Charley Harper : an illustrated life

Todd Oldham. 2009

Charley Harper was an American original. For over six decades he painted colorful and graphic illustrations of nature, animals, insects and people alike, from his home studio in Cincinnati, Ohio until he passed away in 2007 at the age of 84. Renowned New York based designer Todd Oldham rediscovered Charley's work in 2001, and collaborated closely with him in the ensuing years; combing through his extensive archive to edit and design this stunning monograph. This coffee table tome is a ... beautiful tribute to Charley Harper's singular style, which he referred to as Minimal Realism (Amazon)

Dick Frizzell : the painter

foreword by Hamish Keith. 2009

Dick Frizzell's images populate our world - you find them on t-shirts, on TV ads, in shop windows, on wine bottles, on cushions and t-towels, and in art shows. People appropriate (or borrow) his images in much the same way that he too appropriated many of the images he has painted over the years. He's reached iconic status in NZ - we love him, he's one of our own ... Dick Frizzell: The Painter contains all of his major paintings, the story of his life in his own thoughtful and highly articulate words, and an essay by Hamish Keith on Dick's work and its place in the New Zealand art world. (Random House website)

Len Lye

edited by Taylor Cann & Wystan Curnow. 2009

Len Lye (1901 - 1980) is one of New Zealand's most celebrated, influential and inspirational artists who continues to be recognised internationally as a pioneer film maker, kinetic sculptor, poet, writer and painter. The world centre for Len Lye is the Govett-Brewster Art Gallery where his collection is housed on behalf of the Len Lye Foundation. (Random House website)

Marlene Dumas

Dominic van den Boogerd and others. 2nd edition, 2008.

Marlene Dumas, a South Africa-born, Amsterdam-based painter, is one of the world's most admired artists, a titan of contemporary painting. Her work recalls the painterly gestures of Expressionism while combining the critical distance of conceptual art with the pleasures of eroticism. Through her delicately painted oil-on-canvas or ink-and-watercolor depictions of the female form as well as portraits of children and erotic scenes, she makes a commentary on the state of painting today. What does it mean to be a woman working within the predominantly male genre of expressionist painting? The artist often depicts women: their expressions, their bodies, their facial typologies, their self-image, and their ideals. The relationship between art and female beauty or between art-historical models an twentieth-century supermodels are constant themes in Dumas' work. She does not paint from life but deliberately chooses 'stock' images from a variety of sources, from magazine cuttings to picture postcards to Old Master paintings, as observed through her contemporary perspective. Since the late 1970s she has exhibited internationally, with solo exhibitions at the Tate Gallery, London (1996), the Museum fur Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt (1998), the Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Antwerp (1999), and Centre Pompidou, Paris (2002). Her work has been shown in some of the world's top international exhibitions, including the Venice Biennale (1995 and 2005) (Amazon )

Russell Drysdale

Lou Klepac. Revised edition, 2009.

This edition of Russell Drysdale has been fully revised to integrate the paintings into the body of the text and includes a new introduction by author Lou Klepac, written to put Drysdale's iconic paintings into a contemporary context. This book traces the career of the unusual and remarkably gifted Drysdale, discussing both the sources of his inspiration and the scope of his achievement. It features more than 150 colour plates that illustrate the work of this popular and significant Australian artist. (Amazon)

Yayoi Kusama

Laura Hoptman, Akira Tatehata, Udo Kultermann

CHECK OUT Yayoi Kusama's current exhibition at City Gallery, Wellington (until 7 February 2010)

This is a monograph on the extraordinary 40 year career of Japanese sculptor and performance artist Yayoi Kusama, recently the subject of a major retrospective at New York's Museum of Modern Art, which toured the United States and Japan through 1999. In January-March 2000 the Serpentine Gallery, London will be presenting a large solo exhibition devoted to Kusama's work. Internationally noted for her soft sculptures an psychedelic installations, Kusama explores themes of love, infinity and obsession throughout her work, from her net-like pattern paintings begun in 1959, to her Pop-inspired love happenings in the 1960s, to installations in which every surface has been compulsively covered in polka-dots, mirrors or stuffed phallus-like protrusions. A visionary whose work is unique in the panorama of post-war art, Yayoi Kusama is known not only as an artist but also as a fashion-designer, poet and novelist - all documented in this comprehensive monograph. (Amazon)

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