The Most Beautiful German Books Prize, 2005, “German Photo Book Award,” 2006 The spectacular series by Japanese photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto (*1948 in Tokyo) are characterized by matchless clarity and presence. His works are always an absolute embodiment of his chosen visual motif, reduced to its essence. Our exquisite monograph is the first to feature works selected from all of the series produced to date— including, of course, his most famous: Sugimoto’s celebrated portraits of wax figures seem to face up to their living audiences; his Seascapes show us nothing less than a person’s first conscious view of the ocean; the extremely long exposures of Theaters elevate the white, luminescent cinema screen, transforming it into a magical image of an altar; and the fascinating Dioramas—photographs of scientific display cases— allow us to travel with the artist far into the past to observe extinct animal species or the daily life of early man. Text in German. Exhibition schedule: K20 Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf, July 14, 2007–January 6, 2008 · Museum der Moderne Salzburg, March 8–June 15, 2008 · SMB Nationalgalerie, Berlin, July 4–October 5, 2008 · Kunstmuseum Luzern, October 25, 2008–January 25, 2009

This catalog, produced in conjunction with Sugimoto’s upcoming exhibition at the Izu Photo Museum in Japan, documents this important artist’s recent investigations on the science and the presentation of photography. Documenting in detail Sugimoto’s architectural and landscape design of the new Izu Photo Museum, the book is at once a reinvention of the artist as architect, as it is an insightful guide to Sugimoto’s interest in the earliest beginnings of photography. Instigated by the urging of his friend, Pop art icon Richard Hamilton, Sugimoto went to England to visit the museum of William Henry Fox Talbot, the inventor of the negative/positive photographic process. Finding common ground with Talbots’ polymathic interests in art and science, this book details images from Sugimoto’s Photogenic Drawing Talbot pieces, where Sugimoto reinterprets 15 unprinted negatives from Talbot’s early studies, as well as 15 images from the artist’s Lightning Field series. Includes text by critic Minoru Shimizu.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images freeze time and space, revealing the workings of our own vision, slowing down the act of perception long enough that it becomes a palpable component of his work. His earliest photographs were images of decadent movie palaces built in the 20s and 30s. By timing the exposure of his photos to the exact length of the film being screened, he produced images that depict theater interiors bathed in the magical glare of an all-white screen: pure light. Next Sugimoto began a body of work that he continues to this day, photographing views of the sea from land, traveling around the world to make pictures that, despite their vastly different geographic origins, seem at first to be the same, with only slight variations. Their captions, however, confirm that each is of a different body of water: Caspian, Ligurian, Black. Other series include his out-of-focus impressions of landmark architectural monuments, wherein the Empire State Building, Le Corbusier’s Chapel de Notre Dame du Haut, and Tadao Ando’s Church of Light in Osaka, among others, are essentialized rather than documented. This volume presents a monographic retrospective of Hiroshi Sugimoto’s complete body of work, including the projects described above and others. New, mostly unpublished images from his recent color work are featured: impressions of the impeccably proportioned shrine Sugimoto designed in Naoshima Island in Japan, as well as a series entitled Colors of Shadow. Specially commissioned essays by photography curators David Elliot and Kerry Brougher examine Sugimoto’s work in depth, while an exhibition history and bibliography round out the volume.

Japanese artist Hiroshi Sugimoto is renowned for his elegant photographic series of seascapes, theaters, museum dioramas, and Buddhist statuary. His new series presents life-size, black-and-white portraits of historical figures — Henry VIII and each of his wives, Voltaire, Benjamin Franklin, Oscar Wilde, and Emperor Hirohito, among others — photographed in wax museums, isolated against black backgrounds, and dramatically lit so as to create haunting Rembrandtesque images. The series, which also includes a 25-foot, five-panel photograph of a wax effigy of Leonardo’s Last Supper, emulates the grand tradition of portraiture and recalls the wax figures’ sources in famous paintings by Holbein, David, van Dyck, and Vermeer. This book, published to accompany an exhibition of commissioned work for the Deutsche Guggenheim Berlin that also travels to the Guggenheim Museo Bilbao, includes texts by a team of art historians and an interview with Sugimoto, offering fresh insights into the work of this contemporary artist.

