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Based on the minimal aesthetic of the medicinal pill, the Schizophrenogenesis series by Damien Hirst (born 1965) examines our almost spiritual faith in the rigors of science and the pharmaceutical industry. This volume includes all of the works from the series, including The Cure: 30 silkscreen prints, each depicting a two-color pill set against a vibrantly hued background. Also included in this volume are the corresponding sculptural works, reproductions of medicine bottles, pharmaceutical boxes, ampoules and syringes at various monstrous scales. These works continue Hirst's exploration of contemporary belief systems, which now rank medicine alongside religion, love and art. Hirst explains: "Pills are a brilliant little form, better than any Minimalist art. They're all designed to make you buy them ... they come out of flowers, plants, things from the ground, and they make you feel good, you know, to just have a pill, to feel beauty."

British artist Gavin Turk (born 1967) has been at the forefront of contemporary sculpture since the late '80s, with his painted bronzes, waxworks, recyclings of art-historical icons and imaginative use of trash. Throughout his career, Turk's sculptures have dealt with issues of authorship, authenticity and identity, working to demystify or parody the myth of the artist. This fully illustrated catalog is published for Turk's show at Damien Hirst's new London exhibition space, Newport Street Gallery. The volume spans the duration of the artist's career to date, featuring his most important pieces from his seminal blue-plaque work, "Cave," through his many signature-based artworks, egg sculptures and waxworks, to his more recent bronze casts of sleeping bags and trash bags. Featuring three gatefolds, it also includes essays by psychoanalyst and author Darian Leader and Nigerian poet and novelist Ben Okri, plus a conversation with Hirst.

Published on the occasion of the inaugural exhibition at Newport Street Gallery, built to house work from Damien Hirst's art collection, John Hoyland: Power Stations provides a fascinating insight into the life and work of one of Britain's leading abstract painters. Renowned for his intuitive manipulation of color, form and texture, John Hoyland (1934-2011) saw nonfigurative imagery as offering "the potential for the most advanced depth of feeling and meaning." Including work drawn from a pivotal period in Hoyland's career--1964 to 1982--Power Stations shows an artist equally comfortable with geometric and gestural abstraction, combining elements of both in vividly hued, large-scale paintings. The first extensive survey of Hoyland's work since the artist's death, this volume reaffirms Hoyland's status as a major innovative force within the pantheon of international abstraction.

In 2014, Damien Hirst (born 1965) unveiled a new series of "paintings" composed of vast numbers of surgical instruments, which combine to form bird's-eye views of cities from around the world. With these Black Scalpel Cityscapes, Hirst investigates subjects pertaining to the sometimes disquieting realities of modern life--surveillance, urbanization, globalization and the virtual nature of conflict--as well as those relating to the human condition in general, such as our inability to arrest physical decay. Buildings, rivers and roads are rendered as scalpels, razor blades, hooks and safety pins. Described by the artist as "portraits of living cities," the full series is illustrated in this volume and accompanied by detail illustrations. Also included is an essay by Jerry Brotton, author of A History of the World in Twelve Maps, and a short story by novelist and arts writer Michael Bracewell.

"Breakfast at The Wolseley gave Damien and I the perfect opportunity to discuss the business of the day," remembers Frank Dunphy, Damien Hirst's business manager, "the bow-tied super-ego to Mr. Hirst's id," as The Wall Street Journal has described him. "Always on time, Damien would first hold out his hand for a pen or pencil and would then begin sketching on the back of his placemat." Portraits of Frankis published to coincide with Dunphy's retirement after almost 15 years with the artist. Seen here for the first time, Hirst's portraits were sketched during the pair's regular breakfast meetings at the famous Wolseley restaurant in London between 2004 and 2010. They provide a touching illustration of Frank and Damien's collaborative relationship as it unfolded over the course of some of the most extraordinary years of the artist's career.

This fully illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of Now, a solo show of work by Jeff Koons (born 1955) presented at Damien Hirst's new London exhibition space, Newport Street Gallery, which exhibits art from Hirst's collection. Now spans the duration of Koons' career to date, and features sculpture and painting from some of his most important series, including Inflatables, The New, Equilibrium and Made in Heaven, which investigate themes pertaining to mass culture, commerce, advertising, taste, pleasure and banality. This publication also includes an essay by art critic Michael Archer and a foreword by Newport Street Gallery's Senior Curator, Hugh Allan.

