Themes & Concepts

This is a heart-warming collection of illustrations from the much-loved viral sensation, Murphy’s Sketches (@murphys_sketches) on Instagram. The perfect gem of a gift for yourself or for your loved ones – A Book to Brighten Your Day is a comforting treasury of positivity and joy.

Filled with stunning drawings, life-affirming words and inspirational poems, these pages will make you pause, take a breath and appreciate the beauty in the smaller, everyday moments. It’s the perfect guide as you reset at the beginning of the year, enjoy the world in bloom in spring, make the most of the summer sunshine and finally, get cosy and festive as the year ends.

Featuring over two hundred beautiful, calming and entertaining illustrated pages, A Book to Brighten Your Day will help you find joy everyday, come rain or shine.

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Laura Knight (1877–1970) was one of the most famous and popular English artists of the twentieth century. She was the first woman to have a solo exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, in 1965. In the following decades her realist style of painting fell out of fashion and her work become largely overlooked. A new generation has rediscovered her work, finding a contemporary resonance in her depictions of women at work, of people from marginalized communities and her contributions as a war artist.

This beautifully illustrated book, which accompanies a major exhibition at MK Gallery, provides an overview of Knight’s illustrious career: from her training at Nottingham Art School at the age of 13 and her time in North Yorkshire and Cornwall, to her visits to traveller communities and a segregated American hospital. It also features her circus, ballet and theatre scenes, paintings of women during the war and her late paintings of nature.

The selection of over 160 works combines celebrated paintings with less known graphic and design works, including ceramics, jewellery and costumes that reflect the artist’s enduring interest in the everyday activities of people from all walks of life.

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Never before published, this self-curated, intensely personal collection of travel notes and sketches by the world’s most revered performance artist offers readers a kind of iconography of Abramović’s daring and utterly original body of work.

An artist’s notebooks are arguably the most authentic means of understanding her process, techniques, and impulses. And, for a performance artist, a rare, permanent record of how she develops her craft. Compiled over the course of four decades on stationery from various hotels, and other temporary residences, this collection of Marina Abramović’s original drawings, collages, poetry, writings, cut-outs, photographs, and doodles offers glimpses of a brilliant mind in constant motion. Beautifully produced and packaged, it takes readers on a journey through Abramović’s thoughts―and traces the evolution of the most fruitful phase of her career.

“I believe we humans need to keep moving forward, and my own life was purely nomadic,” Abramović writes of her travel diaries. “My home was everywhere I went because my home was my own body.” With the archival material elegantly reproduced in the original size on high-quality paper, this collection offers Abramović’s enormous fanbase unprecedented access to her creative process.

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• This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism at the Dulwich Picture Gallery 31 March – 10 September 2023
• Bringing together around 30 of Morisot’s most important works from international collections, many never seen before in the UK
• The exhibition reveals the artist as a trailblazer of the impressionism movement

Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism is the first major UK exhibition of the renowned Impressionist since 1950. In partnership with the Musée Marmottan Monet, Paris, it will bring together around 30 of Morisot’s most important works from international collections, many never seen before in the UK, to reveal the artist as a trailblazer of the movement as well as uncovering a previously untold connection between her work and 18th century culture, with around 20 works for comparison.

A founding member of the Impressionist group, Berthe Morisot (1841-1895) was known for her swiftly painted glimpses of contemporary life and intimate domestic scenes. She featured prominently in the Impressionist exhibitions and defied social norms to become one of the movement’s most influential figures. Berthe Morisot: Shaping Impressionism will draw on new research and previously unpublished archival material from the Musée Marmottan Monet to trace the roots of her inspiration, revealing the ways in which Morisot engaged with 18th century art and culture, while also highlighting the originality of her artistic vision, which ultimately set her apart from her predecessors.

Highlights will include Eugène Manet on the Isle of Wight (1875), painted while Morisot was on honeymoon in England, and her striking Self-Portrait (1885), which will appear alongside Jean-Honoré Fragonard’s Young Woman (c.1769) from Dulwich Picture Gallery’s collection. Apollo revealing his divinity to the shepherdess Issé, after François Boucher (1892), In the Apple Tree (1890) and Julie Manet with her Greyhound Laerte (1893), are among nine paintings on loan from the Musée Marmottan Monet, many receiving their first ever showing in the UK.

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‘To say this series is “empowering” doesn’t do it justice. Buy a copy for your daughters, sisters, mums, aunts and nieces – just make sure you buy a copy for your sons, brothers, dads, uncles and nephews, too.’ – Independent

The women who shaped and were erased from our history.

Forgotten Women is a new series of books that uncover the lost herstories of influential women who have refused over hundreds of years to accept the hand they’ve been dealt and, as a result, have formed, shaped and changed the course of our futures.

The Artists brings together the stories of 48* brilliant woman artists who made huge yet unacknowledged contributions to the history of art, including Camille Claudel, the extraordinarily talented sculptor who was always unfairly overshadowed by her lover, Rodin; Baroness Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven, who has been claimed as the true originator of Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain; and Ana Mendieta, the Cuban refugee who approached violence against women through her performance art before her own untimely death.

With chapters ranging from Figurative to Photography, and Craft to Conceptual, this is an alternative guide to art history that demonstrates the broad range of artistic movements that included, and were often pioneered by, female artists who have been largely overlooked.

*The number of Nobel-prize-winning women.

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An updated edition of the acclaimed monograph, celebrating one of the most iconic and revolutionary artists of our time.

“Yayoi Kusama transcended the art world to become a fixture of popular culture, in a league with Andy Warhol, David Hockney, and Keith Haring.” ―The New York Times

Kusama is internationally renowned for her groundbreaking work on themes such as infinity, self-image, sexuality, and compulsive repetition. A well-known name in the Manhattan scene of the 1960s, Kusama’s subsequent work combined Psychedelia and Pop culture with patterning, often resulting in participatory installations and series of paintings. This revised and expanded edition of the 2000 monograph, which is arguably still one of the most comprehensive studies on her work to date, has been augmented by an essay by Catherine Taft and a collection of new poems by the artist.

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