Jason Rosenfeld

The first – and highly anticipated – monograph on one of the most influential painters of our time Cecily Brown is a British-born, New York-based artist who rose to prominence in the late 1990s. Brown established her unique voice within the art sphere by investigating the sensual qualities of oil paint and challenging the conventions of abstraction and figuration. Through a range of reference to old master paintings, Abstract Expressionism, and popular culture, Brown's symbolic language, exuberant brushwork, rich palette, intense energy, and embrace of the erotic have redefined some of painting's historical canons.

This publication covers the entirety of the multivalent art of Pakistan-born American artist Shahzia Sikander (b.1969), with a particular focus on her painting. It contextualises her art within her early education in Lahore, move to America in 1993, and then her establishment in the New York art world since 1997. Sikander's work is among the most thought-provoking and ambitious in the contemporary art world. Initially transforming the traditional form of miniature painting, she pioneered what is now recognised as the Neo-Miniature movement, and over the past 20 years has sought to diversify a predominant Eurocentricity in contemporary art. Her paintings, video animations, mosaics and sculptures interweave historical and contemporary ideas about narrative, gender, trade, empire, and diaspora while centring on women's lives. This book considers the scope of Sikander’s considerable ambition and achievement.

The first monograph on the internationally celebrated Nigerian American painter who blends her personal history and the African diasporic identity in layered compositions “Critics have often (and rightly) marveled at the care and finesse with which Akunyili Crosby assembles vast multiplicities of time and place into singular sites of visual contestation.” —FriezeNjideka Akunyili Crosby’s work unites multiple places and temporalities, reflecting both personal and universal dimensions of contemporary life and, in particular, the intricacies of the African diasporic identity. This first monograph on Akunyili Crosby brings together nearly fifty paintings, made from 2010 to 2023, that chart her methodical practice of layering painted representations of people, locales, and aspects of her own experiences with transferred images sourced from her personal collection, Nigerian publications, and other outlets. Akunyili Crosby reveals and revisits distinct realms, from lush gardens to domestic, interior worlds related to motherhood, family, marriage, the body, and personal identity. New texts from Jareh Das, Helen Molesworth, Jason Rosenfeld, and Drew Thompson focus on a range of themes in Akunyili Crosby’s work, including her visual language and material practice, her mixing of Western and Nigerian imagery and forms, and her use of photography in portraiture and figuration.

In this concise and beautifully illustrated introduction book, expert Jason Rosenfeld walks us through the key moments and central artworks to the Pre-Raphaelite movement. The Pre-Raphaelites, the first avant-garde group in the history of British art, were bent on introducing bold new ideas, encouraging change in art and challenging the broader culture. They rebelled against the academic art of the day and produced novel explorations of subjects from literature, poetry and the Bible. The principal members of the group, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and Dante Gabriel Rossetti, created such seminal and well-loved paintings as The Awakening Conscience, Ophelia and Beata Beatrix. Jason Rosenfeld, an acknowledged expert on the Pre-Raphaelites, explores the origins and influence of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.