Hiroshi Sugimoto’s images freeze time and space, revealing the workings of our own vision, slowing down the act of perception long enough that it becomes a palpable component of his work.a body of work that he continues to this day, photographing views of the sea from land, traveling around the world to make pictures that, despite their vastly different geographic origins, seem at first to be the same, with only slight variations. Their captions, however, confirm that each is of a different body of water: Caspian, Ligurian, Black. Ever the romantic enthusisast of the photographic medium, the seascape series are testament to his ardor. While they are deeply ‘photographic’ they are also deeply metaphysical and existential documents. As a form and cultural construct they exist as the ultimate distilling of the form of photographic landscape.

This artist’s book, in Praise of Shadows from Japanese artist and photographer Sugimoto, explores the image of the candle flame and the shadow it casts. Based on an installation in which the artist created seemingly uniform, but slightly different transparent images of candle flames and then projected them onto a wall with the light of actual, other candle flames — this book conjures a meditation on that most poetic of symbols

Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. He studied photography at the Center College of Design in Los Angeles before moving to New York in the 70s. His work has been exhibited internationally, including at the Berkeley Art Museum, California; the 10th Biennial of Sydney, Australia; capc MusEe de l’Art Contemporain, Bordeaux; the Carnegie International, Pittsburgh; the New Museum of Contemporary Art, New York; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

Francesco Bonami is a curator, writer and critic. He is also the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago.

“Marco de Michelis is a Professor of the history of architecture at the Bauhaus University in Wermar Germany and a scholar at the Getty Center for the History of Arts in Santa Monica, California. He has published extensively about contemporary architecture and his prior books include Luis Barragan (Skira, 2000) and Bauhaus 1919-1933 (Mazzotta, 1996).”

A visual survey of contemporary artists’ photography of architecture, featuring the work of Andreas Gursky, Iwan Baan, Wolfgang Tillmans, Catherine Opie, Thomas Ruff, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and more. Since the invention of photography, architecture has proved a worthy subject for photographers. Shooting Space: Architecture in Contemporary Photography showcases the relationship between the two practices. The book presents a broad spectrum of work from a diverse roster of renowned and emerging artists: Annie Leibovitz captures the construction of Renzo Piano’s New York Times building; James Welling revisits Philip Johnson’s iconic Glass House; Walter Niedermayr shifts perspectives on SANAA’s sculptural designs. The book is divided into five chapters, covering collaborations between photographer and architect, global urbanization, alterations to the natural landscape, reappraised Modernist icons, and imagined environments. Presenting a fresh study of outstanding work in contemporary architectural photography, Shooting Space not only provides an engaging display of beautiful photography, but will reward the reader with a considered survey of our built environment.

The fields of photography and architecture have long been closely linked: photography provides a powerful way for architecture to be appreciated from a distance, and the camera lens alters and enhances buildings so that they can be appreciated anew, even by those already intimately familiar with them. Concrete: Photography and Architecture explores this deep and often complex relationship, with particular attention paid not only to how photography influences the perception of architecture but also the very design itself. Beginning with the invention of photography in the nineteenth century, this volume presents iconic images of urban architecture and townscapes that are organized thematically rather than simply chronologically. The editors have assembled over two hundred images from numerous notable photographers, including: Georg Aerni, Adolphe Braun, Balthasar Burkhard, Lynn Cohen, Walker Evans, Lucien Hervé, Germaine Krull, Stanley Kubrick, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and William Henry Fox Talbot. Originally published to coincide with an exhibition celebrating the Fotomuseum Winterthur’s twentieth anniversary, Concrete: Photography and Architecture is an exhaustive investigation of architectural photography and is as beautiful as it is informative.  

Art and Film Since 1945: Hall of Mirrors explores the complex and profound relationship between cinema and the visual arts in the postwar era. It examines how art has shifted toward film, how film has been influenced by art, and how the two have fused into new forms of artistic expression.
Published in conjunction with a major exhibition organized by The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, Art and Film features work by more than one hundred of the century’s most remarkable filmmakers and artists, such as Joseph Cornell, Alfred Hitchcock, Akira Kurosawa, Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Richard Hamilton, Diane Arbus, Andy Warhol, Raul Ruiz, John Baldessari, Cindy Sherman, Hiroshi Sugimoto, and Stan Douglas.
The book’s seven essays range widely over themes including Hollywood glamour and stardom, the experimental cinema of the sixties, the influence of psychoanalytic and feminist film theory on art, nostalgia for cinema’s golden age, and presentiments of its fragmentation and death. The dialogue between art and film returns frequently to cinema’s origins, splintering and re-arranging into new, self-reflexive experiences that highlight and subvert film practice.

