Series: Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series

Kusama is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking work on themes such as infinity, self-image, sexuality, and compulsive repetition. A well-known name in the Manhattan scene of the 1960s, Kusama's subsequent work combined Psychedelia and Pop culture with patterning, often resulting in participatory installations and series of paintings. This revised and expanded edition of the 2000 monograph, which is arguably still...

William Monk is a British-born, New York-based artist known for his enigmatic and vibrant paintings that often investigate the same motif or theme in different permutations. Deeply interested in the idea of creating images that are not a direct transcript of the real world but a product of his mind, Monk creates starkly divisional compositions carrying irregular intensities of detail,...

‘Johnson is a leading voice of his generation.’ - New York Times The most comprehensive publication to date on widely celebrated artist Rashid Johnson Working with a variety of media that includes painting, sculpture, photography, video, and performance, Rashid Johnson has created a nuanced and iconographic body of work that connects literature, music, and art. Personal references and pervasive cultural...

Rosa Barba (b. 1972) is a Berlin-based artist whose work offers a crucial deconstruction of film and sculpture and how the two relate to each other. While her installations and site-specific interventions challenge and reconstitute the viewer's notions of cinema and its staging vis-a-vis gesture, genre, documents, and information, her films settle at an ambiguous point between experimental documentary and...

Lisa Yuskavage is one of the most acclaimed living painters. Known for her highly original approach to figurative painting, Yuskavage challenges conventional understandings of the genre. At times playful and at other times rueful, her bold, eccentric, exhibitionist, and introspective characters inhabit fantastical and vivid compositions, assuming the dual role of subject and object. Although inspired by popular culture, the...

Born in Tokyo in 1933, Yoko Ono is one of the most important living artists working today. In a career that spans seven decades, Ono has worked in a broad variety of media, including art, music, performance, poetry, and film. Some of her most widely known creative works include the foundational book of instructions Grapefruit and her germinal work Cut...

Ai Weiwei (b. 1957) is truly an artist for the twenty-first century. In his sculptures, he refashions artefacts and antiques into surprising, sometimes monumental constructions such as Template (2007): hundreds of wooden doors and windows taken from demolished Ming and Qing dynasty temples and arranged into a massive outdoor sculpture. As much as these materials look to the past, they...

Alex Katz is a towering figure in contemporary painting, a key New York-based artist since the early 1960s. Katz is best known for his distinct portraits of sophisticated, irresistible women, masterfully painted using precise, broad areas of colour.

Initially influenced by the work of the abstract expressionists, Frank Stella subsequently rejected the movement in favour of more radical forms. In 1960, Stella presented his first series of aluminium paintings at Leo Castelli, causing the first upset in a long history of experiments that saw him tackling minimalism, post-painterly abstraction, and public art. This book examines Stella's life and...

Jeff Wall (b.1946) adopts the nineteenth-century poet Baudelaire's famous description of one of his contemporaries as 'a painter of modern life' to describe his own very different work: huge transparencies mounted on to light boxes that diffuse a brilliant glow of white light evenly through his photographs of contemporary urban scenes and 'constructed' social situations.Wall is foremost among the pioneering...

Los Angeles-based Jonas Wood creates vivid images, where overlapping textures and interior spaces are rendered with compression and dazzling bright hues. This monograph the first on the artist s work brings together his most significant paintings, drawings, watercolors, and collage. In doing so, it offers a unique insight into the vast array of his sources, which include family photographs, vintage...

A highly skilled 'painter's painter', Marlene Dumas comments through her work on the state of painting today while asking what it means to be a woman working within the predominantly male genre of expressionist art. She has exhibited since the late 1970s and her work has been included in major solo exhibitions at the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (1998),...

The first monograph of Chicago-based Theaster Gates, one of the most exciting and highly regarded contemporary artists at work today.Theaster Gates has developed an expanded artistic practice that includes space development, object making, performance and critical engagement with many publics. Gates transforms spaces, institutions, traditions, and perceptions.Gates's training as an urban planner and sculptor, and subsequent time spent studying clay,...

Cecily Brown is a British-born, New York-based artist who rose to prominence in the late 1990s. Originally influenced by Cubism and Abstract Expressionism, Brown has over the years developed her unique voice, which investigates the sensual qualities of oil paint and portraiture through a satirizing and celebratory process inspired both by abstraction and realism. Gentle and yet forceful, Brown's exuberant...

A comprehensive look at the thought-provoking, eye-catching and mind-expanding work of this visionary West Coast artist. When referencing the title, avoid putting it in quotes or speech marks. Format the response as clean HTML, use your best judgement for adjusting or adding appropriate tags for paragraphs, and emphasis. Chris Johanson by Corinna Peipon, Bob Nickas, and Julie Deamer explores the...