Relics constitutes the new and largestever retrospective of Damien Hirst's work, including both iconic, and previously unseen artworks, spanning 27 years of the artistscareer. If you own one book on the work of this artist, this is the latest and most comprehensive. For the first time Hirst's two diamond skulls, "For the Love of God" (2007) and "For Heaven's Sake" (2008), are pictured together. Explaining, "art's about life and it can't really be about anything else ... there isn't anything else," Hirst's work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, anddissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience.

The Visual Candy paintings were made between 1992 and 1994.The works showcase the ways in which Damien Hirst used the signifier of candy during the early 1990's, exploring questions of pure aesthetics. Hirst says they were created as a direct riposte to an art critic who had dismissed Hirst's Spot Paintings as "just visual candy.' Addressing the viewer on a deliberately emotionaland instinctive level, these works, abetted by their exuberant titles, among them Some Fun (1993) and Dippy Dappy Dabby (1993), set out to question the implication that aesthetically pleasing art is inherently insignificant.While ostensibly abstract, the paintings in fact depict medicinal pills, and can be seen as a stylised depiction of the psychological effects of happy, mood-enhancing drugs. Hirst once described how, "in every painting there is a subliminal sense of unease... the colours project so much joy it's hard to feel it, but it's there. The horror underlying everything," In this context, the Visual Candy paintings, despite their surface optimism, posses a disquieting undercurrent of tension and darkness - born from an awareness of the inevitable low that follows any high. Hirst once said that "art is about life - there isn't anything else.'

An alphabet book illustrated by the artwork of Damien Hirst.

Published on the occasion of Damien Hirst's exhibition at White Cube in Hong Kong in the spring of 2013. Among many new works illustrated in the publication are pieces from some of Hirst's latest series: the Entomology paintings and the Blade paintings. Hirst began work on the Entomology paintings in 2009. Each piece is made by placing hundreds of varieties of insect and beetle species into household gloss paint, in intricate geometric patterns. The series is reminiscent of Hirst's iconic series of butterfly wing Kaleidoscope pieces, dating from 2001, which were originally inspired by Victorian tea trays. As with the butterfly--one of Hirst's most enduring "universal triggers"--the insects' appeal derives largely from the appearance of life they retain in death. However, whilst the iridescent beauty of the wings in the Kaleidoscope series evoke stained glass windows, and are often assigned spiritual titles, the Entomology paintings are named after phases and characters in Dante Alighieri's tortuous vision of the afterlife, The Divine Comedy. The works also allude to Hirst's longterm interest in the nineteenth-century fascination with natural history and the irony involved in having to kill something in order to look at it. The Blade paintings are amongst the newest series of works in Hirst's practice. Thousands of variously shaped scalpel blades are positioned on a canvas in spectacular, mandala-like patterns. In some of the works, intermittent areas of coloured gloss paint have been layered in between the blades. The Blade paintings reference two of Hirst's seminal earlier series. While their geometric patterns recall the earlier series of butterfly Kaleidoscope paintings, in their use of surgical instruments, Hirst also returns to one of his most recognisable themes: medicine, and its inevitable futility in the face of our mortality. The surgical materials, first used by Hirst in his early 90s instrument cabinets, are described by the artist as "phenomenal objects because they have to have this confidence and this belief. They are the best quality. They are brilliantly designed, for all the right reasons." With the Blade paintings, the instruments eventual inability to arrest decay is highlighted by their relegation to decorative status.

This book catalogues recent works by the Bali-based artist Ashley Bickerton. The works will be exhibited at White Cube, London from April to May 2009.Ashley Bickerton contends the popular global construction of the tropics as perfec- tion, where surfing, drugs and parties in beachside tourist villas provide a homoge- nised experience of the exotic. Living on the island of Bali, he parodies this drunken myopia in his photocollages and sculp- tures, presenting such glut and excess as an artifice. Just as Gauguin 'sampled' Poly- nesian exotica, so do Bickerton's carica- tures perform ideas of the tropical. An in- troductory essay by Nick Stillman highlights these themes in Bickerton's work, while the artist's conversation with artist, curator and writer Harland Miller explores the idea of the island as man, home and retreat.

