Books published by Skira

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.

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.

From the extreme edge of the firmament, Hildegard contemplates the wheel of creation that springs from the heart of God, a cosmological instrument in which mankind resides, described in size and proportions, and in the internal movements of the soul and the body. This is the scenario in the Book of Divine Works. It is a long sequence of ten scenes that invites human beings to climb the road of virginitas, towards the re-composition of their own selves in union with the divine Caritas. The refined miniatures in the Lucca manuscript - reproduced in the central plates of the book with a simple key illustrating their symbolic significance - were produced about twenty years after Hildegard's death, and provide a masterful illustration of the architecture of her vision. The dialogue with the images from her first work Scivias (A Journey into the Images, Skira 2019) has cast light on the unifying design that connects them, activating a process of figurative re-transcription of the work. Following the sapiential instructions on dimensions and proportions, and inserting the shapes and colours taken from the Scivias miniatures, constructed according to Hildegard's own instructions, the individual elements described have been redrawn. The use of three-dimensional design has produced vibrant visions of a spherical cosmos, a luminous heavenly vault, a precise anatomy of the human body and the plasticity of the civitas dei (city of God), revealed in the large plates at the end of each chapter. The analysis of the construction lines of the miniatures in the Lucca manuscript and the subtle constructive syllogism of the visions enable us to perceive, outlined in a few brief strokes, the eternal presence of mankind in the heart of God.

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.

The third volume of the series of Photographic Albums of the Intesa Sanpaolo Historical Archives is devoted to a striking and previously unpublished collection of photographs linked to the history of the Banca Commerciale Italiana (COMIT), a credit institution that set up the Società Commerciale d'Oriente (COMOR) in Geneva in 1907, together with a group of Venetian entrepreneurs led by Giuseppe Volpi. Their aim was to promote the financing of plants and infrastructure such as railways, mines, electric power stations and shipping companies in the Near East. COMOR moved its headquarters to Milan in 1912 but it had various offices it could count on in the Mediterranean basin, including an office in Istanbul, then Constantinople, managed by engineer Bernardino Nogara, a fiduciary of COMIT in the Mediterranean and Eastern Europe, and a prominent figure in the history of the 20th century. The photographic narrative begins in the Ottoman Empire of the early 20th century, and ends with the outbreak of the First World War. It is centred around the Nogara family, who followed the head of the family to Constantinople. All the photos published in this book come from the Bernardino Nogara Private Archives, a photographic collection with a value that extends far beyond an interest in the history of the bank. It is a revisiting of subjects that have until now mainly been known and studied only through the official photographs circulated by the Empire to show the West the modernity of Ottoman society. Intesa Sanpaolo has decided to exploit this remarkable visual heritage and make it available to everyone through the bank's Culture and Historical Archives Project.

Emerging in the late 1960s and early 1970s, he quickly established himself at the forefront of the loose cohort of artists, now known as Mono-ha, who radically redefined postwar Japanese art through their ephemeral interventions into both institutional and everyday spaces. Often working with raw natural and industrial elements, Suga gained recognition for installations such as Parallel Strata (1969), a fortress-like configuration of slabs of paraffin wax that subtly deformed in response to the environmental conditions at the venue, and Infinite Situation II (steps) (1970), for which he altered the function of a stairwell at the National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, by covering its steps with sand smoothed to reflect the grade of the incline. Such works were conceived by Suga as "situations," or expansive fields where objects engage each other through relations of fundamental equality and interdependence. According to Suga, the elements of a situation exist in a state of "being left" that activates viewers by its very resistance to being processed as information. In denying the agency of the artist, this vision was an early argument for the agency of all things. Kishio Suga Writings, 1969-1979 is the first volume in an authoritative anthology of translations that will, for the first time, offer English readers a thorough understanding of Suga's thought. It features the trilogy of formative texts Suga wrote in 1968-69 under the penname Katsuragawa Sei; fragmentary statements published in the exhibition listings section of the magazine Bijutsu Techo from 1972 to 1981; and groundbreaking essays spanning the 1970s. This volume also includes a substantial introductory essay by Andrew Maerkle on the theoretical implications of translating Suga, along with commentary by Maerkle on each of the translated texts, and a glossary of Suga terms. Additionally, an essay by Ashley Rawlings addresses the history of the translation of Suga's artwork titles. Illustrations of Suga's works appear throughout.

This first monograph about the artist explores all aspects of Danhôo's artistic path, from early works to his latest creations.

Offers information on over forty exhibiting galleries and their artists, as well as twenty artists appearing in Eye Zone, an exhibition held within the fair.

A monograph surveying the works of the celebrity photographer Uli Weber, one of the most accomplished photographers of his generation.

This guide to the Thyssen-Bornemisza Foundation of Villa Favorita displays the new installation of the Foundation and features a section devoted to the Collection's sculpture and old masters. An essay describes the history of the Villa and its garden on the shores of Lake Lugano.

The complete catalogue of Gauguin's work during one of the most prolific periods of his life, 1873-1888, from his youthful beginnings to his establishment as a mature and innovative painter. Divided into two volumes, the catalogue follows chronologically the development of his work. Each painting is reproduced in colour with commentary.