Jennifer Higgie

The most comprehensive overview of the artist's paintings to date, Nicola Tyson: Selected Paintings 1993-2022 provides a thorough investigation of the artist's evolving lexicon. "Tyson's paintings do not mirror the world that we see with our eyes. Rather, they invoke a kind of dreamscape; the forms are familiar, we understand them, but we cannot quite place how we know them, or where we saw them, or why we are seeing them again now." -Kathy Noble, Artforum Known primarily as a painter, Nicola Tyson adds psychological weight to eroticized flesh. She enlivens her canvases with a motley of biomorphic creatures, amalgamated from partly recognizable coordinates of corporeal and animalistic appendages. Her enigmatic mutations, borne out of what she calls "psycho-figuration," explore the possibilities unlatched by a bodily orientation to painting, informed as much by identity, gender and sexuality as by recesses of the unconscious. The paintings often become a surprise to the artist herself. By relying less on reason, Tyson carves a humorous, unsettling, as well as liberating approach to painting the female body, which roots it in experience rather than the merely observed. The most comprehensive survey on Nicola Tyson's paintings to date, spanning three decades of her career, Selected Paintings 1993-2022 provides a panoramic view of the evolving language in her paintings. With more than 150 illustrated pages dedicated to the artist's chromatically saturated palette, the book boasts over 50 full-color reproductions of her paintings, supplemented by close-up detail images, installation shots and photographs of the artist in her studio. The monograph includes an essay by Jennifer Higgie, which elaborates on Tyson's feminist-informed yet intuitive methods to subjective painting. Higgie illuminates the paintings against the backdrop of the carnivalesque ethos of 1970s queer life in London, in which Tyson came of age, as well as the fertile experiments of Trial BALLOON - the feminist-collective space that the artist founded in the 1990s upon her move to New York. Selected Paintings 1993-2022 offers readers the opportunity to delectate in the sumptuous details of Nicola Tyson's idiosyncratic and startlingly mysterious vision, all while gaining a thorough understanding of what drives her painting practice.

Daniel Crews-Chubb (b.1984) is a London-based painter whose mixed-media works wrestle with the human condition and modes of selfexpression. This monograph, Out of Chaos, is published to coincide with his solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor, New York, which brings together new paintings and works on paper. Crews-Chubb’s paintings exist somewhere between figuration and abstraction. They draw on a wide variety of references, including ancient cosmologies, historic artefacts and sculpture, pre-Columbian deities, Cubism, Abstract Expressionism and Hellenic myth. He intertwines canonical sources and classical allusions in his paintings, creating a highly personal, idiosyncratic lexicon of human, celestial and bestial figures. Out of Chaos takes its title from the ancient Greek notion that chaos is a state of undifferentiated matter from which the universe emerged. The paintings that form this series feature urgent, gestural marks and passages of vivid colour, centred around the figure as a motif. The bodies that he depicts are ageless, nongendered and non-racial – conduits for feeling, rather than signifiers of individuals. This publication reproduces Crews-Chubb’s paintings from 2015 to 2024, starting with his early works and subsequently organised into seven series. Notable among these are the recent Immortals (2022–) and Out of Chaos, which is the focal point of his solo exhibition. The book also features an introduction by the writer Jennifer Higgie, an essay by art historian Matthew Holman and an interview with writer Amah-Rose Abrams. Daniel Crews-Chubb was born in Northampton in 1984. He completed his BA at Chelsea College of Arts, London, in 2009 and undertook the Turps Studio Programme, London, in 2013. He lives and works in London. His first solo museum exhibition will take place at the Long Museum, Shanghai, in November 2024.

Jennifer Higgie presents a year in the life of Richard Dadd, infamous inmate of one of England's most notorious sanitariums, London's Bethlem Hospital, better known as Bedlam. Incarcerated, Dadd thoughts return to a grand tour of Europe and the Middle East taken with his patron, Sir Thomas Phillips. The two men travelled through German forests, Alexandrian brothels and across the desert to the Nile. By the time they found themselves beneath the unforgiving sun of Syria and Palestine, Dadd's fraught mind was taxed to the limit with extraordinary images. He became stranger and more violent, changes his companion attributed to sunstroke. But somewhere on that journey, Dadd had become a devotee of the god Osiris. Shortly after his return to England in 1843, the god directed him to take a life, and Dadd was on the road to Bedlam. At once jarringly acute and alarmingly askew, Dadd's voice is rendered with both empathy and acuity by Higgie. This is a poetic and considered portrait of an artist, as well as an intriguing mystery about how, and why, a mind can go so swiftly and dangerously awry.

