The most complete monograph realized about the noted Austrian painter, photographer, filmmaker, performer and set designer, born in Vienna in 1948.

The works of Helnwein show the bare truth where society instead hides and removes. What emerges by leafing through the pages of this monograph is the obsession that accompanies the artistic career of this notable Austrian artist, marked by the wish to breakdown the rhetoric of war, the constructions of self-absolution, the mystifications of religious institutions in whose pitfalls men periodically fall as if they had not committed the same mistake over and over again.

Edited by Demetrio Paparoni and divided into sections that make this volume a valid tool for exposing the different aspects of Helnwein’s work, the monograph includes, aside from the editor’s text, a preface by Sean Penn and essays by Klaus Schröder (director of the Albertina in Vienna) and Martin Muller (director of Modernism Gallery in San Francisco) and a conversation between the artist and Jonathon Keats (American conceptual artist and experimental philosopher).

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Art critic, curator and essayist, Demetrio Paparoni has written introductions for catalogues on artists including Li Songsong, David Salle, Vik Muniz, Peter Halley,

Sean Scully, Jim Dine, Zhang Huan, Wang Guangyi and Ding Yi. He has written and edited numerous books and monographs, including those on Timothy Greenfield-Sanders (2001), Brian Eno & Mimmo Paladino (2001), Chuck Close (2002), Jonathan Lasker (2002) and Wang Guangyi (2013), Morten Viskum (2016), Natee Utarit (2017), Vibeke Slyngstad (2017), Laurent Reypens (2017), Ronald Ventura (2018), Espen Dietrichson (2018).

The first extensive monograph dedicated to the artist Rafael Megall, whose work is strongly interwoven with Armenian recent history.

This illustrated volume highlights the rich personality of the Armenian painter Rafael Megall (born 1983), his connection with the artistic tradition of his country, and the peculiar language inspired by the story of his people. The book offers a panorama of his production, among others: the famous “icons,” paintings on wood first showcased at the 57th Venice Biennale; the installation The Artist and His Mother, showcased at the National Gallery of Armenia, one of the most powerful artworks dedicated to the Armenian genocide; the unpublished series of portraits dedicated to Lev Tolstoy.

About the Author:

Demetrio Paparoni is an Italian art critic and writer, curator and essayist. Among his publications and monographs, often revealing the contemporary Asian world, are Ronald Ventura, Works 1998–2017 (2018), Nyoman Masriadi: Telepathy Contact (2020), The Devil: A Visual History (2017).

The first comprehensive monograph on the life and career of the Filipino artist Andres Barrioquinto, a rising star of the contemporary Southeast Asian art scene. 

The volume deals with the complex universe of the artist (Manila, 1975), who combines elements deriving from the iconography and aesthetic of Baroque with Japanese woodcuts (ukiyo-e), reinterpreted in a Pop style. In his paintings, men, women, and anthropomorphic animals are shown in forests plentiful with butterflies and birds, introducing the theme of vanitas in a context of strong visual impact.

About the Author:

Demetrio Paparoni is an art critic, curator and essayist. Among his publications: Wang Guangyi (2013), Natee Utarit (2017) and Ronald Ventura (2018).

What was particularly memorable for those who saw Anish Kapoor’s first shows, in the early eighties, was the silence conveyed to the exhibition space by those small sculptures covered with yellow, red, black or blue pigments.

When the young Kapoor became established on the international scene at the beginning of the eighties,immediately attracting the attention of critics, the art scene was characterized by very noisy art made of large-format paintings, mainly with harsh and violent colors, and redundant in memories and citations ranging from art history to mythology. In this context, Kapoor’s intimist sculptures were offbeat and also distinguished themselves from the so-called “New British Sculpture” so widely discussed in those years.

On closer inspection, that “new” sculpture was not so very new at all, since it constructed narratives and figurative images made through a system of signs placed in relation to each other to give life to a compositional whole.

The young British sculptors had inherited this conception of sculpture from Anthony Caro, and although it was already the postmodern era Caro, as the expression of a tendency to be overcome, was considered the father to kill. The only one of those artists who created a new way to understand sculpture was Kapoor himself, who felt it was possible to return to the origins of art without suffering inferiority complexes towards the artistic avant-gardes of the twentieth century.

Not that Kapoor distanced himself from the history of modern art - as evidenced by his interest in Constantin Brancusi, Marcel Duchamp, Yves Klein, Barnett Newman, Robert Smithson or Donald Judd. To put it simply, he believed there were archaic forms tied to the spiritual dimension that never lost their ability to create relationships between individuals.