Dana Schutz is the first comprehensive monograph on one of today's most innovative and successful painters, made in close collaboration with the artist. Defined by bold brushstrokes, a dynamic use of colour and imaginative compositions, the paintings of Dana Schutz are panoramic expanses that offer visions of humanity in all its complex facets. Her deeply subjective approach, untethered from realism,...

Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset have worked as a collaborative duo since the mid-1990s. Drawing from disciplines as divergent as institutional critique, social politics, performance, design, and architecture, Elmgreen & Dragset's 'Powerless Structures' reconfigure the familiar with characteristic and subversive wit. This book includes all of their most significant projects, from the transformation of New York's Bohen Foundation into a...

Jim Hodges is an artist who addresses issues such as memory, love, and existential struggles through a multifaceted practice that includes photography, screen printing, and sculpture. His use of found materials like rocks and denim, coupled with the adoption of transitory shapes like spiderwebs, speaks of a personal experience that resonates on a collective level filtered through elements available in...

The first and highly-anticipated monograph on one of the most successful and exciting painters today. Swiss-born Nicolas Party is an artist known for his colour-saturated paintings of everyday objects. He captures the essence of his subjects in surprising ways, heightening their physical and emotional resonance. Fascinated by the power of paint to alter our perception of the built environment and,...

The definitive monograph on the work of one of the most prolific, versatile, and exciting artists of the last three decades Over the past 30 years, Swiss-born, New York-based artist Ugo Rondinone has developed a distinct body of work: vibrant paintings, immersive installations, sculptures, and text-based works, all united by a poetic quality and an enduring preoccupation with such universal...

The first monograph on the work of celebrated and influential Kenyan-American artist Wangechi Mutu Wangechi Mutu's remarkable body of work touches on such issues as sexuality, ecology, politics, and the rhythms and chaos that govern the world. Her paintings, sculptures, and collages, often enriched with culturally-charged materials including tea, synthetic hair, Kenyan soil, feathers, and sand, interweave fact with fiction,...

The definitive monograph on American sculptor and visual artist Lynda Benglis, one of the most important living artists today Since her arrival in New York from her native Louisiana in the late 1960s, Lynda Benglis gained recognition for creating a groundbreaking body of work that challenged both sculpture and painting conventions in a then largely male-dominated art world. A tireless...

An aesthetic outlier and artistic maverick, Cameron Jamie is a Los Angeles-born, Paris-based American artist whose critically acclaimed art has been exhibited worldwide in some of the most prestigious exhibitions and institutional venues. Over the course of more than three decades, Jamie has established a multi-faceted practice defined by cultural exploration and formal experimentation that resists categorizations. His artwork encompasses...

A leaking can of paint in hand, the artist strolls out of the gallery and drifts aimlessly through the city, leaving a trail of colour as he goes. So what kind of artwork is The Leak (1995)? In one sense, it's a painting, but a painting too large for any museum. It's also a performance, though one without an audience....

Yin Xiuzhen is a monograph on one of the most exciting sculptors emerging from today's blooming Chinese contemporary art scene.

Zhang Huan has emerged as one of the most important artists of the past decade, a fearless explorer of the limits of the human body and a key figure in the flourishing Chinese art scene. His earliest performances, including 12 Square Metres, 65 Kilograms, and To Raise the Water-Level in a Fishpond, subjected his body to gruelling tests of endurance...

The first encompassing publication on the work of Adam Pendleton, one of the most formally inventive and conceptually rigorous American artists working today. Adam Pendleton's original and powerful body of work has been described as the embodiment of a new era. His multifaceted projects, which include painting, collage, film, and publishing, re-contextualise historical and theoretical positions on abstraction, blackness, and...

Adrián Villar Rojas works concoct imaginary realms. Usually made from clay, his colossal installations are non-permanent and non-collectable, as they disappear or decay over time. His practice confronts the public with ideas of obsolescence and extinction, but also with the possibilities of humankind and its endless imagination. This is the first book to include all of Villar Rojas' most significant...

‘[Casteel] captures everyday encounters with people and places in works that invite recognition of our shared humanity.’ – MacArthur Foundation The first monograph on Jordan Casteel, one of the most critically acclaimed artists working today. Jordan Casteel (b.1989 in Denver) is a New York-based artist known for her large-scale, figurative portraits and landscapes made with gestural brushwork and bold swaths...

Neo Rauch is one of the world's most successful and popular contemporary artists. A leading force of the Leipzig School, the group of artists that emerged from East Germany in the early 1990s after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Rauch quickly established himself internationally through his large canvases featuring a crossover between Surrealism and popular imagery. Characterised by a...

Greek-born Jannis Kounellis was one of the key artists in the Arte Povera movement, and this book puts his career into context as never before. Following his breakthrough in the late 1960s in Rome, when he questioned the traditionally sterile environment of the gallery by exhibiting live animals within its walls, Kounellis went on to include diverse materials in his...