Alastair Gordon (b.1978, Edinburgh), is an artist based in London. This, the first major monograph of the artist’s career, includes over 160 paintings, drawings and documentational photographs, along with notes by Gordon himself. The book introduces this accomplished and engaging new voice in British painting.Gordon’s paintings bring the historic languages of genre painting and the quodlibet into a contemporary discourse that pushes the boundaries of realism, figuration and illusionism to focus on everyday moments. His work often elevates seemingly ordinary objects – feathers, matchsticks, postcards – allowing them to speak to wider concerns of beauty, truth, life and death. The documented works, produced between 2012 and 2023, include paintings made in oil or acrylic on MDF, wood, ‘found’ wood, gesso panel, paper, canvas and occasionally linen. Each is distinctive for its style and for the recurring motifs Gordon selects such as masking tape, paper ephemera and repeated, subtly different studies of the same subject. Gordon’s texts describe how objects found mud larking on the banks of the River Thames, shoes from the London City Mission and rags and papers discarded from art students’ studios have been depicted in paintings, incorporating the histories and stories of each item (and each person) into his work. The book also features recent works influenced by rural landscapes and parkland.An introduction by Julia Lucero, Associate Director of Nahmad Projects, London, emphasises the importance of nature and of meditation within Gordon’s practice. Specifically, Lucero brings out the idea of the ‘axis mundi, that metaphysical and mystical connecting point where heaven meets Earth’. She explores the significance of quodlibet, a seventeenth-century trompe-l’oeil painting technique that Gordon favours, rendering brushstrokes invisible and affording everyday objects new significance, even ‘profound value’. Humble objects such as a matchstick or paper aeroplane might be elevated to the realms of the divine. An essay by Jorella Andrews, Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, describes the influence of Gordon’s time on a research residency in the former studio of Paul Cézanne at Les Lauves on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence. His experiences there proved pivotal to the direction of his practice, in which both the ‘visual misdirection’ of quodlibet and the qualities of wood have become central. Andrews brings art historical texts and works of art into relation with Gordon’s paintings, making comparisons between subject, form and approach. Andrews’ text further details the recent synthesis of two sides of Gordon’s work: precise illusionism combined with looser observations made in the natural landscape.Edited by Alastair Gordon Studio, designed by Herman Lelie, printed by EBS Verona and published in 2023 by Anomie Publishing, London, the publication has been generously supported by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson through Fieldstead and Company.

Honor Titus (born 1989) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. A self-taught painter, Titus is deeply influenced by his creative past as a musician and poet. Titus’s paintings, often suffused with a sense of romance, are embedded with nostalgic references to a simpler time and feature dark, luminous jewel tones. His works often depict faceless figures in minimal urban landscapes, reflecting the isolation that stems from metropolitan anonymity. Titus’s simplified compositions and striking patches of colour are inspired by Les Nabis while his flat, decorative surfaces echo the graphic hyperrealism of artists inspired by American advertising, such as Alex Katz.This, the artist’s first trade monograph, presents new and recent works, including a body of work presented in his 2022–3 solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor, London, Bourgeoisie in Bloom. Here Titus expands on the themes of ritual, class and nostalgia that have characterised previous work, incorporating debutante balls in which young adults are presented to society. Favouring bright panels of colour, Titus evokes traditions of cultural formality, using precise brushwork to delineate details of old-world glamour such as the tilt of a bow tie and the line of a ballgown. A foreword by artist Henry Taylor considers his first encounters with Titus’s work and their continuing friendship. Taylor describes the biographical factors that inform the subjects Titus paints, including music, referencing the first solo show of the artist’s work held at Henry Taylor Gallery in Chinatown, 2020. A text by Durga Chew-Bose brings the themes of nostalgia and memory into the field of discussion. Anecdotes relayed to Chew-Bose bring forward real experiences in relation with his work. The artist’s own words illuminate filmic, musical, photographic and romantic influences on the paintings, while dwelling, lastly, upon his studio space. Klaus Ottmann’s text reflects philosophically and sociologically on Titus’s oeuvre, bringing key art historical reference points into the discussion. Ottmann’s contribution draws connections to key works of literature and criticism that contextualise his work. Published following the exhibition Honor Titus: Bourgeoisie in Bloom at Timothy Taylor, London, 17 November 2022 – 14 January 2023, the publication has been edited by Chloe Waddington, designed by Joe Gilmore, and co-published in 2023 by Timothy Taylor and Anomie Publishing, London.Honor Titus (b. 1989, Brooklyn, NY) is a self-taught American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Recent solo exhibitions include Honor Titus: Bourgeoisie in Bloom, Timothy Taylor, London, United Kingdom (2022–3); Spotlight: Honor Titus, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2022); Honor Titus: For Heaven’s Sake, Timothy Taylor, New York, NY (2021) and Honor Titus: Goodness Gracious, Studio Henry Taylor, Los Angeles, CA (2020). His work has been part of numerous group exhibitions, including IRL (In Real Life), Timothy Taylor, London, United Kingdom (2021); Parallel Worlds, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2021); and I will wear you in my heart of heart, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2021); and (Nothing but) Flowers, Karma, New York, NY (2020), among others. His work is represented in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; The Bunker Artspace, Palm Beach, Florida; and the Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China. Titus has been featured in publications including Art in America, Artnet, Frieze, GQ, Interview Magazine, The New York Times, and Town & Country.