In Sisterly Affections, London-based artist Sofia Mitsola (b. 1992) constructs a vivid pictorial world where myth, desire, and painting converge on contemporary terms. Her women figures--confident, theatrical, and self-possessed--inhabit spaces that resist fixed narrative or moral framing. Mitsola approaches female eroticism not as spectacle but as agency, informed by classical imagery and reworked through a contemporary feminist lens. Bringing together paintings, drawings, and watercolors, the catalogue is accompanied by a text by Alyce Mahon and an interview by Jennifer Higgie, offering a nuanced portrait of an artist redefining the terms of sensual representation today.

Rose Wylie OBE RA (b. 1934) lives and works in Kent. She paints from memory, frequently taking her imagery from mass media. Her large works on unstretched, unprimed canvas appear simple at first glance, but close inspection reveals them to be subtle meditations on the nature of visual representation. She regularly brings together apparently disparate images, creating visual rhymes and resonances that coalesce into unified compositions. This new book, the catalogue of a large-scale exhibition at the Royal Academy, brings together leading authorities on Wylie’s work and a host of her unmistakable imagery.

This substantial new monograph on Perth-born, London-based artist Tim Braden presents paintings and works on paper produced over the past twenty years. Featuring new and recent texts by Matt Incledon and Thomas Marks, along with abridged versions of key texts by Jennifer Higgie and Dominic Molon, the publication has been designed by Joe Gilmore and is co-published by Frestonian Gallery and Anomie Publishing, London. Tim Braden’s work sits at the meeting point of restlessness and order. His London studio mirrors this balance: serene white walls and clear worktables face shelves crammed with books, pinned postcards and sketches, racks of brushes and pigments, odd sculptures and suspended remnants of installations. That duality – calm structure alongside eclectic curiosity – animates his painting practice. Across two decades, Braden has resisted linear progression. Within weeks he might move from fine ink drawings to rich oil interiors or expansive acrylic abstractions. His exhibitions are curated like group shows – varied yet unified by a refined command of colour and the interplay between abstraction and figuration, each mode constantly informing the other. Braden’s subjects are equally diverse: mountains and interiors, books, posters, craftspeople and travellers, all rendered through a vivid and enquiring gaze. A formative visit to his cousin Patrick Heron’s studio sparked his lifelong fascination with colour; later influences, including Josef and Anni Albers and the Bauhaus legacy, deepened his engagement with craft, design and teaching. His landscapes – particularly mountains – form a language of peaks, lakes and snow through which he explores structure, scale and the subtleties of tone. Sometimes Western in perspective, sometimes aerial and Eastern in approach, they turn apparent emptiness, such as snow or sky, into delicate fields of chromatic activity. Human presence appears fleetingly – houses, figures or traces of printed media – reminding us that perception is always mediated. Braden’s North African works, especially from Tangier and Algiers, question how artists look at the ‘exotic’. He acknowledges the legacy of Orientalism by painting both the beauty and the filters through which it is seen, often embedding postcards or reproductions within his compositions. His working process preserves the immediacy of sketches even when scaled up, maintaining freshness and spontaneity. A parallel thread, explored in Making is Thinking, celebrates the artistry of labour. Braden paints weavers, gardeners and ceramicists – frequently women – paying homage to forms of making often dismissed as craft. He treats the act of creation as a shared human impulse, echoing Anni Albers’ belief in listening to ‘what the materials want to do’. Whether depicting the studios of admired painters, domestic interiors or his own home, Braden transforms rooms into quiet temples of colour and reflection. His garden scenes likewise suggest care and contemplation in an overstimulated world. Even his travel works – real or imagined – translate distant times and places into present moments of luminous equilibrium. Restless yet disciplined, Braden’s art embodies a profound, ongoing fascination with colour, making and seeing.

The first serious study on the paintings of the female icon and one of the most celebrated British artists, Tracey Emin Dame Tracey Emin DBE is known for her frank, confessional style and for transforming her inner world into intimate works of art. She has become one of the most celebrated artists in the world, a household name, and part of the Art establishment. Her practice includes painting, drawing, film, photography, sewn appliqué, sculpture, and neon, but in recent years she has focused on painting. Inspired by artists Egon Schiele and Edvard Munch, her paintings are provocative, confrontational, and vulnerable. They are at once deeply personal and universal, and it’s for this reason her work is revered around the world, and she has become an international icon. The book features more than 300 images of Emin’s gestural and expressive figurative paintings, from the 1990s to today, as well as a conversation with close friend David Dawson and an essay by Australian writer Jennifer Higgie. Made in close collaboration with the artist, this special book is the first publication dedicated to Emin’s emotive paintings and showcases her soulful work like never before.

