British artist Ian McKeever has been working on the international stage for more than five decades. This, his latest publication, documents Against Architecture – an exhibition that had its first incarnation, curated by Robin Klassnik, at Matt’s Gallery, London (5 February to 19 March 2017) before being reconceived and presented as Against Architecture, Remodelled at TheGallery, Arts University Bournemouth (3 November 2023 to 18 January 2024), curated by Violet M McClean as part of TheGallery’s twenty-fifth anniversary celebrations. McKeever was made an AUB Honorary Fellow in 2002 and launched TheGallery’s text + work programme in 2004. The exhibition was McKeever’s first foray into installation art, seeking to explore the relationships between his photo/painted panels and the physical spaces in which they are presented. For this, along with a team of helpers and student volunteers, he built a structure with 3 x 2-inch stud walling timbers and sheets of plasterboard comprising myriad walls, passageways, openings, ledges and platforms, challenging the conventional white cube gallery space and bringing the viewer’s body into heightened dialogue with both their surroundings and the artworks. The works, a series of the acclaimed artist’s abstract paintings combined with ostensibly abstract photographs, pose formal and theoretical questions about perception, visual languages and modes of representation – ideas explored in an essay by Berlin-based English arts writer Mark Prince.The publication features numerous other text contributions: an introduction by Professor Paul Gough, Principal and Vice-Chancellor, AUB; Sue Hubbard, poet, novelist and art critic; Violet M McClean, Curator at TheGallery, AUB; photography graduate Eliza Naden; interior architecture and design graduate Milly Louise Harvey; Associate Professor Dominic Shepherd, AUB; and Ian McKeever himself. Along with illustrations of the artist’s past exhibitions and examples of his works of art, special attention is given to documentation of both iterations of the Against Architecture exhibition, including newly commissioned photographs of Against Architecture, Remodelled at TheGallery by Eliza Naden. The publication, which has been edited by Violet M McClean and Millie Lake, and designed by Warin Wareesangtip, has been produced in an edition of 1000 copies.Ian McKeever was born 1946, Withernsea, Yorkshire, UK. He lives and works in Hartgrove, Dorset. McKeever has received numerous awards including the prestigious DAAD scholarship in Berlin 1989/90 and was elected a Royal Academician in 2003. He has held several teaching positions including Guest Professor at the Städel Akademie der Kunst in Frankfurt, Senior Lecturer, Slade, University of London and Visiting Professor at the University of Brighton. He has also published many texts on painting.Recent public solo exhibitions include Ian McKeever / Tony Cragg – Painting and Sculpture, Skulpturenpark Waldfrieden, Wuppertal, Germany (2020); Paintings 1992–2018, Ferens Art Gallery, Hull, UK (2018); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunstmuseet i Tønder, Denmark (2015); Between Darkness and Light, National Gallery of the Faroe Islands, Tórshavn, Faroe Islands (2015); Hours of Darkness, Hours of Light, Kunst-Station Sankt Peter Köln, Cologne, Germany (2014); and Hartgrove. Malerei und Fotografie, Josef Albers Museum, Bottrop, Germany (2012). McKeever’s work is represented in leading international public collections, including Tate, British Museum, Royal Academy of Arts, London; Museum Moderner Kunst (mumok), Vienna; Museum of Fine Arts, Budapest; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; Glyptotek, Copenhagen; Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; Brooklyn Museum of Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Boston Museum of Fine Art and Yale Center for British Art, Connecticut.

