Finding the best installation art now suitable for your needs isnt easy. With hundreds of choices can distract you. Knowing whats bad and whats good can be something of a minefield. In this article, weve done the hard work for you.
Reviews
1. Public Art (Now): Out of Time, Out of Place
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Public Art Now Out of Time Out of PlaceDescription
The face of public art is changing. In recent years, a new generation of artists has rejected the monumental scale and mass appeal of conventional public sculpture, instead favoring unconventional forms that disrupt rather than embellish a particular location. Public Art (Now) is the first survey of the most influential forms of the past decade that are redefining the practice of public art today. Some 40 key projects from around the world are highlighted, with detailed descriptions and installation and process shots. Interviews and quotes from practitioners, commissioners and commentators reveal the context for each project, while an introduction sets out the conceptual, practical and ethical issues raised by the work. This dynamic combination of projects, places and people is both a must-have reference book for art-world specialists and an accessible introduction to the subject. Among the featured artists are Mike Kelley, Francis Als, Superflex, Paul Chan, Susan Philipsz and Theaster Gates.2. Public Art Now
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Watch out you're about to run into public art! Public Art Now showcases large- and small-scale public art installations that appear everywhere, from sidewalks and bus stops to parks and exhibition centers. The projects within are often made to be enjoyed through more than just looking, with audiences being encouraged to touch, photograph, climb, read, listen, sit, swing, and run through the artworks. Pieces such as a walk-in origami-style hut with a kaleidoscopic interior, an iridescent bike path, an entire two-story home with oversized white balloons spilling out of every window, and a colorful library designed to be pulled apart and re-assembled question the relationship between artist and audience, and create an intimate relationship between those who create and those who experience their exciting creations.3. Dike Blair: Now & Again
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Dike Blair (born 1952) began to make modestly scaled gouaches in the mid-1980s. Now & Again is the first substantial monograph on the painting and sculpture of Dike Blair; it is published on the occasion of his exhibition at the Weatherspoon Art Museum, Greensboro, North Carolina, and gathers 50 gouaches and 14 large sculptures dating from 2001 to the present.4. Martin Boyce: When Now Is Night
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Best known for his powerful sculptures and installations, Scottish artist Martin Boyce reconfigures everyday elements into alternate realities. Garbage cans are lopsided, trees consist of straight lines, and air-vent grilles become objets d'art. Heavily influenced by modernism, Boyce often incorporates well-known objects by mid-twentieth-century designers into his work, such as the Eames Storage Unit or the four concrete trees by Joel and Jan Martel for a 1925 garden. By reinventing or deconstructing them for his installations, Boyce critically reflects on the legacy of modernist design.When Now is Night is the most significant monograph on the artistwho won Britain's coveted Turner Prize in 2011in a decade, providing an overview of his career with an emphasis on work from recent years. While his practice is frequently considered in relationship to modernism and the specific precedents he draws on, this book places a greater emphasis on the narratives he develops within individual works and the process involved in creating them. This shift in focus will encourage new insights into Boyce's work, making it an invaluable resource for admirers and scholars alike.
5. Akira Yoshizawa, Japan's Greatest Origami Master: Featuring over 60 Models and 1000 Diagrams by the Master
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Akira Yoshizawa Japan s Greatest Origami Master Featuring over 60 Models and 1000 Diagrams by the MasterDescription
This collection of projects by the "father of modern origami" contains detailed instructions for 60 of the master's original works.Master origami artist Akira Yoshizawa was a true innovator who played a seminal role in the rebirth of origami in the modern world. He served as a bridge between past and presentbetween the ancient traditional craft and the development of origami as a contemporary practiceinventing new techniques and in preserving the traditional Japanese forms. In fact, the notational system of diagrams widely used today to indicate how models are folded was developed mainly by him. Above all, Yoshizawa was responsible for elevating origami to the status of an art form.
This beautiful origami book is the first comprehensive survey of the extraordinary work of Akira Yoshizawa. In addition to 60 models from his private collection, it features over 1,000 original drawings by the artist, and English translations of his writings in Japanese on origami, all of which are published here for the very first time.
Origami projects include:
- The Koinobori and the Helmet
- Butterflies of Every Kind
- Fairy Tale Crowns and Caps
- The Lion Mask
- The Tengu Masks
- and much more!
6. Picasso Painter and Sculptor in Clay
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
pp. 258, prvious onwer's name in feltpen on lower edges of pages, o/w vg, colour illustraitons."The world-famous Pablo Picasso is known almost exclusively for his paintings. Picasso: Painter and Sculptor in Clay accompanies the exhibition of the same title at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and marks the first time his prolific work in clay7. Installation Art Now
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New Installation ArtDescription
The much anticipated follow-up volume to our bestselling 2011 title Installation Art, this is the most impressive collection of renowned avant-garde installation pieces to-date. Only top-tier projects are featured, including biennale pieces from many different countries. Interior gallery and museum installations encourage poetic new ways of looking at enclosed space, while exterior projects on both large and small scales astound through their dramatic use of materials and reinvent the urban and rural built environment. Pink balloons are suspended in rows above the main thoroughfare of a major city, a prism of colored threads hung in the air makes an otherwise blas staircase magical, thin rays of light hover in space, a hole in a gallery wall reveals an entire hidden realm composed of layered ice blocks, while neoclassical arched windows pour transparent crystallized ice flows out onto marble floors. This beautiful book completely changes how we look at our everyday surroundings and their possibilities.8. Sculpture Now (World of Art)
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
An authoritative, highly readable new survey that reveals the great diversity and energy within sculptural practice today
Here are the most exciting developments in sculpture across the globe since the mid-1990s. Identifying the key trends, Anna Moszynska discusses the artists who are forging new paths and setting the contemporary agenda. She examines major shifts that have taken place in the last two decades, including the move from a concern with the discrete object to the more complicated and dynamic relationships found in installation-based practice, as well as the increased concern with the experiential nature of sculpture and the participatory role of the viewer. The worlds most promising new talent is discussed alongside established contemporary artists including Cai Guo-Qiang, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake and Dinos Chapman, Isa Genzken, Thomas Hirschhorn, Mike Kelley, Christian Marclay, Bruce Nauman, Gabriel Orozco, Doris Salcedo, James Turrell, and Ai Weiwei. 200 color illustrations9. Picasso (Dover Fine Art, History of Art)
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For more than a generation, Gertrude Stein's Paris home at 27 rue de Fleurus was the center of a glittering coterie of artists and writers, one of whom was Pablo Picasso. In this intimate and revealing memoir, Stein tells us much about the great man (and herself) and offers many insights into the life and art of the 20th century's greatest painter.
