BELLAS ARTES

Japan's contemporary architecture has long been among the most inventive in the world, recognized for sustainability and infinite creativity. No fewer than eight Japanese architects have won the Pritzker Prize. Since Osaka World Expo ’70 highlighted contemporary forms, Japan has been a key player in global architecture. Tadao Ando's geometry put Japanese building on the map, bridging East and West. After his concrete buildings, figures like Kengo Kuma, Shigeru Ban, and Kazuyo Sejima pioneered a more sustainable approach. Younger generations have taken new directions, in harmony with nature, traditional building, and an endless search for forms. Presenting the latest in Japanese building, this book links this unique creativity to Japan's high population density, modern economy, long history, and continual disasters in the form of earthquakes. Accepting ambiguity, constant change, and catastrophe is a key to understanding how Japanese architecture differs from that of Europe or America.

De música, por supuesto sus inicios, referencias y maestros, sus trabajos, pero también de otros asuntos más personales sus miedos y sueños y universales amor, drogas, política, religión, muerte es de lo que el autor de este libro, reconocido periodista cultural con varias biografías de estrellas de la canción española en su haber, ha conversado a lo largo de tres décadas con los 40 grandes músicos e intérpretes que lo protagonizan.

Across Brazil and around the world, the elegant and meticulously crafted spaces designed by the firm Dado Castello Branco Arquitetura e Interiores are known for blending functionality with aesthetic allure. These places—residences, apartments, and villas, all in the signature style the firm has honed since its founding in São Paulo in the early 1990s—are brought to cinematic life by Brazilian artistic director and visual artist Ricardo van Steen. In these pages, van Steen stages a visual journey through four key elements of the company’s sophisticated design vision: He considers light as medium and muse, almost a character in the drama of each living, breathing space. He attends to matter, meaning the very materials of wood, copper, stone, fabric, and glass through which Dado’s designs achieve their richness and authenticity. He turns to the horizon, an essential feature that opens up perspectives and creates visual intrigue, serving as a metaphorical guide to the soul of the space. And he closes with art, paying tribute to Dado Castello Branco’s lifelong passion for the artists who inspire him and the art objects whose presence enhances these meticulous interiors. This richly illustrated publication brings us into these worlds of drama and elegance with exclusive photography and a profound consideration of the legacy of this legendary firm.

Painter, sculptor, writer, filmmaker, and all-round showman Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) was one of the 20th century’s greatest exhibitionists and eccentrics. One of the first artists to apply the insights of Freudian psychoanalysis to art, he is celebrated in particular for his surrealist practice, with such conceits as the soft watches or the lobster telephone, now hallmarks of the surrealist enterprise, and of modernism in general. Dalí frequently described his paintings as “hand-painted dream photographs.” Their tantalizing tension and interest resides in the precise rendering of bizarre elements and incongruous arrangements. As Dalí himself explained, he painted with “the most imperialist fury of precision,” but only “to systematize confusion and thus to help discredit completely the world of reality.” Revolutionizing the role of the artist, the mustache-twirling Dalí also had the intuition to parade a controversial persona in the public arena and, through printmaking, fashion, advertising, writing, and film, to create work that could be consumed and not just contemplated on a gallery wall.

“Les diners de Gala is uniquely devoted to the pleasures of taste … If you are a disciple of one of those calorie-counters who turn the joys of eating into a form of punishment, close this book at once; it is too lively, too aggressive, and far too impertinent for you.”—Salvador Dalí Food and surrealism make perfect bedfellows: sex and lobsters, collage and cannibalism, the meeting of a swan and a toothbrush on a pastry case. The opulent dinner parties thrown by Salvador Dalí (1904–1989) and his wife and muse, Gala (1894–1982) were the stuff of legend. Luckily for us, Dalí published a cookbook in 1973, Les diners de Gala, which reveals some of the sensual, imaginative, and exotic elements that made up their notorious gatherings.

From a small, picturesque farmhouse in the rich fields and meadows of Normandy, David Hockney followed the changing seasons across 2020 and into the new year. He used his iPad to spontaneously depict impressions of the landscape surrounding him, catching the first spring blossoms, the smell of summer, the saturated colors of autumn, and the stark shapes of dark branches in winter time. The 220 (plus four bonus) iPad paintings in this book are printed with six colors to match the richness of the artist’s vision. A short introduction by Hockney reveals how this planned project became a lifeline during the COVID lockdown, from which he spread his message of hope: “Remember they can’t cancel the spring.”