Peter Howson has established a formidable reputation as one of his generation's leading figurative painters. Many of his paintings derive inspiration from the streets of Glasgow, where he was brought up. He is renowned for his penetrating insight into the human condition, and his heroic portrayals of the mighty and the lowly. His experiences of abuse - whether self-inflicted and substance-related or the traumatic events of his childhood - have moulded his view of the world and afforded him an affinity with those individuals who are classed as somehow 'on the edge'. His ability to speak to those on the margins is proof of his enduring skill at capturing the maverick, the excessive and the non-conformist. In 1992 he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. He was appointed official British war artist for Bosnia in 1993 and in 1996 was awarded Doctor of Letters at The University of Strathclyde. His work is in numerous international private and public collections.This publication is the first major statement about Howson’s work for almost twenty years and accompanies a major retrospective at Edinburgh City Art Centre. It illustrates his consummate skill in a range of media and documents his religious work as well as his graphic responses to recent global events.

Anomie Collections 1 is a publication accompanying the first edition of Anomie Collections – a London-based initiative that supports the work of contemporary British painters by acquiring works on behalf of a group of private collectors. This first edition of the scheme resulted in the purchase of fifty-six paintings and works on paper, documented and presented here along with newly commissioned texts by Anneka French and an introduction by Matt Price, Publisher at Anomie Publishing and curator of the edition. The works span a variety of genres, from landscapes and urban scenes to still lifes, portraits and abstractions. The artists featured in Anomie Collections 1 are: Jasmir Creed, Marguerite Horner, Cathy Lomax, Kathryn Maple, Kate Mary, Daniel Shadbolt, Caroline Thomson and Jim Threapleton.

Matthew Krishanu’s paintings explore topics including childhood, race, religion, art history, family, grief and love. His subjects – frequently Brown people, especially children – are realised with a shallow pictorial depth, delicate washes of colour, and with a sense of interior life. Through this, Krishanu questions the positions of his painterly subjects and depictions of landscapes in relation to the legacy of European colonialism and the art historical canon. Krishanu’s practice is heavily informed by his early childhood spent in Dhaka where his parents moved in order to work for the Church of Bangladesh.This, his first trade monograph, presents a number of series of Krishanu’s works: Another Country, Expatriates, Mission, House of God, Religious Workers and In Sickness and In Health. The paintings included have been made in oil and/or acrylic on canvas, linen or board, with the earliest produced in 2007 and most recent completed in 2022.The publication features essays by Mark Rappolt and Dorothy Price, alongside an interview with the artist by Ben Luke. Rappolt, Editor-in-Chief at ArtReview magazine, details the various worlds present within Krishanu’s paintings. He draws out key themes within Krishanu’s oeuvre such as power, religion, identity and memory, while highlighting its distance from didacticism, and at times, its carefully constructed ambivalence, through examination of key works such as Mission School (2017), Mountain Tent (Two Boys) (2020) and Playground (2020). Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at The Courtauld, writes sensitively about solitude, memory and emotion which are palpable within Krishanu’s work. In particular, the series In Sickness and In Health, which traces a life path of Uschi Gatward, the artist’s late wife, over sixteen years to her untimely death from cancer in late 2021. The series is foregrounded as a significant and intimate body of work that subtly shifts over the time period it depicts. In a new interview with Luke, a critic and editor at The Art Newspaper, Krishanu discusses his practice in relation to ideas of religion, race, global art history, photography, health and personal experiences. Krishanu’s work explores, in the artist’s own words, ‘the puzzle of painting’.The publication has been edited by Georgia Griffiths and Matt Price. It has been designed by Joe Gilmore, printed and bound by EBS, Verona, and produced by Anomie Publishing and Niru Ratnam, London. The publication has been supported by Guy Halamish; Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai; Niru Ratnam, London; Taimur Hassan; and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles.Matthew Krishanu (b.1980) was born in Bradford and is based in London. He completed an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Playground’, Niru Ratnam (2022), ‘Undercurrents’, LGDR, New York (2022), ‘Picture Plane’, Niru Ratnam, London (2020), ‘Arrow and Pulpit’, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2021), ‘Corvus’, Iniva, London (2019), ‘House of Crows’, Matt’s Gallery, London (2019), ‘A Murder of Crows’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2019), ‘The Sun Never Sets’, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, (2019) and ‘The Sun Never Sets’, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield (2018). He has recently been in the group exhibitions ‘The Kingfisher’s Wing’, GRIMM, New York (2022), ‘Prophecy’, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre (2022), ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’, Hayward Gallery, London (2021), ‘Coventry Biennial’, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Leamington Spa and Herbert Art Gallery & Museum (2021), ‘John Moores Painting Prize’, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2021), ‘Everyday Heroes’, Hayward Gallery/Southbank Centre (2020) and ‘A Rich Tapestry’, Lahore Biennale (2020).

