Taschen

We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with TASCHEN that allows us to present a selection of their extraordinary books featuring visual artists to our worldwide art and design-loving collectors. This SUMO-sized retrospective presents the work of Annie Leibovitz and features some of the most famed actors, musicians, artists, writers, athletes, and businesspeople of our time.  Choose one of four different cover photos: Keith Haring, Whoopi Goldberg, David Byrne or Patti Smith. This iconic portrait collection is presented with a Marc Newson-designed book stand and a supplementary essay compendium.

The bookends of the Leibovitz collection are the black-and-white photograph of Richard Nixon’s helicopter lifting off from the White House lawn after he resigned as president in 1974 and the formal color portrait of Queen Elizabeth II taken in a drawing room of Buckingham Palace in 2007. In between are portraits that make up a family album of our time: actors, dancers, comedians, musicians, artists, writers, performance artists, journalists, athletes, businesspeople. Performance and power are recurring themes. A supplementary book contains essays by Annie Leibovitz, Graydon Carter, Hans Ulrich Obrist, and Paul Roth and short texts describing the subjects of each of the over 250 photographs.

Limited to a total of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, this book is available as Collector’s Edition (No. 1,001–10,000) and also as an Art Edition (No. 1–1,000) with a fine art print, signed by Annie Leibovitz, and the full set of all four covers.

A Bigger Book, TASCHEN’s SUMO-sized David Hockney monograph, is as spectacular in format as it is in scope. In it, the artist takes stock of more than 60 years of work, from his teenage days at the Bradford School of Art, through his breakthrough in 1960s Swinging London, life by Los Angeles pools in the 1970s, up to his recent extensive series of portraits, iPad drawings, and Yorkshire landscapes.

The book’s sumptuous portfolio is supplemented by an illustrated chronology of more than 600 pages, contextualizing Hockney’s art with drawings, graphic work, portrait photos, and text based on the artist’s own writings as well as contemporary reviews.

Never before has Hockney’s oeuvre been published on such an astonishing and immersive scale. As each page unfurls in a blaze of blues, pinks, greens, and oranges, we are spellbound both by the artist’s vibrancy as a colorist and his extraordinary sense of the conditions of the world that surrounds us. Through Hockney’s restless interrogation of perception and representation, we witness the mellow sheen of light on a muddy Yorkshire puddle, the ochre enormities of A Bigger Grand Canyon, the rustic majesty of Bigger Trees near Warter, and, of course, A Bigger Splash, with the exquisite sparkle of a turquoise pool beneath an iridescent California sky. These major paintings are joined by the artist’s drawings, photo-composites, multi-perspective collages, stage designs, multi-camera video works, and iPad drawings, each a panoply of looking and showing in different styles and media.

Hockney himself is present in every aspect of the publication. He collaborated closely through all production stages and conceived of this book as a purely visual survey of more than 450 works prefaced by a handwritten programmatic statement. As an artist who rarely looks back, the vast volume is as much his own personal review as it is a definitive record for art lovers all over the world. “I don’t tend to live in the past,” he comments, “Working on this book, I see quite how much I have done.”

Collector's Edition of 9,000 copies (No. 1,001–10,000), each signed by David Hockney and with a Marc Newson bookstand.

We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with TASCHEN that allows us to present a selection of their extraordinary books featuring visual artists to our worldwide art and design-loving collectors. 

The original Newton SUMO was overwhelming in every respect: a 464-page homage to the most influential and controversial photographer of the 20th century, and a book that broke records for weight, dimensions, and resale price.

Published in a limited edition of 10,000 signed and numbered copies, the first SUMO sold out soon after release and quickly multiplied its value. As a worldwide publishing sensation, the book took the art monograph genre to an entirely new level and is today found in numerous important collections around the world, including New York’s Museum of Modern Art. Legendary SUMO copy number one, autographed by over 100 of the book’s featured celebrities, also broke the record for the most expensive book of the 20th century, selling at auction in Berlin on April 6, 2000 for 620,000 German Marks.

Created on the occasion of the centenary of Helmut Newton’s birth and TASCHEN’s 40th anniversay this spectacular new edition editioned by June Newton is now available. Shrunk to exactly half the size of the famous 1999 original, the “BABY SUMO” is no less glamorous: With more than 400 breathtaking images, reproduced and printed to the latest standards, it still has all the scope of a private exhibition of photographs. It is likewise published in a limited edition of 10,000 copies and comes with a detailed booklet documenting the making of this major publishing event. Philippe Starck has once again designed the accompanying book stand, this time including a pedestal, as an ideal way to display the volume.

