Your mother was a fish / A. M. Homes.

Text by Maura Reilly, Laurie Ann Farrell. Interview with Martine Antle.

Ghada Amer (b. Cairo, 1963; lives and works in New York) rose to renown in the mid-1990s with depictions of erotic motifs she stitched onto her paintings. These works compellingly interwove an ironic take on traditional role models with a confident reimagination of the painterly medium by combining it with embroidery. In 2014, the artist turned to working with clay, initially using it to produce models for her steel sculptures, then developing increasingly impromptu shapes. After making abstract colorful clay sculptures that stand out for their coarse-grained contours, she was awarded a two-year residency at the Greenwich House Pottery in New York, where she created works that are without parallel in the worlds of fine art or ceramics. Amer starts out with large-format thin slabs of clay that are extraordinarily difficult to handle, painting women's portraits on both sides and then bending the slabs and standing them on edge. This book presents numerous works from both series of ceramics as well as documentary photographs showing the artist at work in the studio. With two essays by Justine Ludwig and Britta Schmitz and a conversation between Sebastian Preuss and Ghada Amer.

Is it possible to speak of a contemporary art with an Islamic difference? This question is the subject of an exhibition that brings together artists who come from the Islamic world. Tapping into certain aesthetic, political, and spiritual notions, this book seeks to highlight the nuanced reactions of each individual artist.

Killer Heels explores the rich cultural history of the high heel and its relation to power, fantasy, sexuality and identity. More than 160 spectacular contemporary and historical shoe designs - from sixteenth-century Venetian platforms to twenty-first-century Christian Louboutins - are presented around six themes: Revival and Reinterpretation, Rising in the East, Glamour and Transgression, Architecture, Metamorphosis and Space Walk. Going beyond the archetypal forms of stiletto, wedge and platform, these extraordinary designs play with the cultural and artistic possibilities of the high heel, use innovative or unexpected materials and push the limits of functionality, wear ability and beauty. Complementing the shoes are stills, sketches and artist statements for six films specially commissioned for the exhibition from Ghada Amer and Reza Farkhondeh, Zach Gold, Steven Klein, Nick Knight, Marilyn Minter and Rashaad Newsome that explore a range of provocative themes and demonstrate the power of the high heel in the collective imagination. In addition, several of the designers included in the exhibition (including Brian Atwood, Zaha Hadid, Pierre Hardy and Christian Louboutin), along with Elizabeth Semmelhack, Curator of the Bata Shoe Museum, contribute thoughts on topics such as their inspiration and design process and the cultural significance of high heels. Beautiful, informative and just plain fun, this collection of killer heels is filled with stunning photos and fashion lore.

- Accompanying a major exhibition at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris- Exploring the life and work of renowned feminist artist Alice Neel, 1900-1948- Essays and an extensive anthology provide an academic insight into Neel's work"I have always believed that women should resent and refuse to accept all the gratuitous insults that men impose upon them." - Alice Neel, 1971 One of the greatest portrait artists of the 20th century, Alice Neel's vibrant, expressionistic paintings revealed a breath-taking depth of emotion within her subjects. From works exploring loss and grief, to communist political art, Neel's work pushed boundaries of social justice throughout the 1900s. Her dedication to capturing the truth of humanity is evident: she painted those rejected by society, the victims of social or gendered oppression. Latin American and Puerto Rican immigrants, African-American writers excluded from the intellectual elite, single mothers struggling to raise their children, homosexual couples - all were presented with equal candidness by Neel's brush. Her unflinching approach to the female body took a ground-breaking step towards reclaiming the nude from the male gaze, and the activism inherent to her art resonates with viewers to this day. This book highlights Neel's political and social commitment to her art, as a figurative painter at odds with the artistic styles of the avant-gardes of her time. Structured in two thematic parts - social injustice and gender inequality - this retrospective includes some 60 paintings and drawings as well as numerous documents. Following the artist from her first works in the 1920s to her final evocative self-portrait, made shortly before her death, this is the defining treatise on Alice Neel.