Bøger udgivet af Fondazione Prada

Peter Fischli's creatively conceived history of the crises of painting over the past 150 yearsConceived by artist Peter Fischli for Fondazione Prada's Venice premises, Stop Painting investigates the persistence of painting in the 21st century. Described by Fischli as "a kaleidoscope of repudiated gestures," the project explores five ruptures within the history of painting over the last 150 years. Painting's first rupture was produced by photography, which led painter Paul Delaroche to exclaim in 1840: "from today, painting is dead." The second crisis is represented by Duchamp's invention of the readymade and collages by the likes of Kurt Schwitters. The third rupture was produced by the interrogations of authorship made famous by Roland Barthes' "death of the author" in 1968; simultaneously, the fourth crisis was the critique of painting as a commodity. The fifth rupture focuses on the crisis of criticism under late capitalism as formulated by Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello.

In no other period of Western art history was the creation of copies from great masterpieces of the past as important as in late Republican Rome and throughout the Imperial Age. Certain Greek and Roman sculptures were established as canonical, their prestige so high and their acquisition so impossible that their reproductions--even on a small, portable scale--became sought-after commodities among the well-read populace of ancient Rome and modern Europe. With almost 400 duotone illustrations, a wealth of explanatory and groundbreaking scholarship and beautiful, delicate paper changes, Serial / Portable Classic examines this culture of the copy. Published to accompany the Fondazione Prada exhibitions Serial Classic in Milan and Portable Classic in Venice, whose display has been conceived by OMA/Rem Koolhaas, it is bound to be treasured by the student of art history and casual reader alike.

Describing the work of the rising Berlin-based Swedish artist Nathalie Djurberg, Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli write in their introduction to this substantial new volume, "Her videos are characterized by small, animated clay figures that she uses to create surreal atmospheres and often grotesque stories. The rudimentary but ingenious staging of these narrations is created by the artist herself. Sexual reminiscing, references to the macabre, violent and subtle pleasures of cruelty and the vaguely depraved give rise to an ambiguous sense of anxiety and unease." Featuring in-depth documentation of Djurberg's work, an essay by Germano Celant, an interview with the artists and a DVD of "The Prostitute," which was created expressly for this publication, this volume is the most substantial study yet of Djurberg's work. Nathalie Djurberg was born in Lysekil, Sweden, in 1978 and she currently lives and works in Berlin. Her work was the subject of a recent one-person show at Vienna's esteemed Kunsthalle Wien.

In the Aoyama district of Tokyo, a mixed-use neighborhood of low-rise buildings where not a square meter of land has been left unoccupied, the Swiss architecture team of Herzog & de Meuron has built a new store for Prada. In this chunky, silvery book, they meticulously illustrate the creative process that led to the realization of "a house and a plaza," a tall and narrow kaleidoscope-like structure that houses a two-story retail space and multiple levels of offices, backed by an outdoor space for the public--a rarity in crowded Tokyo. The finished structure, encased in a visually porous shell or skin, is as decorative as it is architectural--or as architectural as it is decorative--and is both metaphorically and literally linked to its surrounding environment, and to the idea of the garment. Here is the story of a theoretically and structurally complex building told lovingly and simply by its architects, through words, models, sketches, photographs and architectural renderings.