Beautiful and human portraits taken in renowned British photographer Sian Davey's garden. Starting from a neglected back yard, with her son she built a garden so beautiful that over the course of three years hundreds of people flocked from near and far to be photographed by her surrounded by the flowers, revealing to her the love of humanity and nature.“Why don’t we fill our back garden with wildflowers and bees, and the people we meet over the garden wall – we’ll invite them in to be photographed by you.” This is what my son Luke announced in the kitchen, midwinter, our back garden abandoned for at least ten years. I was sitting at the kitchen table, navigating a family deep in crisis. What came next was a pilgrimage: an ongoing act to cultivate a space grounded in love, a reverential offering to humanity. This is what became The Garden. In a short window of time, we worked intensively to clear our longneglected garden. During the process, we intensively researched native flowers, soil and biodiversity. We sourced organic local seeds and sowed under the moon cycles, biodynamically. We offered prayers along the way. We invited the pollinators and nature spirits. Luke and I obsessively shared our dreams, our insights and visions. We called in our ancestors to support and strengthen our vision. We collected stories from the people we met over the garden wall whilst we worked, which soon came to feel like an intimate, confessional space. We then watched the flowers emerge, silently appearing from every corner of the garden. Mullein, meadowsweet, wild carrot, giant sunflowers and thousands of poppies and cornflowers. We built structures for climbing gourds, tromboncinos, and sweet peas to clamber over. And as the flowers opened, they called in the community; the mothers and daughters, grandparents, the lonely, the marginalised, teenagers, new lovers, the heartbroken and those that had concealed a lifetime of shame. They became enfolded into the story of the garden, creating and partaking in the story equally. As the garden evolved it became an expression of joy, interconnectedness, yearning, sexuality, and defiance. The garden became a metaphor for the human heart itself. Those who entered the garden reflected back to me my history and who I had become. Everyone has a place in our garden. I am the garden. Those who enter are the garden. Without distinction, without separation.

'Endlessly intriguing . . . I was enchanted' - DAILY TELEGRAPH'Illuminating in every sense of the word' - John HiggsIn an illuminating blend of memoir and art history, The Other Side explores the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women artists. From the twelfth-century mystic Hildegard of Bingen and the nineteenth-century spiritualist Georgiana Houghton to the pioneering Hilma af Klint, these women all - in their own unique ways - shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of their myriad lives, Jennifer Higgie considers the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art.

The first major work of art history to focus on women artists and their engagement with the spirit world, by the author of The Mirror and the Palette. It's not so long ago that a woman's expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her reputation, or even killed her. And yet spiritualism, in various incarnations, has influenced numerous men--including lauded modernist artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Paul Klee--without repercussion. The fact that so many radical female artists of their generation--and earlier--also drank deeply from the same spiritual well has been sorely neglected for too long. In The Other Side, we explore the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women, from the twelfth-century mystic, composer, and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint, who painted with the help of her spirit guides and whose recent exhibition at New York's Guggenheim broke all attendance records to the 'Desert Transcendentalist', Agnes Pelton, who painted her visions beneath the vast skies of California. We also learn about the Swiss healer, Emma Kunz, who used geometric drawings to treat her patients and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun, whose estate of more than 5,000 works recently entered the Tate gallery collection. While the individual work of these artists is unique, the women loosely shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of these myriad lives while sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. A radical reappraisal of a marginalized group of artists, The Other Side is an intoxicating blend of memoir, biography, and art history.