Chibụike Ụzọma (b. 1992, Port Harcourt, Nigeria), is a multidisciplinary artist working with painting, photography, drawing, text and video, living and working in New Haven, Connecticut. Documented here are sixteen of the artist’s large paintings rendered in oil and acrylic or acrylic spray paint on canvas, made in 2022. Accompanying an exhibition of the same name at Simon Lee Gallery, London, the first solo exhibition of his work in the UK, this publication is the fourth pillar of a collaborative project by the artist, setting his own paintings in relation to video and audio works by Edward Owens and João Orecchia respectively. Ụzọma works with non-linear narratives, using a mix of painting languages that dodges and weaves the liminal spaces between representation and meaning. Fragments of stencilled letters jolt against textured pools of paint, and diaphanous figures are cropped by cinematic horizons. Comprising colourful, abstruse portraiture against stark black and white backgrounds, the paintings in 'To Kick a Stone' are deeply suggestive, but ultimately formalist explorations of shape and composition.An introduction by Kat Sapera, Director of Simon Lee Gallery, draws upon her first encounters with the artist and details the influence of philosophy and the act of looking. Sapera brings the collaboration with Orecchia and Owens to the forefront of her discussion while touching on Ụzọma’s making processes.In an essay by Ụzọma, the artist himself writes lyrically upon subjects including poetry, religion, good and evil, in order to bring a number of key concepts that circle his work into the field of view.Essays by Bishupal Limbu, Associate Professor of English at Portland State University, and by Carlos Valladares, writer and critic, help amass a portrait of an artist whose enquiry is informed by film, philosophy and pictorial language – with the layering, unravelling and opening-up of narrative as a core focus. Their writing brings key art historical figures into dialogue with Ụzọma’s work.Lastly, the artist appears in conversation with writer and curator Ekow Eshun. This frank and illuminating conversation provides insight into the artist’s painting practice, previous series of works and intentions, while also discussing issues of identity and Blackness. Their interview further reflects on past exhibitions, connections with other key artists and Ụzọma’s recent MFA studies at Yale.Published on the occasion of the exhibition Chibụike Ụzọma – To Kick a Stone, 19 January – 25 February 2023, Simon Lee Gallery, London.Edited by Kat Sapera, designed by Joe Gilmore, printed by Pressision, Leeds and co-published in 2023 by Simon Lee Gallery and Anomie Publishing, London.

Kathryn Maple (b. 1989, Canterbury) is an artist specialising in drawing and painting. Her large-scale paintings feature urban, suburban and rural landscapes which are frequently populated by human figures. Her work is distinctive for its use of intensely layered mark making, lending the work both urgency and intimacy. The places and people depicted, rendered in a range of painting and drawing materials, are frequently afforded a sense of wildness or mystery by dint of their colour palette, collage-like compositions and recurring motifs such as wind-blown trees and winding pathways. This, her first monograph, features 379 images, many of which are reproduced for the first time. These include the presentation of her recent major series of oil pastel on paper works 'A Year of Drawings', alongside reproductions of her mixed media works on paper, as well as large oils on canvas. An essay by Kathryn Lloyd, writer, artist and Contemporary Art Editor at The Burlington Magazine, offers insight into Maple’s impulse to explore the world around her through her work. Large-scale paintings, replete with dense layers of marks, are constructed by means of personal encounter, memory and imagination. Details of man-made objects, tree bark and human skin, for instance, become composite, crucial in capturing fleeting experiences of place and of people. Lloyd brings out the symbolism of Maple’s work, making art historical comparisons while connecting these to the specific local characteristics of Maple’s familiar South London landscapes and the importance of walking to the artist’s practice.An interview with independent curator and critic Anneka French is focused on 'A Year of Drawings', a series of 365 drawings made daily since January 2022 outside the artist’s studio. They discuss the process, materials and art historical and literary influences upon Maple’s work, with a focus on how her drawing and painting strands of work impact each other. Their conversation provides an insight into the thinking of the artist at a crucial stage in Maple’s career.Taking its title from the lyrics of The Cure’s A Forest (1980), Editor Matt Price’s essay 'Into the Trees' offers an introduction to, and an overview of,' A Year of Drawings', discussing examples of the works and considering aspects of the series ranging from art historical precedents to themes, recurring motifs and interpretation.The monograph is published to coincide with the exhibitions: Under a Hot Sun, by Kathryn Maple, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 11 February – 30 April 2023 and Kathryn Maple: A Year of Drawings, Lyndsey Ingram Gallery, London, 1–17 March 2023. It has been edited by Matt Price, designed by Anomie Studio, printed by Mixam, Watford, and published by Anomie, London. Kathryn Maple was born in Canterbury in 1989, and lives and works in South London. She graduated in 2011 with a degree in fine art printmaking from the University of Brighton, before undertaking a postgraduate programme at the Royal Drawing School in 2012–13. Maple has featured in exhibitions at venues including Barber & Lopes at the British Art Fair, London, The Royal Academy, London, Beers London, Messums Wiltshire, Flowers Gallery, London, Frestonian Gallery, London, Christies New York, Kristin Hjellegjerde Gallery, London, and Drawing Room, London. Maple was the winner of the Times Watercolour Competition 2014 and 2016, and The John Moores Painting Prize 2020. Her exhibition Under the Hot Sun at the Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool, 2023, was awarded to Maple as part of her prize for winning the latter.

