New Release Books by Michael Bracewell

UNFINISHED BUSINESS focuses on an ordinary suburban office worker, fundamentally weak but always keeping his eyes fixed on some horizon where a heightened, romantic, better world must surely exist. Faced with the regular stuff of life - work, aspiration, marriage, age, divorce, bereavement - his ordinary plight is sharpened, becoming increasingly urgent. Having lived in a modern condition, confusing pleasure with happiness, wanting the dream to deliver, what do you do when you notice the shadows begin to lengthen on the lawn?

'The best evocation I've read of London in the '80s' Neil Tennant 'I loved Souvenir . . . it rescued some things for me - a certain aesthetic, a philosophical engagement with time and poignant beauty and lived history that I have found myself looking for, and not finding, elsewhere in recent years . . . the book gave me new hope' John Burnside 'A suspended act of retrieval, a partisan recall; a sustained, subtle summary of our recent past, and an epitaph for a future we never had' Philip Hoare 'Michael Bracewell proves himself to be nothing less than the poet laureate of late capitalism' Jonathan Coe A vivid eulogy for London of the late 1970s and early 80s - the last years prior to the rise of the digital city. An elliptical, wildly atmospheric remembrance of the sites and soundtrack, at once aggressively modern and strangely elegiac, that accompanied the twilight of one era and the dawn of another. Haunted bedsits, post-punk entrepreneurs in the Soho Brasserie, occultists in Fitzrovia, Docklands before Canary Wharf, frozen suburbs in the winter of 1980...

Catalogue of the New Normal Pictures first exhibited at Lehmann Maupin in September 2021

The most comprehensive monograph to date on the British artist and writer loved for his witty book-cover-inspired canvases Harland Miller's creativity as both artist and novelist culminates in his iconic paintings of battered book covers with cleverly invented titles. Initially appropriating the classic Penguin paperback before devising his own unique designs, Miller combines aspects of pop art, abstraction, and figurative painting to create highly coveted artworks that have won him a cult following. This monograph covers nearly 20 years of his paintings, and features newly commissioned essays by eminent art writers exploring different aspects of his practice.

The most comprehensive monograph to date on the British artist and writer loved for his witty book-cover-inspired canvases Harland Miller's creativity as both artist and novelist culminates in his iconic paintings of battered book covers with cleverly invented titles. Initially appropriating the classic Penguin paperback before devising his own unique designs, Miller combines aspects of pop art, abstraction, and figurative painting to create highly coveted artworks that have won him a cult following. This monograph covers nearly 20 years of his paintings, and features newly commissioned essays by eminent art writers exploring different aspects of his practice.

Roxy Music and Art-Rock Glamour is a detailed exploration of the origins of the glam scene in the early seventies. Fronted by the deeply charismatic Bryan Ferry - equal parts fifties crooner and stylish spaceman - and with the visionary Brian Eno on keyboards, Roxy Music melded high-art intentions with commercial savvy to redefine what we understand pop culture to mean, and in the course of so doing created some of the twentieth century's most adventurous music.

Michael Bracewell

This landmark book reflects on almost 70 years of works by Bridget Riley (b.1931), from some of her earliest to very recent projects, providing a unique record of the work of an artist still very much at the height of her powers. Essays from leading scholars and commentators on Riley's work will make this title the authority on new thinking around Riley's practice. The book includes a special 'in conversation with Bridget Riley' discussion conducted by Michael Bracewell. In the last decade, Riley has continued to push her practice considerably, producing several large-scale site-specific wall paintings as well as continuing to develop new paintings. This book will explore these recent developments, as well as showcasing a number of very early drawings and paintings by Riley never previously published. It will also examine the notable influence that other artists such as Georges Seurat and Piet Mondrian have had on Riley's work. AUTHOR: Lucy Askew is Senior Curator (Exhibitions) at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, specialising in post-war and contemporary art. Her previous publications include From Death to Death and Other Small Tales: Masterpieces from the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art and the D.Dasklalopoulos Collection (2010) and Louise Bourgeois: A Woman without Secrets (2013). SELLING POINTS: * Includes up-to-date discussion of Riley's most recent works by leading scholars in the field * Featuring a number of very early drawings and paintings never before published * Includes a brand new interview with Bridget Riley conducted specifically for this book 120 colour images

