A gorgeous botanical tour of art and design across the ages
This handsome volume invites readers on an intimate stroll through
centuries of jewelry, botany, drawing, prints, video-game imagery and
scientific illustrations, offering a primer on the beauty and ingenuity
of nature as reflected in art. Five contributions punctuate the visually
structured journey, including a previously unpublished leporello by the
late artist Etal Adnan that pulls out into a six-page gatefold. Indeed,
this book-as-object is a masterpiece in and of itself, featuring a cover
infused with fluorescent and silver inks and titled with a serigraph, in
addition to eight pages of sumptuous endpapers printed in deep forest
green.
A coterie of international thinkers guide Botanical's ambitious scope
and aim: Emanuele Coccia, Italian philosopher and author of The Life of
Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture (2018); Estelle Zhong Mengual, French
art historian; Filipa Ramos, Portuguese curator and author of the
upcoming book The Artist as Ecologist (2023). Through their rigorous
and engaging essays, they unravel the mysterious inner workings of
nature and celebrate the visionary mimetic art born from culture.
Artists and designers include: Noyubushi Araki, Emile Gallé, Joan
Fontcuberta, Christian Dior, Claude Monet, Sarah Bernhardt, Eugène
Delacroix, Giuseppe Arcimboldo, Anna Atkins, Gustave Courbet, Henri
Cartier-Bresson, René Lalique, Georgia O'Keeffe, Otto Dix, Robert
Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint-Laurent.