Collector's edition of 10,000 numbered copies with a bookstand by Philippe Starck. Edited and revised by June Newton.

GOAT: GREATEST OF ALL TIME: A TRIBUTE TO MOHAMMAD ALI is a book with the power, courage, depth, creativity, and dazzling energy of its extraordinary subject. With thousands of images, including photography, art, and memorabilia and two gatefold sequences, this epic publication pays vivid tribute to The Greatest both in and outside of the ring.

Original essays and five decades’ worth of interviews and writing explore the courage, convictions, and extraordinary image-building that made Ali one of the most recognizable and inspirational individuals on the planet, an icon not only as an extraordinary athlete, but also as an impassioned advocate of social justice, interfaith understanding, and peace.

This exceptional Champ’s Edition, limited to 1,000 copies, is signed by Muhammad Ali and Jeff Koons and features:

• Four gelatin silver prints signed by photographer Howard L. Bingham and Muhammad Ali.
• The sculpture Radial Champs by Jeff Koons, measuring 175 x 170 cm (69 x 67 in.) and comprised of two inflatables and a stool.
• Over 3,000 images—photographs, art, and memorabilia, much of it published for the first time—from over 150 photographers and artists.
• Original essays and the best interviews and writing on the Champ over five decades, totaling 600,000 words.
• A silk-covered box illustrated with Neil Leifer’s iconic 1966 photo Ali vs Williams.
• XXL-format: 792 pages, including two gatefold sequences measuring 200 x 50 cm (80 x 20 in.); nine gold-metallic double-page spreads printed in silkscreen open each chapter.
• Highest-quality binding in pink leather, the color of Ali’s first Cadillac.
• Optimum photographic reproduction, creating unparalleled intensity and range in the colors and exquisite tone and density within the duotone images.
• Eight-color printing on Galaxi Keramik 200 gsm semi-matte paper with gloss varnish on all images.

This two-volume SUMO-size edition is designed and edited by Lélia Wanick Salgado and numbered and signed by Sebastião Salgado. Quarter-leather bound, it is presented with a bookstand in cherry wood veneer designed by Tadao Ando and a clothbound caption book explaining each stunning shot.

GENESIS is Salgado's love letter to the planet. It is the result of an epic eight-year expedition to rediscover the mountains, deserts, and oceans, the animals and peoples that have so far escaped the imprint of modern society—the land and life of a still pristine planet. The GENESIS project, along with the Salgados’ Instituto Terra, is dedicated to showing the beauty of our planet, reversing the damage done to it, and preserving it for the future.

On over 30 trips—by foot, light aircraft, boats, canoes, and even balloons, through extreme temperatures and in sometimes dangerous conditions—Salgado has created a collection of images showing us nature, animals, and indigenous peoples in such intense beauty it takes our breath away. The reach is truly global. Through Salgado’s lens, one discovers the animal species and volcanoes of the Galápagos; the penguins, sea lions, cormorants, and whales of the South Atlantic; Brazilian alligators and jaguars; and African lions, leopards, and elephants. We travel over icebergs in the Antarctic, the volcanoes of Central Africa, the ravines of the Grand Canyon, and the glaciers of Alaska. We encounter the Stone Age Korowai people of West Papua, nomadic Dinka cattle farmers in Sudan, Nenets and their reindeer herds in the Arctic Circle, as well as the Mentawai jungle communities on islands west of Sumatra.

In characteristic monochrome, Salgado’s painterly notes are perfectly tuned to these sublime scenes, capturing sweeping aerial panoramas as much as the most intricate details and textures, from a reptilian skin to the fur coat of the Nenet people of northern Siberia. The exquisitely reproduced images are arranged not by theme but rather conceived as a journey around the globe, immersing them in Salgado’s vision of the Earth’s mesmerizing scale, order, and beauty.

Exploring Wool’s work in close to 500 pages, this monograph is staggering in scope and depth. All work phases are covered in large-scale reproductions and accompanied by production Polaroids and installation photos by Wool himself. Editor Hans Werner Holzwarth has previously collaborated on several catalogues and artist’s books with Wool. Essays and analyses by Glenn O’Brien, Jim Lewis, Ann Goldstein, Anne Pontégnie, Richard Hell, and Eric Banks make this book a great read as well as a definitive study of the artist’s oeuvre so far.

In your face, achingly simple, deceptively frank, the work of Christopher Wool is so very New York. Though he owes a debt to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art he completely transcends these genres. Whether it’s a text-based painting or an abstract spray-painted piece, Wool questions painting, like many other artists in his generation, but he doesn’t provide any easy answers. As one piece proclaims, “The harder you look the harder you look.”