The anonymous, middle-aged narrator of Perfect Tense is a man broken on the wheel of office life - the great beige wheel of grinding routine, the uniform grey carpets, the endless buff envelopes. Driven by the entropy of the office, out of step with the zeitgeist, he has begun to question his whole generation, and his own empty, under-achieved life in particular. Recounting his day at the office - one particular day, which seems to mimic the coffee-mug slogan, 'Today Is The First Day Of The Rest Of Your Life' - the narrator scrutinises the arcane of his environment like an urban anthropologist, looking for aesthetic or spiritual purpose and finding only print-outs and suspension files, spider plants and yuccas and polystyrene cups. In this short, brilliant novel, we are taken on a terrifyingly familiar tour of office life which is at once hilarious and profound - the comedy of recognition matched by deepening urban anxiety, as if TS Eliot had been blessed with Groucho Marx's comic timing. One man's unravelling philosophical crisis amid the leaving parties and sandwiches becomes, in the hands of Michael Bracewell, a metaphysical search for order and purpose deep in the back of a desk drawer.

A collection of photography, drawing, and sculpture showcasing the work of Birgit Jürgenssen, (1949-2003), one of Austria's leading avant-garde artists, and a strong feminist and fierce advocate for women in the arts

Pale Carnage presents work by a number of international artists addressing ideas of cruelty, desire, beauty, decadence, voyeurism and violence. Evoking the culture and history of the late 19th and early 20th century, the exhibition explores the relationship between classicism and modernism and its unsettling association with fascism. Fascism encompassed both the ancient and modern, harking back to classical art, architecture and imagery, while at the same time championing a horrifying kind of futurism.

In answering the question posed by its title, and drawing on his twenty year relationship with the artists, Michael Bracewell is the first writer to engage directly with Gilbert & George to understand why they have devoted their lives exclusively and continuously - to the vision of art they conceived within months of first meeting. What emerges piece by piece is a portrait of Gilbert & George as two men who are infinitely more intense, strange, determined and alone than their longstanding public image suggests.

Edited by Florence Derieux. Text by Michael Bracewell, Martin Clark, Terry R. Myers.

British artist Clare Woods is internationally regarded as one of the most significant painters working today. Her paintings and works on paper are found in important public and private collections around the world, and she has produced many highprofile public commissions in the UK and Europe. Her highly colouristic paintings in oil or gloss paint on aluminium of strange, dark landscapes and anthropomorphic forms hover somewhere between abstraction and representation, expressing both a poetic romanticism and an unnerving psychic charge. This beautifully designed and illustrated volume is the first monograph on Woods' art. It presents all the major works from her career to date, from small-scale intimate paintings and prints to ambitious large-scale architectural projects. The dynamic layout of the book, with a varied mix of close-up detail and installation shots, gives the reader a strong sense of the diverse scale and immersive, push-pull nature of the paintings. Five prominent writers consider various aspects of her practice, including her use of photographic source material; her engagement with the traditions of landscape and figurative art; her relationship with artistic forebears, such as Francis Bacon, Paul Nash and Graham Sutherland; the context of painting practice today and twenty-firstcentury culture; and the connections between her life and work.