Nick Hornby (b. 1980, London) is one of the leading sculptors of his generation in Britain today, creating works on both intimate and monumental scales, and at the intersection of art history and contemporary technology. Hornby’s practice uses software that allows him to extract, alter and hybridise sculptures from art history into new works made from marble, steel, bronze, resin, wood and composite materials. It could be said that Hornby has opened up a new sculptural language for the twenty-first century.This, his first major monograph, features approximately 175 images, many of which are reproduced here for the first time or have been commissioned for the publication. Alongside documentation of works presented in galleries and outdoor spaces are production images taken in the studio and fabrication workshops. Hornby’s practice is here divided into four categories: Intersections, Extrusions, Hydrographics and Collaborations.A foreword by Luke Syson, Director of the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, offers insight into Hornby’s internal and external relationship with sculpture, considering the links between two and three dimensions, abstraction and representation, the ‘real’ and the digital.Editor Matt Price’s introduction takes readers on a whistlestop tour of the artist’s oeuvre, from his early family life and studies at Chelsea and The Slade in London, to his latest major exhibitions and commissions. Price covers a range of significant aspects such as the importance of music and sound, which were key elements of Hornby’s early work, to sculptures made in collaboration with others, and recent pieces combining art history with technology in their design and fabrication.An essay by Dr Hannah Higham, Senior Curator of Collections and Research at the Henry Moore Foundation, provides the most substantial piece of critical writing on Hornby’s work to date, drawing out specific touchstones in the history of art and discussing the relationship between the work and time. Higham further explores the ways that the motion and position of the viewer alter the experience of the sculptures, with new angles revealing fresh artistic inspirations from Hans Arp or Elizabeth Frink to ideas from communities Hornby has worked with and other contemporary artists with whom he has collaborated.An interview with Dr Helen Pheby, Associate Director, Programme, at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, probes the artist further about his cultural and theoretical inspirations, methods, materials and ideologies, including his views on collaboration, the public nature of art and its accessibility. Their conversation provides an insight into the thinking of the artist at a crucial stage in his career.The monograph brings together works spanning Hornby’s career for the first time. It follows Hornby’s first institutional solo exhibition at MOSTYN, Wales, and his first permanent outdoor sculptural commission for Harlow Science Park in Essex. The publication is edited by Matt Price, designed by Herman Lelie, printed by EBS, Verona, and published by Anomie, London. Nick Hornby, born in 1980, is a British artist living and working in London. Hornby studied at The Slade School of Art and Chelsea College of Art where he was awarded the UAL Sculpture Prize. In the UK he has exhibited at Tate Britain, Southbank Centre, Leighton House (all London), Cass Sculpture Foundation, Sussex, MOSTYN, Wales, and the Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge. International exhibitions have been held at the Museum of Arts and Design, New York and Poznan Biennale, Poland, along with residencies with Outset, Israel, and Eyebeam, New York. In 2014 Hornby was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Sculptors.

