 1950 making headline news.

With over 150 illustrations and texts by leading experts in the field, this book sheds light on a little-known aspect of Picasso’s career, while at the same time redrawing our mental map of British culture in the early and mid-twentieth century.

James Beechey is an art historian and the author of Patrick Heron: Paintings 1970-84. Chris Stephens is Curator (Modern British Art) and Head of Displays at Tate Britain and the editor of Henry Moore and Francis Bacon.
Contributors Andrew Brighton, Christopher Green, Helen Little and Richard Humphreys, plus an interview with John Richardson.

Design for a living world asks us to think about the products we use – where they come from, how they are made, and the impacts they have on our planet. The Nature Conservancy invited ten designers to create new objects from sustainable materials sourced from around the world. Wood, plants, wool, and other organic materials were transformed into intriguing objects, revealing extraordinary stories about regeneration and the human connection to the earth’s lands and water. Together, designers and consumers can reshape our materials economy and help advance global conservation ethic by choosing sustainable matrials that support, rather than deplete, endangered places.

Ernest Cole (1940-1960) believed passionately in his mission to tell the world in photographs what it was like and what it meant to be black under apartheid. He identified intimately with his own people in photographs of unsurpassed strength and gravitas, with courage and compassion, he portrayed the full range of experience of black people as they negotiated their lives through the insanity of apartheid and its racist laws and oppression. In order to publish his book, House of Bondage, Cole went into exile. Immediately after it came out in 1967, it was banned in South Africa and this major critique of apartheid has hardly been seen in his own country since.

Cole died in New York after more than 23 years of painful exile, never having returned to South Africa and leaving no known negatives and few prints of his monumental work. Tio fotografer, an association of photographers with whom Come worked from 1969 to 1975 when his place of residence was Stockholm, received a collection of his prints and these were later donated to the Hasselblad Foundation. These extremely rare prints, most of them made by Cole himself and most never previously exhibited, form the core of this exhibion and book. This book tells the story of Ernest Cole’s life, both in his own words and through the reminiscences and writings of those people who knew him personally and professionally.

Tracey Emin first came to public attention in the early 1990s and has gone on to achieve a level of visibility unparalleled for an artist in recent times. Her use of intensely personal, everyday materials gives her work an intimate quality, combining avant-garde ideas with traditions of craft. Employing a variety of media that have included installation, film and video, prints and drawings, neon, fabric and artists’ books, Emin has built up a formidable body of work whilst maintaining a distinctive artistic vision that is all her own.

Neal Brown’s accessibly written and lavishly illustrated survey includes numerous extracts from Emin’s own writings, engaging with the literary quality that underpins most of her work, and placing her portraits in a tradition that includes Egon Schiele, Edvard Munch and Van Gogh.

Reaching beyond any status Emin may have as a media celebrity, this is a thoroughgoing yet approachable introducition to the work of this important contemporary artist.

The American Artist Ed Ruscha (b. 1937) has worked in a variety of media including painting, printmaking, drawing, photography, books and film, to produce art that is at once playful and profound. Based in Los Angeles since the late 1950s, he was influential in the development of Pop Art on the west coast, particularly through the production of a series of artists’ books that continue to inspire younger generations of artists.

This book traces the development of Ruscha’s work across five decades, exploring its engagement with Dada and Surrealism, Pop, the rise of conceptual art, photography, literature and cinema. It also focuses in detail on Ruscha’s techniques – in particular his delicate drawings and prints using organic materials – and the process of making art as documented in his notebooks.

Artists included in this series (click on the artist name for more information):

• Peter Blake
• Louise Bourgeois
• Tracey Emin
• Douglas Gordon
• Antony Gormley
• William Kentridge
• Sarah Lucas
• Julian Opie
• Gabriel Orozco
• Paula Rego
• Ed Ruscha
• Jeff Wall
• Rachel Whiteread
• Richard Wilson

Each book in this series is available from the David Krut Bookstores at 140 Jan Smuts Avenue and Arts on Main, Johannesburg, and at the Montebello Design Centre in Newlands, Cape Town.

It’s not a mistake to see a shape in the cloud. That’s what it is to be alive with your eyes open; to be constantly, promiscuously, putting things together. – William Kentridge.

William Kentridge is one of the world’s leading contemporary artists. His work spans many genres – film, printmaking, books, tapestry, sculpture, and opera and theatre design – but all of these are linked back to the discipline of drawing, which for Kentridge is ‘thinking aloud’, that he finds the most direct way to address ‘an art (and politics) in which optimism is kept in check and nihilism at bay’. With over a hundred illustrations, this survey by author and artist Kate McCrickard is an ideal introduction to his diverse achievements.

Marina Abramović has spent four decades making traumatic and transcendent artworks using her own body as a material–and breaking through the boundaries of visual art along the way. In the early 1970s, Abramović began making performances that have turned into legend. These included lying in the center of a burning five-pointed star (symbol of the communism of her native Yugoslavia) until she lost consciousness; remaining determinedly passive for six hours while members of an audience did whatever they wanted to her (even pushing a loaded gun into her neck); and cutting a pentagram on her stomach before whipping herself and lying naked on a cross made of ice.

When Marina Abramović Dies examines the extraordinary life and death-defying work of one of the most pioneering artists of her generation–and one who is still at the forefront of contemporary art today. This intimate, critical biography chronicles Abramović’s formative and until now undocumented years in Yugoslavia, and tells the story of her partnership with the German artist Ulay–one of the twentieth century’s great examples of the fusion of artistic and private life. Abramović/Ulay started out living in a Citröen van, touring Europe and making “relational” performances that explored their symbiotic (and often painful) relationship. In their final performance, after twelve years of collaboration, the two walked toward each other from opposite ends of the Great Wall of China until, after ninety days, they met in the middle and said goodbye.

In one of many long-durational performances in the renewed solo career that followed, Abramović famously lived in a New York gallery for twelve days without eating or speaking, nourished only by prolonged eye contact with audience members. It was here, in 2002, that author James Westcott first encountered her, beginning an exceptionally close relation between biographer and subject. When Marina Abramović Dies draws on Westcott’s personal observations of Abramović, his unprecedented access to her archive, and hundreds of hours of interviews he conducted with the artist and the people closest to her. The result is a unique and vivid portrait of the charismatic self-proclaimed “grandmother of performance art.”