Marc Mayer

Since 1989, Roxy Paine has been filling galleries, museums, and sites worldwide with his dark, whimsical installations and sculptures, melding the industrial and the organic to explore manmade and natural systems and their ramifications. Paine divides his work into categories: Art Making Machines, mad-scientist mini-factories that produce works of art; Replicants, replicas of flora and fungi made out of industrial materials; Fungal Fields, painterly compositions of his fungi sculptures; Specimen Cases, vitrines filled with his fungal and floral replicas; and Dendroids, metal tree-like forms. Through these industrial-natural visions, Paine reveals the horror and wonder when science and nature collide.

Jean-Michel Basquiat was only twenty-seven when he died in 1988, his meteoric and often controversial career having lasted for just eight years. Despite his early death, Basquiat's powerful A uvre has ensured his continuing reputation as one of modern art's most distinctive voices. Borrowing from graffiti and street imagery, cartoons, mythology and religious symbolism, Basquiat's drawings and paintings explore issues of race and identity, providing social commentary that is shrewdly observed and biting. This bestselling book, now available in a compact edition, celebrates Basquiat's achievements in the contexts of the key influences on his art. It not only re-evaluates the artist's principal works and their meaning, but also explains what keeps his painting relevant today.