Anna Freeman Bentley’s paintings use architectural imagery to explore the emotive potential of space. Grounded in an interest in the baroque her source material includes junk shops, restaurants, private members clubs, flea markets and designed interiors. Central to her work is an investigation into surface, tension and the atmosphere evoked by these different interior surroundings. The spaces she depicts are empty, yet visual signifiers point to evidence of people and social happenings.This, Freeman Bentley’s third publication to date, is centred on the relationship between painting and cinema and is divided into sections dedicated to major paintings on canvas and panel, and a number of works on paper (all works 2021–22). Freeman Bentley’s work here is focused on sets from 'The Colour Room' (2021), a film that tells the story of the early career of celebrated British ceramicist Clarice Cliff (1899–1972). The foreword to the book is written by Rollo Campbell and Matt Incledon of Frestonian Gallery. An essay by writer and critic Thomas Marks draws out the importance to her work of historic and contemporary cinema and temporary architecture. Marks notes a change in palette in these new paintings, with Freeman Bentley embracing pastels and tracing parallels between the artist herself and Cliff. An interview with Georgie Paget, co-founder of Caspian Films, production company for 'The Colour Room', meanwhile, provides insight into the artist’s particular interest in the artifice of film props and of the film set as a layered space ‘steeped in meaning, purpose and potential.’ The two discuss the reciprocity of painting and cinema in detail, recounting Freeman Bentley’s experiences on the film’s sets and discussing her working processes, beginning with taking photographs on set, through to oil sketches and the later development of large-scale canvases.The publication is edited by Matt Incledon and Matt Price. It is designed by Joe Gilmore, printed and bound by Gomer, Wales, and co-published by Frestonian Gallery, London, and Anomie Publishing, London. The publication coincides with the second solo show by Anna Freeman Bentley at Frestonian Gallery, by whom the artist is represented. The exhibition, also titled ‘make believe’ is divided between two sites: the 2022 Armory Show, New York, and Frestonian Gallery, London. Anna Freeman Bentley studied Painting at Chelsea College of Art, Kunsthochschule Berlin Weissensee and the Royal College of Art. Awards and residencies include Palazzo Monti Residency, Brescia, Italy, 2019; The Elizabeth Greenshields Foundation Grant 2019 and 2017, and Artist in Restaurant residency at Michelin-starred restaurant Pied à Terre, London, 2012. Selected exhibitions (* denotes solo) include DENK Gallery, Los Angeles, 2019*, Ahmanson Gallery, Irvine, 2018*; Space K, Seoul, 2017; 68projects, Berlin, 2017; the East London Painting Prize 2014 and 2015; Workshop Gallery, Venice, 2012*; MAC Birmingham, 2011; Prague Biennale, 2011, and the Bloomberg New Contemporaries, 2009. Her work is part of the Hotel Crillon collection, Paris; Saatchi Collection, London; Hogan Lovells Collection, London; the Ahmanson Collection, California, and numerous private collections worldwide.

Lorna Robertson’s colourful paintings, often made with a combination of oil paint and collage, have a distinctly nostalgic tone. Shimmering female forms with swinging skirts from the 1950s or bonneted bathers from the 1920s jostle with richly described interiors and crowded tabletops. Hints and glimpses of tangible forms – a fashion model, for example, or a vase – appear and then fragment into patterns and explosions of colour. This new publication coincides with Robertson’s exhibition at Ingleby Gallery and is divided into sections that feature collections of recent large paintings by the artist (2015–2022), small paintings (all 2022) and works on paper (2016–2022), all of which demonstrate Robertson’s characteristic layered interpretations of the female form alongside recurring motifs such as hats, long dresses and flowers. Her drawings (2018–2020) offer fluid forms in ink, pencil and watercolour. An essay by art critic Hettie Judah explores Robertson’s work in terms of pattern, costume and architecture, drawing out key inspirations including tapestry, advertising and magazine design through abstracted forms. The influence of contemporary female painters and those from art history is further considered. In another text, Robertson is in conversation with artist and writer Mikey Cuddihy. This frank interview reveals much about Robertson’s intuitive working processes: from starting points, colour decisions, the rhythms of brushwork and considerations of scale, to the wider relationship between text, music, drawing and painting.The publication is edited by Ingleby Gallery, designed by Joanna Deans, Identity, printed by Albe De Coker, and co-published by Ingleby Edinburgh, and Anomie, London. The publication coincides with Robertson’s first solo exhibition 'thoughts, meals, days' at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, in 2022. The artist is represented by Ingleby Gallery.Lorna Robertson was born in Ayr on the west coast of Scotland in 1967. She studied at Duncan of Jordanstone College of Art in Dundee and currently lives and works in Glasgow. Recent public solo exhibitions include 'Kodachroma', Glasgow Project Room (2013); 'This Dark Ceiling', Intermedia Gallery, C.C.A, Glasgow (2008); 'The Overlooked', Atelier Am Eck, Dusseldorf, Germany (2006); and 'New Paintings', 64 Osborne Street, Glasgow (2005). Robertson’s group exhibitions include 'Once Upon a Time', Flora Fairbairn, The Portman Estate, London (2022); 'Faces in the Water', Ingleby at Cromwell Place, South Kensington, London (2021); 'Brexit: Mail Art from a Small Island', Sipgate Shows, Düsseldorf, Germany (2019); 'Lorna Robertson and Robert MacBryde', Kingsgate Project Space, London (2019); 'Psychopathology of Everyday life', Glasgow Project Room (2011); and 'Vistas', Glasgow Project Room (2003). The artist was awarded the John Kinross Traveling Scholarship to Florence in 1990 and the Summer Scholarship, Hospitalfield School of Art, Arbroath, Scotland in 1989.

