Tony Godfrey

An in-depth look at the work and career of this fascinating artist, who is having a profound impact on contemporary painting Nigel Cooke is known for his complex paintings, which thematically explore the meeting point between creative labour, consciousness, art history, consumer culture, and nature. Primarily centred on meticulously painted, large-scale urban landscapes, which he calls 'hybrid theatrical spaces', Cooke's work employs disparate styles, often integrating trompe l'oeil miniature rocks and trees with backdrops of graffiti-marked buildings, to create scenes conveying obscure and macabre narratives. This survey of Cooke’s career to date explores the artist's style, approach, and impact on contemporary art and includes his very latest works, completed shortly before publication.

A lively introduction to and history of international contemporary art from 1960 to the present. What does it mean? Is it really art? Why does it cost so much? While these questions are perpetually asked about contemporary art, they are not the questions that E. H. Gombrich set out to answer in his seminal book The Story of Art. Contemporary art is very different from what came before. From the 1960s, where Gombrich’s account concludes, artists began to abandon traditional forms of art and started to make work that questioned art’s very definition. This is where Godfrey picks up the story. Developments in contemporary art have followed no straightforward line of progress or sequence of movements. Recognizing this, Tony Godfrey creates a narrative from a series of often dramatic creative conflicts and arguments around what art is or should be. From object versus sculpture and painting versus conceptual to local versus global, gallery versus wider world, The Story of Contemporary Art traces a history in terms of drastic changes in social and political life over the last sixty years. How do we experience being human in a world that seems to change so quickly? In exploring art’s relationship to this question, Godfrey asserts that multiple voices must be heard: critics, theorists, curators and collectors, but also audiences and artists themselves. Key to the book is the story of how a perception that art was made almost exclusively by white men from North America and Western Europe has been radically overturned. Compelling and intelligent, but never academic, this book tells us how.

An instant classic--a lively new introduction to contemporary art that stretches from Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to Marina Abramovic's performance art to today's biennale circuit and million-dollar auctions. Encountering a work of contemporary art, a viewer might ask, "What does it mean?" "Is it really art?" and "Why does it cost so much?" These are not the questions that E. H. Gombrich set out to answer in his magisterial The Story of Art. Contemporary art seems totally unlike what came before it, departing from the road map supplied by Raphael, D rer, Rembrandt, and other European masters. In The Story of Contemporary Art, Tony Godfrey picks up where Gombrich left off, offering a lively introduction to contemporary art that stretches from Andy Warhol's Brillo boxes to Marina Abramovic's performance art to today's biennale circuit and million-dollar auctions. Godfrey, a curator and writer on contemporary art, chronicles important developments in pop art, minimalism, conceptualism, installation art, performance art, and beyond.

This is the first monograph to give an overview of the entire career to date of artist Ding Yi (b. 1962), whose work, unlike most other well-known Chinese painters, is wholly abstract. Large in scale, and extraordinary in detail, Ding Yi's paintings invite a myriad of questions, not least how an intuitive artist works with recurrent patterns and symbols. Tackling this paradox, the authors discuss a range of questions pertinent to the artist, primary of which is how China has shaped his work, both culturally and environmentally, over the past thirty years.Based on extensive interviews with the artist, Ding Yi presents a definitive portrait of an important contemporary painter, who holds a unique position in Chinese art history. As such, it is essential reading for fans and the uninitiated alike.

Un estudio exhaustivo y ameno de la pintura de los ultimos 30 anos, que presenta la obra de figuras consagradas como Gerhard Richter y Neo Rauch junto con la de jovenes valores como Jumaldi Alfi e Ingrid Calame.Fotorrealismo, paisajes, bodegones, retratos, neoexpresionismo, instalaciones de pintura o la escuela de Leipzig son solo algunos de los temas de este fascinante medio artistico que explora el autor.Con obras de 240 artistas de mas de 30 paises, este estudio constituye un completo analisis global de lo que es la pintura y de lo que se hace en todo el planeta.Organizado por temas, abarca una amplia gama de estilos, materiales y metodos de la pintura contemporanea.Perspicaz y asequible, el estudio de Tony Godfrey seducira por igual a los especialistas y a los aficionados a la pintura.