Wool became known in the mid-1980s through all-over paintings produced with rubber rollers commonly used to simulate decorative wallpaper patterns on walls. By 1988 he had hit stride with his dry, dead-pan word paintings (“Trbl,” “Riot,” “Sell the House, Sell the Car, Sell the Kids”), while continuing to explore the possibilities of pattern painting. From the 1990s, he developed the painterly qualities of his work, using a mostly black-and-white palette, starting from abstract lines drawn with a spray gun or layered stock images, overpainting silk screens on linen, wiping out images, with a widening variety of media, including photography, silk screen, and computer graphics.

Only a book of truly epic scale could begin to unpack the emotional, historical, and formal density of Rauch’s canvases. Comprising over 450 pages, including more than 250 large-scale reproductions, this monograph is the most inclusive collection of his work to date. It offers a generous range of writings that illuminate the personal, symbolic, and formal complexities of Rauch’s world. Wolfgang Büscher’s open and sensitive account of a walk through Rauch’s neighborhood reveals the painter’s compassion and modesty. Harald Kunde tracks Rauch’s stylistic development through its main semantic threads and historical influences. Gary Tinterow draws from his work on Rauch’s exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art to offer the reader a guide to the symbols that form the painter’s extensive mythology. These essays complement Rauch’s work with nuanced insights while allowing the images room to speak on their own. Within this atlas, readers will discover the rich density and enigmatic openness of Rauch’s paintings.

Born in Leipzig in 1960, Rauch learned his trade behind the Iron Curtain. His influences and interests were shaped by personal hardship and the tumultuous changes in East Germany after the Wall fell. In the late 1980s, having finished his studies at the Academy of Visual Arts Leipzig under Arno Rink and Bernhard Heisig, he explored diverse approaches to painting in dialogue with works he encountered by Francis Bacon, the New Wild painters, and the pre-Renaissance painters he saw during his travels in Italy. By 1993, he had arrived at the unique style of intertwining figuration and abstraction that characterizes his oeuvre and has brought him international attention and respect.

Each image captures a fleeting moment, from the colorful sunrise and lilac morning sky to nighttime impressions and the arrival of spring. Fascinating details reveal drops on window panes, distant lights in the night, reflections on glasses, bottles, and vases an abundance of subtly varied vegetation. We experience the passage of time through the eyes of David Hockney.
Bursting with radiant and unsettling juxtapositions, Rauch's paintings are wormholes into worlds of startling psychological power and cultural collisions. His scenes involve the viewer in a history that is at once mythic, intimate, and present. Through a deep consideration of philosophy, art history, literature, and his own dreamscape, Rauch’s paintings depict the precipices of progress and the struggles of communication. Electrified by their rich palettes, Rauch’s fragmented landscapes and timeless characters dance between pop and baroque, social and psychological, graphic and painterly.

From mirrors as canvases to computer paintings, this is the definitive monograph of Albert Oehlen's work to date. In the so-called death of painting, Oehlen found instead its enlivenment, expanding his practice by setting rules explicitly designed to overcome convention. A must-have for anyone serious about contemporary art and the future of painting practice.

Often wryly funny and just as smart, Albert Oehlen’s paintings play the medium for all it’s worth—and then some. After realizing that the so-called death of painting freed him to explore “the number of aspects through which one could expand painting,” Oehlen started work on a wide variety of figurative and non-objective offerings, in what he has called his “post-non-figurative” art. The artist continuously challenges himself, setting up rules that force him to overcome convention and his own routine in order to arrive at a satisfying image. During his career he has chosen to paint only in primary colors or in gray, to integrate mirrors into his canvases, or to take up computer painting when the first PCs became available. In his most recent work Oehlen expands painting through the use of advertising posters whose in-your-face aesthetics he transforms with subtle brushwork. Never without a touch of tongue-in-cheek humor, his work seems to be winking at us as it dares us to change the way we perceive an image.

This XL monograph covers the entire scope of Oehlen’s oeuvre: Roberto Ohrt discusses the early years, when Oehlen came into his own alongside Kippenberger, Büttner, and others, part of a scene that broke rules in art and rock music. Klaus Kertess examines the years from 1988 onwards, when Oehlen saw himself more self-consciously as a painter and started his first abstract works, then continued to probe the limits of the medium. Martin Prinzhorn and John Corbett take a close look at aspects of Oehlen’s iconography, and Oehlen discusses his computer paintings in a conversation with Corbett. An exhaustive biography and bibliography round out this comprehensive study. While Oehlen fans will rejoice at the publication of this breathtaking book, no one with an interest in contemporary art should pass up this unique opportunity to discover Oehlen’s remarkable body of work.