Portraits of the Last Golden Age is the latest major monograph on the work of Budapest-based artist Attila Szűcs (b.1967, Miskolc, Hungary), one of the leading painters in Hungary today. Following on from his 2016 monograph, Specters and Experiments, published by Hatje Cantz, Portraits of the Last Golden Age features a substantial in-conversation between Szűcs and Sándor Hornyik, an art historian, curator and senior research fellow at the Hungarian Academy of Sciences, Budapest. ‘Mankind is in an extremely tense situation,’ Szűcs asserts, ‘with the escalation of natural disasters, with artificial intelligence getting out of hand, the world can easily take a dystopian turn.’ During the course of the conversation, the two men discuss topics ranging from portraiture to posthumanism, meditation to metaphysics, intuition to the irrational. In addition to presenting examples of Szűcs’ accomplished and haunting monochrome works on paper employing materials such as acrylic, charcoal and graphite, the publication features over seventy oil paintings made between 2019 and 2023 depicting dark dreamscapes and transcendental scenes of alternate realities. Disembodied hands grab or caress, as if apparitions from another dimension; sleeping figures exhale multi-coloured breath that verges on the supernatural; long golden hair flows down the side of a bed, pooling on the floor like an uncanny waterfall; heads float in dark water as if decapitated; otherworldly fires rage while apocalyptic explosions highlight environmental disasters and humankind’s seemingly unstoppable drive towards auto-destruction. Szűcs’ work is both an exploration into the human psyche and into the universe itself, much of which is as-yet unknown: quantum worlds and multiverses, the complexities of time and space, and the possibilities of an afterlife. Bleak yet beautiful, dark yet dazzling, Szűcs’ practice asks what painting can bring to twenty-first century thinking and image-making.Produced by Erika Deák Gallery, Budapest, and co-published by Anomie Publishing, London, the publication features texts in English and Hungarian (translated by Dániel Sipos), was designed by Géza Ipacs, and printed and bound by EPC Nyomda, Budaörs. Attila Szűcs (b.1967, Miskolc, Hungary) is an artist based in Budapest. Solo shows include Portraits of the Last Golden Age, Erika Deák Gallery, Budapest, 2023; Duplicated Dreamer, FL Gallery/Wizard, Milan, 2022; Transhuman Etudes, Centrul de Interes, Cluj-Napoca, 2020; Preparing for Lightness, Emmanuel Walderdorff Galerie, Düsseldorf, 2017; and Specters and Experiments, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2016. Group exhibitions include Becoming. The force of existence, HAB, Art Center Budapest, 2023; Men, The male body in Robert Runtak's collection, The South Bohemian Gallery, Hluboká nad Vltavou, Czech Republic, 2022; You know who, Ömer Koç Collection, Abdülmecid Efendi Mansion, Istanbul, 2022; and Ludwig-30-Costumize/Testreszabás, Ludwig Museum, Budapest, 2019.

The artist Michael Sandle (b. 1936) is well known for his powerful and uncompromising sculptures such as A Twentieth Century Memorial (1971-78), The Drummer (1985) and Iraq: The Sound of Your Silence (2009). Sandle has also been a very prolific draughtsman over the years, making a large number of prints and drawings, both in relation to his sculpture and also apart from it. This new publication looks closely at his works on paper across his whole career. It presents his two-dimensional work from his early years whilst training at Douglas School of Art (1951-54), at the Slade School of Art (1956-59), where he studied painting and printing, and at the Atelier Patris in Paris (1960), right up to the present day. Alongside lithographs and etchings, it shows pages from his sketchbooks and many medium and larger format drawings.The book begins with a new and extensive ‘in conversation’ conducted between Sandle and the art historian and curator Jon Wood that looks in detail at the interconnected lives led by his prints, drawings and sculptures over the last sixty years. Their discussion focusses on the materials and techniques the artist has used, as well as on the subjects, concerns and contexts of this extraordinary body of work.

Smickel Inn is a publication of works by London-based Anglo-Dutch artist Nick Goss, produced by Ingleby, Edinburgh, and co-published with Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, and Anomie Publishing, London. Along with around sixty plates and illustrations, the publication features an essay by writer, journalist and critic Hettie Judah, and an in-conversation between Goss, fellow painter Michael Armitage and writer Thomas Marks. ‘Smickel Inn is a real place in an unreal place,’ writes Judah, ‘a snack bar on an outer extremity of the port of Rotterdam. ’ It’s a venue that is popular with port workers and sailors—a clientele of regular and transitory people often involved in sea freight or oil shipping, though their lives, personalities and stories are largely played out in Goss’s mixed-media paintings through the bar’s interior décor: an old vase with fresh flowers, a stack of glass ashtrays, a well-worn piano with a pile of books on top, an eclectic selection of picture frames with faded scenes and a clock that might only be right twice a day.Filtered through Goss’s imagination, Smickel Inn carries its history with it, much of it decorating the countertop; it’s a venue that charms with its informality—a place that knows itself, and its disparate customers. In real life, the bar has a cinematic view of the port and the North Sea, translated here, through Goss’s creative process of painting and silk-screening, into a scene from an engraving of seventeenth-century Sicily. Fragments from different places and eras infiltrate his images, creating a patina of palimpsests, visual echoes, perhaps, of memories of travellers coming through the port. The body of work takes us around the wider Dutch coastline and beyond—we see passengers on foot disembarking a ferry, have a backseat view of a car ride around the village of Stavenisse, and join a night-time campfire on the beach at Scheveningen, among other more mysterious, if not abstruse, locations and scenarios. Observation from contemporary life mingles with visual culture spanning centuries and continents in Goss’s oeuvre, creating lyrical yet strangely haunting and melancholic paintings, trapped in time somewhere between personal experience and collective memory.Nick Goss is an Anglo-Dutch painter, born in Bristol in 1981. He studied first at the Slade School of Art (2002–06) and then at the Royal Academy Schools, London (2006–09). He has exhibited widely in Europe and America, including solo exhibitions with Josh Lilley, London, Matthew Brown, Los Angeles, Simon Preston, New York, and Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin. His first institutional survey, Morley’s Mirror, was presented in 2019 at Pallant House, Chichester, UK. Smickel Inn is published to coincide with Goss’s first exhibition at Ingleby, Edinburgh, in the autumn of 2023.