The Conclave charts the first thirty years in the life of a suburban dilettante with aesthetic aspirations, who, in the 1980s, begins a lucrative career. The story roams from the edge of London to a well-healed part of Bristol, and in doing so reveals a disturbing - and unforgettable - tale of loneliness and lost love.

the first clear anatomy of a confused decade, the 1990s – ‘Bracewell, with great verve and style, animates the cultural conversation’, Greil Marcus

An electrifying, trenchant meditation on England's pop sensibility, England Is Mine shows the novelist and critic Michael Bracewell on blistering form as he hops from Oscar Wilde to Paul Weller, Goldie to Graham Greene, in a dizzyingly erudite cultural history. Bracewell's eye is unswervingly democratic, as, for example, W. H. Auden ('grandfather of the robot dandys') is to be found sitting next to David Bowie ('a sort of Mod from Mars'). He is also intensely funny: who was it that '[covered] the territory of Angela Carter's Company of Wolves in the guise of a pre-Raphaelite raised on Jackie'? Kate Bush, of course. Through impassioned argument and an insight both hilarious and surgical (note Oasis's veneration of the Beatles as 'an example of England's nostalgia for Englishness as a kind of heritage pop') England Is Mine offers a genuinely unique and, more importantly, cogent take on England's pop history.

Perhaps best known for hyper realistic portraits of subjects from Kate Moss to the heavily tattooed Mr. X and Zoe which take the process of portraiture beyond the photographic medium, Jason Brooks rose to prominence in the early 1990s with a generation of British artists who enjoyed wide international acclaim. In these and his recent work exploring old masterpieces and anonymous found paintings, Brooks demonstrates his interest in affirming the faith that painters retain in the medium of painting. Ranging from his iconic portraits of the 1990s, through to restless experiments with sculpture, found materials and the essence of painting as a medium, Jason Brooks: Perpetual Orgy is the first overview of the career of a singular and versatile artist. Heavily illustrated with colour images from Brooks' rich and varied oeuvre, Perpetual Orgy offers a poetic and insightful reading of his practice from novelist, curator and critic, Michael Bracewell. Specially commissioned for this title, Bracewell has written a series of essays in response to an extended conversation with the artist and an engagement with his work spanning many years.

Over the past 25 years Ian Davenport has consistently employed intensely rigorous and unconventional painting processes. This book provides an in-depth examination of his production, from his electric fan paintings, to his poured arches, circles, lines and puddle paintings.

In 2008, Damien Hirst created a series of one hundred and fifty paintings, each titled after an Old Testament psalm, and made from butterfly wings and household gloss paint on canvas. The ‘Psalms’, in which iridescent butterfly wings combine to form kaleidoscopic patterns reminiscent of Gothic stained glass windows or Buddhist mandalas, were conceived nearly twenty years after the artist’s first use of the insect. Now one of his most recognisable motifs, the butterfly is here used to address some of Hirst’s most enduring themes: beauty, art, belief, life and death.00This stunning publication provides a comprehensive survey of the series. Each of the fully illustrated paintings is accompanied by the psalm from which its title derives, the biblical text rendered on images of individually selected colour marble samples. With the addition of a complete list of works and essays by writers Michael Bracewell and Amie Corry that investigate the historical and conceptual background to the works, ‘The Complete Psalm Paintings’ is an exquisite companion to one of Hirst’s most beautiful series.

Ann-Marie Jamess intricate paintings are built up through layer upon

Cultural critic and writer, Michael Bracewell has written widely and increasingly on modern and contemporary art and has been a regular contributor to Frieze magazines since its inception. He has written extensively for museums and galleries on artists including Gilbert & George, Richard Hamilton, Bridget Riley, Wolfgang Tillmans, Anish Kapoor, Keith Coventry, John Stezaker, Glenn Brown and Damien Hirst. This collection of Bracewell's writing on art explores connections between the visual arts, pop music, modern iconography and sub-cultures, while appraising the vision and ideas of individual artists and the relation of their work to its broader cultural context.

Through dialogues between the works of diverse artists, this catalogue proposes a reflection on our current perception of disaster. It includes an insightful essay by British critic and novelist Michael Bracewell that discusses, among other issues, Warhol's engagement with the subjects of death and catastrophe.