This book features Kishin Shinoyama's widely unseen portrait series of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, shot at Ono’s request for the cover of the couple’s 1980 album, Double Fantasy. With exceptional access to the couple’s private apartment, Shinoyama immortalizes this iconic couple at a decisive moment in their personal and creative relationship, and just three months before Lennon’s untimely death.

Renowned for his sensual, provocative images, Shinoyama is one of Japan’s most controversial and acclaimed artists, at once hailed by critics and charged for public indecency. Photographing everything from antiques to porn stars, Shinoyama is particularly recognized for his work with pop icons and celebrities, and the rare, private moments he captures with very public personalities. Through his lens, world-famous faces often reveal an unexpected openness and vulnerability.

This capacity for ease and intimacy is perhaps most poignantly expressed in his beautiful series of photographs of Yoko Ono and John Lennon, shot at Ono’s request for the cover and promotion of the couple’s celebrated 1980 album, Double Fantasy, just three months before Lennon’s untimely death. Now, over 30 years later, these images—many of them never seen before—still resonate with a remarkable freshness and honesty, immortalizing the iconic couple at a pivotal moment in their personal and creative relationship.

When David Hockney discovered the iPhone as an artistic medium, he opened up entirely new possibilities for painting. He made his first digital drawings in spring 2009. The iPhone was easy to use and he didn’t even have to get out of bed to start his working day, drawing morning impressions in broad lines and dazzling colors directly on his screen. In 2010, Hockney first used an iPad which, with its larger screen, expanded his artistic repertoire and enabled an even more complex interplay of color, light, and line.

Each image captures a fleeting moment, from the colorful sunrise and lilac morning sky to nighttime impressions and the arrival of spring. Fascinating details reveal drops on window panes, distant lights in the night, reflections on glasses, bottles, and vases an abundance of subtly varied vegetation. We experience the passage of time through the eyes of David Hockney.

This artist’s book, printed in large-format, brilliant resolution, presents these impressions in 120 drawings made between 2009 and 2012, arranged by the artist himself in chronological order.

Collector’s Edition (No. 1,001–2,000), each signed by David Hockney.

This special Collector’s Edition from TASCHEN documents Christo and Jeanne-Claude's colossal installation in New York City's Central Park from conception to realization. The book is designed by Christo and Jeanne-Claude with texts by Jonathan Henery and photographs by exclusive photographer Wolfgang Volz.  It is a lasting and stunning souvenir of this remarkable work of art. Each copy comes with a 24 x 24 cm (9.4 x 9.4 in.) piece of the project’s original fabric and features over 100 preparatory drawings and collages, as well as 900 important documents, engineering drawings, technical data, maps, and 1,441 photographs from 1979 to 2005.

February 2005 marked the ephemeral installation of this monumental work of art in New York City’s Central Park. First conceived in 1979 and rejected by New York City government in 1981, the project was approved by Mayor Michael Bloomberg’s administration in 2003. The work of art consisted of 7,503 16-foot-high vinyl gates with saffron-colored fabric panels on 23 miles of the park’s walkways.

Seen from the buildings surrounding the park, The Gates looked like a flowing saffron river, while those walking through them experienced the ambience of a fluid golden ceiling. Financed entirely by Christo and Jeanne-Claude through their C.V.J. Corporation, The Gates were assembled and installed by thousands of paid workers. Completed on February 12, 2005, The Gates remained in place for 16 days, after which they were removed and the materials recycled. The work of art was free for all visitors, who continued to use Central Park during the whole process.

Limited Collector’s Edition of 5,000 copies, signed and numbered by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and Wolfgang Volz, with original project fabric.

We are thrilled to announce our new partnership with TASCHEN that allows us to present a selection of their extraordinary books featuring visual artists to our worldwide art and design-loving collectors.

This SUMO-sized retrospective featuring the work of David Bailey celebrates one of the world’s most influential photographers and the culmination of two years researching his archives. Gathering portraits from the 1950s to the 2010s, we discover some 300 subjects as varied as Nelson Mandela, the Beatles, the Queen, Bill Gates, and Yves Saint Laurent.

The Collector’s Edition (No. 301–3,000), each numbered and signed by David Bailey, with a bookstand designed by Marc Newsom. Each edition comes with a set of four different book jackets featuring John Lennon and Paul McCartney, Jean Shrimpton, Mick Jagger, and Andy Warhol.