CoBra - The colour of freedom

Giovanni Maria Accame
Electa

Flaminio Gualdoni
Charta

Cesare Benaglia
Silvia Editrice

Peter Osborne
Phaidon Press Limited

This book marks a new, original and authoritative re-examination of a major turning point in late twentieth-century art. Since the mid 1960s Conceptual art - an art that consists of ideas, written down, enacted or simply carried in your head - has directly challenged the very notion that a work of art is by definition an object of visual pleasure. Conceptual art is first and foremost an art of questions. As this book demonstrates, Conceptual art continues today to raise fundamental questions not only about the definition of art itself but about politics, the media and society. Conceptual art, since its zenith from 1966 to 1972, has influenced not only all subsequent art but made a major contribution to the history of ideas. It, in turn, drew much of its inspiration from the writings of thinkers ranging from the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein to the playwright Samuel Beckett. For the first time, excerpts from these key influential writings are included alongside the major original texts by artists, critics, curators and art historians. An international movement, Conceptual art encompasses not only North America and Western Europe but also South America, Eastern Europe, Russia, China and Japan. Its legacy is global, ranging from small local participatory projects to large-scale installations at major museums and biennales.

Achille Bonito Oliva
Gabriele Mazzotta

Galleria d'Arte Internazionale G.I.O. ARTE
s.e.

Thierry W. Despont
Assouline Publishing

Combining geometrical purity and gestural grandeur, Thierry W. Despont conjugates his architectural skills and painter's virtuosity in this spectacular collection of majestic, daunting, and singularly attracting orbs, turning his struggle with corrosive materials and richly textured pigments into a spiritual achievement. A compound of restless collage and swirling pigments, each orb is animated by a life of its own: colorful magma breaking through the scorched surface of the canvas, white streaks flickering against the encroaching and abysmal darkness of a stark black background that seems about to engulf it. At the same time dynamic and mesmerizing, they are mysterious and numinous, intimate and remote; a lesson in the "abstract sublime," they conjure up the immemorial awe of man in front of a cosmic world he both reveres and dreads. Beyond the eruptive, cataclysmic forces animating them, the orbs are inwardly radiant, animated by a life that seems to emerge from their depths, and conjure up a paradoxical harmony that embues them with an ultimate metaphysical dimension.

Simon Pfeffel
s.e.

Emma Lavigne
Centre Pompidou

Published for the occasion of Pierre Huyghe's exhibition at the Pompidou Centre which offers retrospective look at his work. It offers a research of nearly 800 images at 90 projects, since his first works twenty years ago.

Michel Tapié
Edizioni d'Arte Fratelli Pozzo

Giuliana Altea, Marco Magnani
Ilisso Edizioni

Bice Lazzari
Editrice Eidos