Throughout his international career spanning more than thirty years, artist and writer David Batchelor has long been preoccupied with colour. ‘Colour is not just a feature of [my] sculpture or painting,’ he notes, ‘but its central and overriding subject.’ This new publication is devoted to an ongoing series of sculptures titled Concretos. First made in 2011, Concretos combine concrete with a variety of brightly coloured – and often found – materials.The publication features a text by Batchelor charting the origins and development of Concretos. He reveals that the first Concreto was made after encountering coloured glass shards embedded in a concrete wall in the back streets of Palermo. Over time these Concretos, their title a nod to the Latin American art movement to which Batchelor’s work is much indebted, have become more complex adventures in layering, pattern and process. Elements such as acrylic plastic, spray and household gloss paint, steel, fabric and found objects all find themselves set in a concrete base. The most recent works, titled Extra-Concretos (2019–) retain much of the simplicity of the early pieces while working on a much larger scale.In an essay commissioned for the publication, curator Eleanor Nairne considers Concretos in light of their material possibilities. Nairne’s vivid text draws connections between the sculptures and a wide range of art historical and literary references. Some of the playful and sensual characteristics of Batchelor’s artistic vocabulary are considered in relation to floral bouquets, sewing-machines, ice cream and poetry. Architectural historian Adrian Forty’s essay discusses concrete’s physical qualities and relationship with modernity. He notes that the imperfect nature and apparent neutrality of the material is key to its enduring place within architecture, design and in Batchelor’s case, contemporary sculpture. ‘In the Concretos,’ asserts Forty, ‘concrete plays a necessary part in allowing colour to be itself. Present, but at the same time part of the barely noticed, half-invisible infrastructure of the city, concrete’s very neutrality performs an unexpectedly active part in these works.’The publication is edited by David Batchelor and Matt Price, designed by Hyperkit, printed by Park, London, and published by Anomie, London. The publication coincides with the first large-scale survey exhibition of Batchelor’s work taking place at Compton Verney, Warwickshire in 2022. The publication has been supported by Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, and Arts Council England.David Batchelor was born in Dundee in 1955 and lives and works in London. In 2013, a major solo exhibition of Batchelor’s two-dimensional work, ‘Flatlands’, was displayed at Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh and toured to Spike Island, Bristol. Batchelor’s work was included in the landmark group exhibition ‘Adventures of the Black Square: Abstract Art and Society 1915–2015’ at Whitechapel Gallery, London. ‘My Own Private Bauhaus’, a solo exhibition of sculptures and paintings by Batchelor was presented by Ingleby Gallery during the Edinburgh Art Festival, 2019. Between 2017 and 2020 a large-scale work by Batchelor was displayed in the collection of Tate Modern. He is represented by Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh, and Galeria Leme, São Paulo. Batchelor’s portfolio also includes a number of major temporary and permanent artworks in the public realm including a chromatic clock titled ‘Sixty Minute Spectrum’ installed in the roof of the Hayward Gallery, London. ‘Chromophobia’, Batchelor’s book on colour and the fear of colour in the West, was published by Reaktion Books (2000), and is now available in ten languages. His more recent book, 'The Luminous and the Grey' (2014), is also published by Reaktion. In 2008 he was commissioned to edit ‘Colour’ an anthology of writings on colour from 1850 to the present published by Whitechapel/MIT Press.

With a career spanning more than five decades, Ian McKeever is one of Britain’s most senior artists working on the international stage. This publication documents the Henge paintings – a series started in 2017 and completed over the course of five years, inspired by prehistoric standing stones in the county of Wiltshire, England, and continuing the artist’s long-standing investigation into the languages and possibilities of abstract painting.Comprising thirty paintings along with numerous works on paper, the genesis of the series was a visit by McKeever to the world-famous neolithic site in the village of Avebury in 2016, where he took black and white photographs of the large stones that form three discrete circles: two smaller ones contained within the largest. Erected some 4500 years ago, Avebury is the largest stone circle in Britain, and forms part of what English Heritage asserts to be ‘a set of neolithic and Bronze Age ceremonial sites that seemingly formed a vast sacred landscape.’Art historian and curator Paul Moorhouse, in his essay commissioned for the publication, describes how McKeever ‘framed each megalith in close-up, their edges visible at the extremity of the resulting images,’ explaining how ‘the experience of moving around Avebury and responding to the huge stones’ monumental presence made an abiding impression that resonated with deep-seated preoccupations.’ McKeever’s resulting body of work is an earnest and considered exploration into how paint can convey universal forces and properties such as mass, gravity and time, and how colour, texture and abstraction can converse with three-dimensional space, form and materiality. The relationship between painting and sculpture in McKeever’s work is discussed by means of an in-conversation between the artist and Dr Jon Wood. ‘My interest in alluding to early megalithic sites in titling the group of paintings Henge paintings,’ says McKeever, ‘was in touching that deeper sense of time, time’s weight, so to speak. How to imbue a painting with its own weight of time, forsake the immediacy of the here and now.’Designed and produced by Tim Harvey, the publication has been printed by Narayana Press in Odder, Denmark. It is published by Anomie, London, with support from Galleri Susanne Ottesen, Copenhagen, and Heather Gaudio Fine Art, New Canaan, Connecticut. The publication accompanies exhibitions of selected works from the Henge paintings at both galleries in 2022.Ian McKeever was born 1946, Withernsea, Yorkshire, UK. He lives and works in Hartgrove, Dorset. McKeever has received numerous awards including the prestigious DAAD scholarship in Berlin 1989/90 and was elected a Royal Academician in 2003. He has held several teaching positions including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton. He has also published many texts on painting.Recent public solo exhibitions include Ian McKeever / Tony Cragg – Painting and Sculpture, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2020); Paintings 1992–2018, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK (2018); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunstmuseet i Tønder, Denmark (2015); Between Darkness and Light, National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands (2015); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln, Cologne, Germany (2014); and Hartgrove. Malerei und Fotografie, Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany (2012). McKeever’s work is represented in leading international public collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok), Vienna; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