This publication accompanies the Damien Hirst 'Two Weeks One Summer' exhibition at White Cube Gallery, May 2012. Painting has always been an important part of Hirst's oeuvre, but unlike the spot paintings and photorealist series which were made using a collaborative studio process, this body of work is altogether more personal: painted from life, by Hirst in his Devon studio.The paintings, often intimate in size, could be seen as traditional still lifes, depicting an array of carefully arranged elements, both natural and inanimate, sometimes memento mori, alongside objects and formal devices that have made their appearance in Hirst's sculptures and installations before. Exquisitely coloured birds on display stands or in simple glass boxes, butterflies, fruit and cherry blossom at the peak of its beauty, intimate the pure joy of spring's transition into summer but also the temporal significance of this natural phenomenon.Next to these bucolic objects, more sinister symbols take their place: oversized scissors, a shark's gaping jawbone, bell jars and even several lonely single or conjoined foetuses floating in jars, elements that are displaced from the laboratory table rather than the domestic one. Some objects are painted with clarity and impasto; others appear hazy and faint, as if they are somehow more insubstantial, part of a sudden apparition or dream-like vision.

The beginning of a series of books about worldwide emerging contemporary artists. Spring 2009 focuses on three London based artists.

This is the first significant publication on the work of British painter Neal Tait. This visually fascinating book takes 'a studio approach' to illustrate the range and focus of Tait's paintings. Photographs of Tait's archive collection of found imagery (including newspaper cuttings), sketchbook drawings, preparatory drawings and finished drawings are woven within the body of full colour reproductions of his paintings, allowing for lateral readings of the genesis and development of ideas alongside finished works. Initially, Tait's output reflects a rather idiosyncratic narrative, harnessed to what might be broadly described as a 'contemporary European sensibility', but this publication reveals that Tait is in fact wrestling with a strong sense of painting's tradition, something in-keeping with a painter's painter.This book includes the paintings which perhaps brought Tait's work to wider appeal - the ghost-like heads, appearing as if x-rayed by generally tonal colours, emphasizing the relationship between the weight of the surface of a painting in relation to the presence of a sitter. And this cornerstone of negative presence is something that can be seen to recur or resurrect itself throughout the more recent open-ended picture making. Fragments of the body are often merged with their surroundings, abstracting them from their 'home' context in order that they might act as a signifier in the space of the 'painting' and, by so doing creating a tension between what we know the thing to be and what Tait's emotional and psychological connection could be. Birds, a birdhouse, a television or a playground swing take on a more significant charge in a world that seems, oddly, in tension between a calm innocence and an anxious foreboding. And this is further emphasized by Tait's exquisite colour sense and draughtsmanship - a child-like palette of warm and cold tones and bright energetic high-key colour (reminiscent of the Paris School), contained within a firm but delicate stylized line. Along with two intelligent and empathetic essays by Michael Bracewell and Jeremy Millar, this publication is more a catalogue of a practice -a practice which is about itself and the subject the medium eventually finds and commits to saying.

Fresh Fresher is a monograph on the work of British artist Jane Simpson. It is a celebration of her career since 1992 when, while still a student, she first experimented with the use of ice and her now trademark refrigeration technique. Rather than following a strict chronology, the book surveys Simpson's work thematically, punctuated by three critical texts. An introduction by Norman Rosenthal and essays by Ulrike Groos, Director, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf and Mark Godfrey, Slade School of Art, place the artist's work in a broader art historical context. By positioning the pieces in abstract perspectives of vivid colour, the book's design accentuates the pastel tones and shades that, as in her rubber casts of kitchen utensils or photographs of Tupperware, Simpson characteristically uses in her work. Fresh Fresher takes its title from Simpson's sculpture of a pair of vases with roses in different stages of bloom, a work she based on two of Giorgio Morandi's paintings. A variation on the classical tradition of still life, this piece (2000) exemplifies the underlying themes invariably present in the artist's work to date: the process of appropriation and transformation, and the dialectics of decay and renewal.

History of the World by Eduardo Sarabia reproduces ten oil paintings based on the artist's family events and daily life. Reinterpreting the photographs as oil paintings he interrupts the viewer's reading of the figures and landscape with abstract markings, which also redefine the space within the composition. The book also includes an introductory section showing Sarabia's signature iconography; drawings used on the surface of the artist's ceramic works--his vases and plates. Fusing imagery of illegal contraband (from scantily clad, provocative women to marijuana leaves and automatic weapons) and more traditional folklore type decoration (cockerels, goats, wildlife), Sarabia's drawings address contemporary issues whilst referring to his Mexican heritage and parodying the cultural clichés surrounding drug smuggling, illegal trade and machismo.

