Ken UNSWORTH

Ken Unsworth is the first major survey book on the senior Australian artist created in collaboration with Anthony Bond and ARTND Foundation. Ken Unsworth is one of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, whose prolific career has spanned more than six decades, producing iconic works that are recognised both in Australia and internationally. This new book, Ken Unsworth by esteemed art curator Anthony Bond OAM, celebrates the output of his art including major installations, performances, paintings and drawings, land art and his major sculptures from collections around the world. Anthony Bond OAM is the principal author of the book with the contribution of dedicated chapters by Australia’s leading art historians and curators including Daniel Thomas, William Wright, Felicity Fenner, Jill Sykes, Anna Johnson, and René Block who survey Unsworth’s painting, drawing, sculpture, performance, dance collaborations and land art. Available in all good book stores and gallery shops. Published 2018, 252 pp, 380 x 253 mm, fabric-covered hardback, ISBN 978099435355-97

The Nightingale and the Rose

A new series of artworks by Del Kathryn Barton are inspired by the wild energy of Oscar Wilde’s classic story The Nightingale and the Rose. Lusciously illustrated, the book contains 20 new paintings and drawings by the Archibald winning artist to accompany the words of Wilde’s timeless tale of love and loss. Del Barton’s exaggerated aesthetic has given a contemporary feel to a classic fairytale. The theme of ecstatic metamorphosis through song attracted Del Kathryn Barton to this story, where the life of a small bird is offered up for the ideal of love. Barton sees the Nightingale as “the true artist, she gives completely of her deepest essence”.

Artist’s Choice: Five Decades of Artists’ Writing (1967–2014)

Over the years Art & Australia invited artists to write about their favourite work on public view, pairings include Shaun Gladwell on Mike Parr, Russell Drysdale by Tracey Moffatt, John Olsen on Lloyd Rees and Martin Sharp praising Cressida Campbell. Introducing the book Imants Tillers was reminded that “looking at art that moves you confirms the value of art and worthiness of being an artist”.

Current: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand

Current: Contemporary Art from Australia and New Zealand is the first comprehensive survey of all that is cutting edge in Australian and New Zealand contemporary practice. In a landmark publication, the book features eighty artists, carefully chosen to best reflect the vibrancy of art of the moment. While Current could be seen as a hot list of contemporary taste in the tradition of Taschen's Art Now, inclusivity is the book's abiding theme. Current is also underpinned by scholarship with commissioned essays by the region's leading writers and curators. Current's beautifully designed pages are filled with many names familiar to followers of contemporary art – including Paddy Bedford, Simryn Gill, Ah Xian, Tracey Moffatt, Shaun Gladwell and Del Kathryn Barton – along with some of the region’s freshest new talents, such as Benjamin Armstrong, Monica Tichacek, Rohan Wealleans, Francis Upritchard and Sean Cordeiro & Claire Healy, whose photograph of the contents of a German apartment wrapped in orange twine graces the book's front cover. Current captures the unique essence of contemporary practice in Australia and New Zealand, charged with the dynamic between Indigenous, western and Asian cultures. The eighty selected artists encompass a diversity of culture and subject and employ every available medium, from painting, photography and performance to installation and video art. Current's contextual essays are written by leading authorities in their fields, including Robert Leonard, Victoria Lynn, Justin Paton, Rachel Kent, Nick Waterlow and Brenda L. Croft, who has convened an important roundtable of Indigenous curators to explore the question of the contemporary within Aboriginal art.

TONY ALBERT

A comprehensive survey of the multidisciplinary oeuvre of Tony Albert, showcasing why the artist is fast becoming one of Australia’s leading figures in contemporary art. Featuring a foreword by Hetti Perkins and an in-depth interview with the artist by notable curator Maura Reilly, the book explores the complex conceptual undercurrent that pervades Albert’s work. Colour reproductions of the works, from photographs to large-scale installations, reveal the artist’s ongoing interrogation of the politics of colonisation and the flagrant injustices that are still faced by indigenous Australians today.

SAM LEACH

Sam Leach, one of Australia’s most acclaimed contemporary artists will release his first monograph, Sam Leach, this month at Sullivan+Strumpf, Sydney. With over 20 solo shows to his name, Leach has exhibited extensively at galleries and museums throughout Europe and across the Asia Pacific region. He is known for his virtuosic oil paintings. Executed with exemplary brushwork and encased in resin, Leach demarcates an ongoing investigation of the intersection between humans and animals. Produced by Art and Australia, the comprehensive survey is interspersed with an essay by celebrated, award-winning Australian author Tim Winton and an interview with writer and art critic Andrew Frost. The book abundantly illustrates over fifty of the artist’s major works to date, including the 2010 Archibald winning portrait of Tim Minchin and Proposal for a landscaped cosmos which took out the Wynne Prize the same year.

Khadim Ali

Khadim Ali is a limited edition book of 500 richly illustrated with Ali’s exceptional paintings and tapestries, works imbued with mythological narratives that take aim at contemporary politics. Khadim Ali is participating in The National, painting the foyer wall of Museum of Contemporary Art in February and March 2017. His work is held major institutions including the National Gallery of Australia, Canberra, Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, internationally at the Victoria and Albert Museum, London and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. Select exhibitions include the Venice Biennial, 2009 and Documenta (13), 2012.

Kate Beynon: AN-LI: A CHINESE GHOST TALE

Hong Kong-born, Melbourne-based artist Kate Beynon pictures the duality of her transcultural self and the alchemy of memory, folklore and contemporary life in her new collection of works staged at TarraWarra Museum of Art (TWMA). Featuring works on paper, paintings, an animated video and a suspended sculptural installation, the exhibition continues Beynon’s interest in exploring aspects of transcultural life, feminisms and notions of hybridity in a globalised and precarious world. Commissioned by Art and Australia for our new hardcover publication, An-Li: A Chinese Ghost Tale, the works are inspired by a supernatural Chinese story of two young spirits who traverse two diametric worlds, which is beautifully retold in the book by Beynon and Laura Murray Cree. Informed by ancestral imaginings, family connections and travel, the artist borrows from the imagery of ornamental objects she grew up with, her maternal grandfather’s scroll paintings and the iconography of sneakers, jewellery and tattoos that are unique to her family. She then weaves these real world inflections with fantasy in the form of Japanese imagery, Taoist magic calligraphy and comic book graphics to tell the story of the otherworldly lovers. The pair, one earthly the other aquatic, are guided by Kwan Yin a goddess who oversees their path from suffering to healing.

Chinese Zodiac

Edited by Art & Australia

Chinese Zodiac presents a dynamic new series of artworks created by twelve of Australia’s leading contemporary artists, with an introduction by Benjamin Law. The book explores the relationship between humans and animals, the East and the West, through a diverse series of artworks responding to the twelve animals of the Chinese zodiac, accompanied by written responses to each artist’s chosen zodiac animal.

Sam Leach | John Young | Michael Zavros | Joshua Yeldham | Kate Beynon | Lindy Lee | Tim McMonagle | eX de Medici | Caroline Rothwell | Christian Thompson | Dane Lovett | James Morrison