For over half a century, Valencia-born, New York-based Manolo Valdés has been a prominent international figure in the arena of contemporary art, known for his work in the mediums of sculpture, painting, drawing and collage. In this striking and imposing publication, designed in close dialogue with the artist by Peter B. Willberg and produced in Italy, Valdés presents a body of thirty-five sculptures created in 2020 and 2021. Along with wood, alabaster, aluminium, steel and resin, the primary medium employed in this body of work is glass, following a significant and intense period of research and experimentation. The resulting works are engaging contemporary portrait busts that make reference to the history of modernist painting and sculpture, taking inspiration from imagery and objects by twentieth-century masters such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Constantin Brancusi. Developing his ‘recipes’ for their fabrication – materials, processes, conditions and timings – with both care and flair, Valdés has created sculptural glass busts in a range of amber oranges, ruby reds, emerald greens, sapphire blues, and onyx blacks, all of which almost seem to glow with what Dr Kosme de Barañano, the book’s author, describes as ‘an inner light’. Barañano’s comprehensive and illuminating essay not only investigates aspects of the history of glass making and its use as a material by artists past and present, but also traces the evolution of the language and forms of Valdés’s glass and mixed-media works across a number of key exhibitions and bodies of work over the course of the past two decades. These include his monumental sculptures at the New York Botanical Garden in 2012 and his dramatic solo presentation in the Place Vendôme in Paris in 2016, both of which offered opportunities to see the artist’s large-scale sculptural works in outdoor settings. Discussing the significance of 'Cabezas' (heads) in his oeuvre, Barañano asserts: ‘These glass "Cabezas" are tremendously sombre and simple works from which emanates a profound silence.’This large-format publication, which is illustrated by specially commissioned photography by Tom Powel, documents many of the sculptures from different angles and by means of details, revealing not only the subtleties and qualities of the surfaces of the abstracted, humanlike glass heads, but also the curious and eclectic appendages that regularly appear to burst forth from them like unorthodox fascinators or eccentric jewellery, from nails and steel rods to glass or metal butterflies and wooden geometric forms. With a timelessness that speaks of civilisations long gone and a modernity that simultaneously seems to look to the future, Valdés has created a body of sculpture in glass that transcends time, touching on the metaphysical nature of the human mind and its outward manifestation in the physical world. Manolo Valdés (b.1942, Valencia) is one of the most significant post-war Spanish artists. A key member of the Equipo Crónica until 1981, in 1989 he moved to New York. Major solo exhibitions include the Guggenheim Bilbao, the Reina Sofía, Madrid, the New York Botanical Garden, and the Château Royale de Chambord, France.

This, London-based painter Sarah Medway’s second publication from Anomie Publishing, is devoted to the subject of the River Thames. The publication presents a series of twenty-eight oil paintings created in Medway’s canal-side studio in central London during the Covid-19 lockdowns of 2020-21. The Thames is beautiful, terrifying, powerful, alluring and dangerous. Medway captures the river’s eclectic dynamics, rhythms and energy through the language of abstract painting, the ripples, bubbles, eddies and currents, the reflections and refractions denoted through sinuous lines, ellipses and spots, dots and loops, flecks and swirls. Referencing 20th-century modernist movements such as De Stijl, Tachisme and post-war American Abstract Expressionism, Medway’s own, lyrical, often graphic approach to painting the Thames results in a vivid interplay between pattern and colour. The paintings have overt musical resonances – tempo, rhythm and dynamics as might be encountered in an orchestral score. Like the river, the paintings are at times joyous and playful, at other times brooding and menacing, yet always moving, in flux, traveling onwards towards the sea. An introductory text by critic and writer Sue Hubbard takes readers through the series, exploring how the paintings engage with the qualities and complexities of the river. An in-person conversation between Medway and writer, editor and curator Anna McNay provides insight into the artist’s life and work, discussing the processes by which Medway makes her paintings and the thinking behind them. Designed and produced by Peter B. Willberg, this foil-blocked, cloth-bound hardback publication with a special dustjacket also features an illustrated chronology documenting Medway’s life and career. Sarah Medway (b.1955, Seaton Carew, UK) is a painter based in London. As well as group exhibitions at institutions such as Tate Britain, the Whitechapel, the Royal Academy, the World Trade Center and Austin Museum of Art, Medway’s solo shows include Flowers East, London, Chelsea Hotel, New York, Kienbaum Gallery, Frankfurt, The Mandalai, Thailand, and Atelier Gallery, Spain. She has works in many public, private and corporate collections in the UK, US, Germany, Italy, Spain, Belgium, Hong Kong and Thailand.