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.

Uncertain Swimmer is the second monograph on the work of British artist Jonathan Wateridge (b. 1972, Lusaka, Zambia), presenting around eighty paintings and works on paper made between 2019 and 2022. Following on from the bodies of work Enclave and Expatria (2016–18), Uncertain Swimmer develops the artist’s interest in modes of representation and the legacies of twentieth-century modernist painting through a visual and social exploration of the motif of the pool, depicting swimmers and sunbathers, often by night. Far from being an escapist environment of aspiration and privilege, Wateridge imbues the pool with a disquieting atmosphere, creating a cumulative feeling of unease and ennui among those present, now seemingly unsure of their world. The publication charts a marked evolution in the artist’s style from the realism of his earlier paintings with complex multi-figure compositions to more solitary, gestural and expressive works. His masterly application of paint takes new forms in the beautiful, curious and often haunting paintings and works on paper showcased here. Art historian and curator Marco Livingstone’s essay considers the change from Wateridge’s naturalistic paintings to the flattened, reduced shapes, forms and lines of the modernism- and abstraction-infused pieces he is making today. Francis Bacon, Edvard Munch and Paul Cézanne are among numerous art historical influences cited by Livingstone, who ruminates on the identity of the people in Wateridge’s portraits and the mercurial spaces they occupy, examining how Wateridge’s current critical preoccupations have transitioned from the autobiographical to more formal concerns.In the featured conversation between Wateridge and fellow painter Caroline Walker, the two artists discuss their overlapping experiences studying painting at Glasgow, as well as Wateridge’s fourteen-year break from painting until 2005. He eventually returned to the medium when he realised it excited him more than anything else. Wateridge elaborates on his fascinating painting process, staging shoots in studios with hired actors and using elements from the photographs in the paintings, often over a period of years. On his canvases, he will scrape back the paint and reapply it, frequently taking pictures of the paintings in their various stages; he will then print the photographs and draw over them to continue working out what he will do with the final paintings. For Wateridge, a painting works when it stops failing, and he embraces unforeseen conclusions.Jonathan Wateridge has recently exhibited with the Hayward Gallery, London; Nino Mier Gallery, Los Angeles, New York and Brussels; TJ Boulting, London; Galerie Haas, Zurich; Pace Gallery and HENI, London. Wateridge's art is in the collections of institutions worldwide, including Aïshti Foundation, Lebanon; Pinault Foundation, Venice; the Saatchi Collection, London; the Rennie Collection, Vancouver; and Simmons & Simmons, London. He has been featured in publications such as The Sunday Times, The Independent, Fad Magazine, Artforum and Artnet. Wateridge is represented by Nino Mier Gallery.