Mixing biological fact with artistic and aesthetic comments, she limns a unique portrait of Picasso as a founder of Cubism, an intimate of Appollinaire, Max Jacob, Braque, Derain, and others, and a genius driven by a ceaseless quest to convey his vision of the 20th century. We learn, for example, of the importance of his native Spain in shaping Picasso's approach to art; of the influence of calligraphy and African sculpture; of his profound struggle to remain true to his own vision; of the overriding need to empty himself of the forms and ideas that welled up within him.
Stein's close relationship with Picasso furnishes her with a unique vantage point in composing this perceptive and provocative reminiscence. It will delight any admirer of Picasso or Gertrude Stein; it is indispensable to an understanding of modern art.
10. Fletcher Benton
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Hardcover: 358 pages Publisher: Harry N Abrams; First Edition edition (November 1990) Language: English ISBN-10: 0810931109 ISBN-13: 978-0810931107 Product Dimensions: 12.5 x 9.8 x 1.5 inches Shipping Weight: 5 pounds11. Munich and Memory: Architecture, Monuments, and the Legacy of the Third Reich (Weimar and Now: German Cultural Criticism)
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Munich And MemoryDescription
Munich, notorious in recent history as the capital of the Nazi movement, is the site of Gavriel Rosenfeld's stimulating inquiry into the German collective memory of the Third Reich. Rosenfeld shows, with the aid of a wealth of photographs, how the city's urban form developed after 1945 in direct reflection of its inhabitants' evolving memory of the Second World War and the Nazi dictatorship.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the German people's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism has dramatically shaped nearly all dimensions of their political, social, and cultural life. The area of urban development and the built environment, little explored until now, offers visible evidence of the struggle. By examining the ways in which the people of Munich reconstructed the ruins of their historic buildings, created new works of architecture, dealt with surviving Nazi buildings, and erected new monuments to commemorate the horrors of the recent past, Rosenfeld identifies a spectrum of competing memories of the Nazi experience.
Munichs postwar development was the subject of constant controversy, pitting representatives of contending aesthetic and mnemonic positions against one another in the heated battle to shape the citys urban form. Examining the debates between traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and critical preservationists, Rosenfeld shows that the memory of Nazism in Munich has never been "repressed" but has rather been defined by constant dissension and evolution. On balance, however, he concludes that Munich came to embody in its urban form a conservative view of the past that was inclined to diminish local responsibility for the Third Reich.
In the second half of the twentieth century, the German people's struggle to come to terms with the legacy of Nazism has dramatically shaped nearly all dimensions of their political, social, and cultural life. The area of urban development and the built environment, little explored until now, offers visible evidence of the struggle. By examining the ways in which the people of Munich reconstructed the ruins of their historic buildings, created new works of architecture, dealt with surviving Nazi buildings, and erected new monuments to commemorate the horrors of the recent past, Rosenfeld identifies a spectrum of competing memories of the Nazi experience.
Munichs postwar development was the subject of constant controversy, pitting representatives of contending aesthetic and mnemonic positions against one another in the heated battle to shape the citys urban form. Examining the debates between traditionalists, modernists, postmodernists, and critical preservationists, Rosenfeld shows that the memory of Nazism in Munich has never been "repressed" but has rather been defined by constant dissension and evolution. On balance, however, he concludes that Munich came to embody in its urban form a conservative view of the past that was inclined to diminish local responsibility for the Third Reich.
12. The Lives of Chinese Objects: Buddhism, Imperialism and Display (Museums and Collections)
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Used Book in Good ConditionDescription
This is the biography of a set of rare Buddhist statues from China. Their extraordinary adventures take them from the Buddhist temples of fifteenth-century Putuo China's most important pilgrimage island to their seizure by a British soldier in the First Opium War in the early 1840s, and on to a starring role in the Great Exhibition of 1851. In the 1850s, they moved in and out of dealers' and antiquarian collections, arriving in 1867 at Liverpool Museum. Here they were re-conceptualized as specimens of the 'Mongolian race' and, later, as examples of Oriental art. The statues escaped the bombing of the Museum during the Second World War and lived out their existence for the next sixty years, dismembered, corroding and neglected in the stores, their histories lost and origins unknown.
As the curator of Asian collections at Liverpool Museum, the author became fascinated by these bronzes, and selected them for display in the Buddhism section of the World Cultures gallery. In 2005, quite by chance, the discovery of a lithograph of the figures on prominent display in the Great Exhibition enabled the remarkable lives of these statues to be reconstructed.
13. Doug Aitken: Sleepwalkers
