Books by Michael Bracewell

Hirst's Psalm paintings allude to Gothic stained glass windows and the circular patterns of Buddhist mandalasThis beautifully illustrated book constitutes a comprehensive survey of Damien Hirst's Psalm paintings. The 150 works in the series are made up of iridescent butterfly wings and paint on canvas, which combine to form kaleidoscopic patterns reminiscent of Gothic stained glass windows. Dating from 2008, the paintings address some of Hirst's most enduring and important themes: beauty, art, belief, life and death. Each of the fully illustrated paintings is accompanied by the Old Testament prayer from which its title is derived, the text rendered on images of individually selected marble samples. Also included is a complete list of works, and essays by art writers Michael Bracewell and Amie Corry. In his essay, Bracewell writes: "The Psalm paintings can't help but bring together, in literal form, such fundamental concepts as beauty, and power over death through prayer and belief, while simultaneously seeming to propose solely their own--albeit spectacular--abstraction. As they take their place within the greater canon of Hirst's art, these paintings extend his fascination with natural history and the potentially synonymous relationships between life, death, art and 'beauty, ' and the language of Christian faith and religion." The Complete Psalm Paintings is an exquisite companion to one of Hirst's most beautiful series.Damien Hirst was born in Bristol in 1965. He first came to public attention in 1988 when he conceived and curated Freeze, an exhibition of his own work and that of his contemporaries staged in an abandoned London warehouse. Since then Hirst has become widely recognized as one of the most influential artists of his generation. Alongside over 80 solo exhibitions, he has worked on numerous curatorial projects. In 2008, Hirst took the unprecedented step of bypassing gallery involvement by selling 244 new works at a Sotheby's, London auction. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995 and received a major solo retrospective at Tate Modern, London. He lives in Devon, England.

'Re-make/Re-model' tells the extraordinary and largely unknown story of the individuals and circumstances that would lead over a period of almost twenty years to the formation of Roxy Music - a group in which art, fashion and music would combine to create in the words of its inventor, Bryan Ferry, "e;above all, a state of mind"e;.Written with the assistance, for the first time, of all of those involved, including Bryan Ferry, Brian Eno, Andy Mackay and Phil Manzanera; the fashion designer Antony Price, the founding guru of Pop art, and Bryan Ferry's tutor, Richard Hamilton, and many more, 'Re-make/Re-model' is also the account of how Pop art, the avant garde underground of the 1960s, and the heady slipstream of London in the Sixties was transformed into the fashion cults of revivalism, nostalgia and pop futurism in the early 1970s.

A lovesong to London in the early 80s: a pre-computer, pre-digital, pre-mostmodern, New Wave age

This beautiful catalog showcases works by British artist Stezaker made between 1976 and 2017--interventions into found images dating mostly from the mid-20th century such as film stills, press and publicity photographs, magazines, and postcards.ards.

The first in a series of small-format publications devoted to single bodies of work, Fire from the Sun highlights Michaël Borremans’s new work, which features toddlers engaged in playful but mysterious acts with sinister overtones and insinuations of violence. Known for his ability to recall classical painting, both through technical mastery and subject matter, Borremans’s depiction of the uncanny, the perhaps secret, the bizarre, often surprises, sometimes disturbs the viewer. In this series of work, children are presented alone or in groups against a studio-like backdrop that negates time and space, while underlining the theatrical atmosphere and artifice that exists throughout Borremans’s recent work. Reminiscent of cherubs in Renaissance paintings, the toddlers appear as allegories of the human condition, their archetypal innocence contrasted with their suggested deviousness. In his accompanying essay, critic and curator Michael Bracewell takes an in-depth look into specific paintings, tackling both the highly charged subject matter and the masterly command of the medium. He writes, “The art of Michaël Borremans seems always to have been predicated on a confluence of enigma, ambiguity, and painterly poetics—accosting beauty with strangeness; making historic Romanticism subjugate to mysterious controlling forces that are neither crudely malevolent nor necessarily benign.” Published on the occasion of Borremans’s eponymous exhibition at David Zwirner in Hong Kong, this publication is available in both English only and English and traditional Chinese editions.

Critic, novelist and cultural voyeur Michael Bracewell is not a writer who's easy to classify. Born in 1958, a veteran of the British punk scene, he is a shockingly wide-ranging intellect whose influences range from Oscar Wilde to Patti Smith to electronic music artist Goldie. One of the most influential commentators on modern and contemporary art, a regular contributor to Frieze since its inception, Bracewell also has won awards for fashion writing. In an engaging collection from the outstanding British art publisher Ridinghouse, Bracewell explores connections between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and various sub-cultures. These finely crafted essays appraise the vision and ideas of individual artists and the relation of their work to its broader cultural context. Bracewell has written extensively on artists including Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anish Kapoor, Keith Coventry, John Stezaker, Glenn Brown and Damien Hirst. Reading Bracewell is sheer pleasure. His British colleagues describe his work as "lyrical" and "inspired." One critic calls him "the poet laureate of late capitalism," while another says his prose "shimmers with metaphysical warmth." Even allowing for critical exaggeration, there's no question this is a writer of huge talent, with a lot to say.

Made across a 32-year span, the works in Tabula Rasa unite the central themes in the art of celebrated British artist John Stezaker, from the capacities of collage to the current flow in an age of mass media. This volume brings silkscreens on canvas from the early 1990s and film still collages from the 1990s and 2009 together for the first time. Accompanying full-colour illustrations and a series of installation views of Stezaker's work at The Approach, London, an essay by art critic and cultural commentator Michael Bracewell looks at the connections within Stezaker's practice, centering on notions of screens, voids and cut-outs.