Tom de Freston (born 1983) is a British artist and writer, living and working in Oxford. He graduated from Cambridge University in 2007. De Freston’s multimedia art tackles themes of trauma, humanity and intimacy across paintings, films and performance. He builds rich visual narratives, drawing on literature, art history and social issues. A prolific author, Granta published de Freston’s debut non-fiction book, Wreck, in 2022 and his second will be released in 2024. Julia and the Shark (Hachette, 2021), created with his wife Kiran Millwood Hargrave, won the Waterstones Children’s Gift of the Year and was shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize for Children’s Writing on Nature and Conservation. De Freston was chosen to illustrate the twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of David Almond’s Skellig, published in 2023.I Saw This was born out of a collaboration between de Freston, filmmaker Mark Jones and Dr Ali Souleman after de Freston was introduced to the academic in 2017. The paintings and mixed-media works that resulted from the project are an exploration into Souleman’s experiences of terrorism, displacement and war in Syria and ruminate on how art can attempt to represent suffering and terror. In 1996, a bomb explosion in Damascus on New Year’s Eve nearly killed Souleman and left him blind. A sensitive and highly-charged topic, Souleman explained to de Freston the importance of engaging with what is happening in Syria. Disembodied mouths, hands and feet appear frequently in the works. Circles recur as a motif, which bear an uncomfortable resemblance to eyes and eye sockets. In the Mirror paintings which stand upright in black boxes, de Freston embeds ash, screws, thick glue, dirt and bits of wood into the canvas. They are corporeal and volcanic, visceral and abstract. The sense of molten heat in the paintings was compounded by a fire in de Freston’s studio in 2020, which was simultaneously destructive while giving the artist and the collaboration new momentum. The collaborative process involves de Freston describing the paintings to Souleman through words and touch. Souleman brings fresh meaning to the works, grounding them in his psychological landscape. Mark Jones captures these interactions in striking photographs and film footage.Habda Rashid, Senior Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at Kettle’s Yard and the Fitzwilliam Museum, introduces I Saw This and considers the challenges of incorporating elements from real life. Journalist Yasmina Floyer’s contribution describes her reaction to de Freston’s work at his 2022 exhibition From Darkness at No 20 Arts, London, where she found that the sooty-black feet stencils and inky circles depicted resonated with her own experience of child loss. The moving text shows how de Freston’s art carries both specific and universal meanings. Editor Matt Price focuses on de Freston’s paintings, structuring his essay with fascinating quotes from Abu al-Ala al-Ma’arri, the eleventh-century blinded Arab philosopher. Crucially, de Freston, Jones and Souleman’s voices are presentin the book, with each shedding light on their part in the project. De Freston’s art is rooted in empathy and I Saw This is a culmination of this, translating Souleman’s world of memory and metaphor.

This beautiful book, of paintings by Alice Mumford and poems by Sue Leigh, brings together exciting new work from the two makers. Collaboration is perhaps not the right word for a project in which paintings and poems sit side by side, each illuminating the other. Onlooker and reader are offered another glimpse, another view which may change the experience of looking and reading. The book includes conversations between painter and poet in which they discuss their experience of working in their different media and consider the limitations and possibilities of each. They talk about their sources of inspiration, how they might choose a subject (or does it choose them?), and the process that surrounds the making of their work. What do they share in their creative lives and how do they differ? The work of these two contemporary artists celebrates the intimacy and beauty that can be found in our everyday lives.

Altdorf’s earliest poems, written during military service and as a prisoner of war, reflected on nature, poetry and art. Beginning a new life, post-war, as an artist, Altdorf explored how the human figure might be depicted through increasingly abstract representations. Similarly, he refined his poetry to create ‘a new, free, melodic’ language’ with ‘a simple, song-like beauty’. Presenting Altdorf’s poetry alongside his art reveals a powerfully interconnected vision shaped but not defined by war: a humanitarian outlook informed by a profound spiritual belief.

From sculpture to woodcuts, glass design to poetry, the work of German artist Egon Altdorf crossed boundaries. ‘Making culture behind the barbed wire’ was how Altdorf endured wartime captivity, inspiring a life dedicated to art that was innovative, spiritual and redemptive. Exhibiting in London alongside sculptors Barbara Hepworth, Lynn Chadwick and Reg Butler at the Unknown Political Prisoner exhibition (1953), he adopted an increasingly abstract approach, rooted in Biblical symbolism yet embracing different faiths, notably in designs for the outstanding interior of Wiesbaden’s new synagogue. Exploring Altdorf’s work in ten interdisciplinary chapters, this book illuminates the still-overlooked contribution of artists who reshaped postwar existence: the lost generation.

