Michael Snow is, without doubt, one of foremost living artist, and a central figure in North American art in the latter half of the Twentieth Century.

Since the reception of the “Independent Film Award” (1968) from the journal Film Culture, his work was placing in the ranks of such major figures of avant-garde cinema as Stan Brakhage and Gregory Markopoulos as well as in the company of two other artists-turned-filmmakers: the photographer Robert Frank and the painter Andy Warhol.

This is the updated and revised version of the Polke book published in 2005 by Ediciones Polígrafa. This publication was designed and conceived in collaboration with the artist and includes part of his personal documentation. It is also the only publication that includes a critical review of his production of Films.

Also there is a very interesting crosscutting issue in the book: the relation of the artist with the Goya painting, Las viejas o el tiempo. The new cover shows Polke photographing this painting in The Beaux Arts Museum in Lille (France). 

Marcel Broodthaers (Brussels, 1924-1976), a poet before becoming an artist in 1964, was a pioneer of intermedia and site-specific installation art but above all an in-depth theorist who ranged widely over the visual arts in his writings. Broodthaers’ work is widely recognized for its movement and combination of mediums: performance, film, text-based work, etc. Often overlooked, his artworks include genuine research into the nature of language, giving a conceptual continuity to all his practice.

Jeff Wall s large-scale Cibachrome tranparencies mounted on light-boxes have exerted a profound influence over little short of the past three decades. His work also spans a time in which the way in which the relationship change. He is one of the last artists to work out his moves on the basis of a linear view of history and then to have a rethink the relationship of his work with art history in a world in which such a view of history was no longer tenable.

Gary Hill is one of the most important contemporary artists investigating the relationships between words and electronic images. His inquiries into linguistics and consciousness offer resonant philosophical and poetic insights as he explores the formal conjuntions of electronic visual and audio elements with the body and the self. With experimental rigor, conceptual precision and imaginative leaps of discovery, Hill s work in video is about, and is, a new form of writing.

Jannis Kounellis has always cherished a fond memory -I would even call it a veneration- of ''those Greek mothers who, rather than bringing up their children to stay by their sides, prepared them to leave home.'' But of course these adventures come to an end sooner or later with the long-awaited return to Ithaca.

During the course of the past thirty years, video art has blossomed well beyond the expectations of its early practioners and theorists. Born as a critique of television and a medium at odds with traditional pictorial forms, at its inception video was filled with an utopian promise that lead artists to belive in a true democratization of art. Today it has reached a pinnacle of technical sophistication and aesthetic importance that was only dreamed of in the 1960s when the accessibility of the Portapak camera seemed to allow limitless creative possibilities.

Starting from the profane material of everyday culture, Polke interprets images of reality rather than reality itself, satirizes tendencies in contemporary painting, questions the role of the artist as author, breaks down the trivial visual worlds of media photography, and always, but always, takes off on the most magnificient flights of imagination. This publication is the most complete monograph on the artist to date, and includes a number of works never before published.