Light, words, and the ephemeral—that shifting condition of random—are concepts present in some form in the entire oeuvre of Chema Alvargonzalez (1960-2009), an artist who divided the two decades of his career between Barcelona and Berlin. Whereas Bruce Nauman and Dan Flavin are Alvargonzalez’s direct sources in the way he configures the space through experimentation with lighting, Mallarmé serves as the basis of his linguistic approach to the practice of art.

Alvargonzalez often accords words the status of objects which—rather than locking in a meaning—enables him to achieve a semantic openness that only the great poets are capable of. In his vanitas pieces, another recurring theme, Alvargonzalez invites us to reflect on death; in his reference to Goethe’s last words (Licht, mehr Licht!) he draws our attention to the close relationship that he forges between nature and poetry.

The Spanish sculptor Julio González (1876-1942) pioneered welded iron constructions and gave the medium an unprecedented expressiveness and range. Born in Barcelona, he learned his craft from his father, a goldsmith and sculptor.

He moved in 1900 to Paris, where his contact with the most innovative and powerful modern art led, as one would expect, to a vitalization of his own artistic conceptions. He arrived at a style of his own through his attempts to incorporate space and time into his work, and in so doing he changed the meaning of iron, endowing it with new constructive and expressive values. His work made a definitive impact on the development of contemporary sculpture.

Though his output was small, his influence on such master sculptors as David Smith ––a distant pupil–– is testimony to the eloquence of his art.

This ambitious publishing project (for which seven volumes are planned) focuses on the artist’s complete oeuvre and is the result of the initiative of Tomàs Llorens, former director of the Reina Sofía Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum both of which are in Madrid, and the IVAM in Valencia, which holds over 400 works by Julio González in its collection. Published in collaboration with the IVAM and the Azcona Foundation in Madrid.

Santiago Calatrava, one of the most renowned contemporary architects, is also responsible for a large number of bridges in several cities of the world Barcelona, Bilbao, Buenos Aires, Haarlem, Jerusalem, Orléans, Seville, Tel Aviv and Valencia, on which his popularity is largely based. Santiago Calatrava. The Complete Works is an exhaustive study of the architect s professional career, outstanding aspects of which are the recent railway stations he designed for Zurich, Lyon Lisbon and Liège, Sondica Airport in Bilbao, the Auditorio in Tenerife and the Ciudad de las Artes y las Ciencias in Valencia, as well as the internodal terminal for the World Trade Center, New York.

The most important aspect of the Joan Miró Foundation’s collections is without doubt its valuable stock of works consisting in over 14,000 items. Most of this collection was donated to the Foundation by Joan Miró himself. Other pieces have come from the collections owned by Pilar Juncosa,the artist’s wife,and Joan Prats,his close friend and the driving force behind the idea of setting up the Foundation.
The Foundation has a large collection of paintings from all the different periods of Miró’s life.The works exhibited show the development of his art from his training in Barcelona and first contacts with the avant-gardes in the early twentieth century,the time spent in Paris and his links with the Surrealists. Miró’s art in the last years of his life was mainly expressed in large-format paintings and denotes a deeper interest in pure colour and in gesture,but without abandoning his lyricism and compositional rigour.It is precisely this period that is most widely represented here,since he donated to the Foundation the works that were in his studio when it was set up. This guidebook is the main tool to achieve to the highlights of the Foundation’s collections.

Albert Ràfols -Casamada (Barcelona 1923) is without doubt one of the foremost artists working today in Lyrical Abstraction, a style that is of undisputed international importance, in which Ràfols-Casamada stands alongside artists such a Helen Frankenthaler and Richard Diebenkorn, with whom he shares an esprit de finesse Dore Ashton, a refined sensibility and a formal asceticism. His sensibility is also given expression in his poetry and serves in this wide-ranging study by J.f. Yvars less as a structural element and more as a kind of pause, establishing the unerring cadence of a discourse of images begun more than 50 years ago.
Vision and Sign. The painting of Ràfols-Casamada is the most complete monograph on this artists and an essential reference book for anyone wishing to study his work.

During the last six years, the photographer Joan Fontcuberta (Barcelona, 1955) has visited libraries and archives throughout Europe and North America and gathered together images of censured text from different epochs and authors –Desiderius Erasmus, Fernando de Rojas, Francisco de Quevedo, among others.

Based on this series of images, Joan Fontcuberta presents “Deletrix”, an artistic project (an exhibition and an artist book) on censorship with the direct involvement of PEN Catalán.

“Deletrix” includes a series of images by the photographer together with texts in which writers of international renown reflect on censorship. This project, driven by PEN Catalán aspires to become a literary and artistic benchmark volume on censorship.

Contributions by Carme Arenas, Manuel Guerrero Brullet, Chenjerai Hove, Herta Müller (Nobel Prize in Literature, 2009), Emmanuel Pierrat, John Ralston Saul y Salman Rushdie.

Joan Fontcuberta was awarded the Hasselblad Prize (2013), considered as the Nobel in photography, in recognition of his entire career. His work has previously been discerned by other awards, such as the National Photography Award (1998) and the National Essay Award (2011).

From October 1989 until September 1995, fourteen site specific projects found their home in the city of Barcelona. Created by Christian Boltanski, John Cage, Jan Dibbets, Rodney Graham, Rebecca Horn, Jannis Kounellis, Richard Long, Mario Merz, Bruce Nauman, Sigmar Polke, Aureli Ruiz & José Maldonado, Ulrich Rückriem, and Lawrence Weiner, the works provided a significant overview of important installation work of the second half of the 20th century. This book documents the intense experience of the project, which was organized by the Espai Poblenou Foundation.

This book is a faithful reflection of the modus operandi and spirit that pervade the professional life of Josep Lluís Mateo, unquestionably one of the Spanish architects’ offices that has had the greatest impact on the international scene. Josep Lluís Mateo has a studio in Barcelona and teaches at the ETH in Zurich, where he is Professor of Architecture and Design. His projects in Paris, The Hague and Amsterdam have been joined by others newly begun in Haarlem, Basel, Mexico FD and Castelo Branco, all of which are analysed in depth in this book, which also includes new photographic reportages by Christian Richters, a photographic essay by the artist Sergio Belinchón on Mateo’s International Convention Centre in Barcelona—one of his most authoritative projects of recent years—an extensive study by José Luis Pardo and an interview by Philip Ursprung.

The Spanish sculptor Julio González (1876-1942) pioneered welded iron constructions and gave the medium an unprecedented expressiveness and range. Born in Barcelona, he learned his craft from his father, a goldsmith and sculptor.

He moved in 1900 to Paris, where his contact with the most innovative and powerful modern art led, as one would expect, to a vitalization of his own artistic conceptions. He arrived at a style of his own through his attempts to incorporate space and time into his work, and in so doing he changed the meaning of iron, endowing it with new constructive and expressive values. His work made a definitive impact on the development of contemporary sculpture.

Though his output was small, his influence on such master sculptors as David Smith ––a distant pupil–– is testimony to the eloquence of his art.

This ambitious publishing project (for which seven volumes are planned) focuses on the artist’s complete oeuvre and is the result of the initiative of Tomàs Llorens, former director of the Reina Sofía Museum, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum both of which are in Madrid, and the IVAM in Valencia, which holds over 400 works by Julio González in its collection. Published in collaboration with the IVAM and the Azcona Foundation in Madrid.