Alastair Gordon (b.1978, Edinburgh), is an artist based in London. This, the first major monograph of the artist’s career, includes over 160 paintings, drawings and documentational photographs, along with notes by Gordon himself. The book introduces this accomplished and engaging new voice in British painting.Gordon’s paintings bring the historic languages of genre painting and the quodlibet into a contemporary discourse that pushes the boundaries of realism, figuration and illusionism to focus on everyday moments. His work often elevates seemingly ordinary objects – feathers, matchsticks, postcards – allowing them to speak to wider concerns of beauty, truth, life and death. The documented works, produced between 2012 and 2023, include paintings made in oil or acrylic on MDF, wood, ‘found’ wood, gesso panel, paper, canvas and occasionally linen. Each is distinctive for its style and for the recurring motifs Gordon selects such as masking tape, paper ephemera and repeated, subtly different studies of the same subject. Gordon’s texts describe how objects found mud larking on the banks of the River Thames, shoes from the London City Mission and rags and papers discarded from art students’ studios have been depicted in paintings, incorporating the histories and stories of each item (and each person) into his work. The book also features recent works influenced by rural landscapes and parkland.An introduction by Julia Lucero, Associate Director of Nahmad Projects, London, emphasises the importance of nature and of meditation within Gordon’s practice. Specifically, Lucero brings out the idea of the ‘axis mundi, that metaphysical and mystical connecting point where heaven meets Earth’. She explores the significance of quodlibet, a seventeenth-century trompe-l’oeil painting technique that Gordon favours, rendering brushstrokes invisible and affording everyday objects new significance, even ‘profound value’. Humble objects such as a matchstick or paper aeroplane might be elevated to the realms of the divine. An essay by Jorella Andrews, Professor of Visual Cultures at Goldsmiths, University of London, describes the influence of Gordon’s time on a research residency in the former studio of Paul Cézanne at Les Lauves on the outskirts of Aix-en-Provence. His experiences there proved pivotal to the direction of his practice, in which both the ‘visual misdirection’ of quodlibet and the qualities of wood have become central. Andrews brings art historical texts and works of art into relation with Gordon’s paintings, making comparisons between subject, form and approach. Andrews’ text further details the recent synthesis of two sides of Gordon’s work: precise illusionism combined with looser observations made in the natural landscape.Edited by Alastair Gordon Studio, designed by Herman Lelie, printed by EBS Verona and published in 2023 by Anomie Publishing, London, the publication has been generously supported by Howard and Roberta Ahmanson through Fieldstead and Company.

Honor Titus (born 1989) is an American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles. A self-taught painter, Titus is deeply influenced by his creative past as a musician and poet. Titus’s paintings, often suffused with a sense of romance, are embedded with nostalgic references to a simpler time and feature dark, luminous jewel tones. His works often depict faceless figures in minimal urban landscapes, reflecting the isolation that stems from metropolitan anonymity. Titus’s simplified compositions and striking patches of colour are inspired by Les Nabis while his flat, decorative surfaces echo the graphic hyperrealism of artists inspired by American advertising, such as Alex Katz.This, the artist’s first trade monograph, presents new and recent works, including a body of work presented in his 2022–3 solo exhibition at Timothy Taylor, London, Bourgeoisie in Bloom. Here Titus expands on the themes of ritual, class and nostalgia that have characterised previous work, incorporating debutante balls in which young adults are presented to society. Favouring bright panels of colour, Titus evokes traditions of cultural formality, using precise brushwork to delineate details of old-world glamour such as the tilt of a bow tie and the line of a ballgown. A foreword by artist Henry Taylor considers his first encounters with Titus’s work and their continuing friendship. Taylor describes the biographical factors that inform the subjects Titus paints, including music, referencing the first solo show of the artist’s work held at Henry Taylor Gallery in Chinatown, 2020. A text by Durga Chew-Bose brings the themes of nostalgia and memory into the field of discussion. Anecdotes relayed to Chew-Bose bring forward real experiences in relation with his work. The artist’s own words illuminate filmic, musical, photographic and romantic influences on the paintings, while dwelling, lastly, upon his studio space. Klaus Ottmann’s text reflects philosophically and sociologically on Titus’s oeuvre, bringing key art historical reference points into the discussion. Ottmann’s contribution draws connections to key works of literature and criticism that contextualise his work. Published following the exhibition Honor Titus: Bourgeoisie in Bloom at Timothy Taylor, London, 17 November 2022 – 14 January 2023, the publication has been edited by Chloe Waddington, designed by Joe Gilmore, and co-published in 2023 by Timothy Taylor and Anomie Publishing, London.Honor Titus (b. 1989, Brooklyn, NY) is a self-taught American artist who lives and works in Los Angeles, California. Recent solo exhibitions include Honor Titus: Bourgeoisie in Bloom, Timothy Taylor, London, United Kingdom (2022–3); Spotlight: Honor Titus, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2022); Honor Titus: For Heaven’s Sake, Timothy Taylor, New York, NY (2021) and Honor Titus: Goodness Gracious, Studio Henry Taylor, Los Angeles, CA (2020). His work has been part of numerous group exhibitions, including IRL (In Real Life), Timothy Taylor, London, United Kingdom (2021); Parallel Worlds, Nassima Landau, Tel Aviv, Israel (2021); and I will wear you in my heart of heart, The FLAG Art Foundation, New York, NY (2021); and (Nothing but) Flowers, Karma, New York, NY (2020), among others. His work is represented in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, Texas; Nasher Museum of Art, Durham, North Carolina; Rennie Collection, Vancouver, Canada; The Bunker Artspace, Palm Beach, Florida; and the Longlati Foundation, Shanghai, China. Titus has been featured in publications including Art in America, Artnet, Frieze, GQ, Interview Magazine, The New York Times, and Town & Country.

