Contemporary Art books and the Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition

The Royal Academy’s Summer Exhibition is an essential part of the London art calendar. First held in 1769 it is now the largest open contemporary art exhibition in the world, drawing together a wide range of new and recent work by established, unknown and emerging artists. With this in mind, we look at a number of modern and contemporary art books from Yale.

The Royal Academy’s famous Summer Exhibition has been held every year without interruption since 1769 and continues to play a significant part in raising funds to finance the students. The Exhibition attracts a high volume of entrants each year with over 12,000 entries received this year from 27 countries. The majority of works are for sale, offering visitors an opportunity to purchase original artwork by high profile and up-and-coming artists.

Yale University Press is one of the most respected publishers of contemporary art books in the world, publishing work by both emerging artists and important figures within the contemporary art scene. Take a look at some recently published books on modern and contemporary art below:

Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment

Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment

Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment
by Eeva-Liisa Pelkonen

Pritzker Prize-winning architect Kevin Roche (b. 1922) is best known for the large, bold urban structures he designed in the 1960s and 1970s, including the Oakland Museum of California and the Ford Foundation Headquarters in New York. Roche is also responsible for the master plans of major universities and museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Central Park Zoo. He is among the twentieth century’s most successful corporate architects, receiving commissions for more than thirty-eight headquarters for such companies as Aetna, Conoco, General Foods, John Deere, Merck, and Union Carbide. A student of Mies van der Rohe and principal design associate of Eero Saarinen, Roche is the leading member of the third generation of modern architects. One of his most important contributions has been to see architecture as a part of the larger man-made environment, which involved seeing transportation, infrastructure, and landscape as architectural issues. This book draws on previously inaccessible archival materials and unpublished interviews to present the full range of Roche’s career and place his innovative work within the larger context of modern architecture. More

Page Spreads from 'Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment'

Page Spreads from ‘Kevin Roche: Architecture as Environment’

Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon

Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon

Four Honest Outlaws: Sala, Ray, Marioni, Gordon
by Michael Fried

In this strongly argued and characteristically original book, Michael Fried considers the work of four contemporary artists – video artist and photographer Anri Sala, sculptor Charles Ray, painter Joseph Marioni, and video artist and intervener in movies Douglas Gordon. He shows how their respective projects are best understood as engaging in a variety of ways with some of the core themes and issues associated with high modernism, and indeed with its prehistory in French painting and art criticism from Diderot on. Four Honest Outlaws thus continues the author’s exploration of the critical and philosophical territory opened up by his earlier book, the magisterial “Why Photography Matters as Art as Never Before”. It presents a vision of the most important contemporary art as not only not repudiating modernism in the name of postmodernism in any of the latter’s many forms and manifestations, but also actually as committed to dialectically renewing certain crucial qualities and values that modernism and premodernism brought to the fore, above all those of presentness and anti-theatricality. Four Honest Outlaws takes its title from a line in a Bob Dylan Song, ‘To live outside the law you must be honest’, meaning in this case that each of the four artists has found his own unsanctioned path to extraordinary accomplishment, in part by defying the ordinary norms and expectations of the contemporary art world. Filled with stunning images throughout and accompanied by a DVD illustrating works by Sala and Gordon discussed in its pages, Four Honest Outlaws is sure to provoke controversy even as it makes a dramatic bid to further transform the terms in which the art of the present should be understood. More

Page Spreads from 'Four Honest Outlaws'

Page Spreads from ‘Four Honest Outlaws’

Rebecca Salter: Into the Light of Things

Rebecca Salter: Into the Light of Things

Rebecca Salter: Into the Light of Things
by Gillian Forrester

Rebecca Salter describes herself as an abstract artist and yet her work draws deeply on the experience of landscape, principally through annual visits to the English Lake District but also in Japan, and at the Joseph Albers Foundation in Bethany, Connecticut. In contrast to the work of Andy Goldsworthy or Richard Long, she leaves no mark on the landscape, returning to her metropolitan studio to distill the experiences recorded in her sketchbooks into profoundly mediated paintings, prints, and drawings. Accompanying an exhibition of the full range of her creative output at the Yale Center for British Art, this gorgeous book explores Salter’s work in the context of international Abstraction, and in relation to her experience of Japanese artistic practices, aesthetics, and ideas of space. Richard Cork focuses on the soothing and sensitive nature of her commission for the entrance hall of St George’s Hospital, London, where a softly glowing, horizontal glass panel emits an ever-changing sequence of colours. More

Page Spreads from 'Rebecca Salter: Inter to Light of Things'

Page Spreads from ‘Rebecca Salter: Inter to Light of Things’

Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg: Sculptures and Drawings
by Patrick Elliott

Born in 1949, Tony Cragg is one of today’s most celebrated and popular sculptors. Before studying art he worked as a laboratory technician, which has had an enormous influence on his practice. His work fuses art and science in a rich and arresting way, and he works in an astonishing variety of styles and materials, including bronze, glass, plaster, wood, fibreglass, and plastics. In 1988 he won the Turner Prize. This beautiful book, celebrating the work of one of the world’s most successful and respected artists, concentrates on works made in the last ten years, but it includes also examples of earlier work, and has been produced in close consultation with Cragg. More

Page spreads from 'Tony Cragg'

Page spreads from ‘Tony Cragg’

These books are available to buy from Yale University Press

Related blogs on contemporary art

http://www.flamingomagazine.com/the-ra-summer-exhibition

http://www.contemporaryartdaily.com/2011/07/week-in-review-july-17-2011/

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