Contributions by Berenice Abbott, Leonor Antunes, Marcel Broodthaers, Roger Callois, Hanne Darboven and Lucy R. Lippard, Eric Duyckaerts, Max Frisch, Frederich Froebel, Joao Maria Gusmao and Pedro Paiva, Florian Hecker and Quintin Meillasoux, Alfred Jarry, On Kawara, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, F. T. Marinetti, Daria Martin, Mario Merz, Helen Mirra, Man Ray, Ben Rivers and Mark von Schlegell, Pamela Rosenkranz and Erik Wysocan, Robert Smithson, Paul Valéry, Iannis Xenakis In the Holocene is based on a 2012 group exhibition of the same name at the MIT List Visual Arts Center that explored art as a speculative science, investigating principles more commonly associated with scientific or mathematical thought. Through the work of an intergenerational group of artists, the exhibition and book propose that art acts as an investigative and experimental form of inquiry, addressing or amending what is explained through traditional scientific or mathematical means: entropy, matter, time (cosmic, geological), energy, topology, mimicry, perception, consciousness, et cetera. Sometimes employing scientific methodologies or the epistemology of science, other times investigating phenomena not restricted to any scientific discipline, art can be seen as a form of inquiry into the physical and natural world. In this sense, both art and science share an interest in knowledge, realism, and observable phenomena, yet are subject to different logics, principles of reasoning, and conclusions. Works by Berenice Abbott, John Baldessari, Rosa Barba, Robert Barry, Uta Barth, Joseph Beuys, Alighiero Boetti, Carol Bove, Marcel Broodthaers, Matthew Buckingham, Hanne Darboven, Thea Djordjadze, Aurélien Froment, Terry Fox, Laurent Grasso, João Maria Gusmão and Pedro Paiva, Rashid Johnson, Kitty Kraus, Germaine Kruip, Daria Martin, John McCracken, Trevor Paglen, Man Ray, Ben Rivers, Pamela Rosenkranz, Robert Smithson, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Georges Vantongerloo, Lawrence Weiner

Artists include Robert Adams, Diane Arbus, Robert Bechtle, Vija Celmins, John Currin, Tim Davis, Keith Edmier, Eric Fischl, Maureen Gallace, Robert Gober, Todd Haynes, Edward Hopper, Bill Owens, Charles Ray, Joel Shapiro, Cindy Sherman, Stephen Shore, Steven Spielberg, Joel Sternfeld, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Henry Wessel.

The arts have changed since 1885, and Les Grands Spectacles sets out to document this evolution in three phases. Starting with the invention of film and the standardisation of the bourgeois theatre-house in the late 19th century, the book then focuses on the modernisation and dissemination of the mass media after World War Two, and finally arrives at the situation of art at the beginning of the new millennium, where events cultivate a theatrical quality, and the individual’s every intimate impulse can become entertainment for the masses. Les Grands Spectacles also shows what effects these changes have had on art or have been spurred by art, and how the social significance of the sensational, the tragic or the deceptive has been understood in art and the material of the spectacle explored, extended, hijacked, altered or destroyed in artworks. Artists in the exhibition include Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Matthew Barney, Vanessa Beecroft, Maurizio Cattelan, Jake & Dinos Chapman, Marcel Duchamp, Marlene Dumas, Sylvie Fleury, Nan Goldin, Dan Graham, Richard Hamilton, Damien Hirst, Candida Höfer, Martin Kippenberger, Yves Klein, Gustav Kluge, Jeff Koons, Yayoi Kusama, El Lissitzky, Robert Longo, Paul McCarthy + Jason Rhoades, Jonathan Meese, Laszlo Moholy-Nagy, Otto Mühl, Takashi Murakami, Dennis Oppenheim, Raymond Pettibon, Pablo Picasso, Richard Prince, Mimmo Rotella, Dieter Roth, Ed Ruscha, Jean Tinguely, Cindy Sherman, Joel Sternfeld, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Nicola Tyson, Dziga Vertov, Catherine Wagner, Andy Warhol, Franz West, and many, many others. Essays by Magrit Brehm, Roberto Ohrt and Klaus Theweleit.