Peter Howson has established a formidable reputation as one of his generation's leading figurative painters. Many of his paintings derive inspiration from the streets of Glasgow, where he was brought up. He is renowned for his penetrating insight into the human condition, and his heroic portrayals of the mighty and the lowly. His experiences of abuse - whether self-inflicted and substance-related or the traumatic events of his childhood - have moulded his view of the world and afforded him an affinity with those individuals who are classed as somehow 'on the edge'. His ability to speak to those on the margins is proof of his enduring skill at capturing the maverick, the excessive and the non-conformist. In 1992 he was commissioned by the Imperial War Museum to record the conflict in the former Yugoslavia. He was appointed official British war artist for Bosnia in 1993 and in 1996 was awarded Doctor of Letters at The University of Strathclyde. His work is in numerous international private and public collections.This publication is the first major statement about Howson’s work for almost twenty years and accompanies a major retrospective at Edinburgh City Art Centre. It illustrates his consummate skill in a range of media and documents his religious work as well as his graphic responses to recent global events.

Anomie Collections 1 is a publication accompanying the first edition of Anomie Collections – a London-based initiative that supports the work of contemporary British painters by acquiring works on behalf of a group of private collectors. This first edition of the scheme resulted in the purchase of fifty-six paintings and works on paper, documented and presented here along with newly commissioned texts by Anneka French and an introduction by Matt Price, Publisher at Anomie Publishing and curator of the edition. The works span a variety of genres, from landscapes and urban scenes to still lifes, portraits and abstractions. The artists featured in Anomie Collections 1 are: Jasmir Creed, Marguerite Horner, Cathy Lomax, Kathryn Maple, Kate Mary, Daniel Shadbolt, Caroline Thomson and Jim Threapleton.