Gideon Rubin (b. 1973, Israel) is an artist who lives and works in London. Exploring identity, history and the inheritance of trauma in his enigmatic paintings, Rubin’s subject matter draws on myriad references such as film, popular culture, art history and literature, creating and investigating mythologies from the recent past. Haunting and subtly theatrical, the paintings often feature faceless yet familiar figures. Underlying each work is Rubin’s expressive mark-making, muted palette and understated use of negative space and raw canvas. _Look Again_ is Gideon Rubin’s second major trade monograph and showcases his substantial body of work since 2015, including studies of people in nature and scenes of solitude and intimacy. Author and art critic Jennifer Higgie discusses the evolution of his artistic style and his many influences—Balthus, De Kooning, Guston and Diebenkorn to name a few. Dr Matthew Holman’s expansive essay touches on Rubin’s cinematic characters, source material, his use of artistic conventions and engagement with sexuality. Holman investigates the meaning of redaction in Rubin’s work, both in his faceless portraits and in Black Book—a work in which Rubin used black paint to erase the contents of a 1938 English translation of Mein Kampf. Exhibited at the Freud Museum in London in 2018, Black Book is an exploration of what is left out of history, as much as what is remembered. Painting is essential to Rubin, as both a creative and therapeutic act; ‘a log keeping him afloat in the middle of the sea’, as he puts it. In conversation with fellow artist Varda Caivano, Rubin analyses his motivations, processes and doubts, and explains his surprising route to painting. Despite coming from a lineage of painters on his father’s side, it was largely his mother’s academic love of art that galvanised his artistic career, as well as a transformational experience in South America that opened him up to painting. An emotive poem by South Korean author Park Joon sheds further light on Rubin’s imagination. Rubin studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and then at the Slade School of Fine Arts in London. He has had numerous international one-man shows and his works are included in a number of international private and public collections. Recent exhibitions include 13, Galleria Monica De Cardenas, Milan (2023), Dark Noise, The Kupferman House Collection, Israel (2023), Portrait without a Face, Fox Jensen Gallery, Tokyo (2023), a solo show at CASSIUS&Co., London (2023) and Living Memory, a two-person show with Louise Bourgeois in a Grade II listed chapel in London (2023). Rubin’s work has been featured in publications such as _Artribune_, _San Francisco Examiner, Vestoj, Koln Kultur, Galerie Magazine, Südostschweiz Newspaper_ and _Elephant_ among others. The publication has been supported by Galerie Karsten Greve, who represent Rubin’s work in Paris, Cologne and St. Moritz.

This book explores the works of one of Sweden’s most esteemed artists, Hilma af Klint, alongside others in her artistic circle – and examines their inspirational influence on contemporary artists working today. Swedish Ecstasy tells the story of renowned Swedish artist Hilma af Klint and her artistic circle as the country sought to reconcile religious beliefs with scientific advances at the turn of the 20th century. While Sweden has often been characterized as a Protestant nation of great engineers and entrepreneurs, the country’s spiritual life has long been governed by a less official current, visible in its art and literature. In the early 20th century, mysticism and esoteric speculation ran through the works of some of Sweden’s most important artistic and literary figures. This book explores these mystic visions and their meaning with this intellectual and spiritual milieu. Contemporary artists Cecilia Edefalk, Carsten Ho¨ller, Christine O¨dlund, Daniel Youssef, and Lars Olof Loeld contribute essays that show how these artworks continue to inspire today.

t's not so long ago that a woman's expressed interest in other realms would have ruined her reputation, or even killed her. And yet spiritualism, in various incarnations, has influenced numerous men - including lauded modernist artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, Kazimir Malevich and Paul Klee - without repercussion. The fact that so many radical women artists of their generation - and earlier - also drank deeply from the same spiritual well has for too long been sorely neglected. In THE OTHER SIDE, we explore the lives and work of a group of extraordinary women, from the twelfth-century mystic, composer and artist Hildegard of Bingen to the nineteenth-century English spiritualist Georgiana Houghton, whose paintings swirl like a cosmic Jackson Pollock; the early twentieth-century Swedish artist, Hilma af Klint, who painted with the help of her spirit guides and whose recent exhibition at New York's Guggenheim broke all attendance records; the 'Desert Transcendentalist', Agnes Pelton, who painted her visions beneath the vast skies of California; the Swiss healer, Emma Kunz, who used geometric drawings to treat her patients; and the British surrealist and occultist, Ithell Colquhoun, whose estate of more than 5,000 works recently entered the Tate gallery collection. While the individual work of these artists is unique, the women loosely shared the same goal: to communicate with, and learn from, other dimensions. Weaving in and out of these myriad lives, sharing her own memories of otherworldly experiences, Jennifer Higgie discusses the solace of ritual, the gender exclusions of art history, the contemporary relevance of myth, the boom in alternative ways of understanding the world and the impact of spiritualism on feminism and contemporary art. A radical reappraisal of a marginalised group of artists, THE OTHER SIDE is an intoxicating blend of memoir, biography and art history.