As Japan sped through modernization and technological advancement in the late twentieth century, complex influences shaped its Modern and contemporary art. Chikaku mixes media and generations in exploring that history through themes of time and memory. It includes work from Yayoi Kusama, Daido Moriyama, Yoko Ono, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Miwa Yanagi.

Die vorliegende Veröffentlichung erweitert diese theologische Fragestellung auf die zeitgenössische Kunst und deren Verarbeitung von Problemen der Gegenwart: Es werden Werke internationaler Künstler zusammengeführt, die sich in ihrer Arbeit mit existenziellen Aspekten des Lebens befassen. Zugleich wird nach den in der Kunst heute noch anwesenden Bildern der alt- und neutestamentarischen Überlieferung gesucht. Die ausgewählten Kunstwerke spüren das Religiöse im Säkularen und das Säkulare im Religiösen auf. In ihnen entwirft der Mensch Bilder von sich selbst in seiner körperlichen und geistigen Existenz. In miteinander verknüpften ikonografischen Linien führt die Publikation Entwürfe von Menschen, ihren Orten und Zeichen zusammen, die ihrerseits spirituelle Fragen stellen. In einführenden Essays werden die künstlerischen und die theologischen Aspekte des Themas erörtert. Hinzu kommen Texte zu den ausgestellten Werken sowie Selbstzeugnisse der beteiligten Künstler. Die Künstler: Dennis Adams, Pawel Althamer,Samuel Beckett, Joseph Beuys, Louise Bourgeois, Sophie Calle, Peter Campus, John Coplans, Hartwig Ebersbach, Jochen Gerz, Roni Horn, Thomas Huber, Martin Kippenberger, Harald Klingelhöller, Willem de Kooning, Maria Lassnig, Via Lewandowsky, Jonathan Meese, Boris Michailow,Juan Muñoz,Bruce Nauman, Gerhard Richter, Anri Sala, Thomas Schütte, Florian Slotawa, Kiki Smith,Robert Smithson, Thomas Struth, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Fiona Tan, Wolfgang Tillmans/Isa Genzken, Patrick Tosani, Mark Wallinger, Andy Warhol, Remy Zaugg

Architecture has always been a central subject matter for photographers. For most of the 20th century, however, the practice of architectural photography has been a professional endeavor; anonymous photographs taken for clients for specific, commercial reasons. This book concerns itself with another, rarer, topic: the photography of architecture as an art practice. It considers the work of seven contemporary photographers who use buildings in their work in a new way. In these photographs, they respond to the work of prominent architects by creating their own interpretations. Here are Andreas Gursky’s photos of the Stockhom Library by Gunnar Asplund, Tomas Ruff’s photos of several works by Herzog & de Meuron, Hiroshi Sugimoto’s photos of Le Corbusier’s Villa Savoye, as well as works by Candida Hofer, Jeff Wall, Gunther Forg, and Balthasar Burkhard. A beautiful and valuable book on one of the prominent movements in contemporary photography. Featuring: Andreas Gursky, Candida Hofer, Thomas Ruff, Jeff Wall, Gunther Forg, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Balthasar Burkhard Edited by Gloria Moure. Essays by Abalos & Enguita, Joerg Bader, Catherine Hurzeler, Hans Irrek, Gloria Moure, Barry Schwabsky, Jeff Wall and Martin Tschanz. Introduction by Terence Riley.

Description: Yet Untitled collects together a dedicated selection of contemporary photography. Presented in a uniquely straightforward fashion, with strong nods to the grid, this volume presents work with a range of concerns and content. Included are photographers who focus on issues of documentation, such as the “Becherklasse” (Bernd & Hilla Becher and their former students Candida Hafer, Thomas Ruff and Thomas Struth); those who deal in the subjective, following in the wake of Otto Steinert; and those who have grouped themselves around Michael Schmidt since the early 80s. Nan Goldin, Lee Friedlander, Bettina Rheims, Tom Wood and Hiroshi Sugimoto are just some of the international artists featured. Brought together over the last seven years by Hannover-based traffic planner Bernd F. Knne, the work in Yet Untitled offers a fascinating overview of recent trends in American and European photography. Accompanying essays and an interview with the collector explore the historical development of contemporary photography on both sides of the Atlantic.

