Design

This handsome, lavishly illustrated volume charts the production and use of ceramics in architecture and interior decoration from the Middle Ages to the present. Drawing on the rich collection of London’s V&A, the book discusses different traditions and techniques, from the encaustic tiles of the Gothic era through Dutch Delftware to the lively, inventive work of Duncan Grant, while the influence of the Islamic world is shown in the tiles of Moorish Spain and Victorian England.

French artist Mirka Lugosi creates a surreal fetishist dreamworld in this collection of her paintings and drawings. The pocket-sized artist's book presents 50 icon-like, fantasy pictures of unsettling mysterious locations, erotic paraphernalia and women exposing themselves. The images are accompanied by poetic texts by Marie-Laure Dagoit. Sexually explicit.

In the 19th century there was an amazing flowering of ironwork forms, mass produced and widely distributed, but of extreme variety and richness of design. This volume introduces cast iron (often mistakenly referred to as 'wrought iron'), its manufacturers and their pattern books, and presents an international photographic inventory of the forms taken by cast iron ornamentation, its national variations, its relationship to architecture and its contribution to the appearance of buildings.

Carved in wood, painted and gilded, winged altar retables were by far the most elaborate works of art of the Gothic period, and most churches in the pre-Reformation period were richly decorated with them - the cathedral in Ulm had 50. Following his detailed introduction, Professor Kahsnitz presents 22 of the most outstanding examples of winged altarpieces, photographed in great detail by Achim Bunz, with analysis of their architecture, iconography and art historical context. Translation by Russell Stockman. Slip-cased.