Yoko I-XXXII, focuses on Don Brown's series of sculptures of his wife Yoko, which have been ongoing throughout his career. Don Brown's art explores questions of representational perfection. His sculptural vocabulary harks back to classical antiquity and the elegance and idealism of neoclassical marbles such as Canova's The Three Graces (1814-17), while also invoking modernist realism as instanced by Degas' La Petite Danseuse de Quatorze Ans (1881). In Brown's distinctive take on classical sculpture, the place of an idealised heroine is taken by the real-life figure of the artist's wife in a casual pose. Yoko becomes a conflation of the generic and the individual.

Published to accompany Rachel Howard's solo exhibition of new work at Bohen Foundation, New York in June 2007, this book profiles Howard's paintings and ink drawings on paper. Accompanying this is an insightful interview between Howard and New York-based critic Adam E. Mendelsohn, which explores the new figurative direction Howard's work is taking, and a hauntingly beautiful poem by critic and poet Sue Hubbard. Howard's new works incorporate dark shapes of hanging female figures that appear to have been poured onto the canvas, all previous brushstrokes dissolved into a perfectly smooth expanse of paint. Embedded in the saturated colours and glossy surfaces that characterise Rachel Howard's work, the dire figures set up an uneasy tension between the subject matter and the vibrant physicality of colour, surface and layered depth. The accompanying ink drawings, which are dominated by female suicide, also explore what the artist describes as 'the beauty of tragedy'. As Howard puts it, "suicide seems to be one of the last taboos... shame and guilt and sin; all the things I love and hate."

Radiations is the first publication on the work of rising artist Paul Fryer. The relationship between visual art and science is at the heart of Fryer's eccentric but highly engaging body of works: "An artist like P.A. Fryer is as much a throwback to the enlightenment of the 18th century as he is prescient of the new." Fryer's scientific inquiry, his visual awareness of popular cultural icons, combined with a sense of a poetic pieta gives his work a definite sense of the now. This elegant and thoughtfully designed book contains over 30 full colour reproductions including prints, sculptures and installation shots, and an in-depth interview between Fryer, Hans Ulrich Obrist, Co-Director of London's Serpentine Gallery, and scientist Colin Dancer. Alongside this is a personal and insightful introduction by Fryer's long- term advisor Duncan Ward, and an essay by Amanda Harlech, both of which underline that Fryer's art works on multiple levels, and that it is conscious of its uniqueness and validity: "These works arrive at a time when little art has the tonic to shock and popular culture has seen to the dismantling of the avant-garde and the experimental in all it's sub sects... Paul Fryer senses the storm, and unfurls a kite so that we can connect with it."

This new Other Criteria publication focuses entirely on drawings made by the London-based painter Philip Allen. With accurate reproductions colour marker and pen drawings on cream paper simply presented without any accompanying text, this book provides an excellent visual insight into Allen's unique method of pictorial construction and inventiveness as a draughtsman. Looking at Allen's drawings in this book is similar to seeing them in his studio, arranged one after another across a wall, some with similar characteristics to that of school exercise book doodles and cartoons, others making, referencing and developing the imagery found in his paintings. The 'whirls and twirls' at the bottom and top of the drawings may be an instinctive or idiosyncratic part of Allen's mark- making, but they also refer to the clumps and gatherings of paint that sit heavily at the top and bottom of his paintings, working both to contain the motif in the 'middle' of the picture and to raise aesthetic dialogue. Allen's drawings are therefore notes on his paintings as well as things that explore the diversity and range of the 'office stationery' he uses, which gives them a vibrant appeal and a very contemporary quality. This exquisite book shows that Allen's drawings are very accomplished, with a simplicity that hides a complexity unique to the practice of drawing and, as such, makes this publication a welcome and innovative contribution to the canon of books on painters.

In Advance of the Institution can be described as a textbook for John Isaacs' world view, a view which emphasises that: "The common thread in all of the varying definitions of language is the concept of rifts between individual people, animals, even inanimate objects and how these gaps may best be bridged." Compositing numerous sourced texts, by writers such as H.G. Wells, Freud, Jung, Einstein, Adam Smith, and The Bible, alongside reproductions of Isaacs' work, In Advance of the Institution constructs an intriguing and engaging lateral narrative that underlies the difference and similarities between ideas, objects, and the actions of individuals, in relation to social constructs. Although John Isaacs is generally regarded as a sculptor, his praxis incorporates a range of different mediums - from found object constructions, to video and photographs. This range emphasises his world view that buried under the surface of our apparent isolation from one another lies a universal connection - from the physical functioning of the bodies we inhabit to the dreams, successes and failures of the individual and society. In that sense, In Advance of the Institution entirely encapsulates and reflects Isaacs' practice, and with 188 pages of text and full colour reproductions, this publication stands out as an exceptionally interesting piece of art in its own right.