This book contains four different views of an artists’ books collection. We just sorted in chronological order and took a picture of what was inside. Vincenzo Agnetti, Carl Andre, Nobuyoshi Araki, Stefano Arienti, Enrico Baj, John Baldessari, Fiona Banner, Matthew Barney, Robert Barry, Carlo Bertè, Alighiero Boetti, Christian Boltanski, Agostino Bonalumi, Brad Brace, Stanley Brouwn, James Lee Byars, Vincenzo Cabiati, Antonio Calderara, Enrico Castellani, Mariana Castillo Deball, Eduardo Chillida, Jean Cocteau, Gianni Colombo, Pietro Consagra, Gino De Dominicis, Sonia Delaunay, Herman De Vries, Giulia Di Lenarda, Gillo Dorfles, Peter Downsbrough, Marcel Duchamp, Olafur Eliasson, Peter Fischli & David Weiss, Lucio Fontana, Tom Friedman, Natalia Gončarova, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Emilio Isgrò, Alex Katz, Anselm Kiefer, Terence Koh, Jannis Kounellis, Melissa Kretschmer, Frank Kupka, Maria Lai, Sol LeWitt, Ugo Locatelli, Claudia Losi, Françoise Mairey, Man Ray, Ari Marcopoulos, Brice Marden, Amedeo Martegani, Fausto Melotti, Jonathan Monk, Mariko Mori, Bruno Munari, Mario Nigro, Mimmo Paladino, Luca Pancrazzi, Giulio Paolini, Jes Petersen, Pablo Picasso, Sigmar Polke, Arnaldo Pomodoro, Markus Raetz, Angelo Savelli, Salvatore Scarpitta, Jim Shaw, Roman Signer, Kiki Smith, Dash Snow, Ettore Spalletti, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Wolfgang Tillmans, Richard Tuttle, Erik Van Der Weijde, Bram Van Velde, Luigi Veronesi, Jan Voss, Andy Warhol, Christopher Wool, Erwin Wurm, Yasuhiro Yoshioka

Luwa AG’s photography collection, initiated in 1990 in Zellweger, Switzerland, by Ruedi and Thomas Bechtler and never before shown in public, has since become one of the finest and most extensive collections in the area of conceptual and serial photography. Embracing the seventies to the present, it contains major works and groups of works by artists such as John Baldessari, Bernd and Hilla Becher, Sigmar Polke, Imi Knoebel, Martin Kippenberger, Thomas Ruff, Andreas Gursky, Fischli & Weiss, Roman Signer, Richard Prince, Jeff Wall, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Stan Douglas, Ken Lum, and Gabriel Orozco. This splendid publication unfurls a rich visual display, and texts by Stephan Berg, Konrad Bitterli, David Campany, Stefan Gronert, and Dora Imhof expound on this spectacular collection.

In 2009, the revered Swiss art publication and editions publisher, Parkett, celebrates its quarter-centenary with a comprehensive retrospective collecting all 200 of the artists editions it has produced since 1984. (They include Tomma Abts, Maurizio Cattelan, John Currin, Peter Fischli/David Weiss, Nan Goldin, Dan Graham, Wade Guyton, Zoe Leonard, Paul McCarthy, Marilyn Minter, Cady Noland, Raymond Pettibon, Richard Prince, Charles Ray, Gerhard Richter, Pipilotti Rist, Ed Ruscha, Dana Schutz, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Christopher Wool, to name just a few.) Originating at the celebrated SANAA-designed 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art in Kanazawa, Japan, the exhibition builds on previous retrospectives held at Kunsthaus Zurich (2005), the Irish Museum of Modern Art (2002), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (2001), and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (2001). “Commissioned by Parkett, the most important artists of our time have created editions that represent the essence of their art or reveal an unexpected dimension… the works cover every possible medium including painting, photographs, drawings, prints, sculptures, videos, DVDs, and sound pieces,” wrote Whitechapel’s Iwona Blazwick in 2001. Weighing in at more than 450 pages, this super-collectible catalogue raisonne, produced in conjunction with the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, is the most comprehensive catalogue ever produced on Parkett’s fabled editions. As such, it is a unique document of today’s art.

