Akt W Malarstwie Polskim

The definitive monograph on Ai Weiwei As his personal circumstances move in constant flux, Ai Weiwei remains a cultural magnet. Renowned for his political activism and social media activity almost as much as for his social interventions, contemporary approach to the readymade, and knowledge of Chinese traditional crafts, Ai’s fame extends throughout and beyond the art world. Drawn from TASCHEN’s limited Collector’s Edition, this monograph explores each of Ai’s career phases up until his release from Chinese custody. It features extensive visual material to trace Ai’s development from his early New York days right through to his recent practice. Focus moments include his international breakthrough in the early 2000s, his porcelain Sunflower Seeds at the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern, his response to the Sichuan earthquake of 2008, and his police detention in 2011. With behind-the-scenes studio pictures, production shots, and numerous statements derived from exclusive interviews with Ai, we gain privileged access to the artist’s process, influences, and importance.

Largely self-taught as an artist, Francis Bacon (1909-1992) developed a unique ability to transform interior and unconscious impulses into figurative forms and intensely claustrophobic compositions. Emerging into notoriety in the period following World War II, Bacon took the human body as his nominal subject, but a subject ravaged, distorted, and dismembered so as to writhe with intense emotional content. With flailing limbs, hollow voids, and tumurous growths, his gripping, often grotesque, portraits are as much reflections on the trials and the traumas of the human condition as they are character studies. These haunting forms were also among the first in art history to depict overtly homosexual themes.

„Są na świecie miejsca niepowtarzalne, które poruszają wyobraźnię, inspirują, zdumiewają. Wizyta w Kopalni to równocześnie wyprawa do wnętrza Ziemi J. Verne i podziwianie Morii J.R.R. Tolkiena. Wedle życzenia pobyt w Kopalni może być wizytą w podziemnym mieście wyposażonym w sklepy, restaurację, plac zabaw, wi-fi lub ekscytującą przygodą, podczas której śmiałkowie wcielają się w górników i poznają solny świat przy świetle górniczej lampy.”
Fragment wstępu autorstwa Kajetana d’Obryn
Prezesa Zarządu Kopalni Soli „Wieliczka” SA

Edycja z tekstem w języku holenderskim.

In the first decades of the sixteenth century, the pictorial arts arrived at an unprecedented level of perfection. That, at least, was a widespread perception among artists and their audiences in central Italy. Imitation, according to the artistic literature of the period, was a productive means of continuing the perfections of a predecessor. In Michelangelo’s Mirror reconsiders the question of Italian mannerism, focusing on the idea of imitation in the works of such artists as Perino del Vaga, Daniele da Volterra, and Pellegrino Tibaldi. Michelangelo was praised as an unsurpassable ideal, and more than any other artist he received the flattering epithet divino. As the cult around him grew, however, a different discourse arose. With the unveiling of the Sistine Last Judgment in 1541, Michelangelo stood accused of having set artifice above the sacred truth he was meant to serve, effectively making an idol of his art. Hansen examines the work of three of the master’s most talented followers in the light of this critical backlash. He argues that their choice to imitate Michelangelo was highly self-conscious and related to the desire to construct their own artistic identities, either by associating their work directly with the ideal paradigm (Daniele), through irony and displacement (Perino), or by incorporating both approaches (Tibaldi).

„Są na świecie miejsca niepowtarzalne, które poruszają wyobraźnię, inspirują, zdumiewają. Wizyta w Kopalni to równocześnie wyprawa do wnętrza Ziemi J. Verne i podziwianie Morii J.R.R. Tolkiena. Wedle życzenia pobyt w Kopalni może być wizytą w podziemnym mieście wyposażonym w sklepy, restaurację, plac zabaw, wi-fi lub ekscytującą przygodą, podczas której śmiałkowie wcielają się w górników i poznają solny świat przy świetle górniczej lampy.”
Fragment wstępu autorstwa Kajetana d’Obryn
Prezesa Zarządu Kopalni Soli „Wieliczka” SA

Edycja z tekstem w języku hebrajskim.

The Pop Star When art went Whaam! American painter Roy Lichtenstein (1923–1997) pioneered a new epoch in American art, bursting onto a scene dominated by Abstract Expressionism in late 1950s New York and defining a new art vocabulary for a new era. With his groundbreaking use of industrial production techniques and trivial, quotidian imagery such as cartoons, comic strips, and advertising, Lichtenstein joined contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and James Rosenquist to reflect and satirize American mass media and consumer culture. Works such as Look, Mickey! (1961), Drowning Girl (1963), and Whaam! (1963) deployed mass production techniques, particularly Ben-Day dots printing, to create a blow-up effect and pixelated “dot” style, with which Lichtenstein has become synonymous. This book provides an essential overview of Lichtenstein’s career, tracing his earliest Pop statements through to later “brushstroke” retorts to Abstract Expressionism and reinterpretations of modern masterpieces. We look at his leading position in midcentury modernism, and the ways in which his works both critique and chronicle 20th-century America.