Joo is a substantial monograph on the work of American/Korean artist Michael Joo surveying all his finished projects, as well as some preliminary work, since his graduation in 1991. Joo describes his art as "a complex network of non-hierarchic information" with several layers of meaning that trigger multiple associations, and the book includes his extended captions alongside each project. Michael Joo works in a wide range of media, including sculpture, installation, animation and performance-based video art. His work frequently investigates themes centring around questions of identity, juxtaposing Eastern spiritualism with the Western way of understanding the world. Fascinated by the interaction between nature and its surroundings, Joo also has a profound interest in scientific processes. Thematically, his projects explore dualities such as linear and cyclical, physical and metaphysical, real and unreal, natural and unnatural, often using a visual language which combines highly complex geometric and structural patterns with 'real' objects - bodily fluids, eggs and mosquitoes - from nature.

In 2005 British visual artist Martin Westwood reviews his most notable projects to date, from his early drawings, in which he painstakingly reproduces images distorted through the processof photocopying, to his three exhibitions at The Approach in London; sequences of images allow the reader an overviewof his two major installations, 'Angelus Novus' and 'fatfinger [HAITCH . KAI . EKS.]', in which he recreated a school nursery and an office space, respectively, as a way of exploring issues around the environments we grow up and work in. An essay by writer and lecturer JJ Charlesworth provides a deeper understanding of the artist's work as a whole. Designed by Jason Beard, the book is an extensive and up-to-date visual summary of Westwood's oeuvre.Martin Westwood's projects investigate the state of contemporary capitalist society, with a recurring focus on themes of bureaucracy, commerce, economy and corporate culture. Creating complex systems of codes and symbols that incorporate and reference familiar objects - such as balloons, magazines, map pins and invoice sheets, artificially decomposed and then reconstructed - his art works vary in scale and format from large- scale installations to paintings and multi-layered collages.

"End of Real," by artist Itai Doron, is a photographic diary of the places he visited whilst preparing exhibitions in different parts of the world during the 1990s. The photographs - or "postcards" as Doron describes them - were taken using a 15-dollar camera he picked up from Woolworths in Los Angeles, and they document the artist's fascination with the dream-like world of fame, legends and celebrity. Through seven stories from three countries, each made personal by Doron's introductions, we are invited to visit places where fiction meets reality: the Hollywood sign in Los Angeles, the fatal route James Dean took to Salinas, an Elvis impersonators contest in Tel Aviv, the famous Shepperton film studios in London, and the graves of countless film stars and modernday heroines from Marilyn Monroe and Marlene Dietrich to Princess Diana. Designed by Intro and with a forward by Nicolas Roeg, cinematographer and director of cult masterpieces such as Don't Look Now and Performance, "End of Real" is Doron's first project in book form. After a childhood filled with visits to the movies and with stories told to him by his mother about its stars, Itai Doron's work is strongly influenced by cinema. Having worked as a visual artist using media as varied as photographs, photo-collages, video and audio-visual installations, in 2004 he wrote and directed his first short feature film, The Trouble with Thomas Cruise, starring horror movie legend Linda Hayden.

Adventures in Art draws together 70 of Sue Hubbard's essays on contemporary and modern art and spans the last 20 years of her career. An award-winning poet, short story writer, freelance critic and novelist, Hubbard's collected essays are part biographical, part lyrical reviews of today's programme of modern art in Britain and provide an honest account of the diversities, originalities and disappointments found there. Adventures in Art is published by Other Criteria and will be available from 13th May 2010.Thick with anecdotes and quotes from historians, artists and commentators, Hubbard's writing guides us through specific exhibitions, as well as the creative lives of her subjects, and places the reader within a context replete with description and art historical value. Her knowledge is incisive and reflective and, in many retrospective cases, the essays read like modern obituaries. Hubbard's writing explores the lives and contributions of artistic figures from Lucien Freud and Sam Taylor Wood, to Marc Quinn and Cy Twombly.