Berlin has seen huge upheavals, including its reinstatement as the capital city of the reunified Germany. This book considers the reasons behind Berlin's vital and vibrant art scene, profiling and assessing nineteen artists who feel a particular affinity with the city.

Art Now is a series of interview-based profiles of prominent contemporary visual artists, bringing together the work of Howard Hodgkin, Antony Gormley, Rachel Whiteread, Julian Opie, Mark Wallinger, and 2001 Turner Prize winner Martin Creed.Sandy Nairne's introductory essay offers a comprehensive overview of the state of contemporary art, highlighting how the six artists manifest some of the best recent and emerging art in Britain today. Each interview presents a thought-provoking survey of the artist's work and ideas and offers a rare and personal insight into their influences and creative processes. Art Now is an excellent introduction to some of today's most important contemporary artists and provides an accessible way to engage with the pleasures and puzzles of art in the twenty-first century.

This book offers a wide ranging collection of work by Picasso; including paintings, drawings and sculptures, all produced in high quality, large-format illustrations.

Ernst Ludwig Kirchner's remarkable series of paintings known as the Berlin Street Scenes is a highpoint of the artist's work and a milestone of German Expressionism, widely seen as a metaphor for modernity itself through their depiction of life in a major metropolis. Kirchner moved from Dresden to Berlin in 1911, and it was in this teeming city, immersed in its vitality, decadence and underlying sense of danger posed by the imminent World War I, that he created the Street Scenes in a sustained burst of creative energy and ambition between 1913 and 1915. As the most extensive consideration of these paintings in English, this richly illustrated volume examines the creative process undertaken by the artist as he explores his theme through various mediums, and presents the major body of related charcoal drawings, pen-and-ink studies, pastels, etchings, woodcuts and lithographs he created in addition to the paintings. The volume also investigates the significance of the streetwalker as a primary motif, and provides insight on the series in the context of Kirchner's wider oeuvre.

German Art Now focuses on the extraordinary group of artists and photographers that emerged in Germany in the decades following the end of World War II, and whose wide-ranging themes and powerful aesthetic have established them as major figures on the world art stage. Featuring Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Jorg Immendorff, Anselm Kiefer, Markus Lupertz, A. R. Penck, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter, this survey examines the way in which, through their sculptures, paintings, and drawings, these artists have confronted issues of national identity, defeat and recovery, mythology and the burdens of history, and the responsibilities of art in society. They have developed new forms of expression in which to address these themes, and their impact on the fields of abstract and figurative art, Pop Art, photo-realism, and performance art has been significant. Similarities of background and generation bind them into a recognizable group, yet, as the authors show, their resistance to any similarities of subject matter, medium, style, or artistic persona continues to ensure their individuality.

A Leading Laboratory for Contemporary Art Turns Thirty KUNST-WERKE BERLIN e.V. is one of the world's most highly renowned organizations for contemporary art. For three decades, the KW Institute for Contemporary Art has been a vital scene of progressive creative practices; pursuing distinctive visions, the curators who have worked here, including Klaus Biesenbach, Anselm Franke, Susanne Pfeffer, and Krist Gruijthuijsen, have set major trends in the international art world. Since KW's early days, the avant-garde program of exhibitions and transdisciplinary events has made significant contributions to the discourse of contemporary art and its impact beyond art's own disciplinary boundaries. Flagship programs have included the Berlin Biennale for Contemporary Art, initiated in 1997, and a wide-ranging exhibition practice that has spawned seminal projects including Berliner Chronik (1994), Stand der Dinge (2000), Regarding Terror: The RAF Exhibition (2005), One on One (2012-13), and The Making of Husbands: Christina Ramberg in Dialogue (2019-20). The list of outstanding artists featured in KW's exhibitions has included Absalon, Kader Attia, Keren Cytter, Cyprien Gaillard, Douglas Gordon, Channa Horwitz, Carsten Höller, Renata Lucas, Hiwa K, Annette Kelm, Mika Rottenberg, Christoph Schlingensief, Hassan Sharif, and Anri Sala. Thirty years after Klaus Biesenbach, Alexandra Binswanger, Philipp von Doering, Clemens Homburger, and Alfonso Rutigliano founded KW in what was then a dilapidated former margarine factory in post-fall-of-the-Wall Berlin, this book reviews the institution's extensive archive and exhibition history. It is the first publication to offer a comprehensive overview of all shows and the eleven editions (and counting) of Berlin Biennale. With essays by Jan Verwoert, Susanne von Falkenhausen, and Jenny Dirksen, a conversation between Klaus Biesenbach, Krist Gruijthuijsen, and Gabriele Horn, and a chronology of exhibitions and projects running to over 50 pages.