Bill Woodrow (b.1948) and Richard Deacon (b.1949) have been making sculpture together since 1990. This new book is the first to showcase the work made over this thirty-year period. They have created over sixty works altogether which they call 'shared sculptures', highlighting the important equality of authorship and responsibility at stake for both these artists. Their shared sculptures exist as five main bodies of work, which have been variously shown in exhibitions in Britain and abroad: 'Only the Lonely' (1993), 'monuments' (1999), 'Lead Astray' (2004), 'On the Rocks' (2008) and 'Don't Start' (2016). Their recent body of work, 'We Thought About It A Lot' (2021), has seen them working on paper to explore their ideas together. This new book provides a rich visual account of these works, showing new and original photographs of them individually and in their exhibition contexts. It also includes studio photographs, images of the preview cards that they have designed for exhibitions over the years and reproduces one of their earlier fax exchanges. The publication features an introductory essay by the art historian and curator Jon Wood and is released to coincide with the artists' latest two-person exhibition, 'We Thought About It A Lot, and other shared drawings' at Ikon, Birmingham, in autumn 2021.

Mariele Neudecker is a German-born, Bristol-based artist working at the crossover of art and science. Her multimedia practice, which incorporates sculpture, video, painting and sound, explores the processes and effects of perception, the complexities and contradictions of landscapes and visuality, and the politics of representation and territorialisation. The influence of the nineteenth-century German romantic sublime is interwoven alongside inspiration from Neudecker’s work with scientists, as a guest artist on the Arts at CERN programme, her trips to the Arctic and travel elsewhere. This major monograph, published following an exhibition of the same name at Limerick City Gallery of Art – Neudecker’s first comprehensive solo exhibition in Ireland - presents more than 200 works from a 35-year-long career. In addition to a foreword by Úna McCarthy, the gallery's Director and Curator, essays by distinguished academics and curators from across the fields of art and science address diverse areas of Neudecker’s practice. A 'timeline' that Neudecker made specially for 'SEDIMENT' concludes the publication. Greer Crawley, an Honorary Research Fellow in the Department of Drama, Theatre and Dance at Royal Holloway, University of London, considers Neudecker’s archive, studio and her working processes, while Ariane Koek, an international expert in the field of arts, science and technology, suggests that the contemporary sublime Neudecker is so often described as seeking is, for her, the very process of perception itself. Her comprehensive introduction to Neudecker’s practice also discusses the tank works, for which the artist is best known, in which fibreglass landscapes are suspended in chemical solutions. James Peto, from the Wellcome Collection, London, focuses on issues of representation, post-colonialism and ‘time’, while Alice Sharp, Artistic Director of Invisible Dust, looks at Neudecker’s work and collaborations concerning the deep sea. Klaus Dodds, Professor of Geopolitics at Royal Holloway, University of London, returns to questions of territorialisation in and around the Arctic, and Professor Kerstin Mey, Interim President of the University of Limerick, considers the genre of still life in Neudecker’s photographic series 'Plastic Vanitas' (2015). Dominic Gray, Projects Director at Opera North, offers insight into Neudecker’s work with sound and music, addressing issues of performance, translation and scale; while Pontus Kyander, an independent writer and curator based in Helsinki, returns to the motif of the forest, arguing that any reading of Neudecker's work might be taken beyond an interest in landscape and the sublime to incorporate contemporary ecological questions. Finally, Crawley's second offering returns to Neudecker's use of sound - its juxtaposition and superimposition, alongside the notion of the window as a device, considering how each creates 'temporal turbulences' and 'an entanglement of materiality, space, form and position,' foregrounding the artist’s desire for viewers to see everything as eternally in flux. The publication, which is released to coincide with a new iteration of Neudecker's exhibition 'SEDIMENT' at Hestercombe, Somerset, in summer 2021, has been edited by Greer Crawley, designed by Herman Lelie and Stefania Bonelli, and printed by EBS Verona. It is published by Anomie Publishing, London. Mariele Neudecker (b. 1965, Dusseldorf, Germany) undertook a BA at Goldsmiths College, London (1987–90), and an MA in sculpture at Chelsea College of Art and Design, London (1990-1). She has shown widely in international solo and group exhibitions. Neudecker is Professor of Fine Art at Bath School of Art, where she runs the research cluster Making | Art | Science | Environment. She is on the Arts at CERN’s guest programme, the European Commission’s JRC SciArt advisory panel and the steering committee of Centre of Gravity, UK. Neudecker works with Pedro Cera, Lisbon; In Camera Gallery, Paris; and Thomas Rehbein Galerie, Cologne.