apan has been at the forefront of photography throughout the 20th century: photography was both a product of and a driving force in modernisation. This book charts three stages of development in this period of Japanese photography: from post-war documentary bearing witness to the destruction of war; turning inward to personal and subjective interpretations of the rapid changes in Japanese society; to a contemporary movement which consistently pushes the boundaries of the photographic medium. These photographers illustrate the diversity and virtuosity of the unique Japanese visual language. Photographers Nobuyoshi Araki, Hiroshi Hamaya, Naoya Hatakeyama, Eikoh Hosoe, Ryuji Miyamoto, Daido Moriyama, Shigeichi Nagano, Takeyoshi Tanuma, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Shomei Tomatsu, Hiromi Tsuchida and Shoji Ueda.

The concept of time has been discussed by philosophers throughout the ages. What is its nature? How does one depict it? Artists, especially, have struggled with representing the ephemeral thing that is time–from On Kawara’s never-ending series of dated one-day paintings, to Janine Antoni’s infinitely massive and barely gnawed-at hunks of chocolate and lard, to Hiroshi Sugimoto’s long-exposure photographs of movie theaters, to Iiigo Manglano-Ovalle’s sped-up video of human motion in Mies van der Rohe’s New National Gallery in Berlin. Tempo will feature encyclopedic texts explaining ideas and terms related to time, and a full-color thematic plate section will include multi-media work by artists as diverse as Francis Als, Mathew Barney, Vija Clemins, Douglas Gordon, Roni Horn, Guillermo Kuitca, Glenn Ligon, Gabriel Orozco, Paul Pfeiffer, Kim Sooja, Fatimah Tuggar, Andriana Varejao, Erwin Wurm, and Andrea Zittel. Published to accompany the first exhibition to be held at MoMA QNS, The Museum of Modern Art’s temporary space in Queens.

The recent rise in the West of Japanese photography makes Setting Sun a crucial document. The first anthology of its kind to appear in English, this book collects key texts written from the 1950s to the present by the country’s most celebrated and controversial photographers, and illuminates a set of ideas, rules, and aesthetics that are specific to Japanese culture, but often little known elsewhere. Contributors include Takuma Nakahira and Daido Moriyama, in whose landmark late-60s magazine Provoke a radically new direction in Japanese photography was set; Nobuyoshi Araki, the provocative and prolific chronicler of bound girls (among other subjects); and Eikoh Hosoe, whose collaborations with the Butoh dance master Hijikata and the novelist Mishima made him prominent as an intellectual figure as well as a photographer. In addition, there are selections from modern masters such as Masahisa Fukase, Takashi Homma, Takuma Nakahira, and Hiroshi Sugimoto. Each chapter in the book is devoted to a central theme that is particular to Japanese photography, such as the role of nostalgia in a culture that has often sought to jettison its past amid the shadows of a war lost. The writings vary in form from diary entry to scholarly treatise, but all reflect a clear connection between word and image, one so essential that no comprehensive consideration of Japanese photography can be complete without it. Edited by Ivan Vartanian, Akihiro Hatanaka and Yutaka Kanbayashi.

Exploring more than a dozen personal collections of contemporary artists, this unique and revealing book probes the aesthetic and psychological dimensions of collecting and shows how objects can influence and reflect their owners’ work. Throughout history artists have collected objects for professional and private reasons. Picasso, for example, collected African and Oceanic art; Walker Evans amassed a huge collection of postcards depicting ordinary Americans; and Matisse was an avid collector of exotic textiles and furniture. This book takes a look at the private collecting habits of contemporary artists including Arman, Peter Blake, Hanne Darboven, Edmund de Waal, Damien Hirst, Howard Hodgkin, Dr Lakra, Sol LeWitt, Martin Parr, Jim Shaw, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Andy Warhol, Pae White, and Martin Wong/Danh Vo. Their holdings range from mass-produced memorabilia and popular collectibles, such as cookie jars and children’s toys owned by Warhol, to unique curiosities and specimens, like Blake’s collection of Walter Potter taxidermy, and other curios and rarefied artifacts, such as important examples of African art owned by Arman. Presented alongside key examples of their work, these objects provide insight into the inspirations, influences, motives, and obsessions of their owners. A lead essay examines the reasons why artists collect, attempting to understand the relationship between the objects artists amass and the works they make, and contributions by or on each of the artists reflect on the personal significance of collecting habits.