'Reveals an until-now hidden history of women's self-portraiture. A gift that keeps on giving' ALI SMITH, NEW STATESMAN, Books of the Year'A fascinating survey . . . Extraordinary' DAILY MAIL'A bewitching, invigorating history' OLIVIA LAING'Grips from the opening pages' FINANCIAL TIMES'Important and brilliantly accessible' VOGUEUntil the twentieth century, art history was, in the main, written by white men who tended to write about other white men. The idea that women in the West have always made art was rarely cited as a possibility. Yet they have - and, of course, continue to do so - often against tremendous odds, from laws and religion to the pressures of family and public disapproval. In THE MIRROR AND THE PALETTE, Jennifer Higgie introduces us to a cross-section of women artists who embody the fact that there is more than one way to understand our planet, more than one way to live in it and more than one way to make art about it. Spanning 500 years, biography and cultural history intertwine in a narrative packed with tales of rebellion, adventure, revolution, travel and tragedy enacted by women who turned their back on convention and lived lives of great resilience, creativity and bravery. This is a dazzlingly original and ambitious book by one of the most well-respected art critics at work today.

Jadé Fadojutimi: Jesture is a publication produced by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery to accompany the second solo exhibition at the gallery of new paintings by London-based artist Jadé Fadojutimi, presented in autumn 2020. The word "Jesture" in the title of the exhibition and publication evokes a sense of the absurd, responding to the disruption of daily rhythms arising from forced isolation during lockdown. Central to Fadojutimi's practice is a repeated questioning of identity, its fluid nature and how the understanding of notions of pleasure, desire and choice are integral to a sense of self. Addressing the exchange between an individual and their environment, the vivid choices of colour and form derive from the associative qualities of the special items that capture her attention and the memories they invoke. Fadojutimi's studio is filled with objects, drawings and writings that evoke nostalgic pleasure. Powerful memories, experienced whilst listening to film, animation and video game soundtracks, transport Fadojutimi to the first time she encountered them, eliciting a response that is experienced through intense colour. The synthesis of these various influences, through which Fadojutimi understands her sense of self, is transformed into large-scale gestural paintings charged with energy and emotion. Described by Fadojutimi as "environments", these complex compositions, neither wholly abstract nor figurative, are built up with layers of oil paint, interrupted by the more linear mark-making made possible by her recent adoption of oil pastels. The introduction of new materials into her painting has enabled Fadojutimi to think more broadly about palette, composition and depth, while translating the spontaneity of her drawing on to the canvas. In her essay for the publication, From Life - Thoughts on the paintings of Jadé Fadojutimi, writer, critic and editor-at-large of frieze magazine Jennifer Higgie writes: "In these paintings, the world, in all of its chaotic glory, exists as an intimation. Art is not an explanation: it's a shot of energy, a flash of colour; a shimmer, a reaction, a line thrown out to see who might pick it up. Pictures are made by people and, like people, their tone can switch direction in the blink of an eye. A painting is a very human thing: they're allowed to be messy. Jadé tells me that her aim is for "deep emotion, not deep description"." This, the artist's first published book, designed by A Practice for Everyday Life and printed by PUSH, London, has been co-published by Pippy Houldsworth Gallery, London, and Anomie Publishing, London. Jadé Fadojutimi (b.1993) lives and works in London. She earned a BA from The Slade School of Fine Art, London, in 2015 and an MA from the Royal College of Art, London, in 2017. After Pippy Houldsworth Gallery took on representation of the artist and presented her first solo exhibition in 2017-18, she had her first one-person institutional show at PEER UK, London in 2019. Acquisitions by Baltimore Museum of Art, ICA Miami, Tate, and a promised gift to Dallas Museum of Art followed soon after. She had her first solo exhibition in Germany with Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne, in 2019 and will have her first solo exhibition in Japan with Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo, opening March 2021. Fadojutimi has been selected to participate in Liverpool Biennial 2021. Her first solo US museum exhibition will be presented at ICA Miami, opening in November 2021. She will also have a solo exhibition of new work at The Hepworth Wakefield in 2021.

This joyous debut from well-known writer and editor Jennifer Higgie (Frieze Magazine) celebrates both the individual and the diversity of the world around us. In kaleidoscopic colour, Higgie takes young readers on a journey from some of life’s most important things (baked beans!) to some of life’s biggest wonders (stars!). The perfect early picture book for budding art lovers!