Text by Filipa Ramos, Emanuele Coccia, Alice Thomine-Berrada, Estelle Zhong Mengual. Conversation with Jean-Marc Mansvelt, Marc Jeanson.
A gorgeous botanical tour of art and design across the ages
This handsome volume invites readers on an intimate stroll through centuries of jewelry, botany, drawing, prints, video-game imagery and scientific illustrations, offering a primer on the beauty and ingenuity of nature as reflected in art. Five contributions punctuate the visually structured journey, including a previously unpublished leporello by the late artist Etel Adnan that pulls out into a six-page gatefold. Indeed, this book-as-object is a masterpiece in and of itself, featuring a cover infused with fluorescent and silver inks and titled with a serigraph, in addition to eight pages of sumptuous endpapers printed in deep forest green. A coterie of international thinkers guide Botanical’s ambitious scope and aim: Emanuele Coccia, Italian philosopher and author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018); Estelle Zhong Mengual, French art historian; Filipa Ramos, Portuguese curator and author of the upcoming book The Artist as Ecologist (2023). Through their rigorous and engaging essays, they unravel the mysterious inner workings of nature and celebrate the visionary mimetic art born from culture. Artists and designers include: Noyubushi Araki, Emile Gallé, Joan Fontcuberta, Christian Dior, Claude Monet, Sarah Bernhardt, Eugène Delacroix, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Anna Atkins, Gustave Courbet, Henri Cartier-Bresson, René Lalique, Georgia O'Keeffe, Otto Dix, Robert Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint-Laurent.
Ahh, plants! Featured spreads are from Botanical: Observing Beauty, the beyond-beautiful, 336-page compendium collecting botanical drawings and prints, scientific illustrations, photographs, images of jewelry, video games and more by the likes of Nobuyoshi Araki, René Lalique, Georgia O'Keeffe, Otto Dix, Robert Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint-Laurent, to name just a few. "It is precisely the impossibility of eliminating or translating, of sublimating their bodies, or sentient life, that defines that the way of accessing plants can only be aesthetic," Emanuele Coccia writes. "And, vice versa, any form of aesthetic representation or manipulation of the living being becomes a form of scientific knowledge. It is as if plants had forced humanity to relate to them as one relates to a jewel, a drawing, a painting—to a core of perception that asks to be reproduced in sensation and memory, that asks to extend and multiply gazes infinitely." continue to blog
FORMAT: Hbk, 8.5 x 10.5 in. / 336 pgs / 185 color / 65 b&w. LIST PRICE: U.S. $49.95 LIST PRICE: CANADA $69.95 ISBN: 9782365680608 PUBLISHER: JBE Books/Chaumet AVAILABLE: 9/20/2022 DISTRIBUTION: D.A.P. RETAILER DISC: TRADE PUBLISHING STATUS: Active AVAILABILITY: In stock TERRITORY: NA LA ASIA AU/NZ
Published by JBE Books/Chaumet. Text by Filipa Ramos, Emanuele Coccia, Alice Thomine-Berrada, Estelle Zhong Mengual. Conversation with Jean-Marc Mansvelt, Marc Jeanson.
A gorgeous botanical tour of art and design across the ages
This handsome volume invites readers on an intimate stroll through centuries of jewelry, botany, drawing, prints, video-game imagery and scientific illustrations, offering a primer on the beauty and ingenuity of nature as reflected in art. Five contributions punctuate the visually structured journey, including a previously unpublished leporello by the late artist Etel Adnan that pulls out into a six-page gatefold. Indeed, this book-as-object is a masterpiece in and of itself, featuring a cover infused with fluorescent and silver inks and titled with a serigraph, in addition to eight pages of sumptuous endpapers printed in deep forest green.
A coterie of international thinkers guide Botanical’s ambitious scope and aim: Emanuele Coccia, Italian philosopher and author of The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018); Estelle Zhong Mengual, French art historian; Filipa Ramos, Portuguese curator and author of the upcoming book The Artist as Ecologist (2023). Through their rigorous and engaging essays, they unravel the mysterious inner workings of nature and celebrate the visionary mimetic art born from culture.
Artists and designers include: Noyubushi Araki, Emile Gallé, Joan Fontcuberta, Christian Dior, Claude Monet, Sarah Bernhardt, Eugène Delacroix, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Anna Atkins, Gustave Courbet, Henri Cartier-Bresson, René Lalique, Georgia O'Keeffe, Otto Dix, Robert Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint-Laurent.
