Beginning with 'Gilles de Binche' (Antwerp, 2005) and concluding with 'Against the Day' (Brussels, Moscow and Malmo, 2009-10), acclaimed painter Luc Tuymans produced a landmark suite of seven thematically linked bodies of work. Their meta-narrative, which traces the philosophical and psychic roots of contemporary civilization, weaves together a range of photographic source images, from St Peter's to Disneyland to Big Brother, that together tell the banal and terrifying story of our times. Luc Tuymans: Is It Safe? features this source imagery alongside more than 100 of the artist's newest paintings, many never before published. Accompanying each body of work is an introductory text written by the artist, while the essay 'Tuymans, Loyola, Leibniz', specially commissioned by Mexican artist Pablo Sigg, provides historical and philosophical context. 'Proper', an essay by Belgian art historian Gerrit Vermeiren, looks at one body of work in detail, tracing the themes and sources of each painting and capturing the cultural atmosphere of the moment in which they were produced. And an extensive interview between Tuymans and his assistant Tommy Simoens offers additional insight into the artist's thinking and motivations. Celebrated as one of the world's most gifted and visionary painters, Tuymans has been creating iconic works of contemporary painting for nearly three decades. With their enigmatic compositions and modulated colours, these works are moving and unmistakable, and their power continues to win new converts to Tuymans's chilling vision of history painting.

Luc Tuymans; Is It Safe?

Arts & Photography

Simoens, Tommy

Sigg, Pablo

History & Criticism

Phaidon Press

Vancouver photographer and video artist Stan Douglas (born 1960) has been celebrated since the late 1980s for his politically freighted retrievals of obsolete technologies and failed utopias. The emphatically narrative character of his films and photographs has made for comparisons with his Vancouver contemporary Jeff Wall, but Douglas also laces his work with a literary engagement, in references to works by Proust, Beckett and other writers. Midcentury Studio sees Douglas pursue a new direction. It chronicles the burgeoning discipline of press photography in North America during the postwar period, for which Douglas assumes the role of a fictional photographer, creating a series of images hypothetically produced between 1945-1951. Douglas constructed a “mid-century studio” using authentic equipment as well as actors to produce carefully staged, black-and-white photographs that painstakingly emulate the period's obsession with crime scenes, dance, gambling and technology. This volume juxtaposes actual photographs from the era with Douglas' superb photo-fictions.

Stan Douglas: Midcentury Studio

Phillips, Christopher

Ludion

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Books by Sigg, Pablo