Matthew Krishanu’s paintings explore topics including childhood, race, religion, art history, family, grief and love. His subjects – frequently Brown people, especially children – are realised with a shallow pictorial depth, delicate washes of colour, and with a sense of interior life. Through this, Krishanu questions the positions of his painterly subjects and depictions of landscapes in relation to the legacy of European colonialism and the art historical canon. Krishanu’s practice is heavily informed by his early childhood spent in Dhaka where his parents moved in order to work for the Church of Bangladesh.This, his first trade monograph, presents a number of series of Krishanu’s works: Another Country, Expatriates, Mission, House of God, Religious Workers and In Sickness and In Health. The paintings included have been made in oil and/or acrylic on canvas, linen or board, with the earliest produced in 2007 and most recent completed in 2022.The publication features essays by Mark Rappolt and Dorothy Price, alongside an interview with the artist by Ben Luke. Rappolt, Editor-in-Chief at ArtReview magazine, details the various worlds present within Krishanu’s paintings. He draws out key themes within Krishanu’s oeuvre such as power, religion, identity and memory, while highlighting its distance from didacticism, and at times, its carefully constructed ambivalence, through examination of key works such as Mission School (2017), Mountain Tent (Two Boys) (2020) and Playground (2020). Price, Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art and Visual Culture at The Courtauld, writes sensitively about solitude, memory and emotion which are palpable within Krishanu’s work. In particular, the series In Sickness and In Health, which traces a life path of Uschi Gatward, the artist’s late wife, over sixteen years to her untimely death from cancer in late 2021. The series is foregrounded as a significant and intimate body of work that subtly shifts over the time period it depicts. In a new interview with Luke, a critic and editor at The Art Newspaper, Krishanu discusses his practice in relation to ideas of religion, race, global art history, photography, health and personal experiences. Krishanu’s work explores, in the artist’s own words, ‘the puzzle of painting’.The publication has been edited by Georgia Griffiths and Matt Price. It has been designed by Joe Gilmore, printed and bound by EBS, Verona, and produced by Anomie Publishing and Niru Ratnam, London. The publication has been supported by Guy Halamish; Jhaveri Contemporary, Mumbai; Niru Ratnam, London; Taimur Hassan; and Tanya Leighton, Berlin and Los Angeles.Matthew Krishanu (b.1980) was born in Bradford and is based in London. He completed an MA in Fine Art at Central Saint Martins in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include ‘Playground’, Niru Ratnam (2022), ‘Undercurrents’, LGDR, New York (2022), ‘Picture Plane’, Niru Ratnam, London (2020), ‘Arrow and Pulpit’, Tanya Leighton, Berlin (2021), ‘Corvus’, Iniva, London (2019), ‘House of Crows’, Matt’s Gallery, London (2019), ‘A Murder of Crows’, Ikon Gallery, Birmingham (2019), ‘The Sun Never Sets’, Midlands Arts Centre, Birmingham, (2019) and ‘The Sun Never Sets’, Huddersfield Art Gallery, Huddersfield (2018). He has recently been in the group exhibitions ‘The Kingfisher’s Wing’, GRIMM, New York (2022), ‘Prophecy’, Mead Gallery, Warwick Arts Centre (2022), ‘Mixing It Up: Painting Today’, Hayward Gallery, London (2021), ‘Coventry Biennial’, Leamington Spa Art Gallery & Museum, Leamington Spa and Herbert Art Gallery & Museum (2021), ‘John Moores Painting Prize’, Walker Art Gallery, Liverpool (2021), ‘Everyday Heroes’, Hayward Gallery/Southbank Centre (2020) and ‘A Rich Tapestry’, Lahore Biennale (2020).

Chibụike Ụzọma (b. 1992, Port Harcourt, Nigeria), is a multidisciplinary artist working with painting, photography, drawing, text and video, living and working in New Haven, Connecticut. Documented here are sixteen of the artist’s large paintings rendered in oil and acrylic or acrylic spray paint on canvas, made in 2022. Accompanying an exhibition of the same name at Simon Lee Gallery, London, the first solo exhibition of his work in the UK, this publication is the fourth pillar of a collaborative project by the artist, setting his own paintings in relation to video and audio works by Edward Owens and João Orecchia respectively. Ụzọma works with non-linear narratives, using a mix of painting languages that dodges and weaves the liminal spaces between representation and meaning. Fragments of stencilled letters jolt against textured pools of paint, and diaphanous figures are cropped by cinematic horizons. Comprising colourful, abstruse portraiture against stark black and white backgrounds, the paintings in 'To Kick a Stone' are deeply suggestive, but ultimately formalist explorations of shape and composition.An introduction by Kat Sapera, Director of Simon Lee Gallery, draws upon her first encounters with the artist and details the influence of philosophy and the act of looking. Sapera brings the collaboration with Orecchia and Owens to the forefront of her discussion while touching on Ụzọma’s making processes.In an essay by Ụzọma, the artist himself writes lyrically upon subjects including poetry, religion, good and evil, in order to bring a number of key concepts that circle his work into the field of view.Essays by Bishupal Limbu, Associate Professor of English at Portland State University, and by Carlos Valladares, writer and critic, help amass a portrait of an artist whose enquiry is informed by film, philosophy and pictorial language – with the layering, unravelling and opening-up of narrative as a core focus. Their writing brings key art historical figures into dialogue with Ụzọma’s work.Lastly, the artist appears in conversation with writer and curator Ekow Eshun. This frank and illuminating conversation provides insight into the artist’s painting practice, previous series of works and intentions, while also discussing issues of identity and Blackness. Their interview further reflects on past exhibitions, connections with other key artists and Ụzọma’s recent MFA studies at Yale.Published on the occasion of the exhibition Chibụike Ụzọma – To Kick a Stone, 19 January – 25 February 2023, Simon Lee Gallery, London.Edited by Kat Sapera, designed by Joe Gilmore, printed by Pressision, Leeds and co-published in 2023 by Simon Lee Gallery and Anomie Publishing, London.