Home  |  Up  |  Info  |  Search  |  View basket  |  Checkout  |  Email us  |  Login

Architecture Decorative Arts Fine Art Forthcoming Titles Instruments and Technology Oriental Art Exclusive Titles

Catalogue >Fine Art >  Monographs >  Vojo Stanic: Sailing on Dreams Vojo Stanic: Sailing on Dreams Robert Boyers, Valeri S. Turchin, Emir Kusturica "Painting is the simplest and most accessible of art forms. Painting can touch anyone, even the most naïve. Even the works of the greatest masters show an essential naïvety and that may be the very thing which makes the painting good. When I say naïvety, I mean the spiritual freshness that some people manage to preserve throughout the whole of their lives." Vojislav Stanic 280 pages / 292 x 265 mm / 250 colour illustrations / hardback ISBN 978-0-85667-650-5   Online price: £48.00 / €72.00 For over half a century the Montenegrin painter Vojislav Stanic has been living and working in the Mediterranean coastal town of Herceg Novi, observing the lives of its inhabitants from the window of his attic studio with a sharp eye and an impish intelligence. There emerges from his paintings a world full of life and colour, a world alive with the incessant hubub of human activty, not unlike the actual surroundings in which the painter finds himself. But though Stanic's insights come from his actute observations on the ordinary routines of local life, his manner of representation, which has much in common with the work of artists such as Magritte and de Chirico, is anything but ordinary. Objects and events which seem to conform to aspects of normal experience are depicted in unfamiliar, and frequently absurd, ways and contexts, inciting the viewer to consider afreash things which are all too often left unconsidered. His unique combination of the real and unreal, the ordinary and fantastical, is what is of most interest in Stanic, as well as what is most unsettling. However, whatever uneasiness this aspect of Stanic's work is wont to produce is soon overcome by what is perhaps the most distinctive feature of his work: his irrepressible humour. In three stimulating essays and an extensive collection of colour illustrations, this book traces the artist's creative development and explores the themes to be found in his work, bringing his work to the attention of an international audience for the first time in his long and distinguished career. About the authors Robert Boyers is editor of the American arts and humanities quarterly Salmagundi and director of the New York State Summer Writers Institute. He has taught at Skidmore College and was the first Tisch professor of arts and letters. He is the author of nine books, including Excitable Women, Damaged Men, a collection of short stories, and The Dictator's Dictation, essays on the politics of novels and novelists. Valeri S. Turchin is professor of art history at Moscow State University, a permanent member of the Russian Academy of Arts and director of the Moscow Society of Admirers of the Art of Vasily Kandinsky. He has written more than three hundred articles and fifteen books, including The History of West European Art Criticism in the 18th and 19th Centuries, Alexander I and Neoclassicism in Russia and Kandinsky in Russia. Emir Kusturica is the internationally renowned director of films including When Father Was Away on Business (winner of the Palme d'Or at Cannes Film Festival in 1985, and nominated for an American Academy Award for Best Foreign Film), Time of the Gypsies, Underground (winner of a second Palme d'Or in 1995) and Black Cat, White Cat. His most recent feature was Promise Me This (2007).