Contemporary art seems difficult... but it can really be for everyone!  
A book that teaches us to see beyond looking.

Contemporary art is difficult. Unlike the art of the past, it often stands outside all traditional canons and conventions, seeking to make the uniqueness of intuition, of gesture, of matter as its most recognisable feature. Once upon a time, a “Madonna and Child” could be of excellent workmanship or a half-crust, but it undoubtedly fell within the sphere of art. In the last hundred years, everything has changed. The boundary between what is art and what is not has often shifted from the object (the work) to the subject (the artist). In other words, artistic production has not only generated new forms of expression, but has become the outcome of an original way of conceiving art itself, transformed into something else than in the past. Contemporary art is accused of not knowing how to communicate with the public, of being comprehensible only to a select few, if not only to the artist. Yet contemporary art really can be for everyone, you just have to know how to see it.  Far from being a summary of ‘all’ contemporary art, this book offers an introductory itinerary through ten masters who lived between the 1940s and today: Pollock, Rothko, Fontana, Burri, Hopper, Bacon, Abramović, González-Torres, Mueck and Hirst. Their works and their lives reveal a powerful spiritual and creative tension: they are artists searching for a light in the darkness of their own time, in the emptiness of meaning after the traumas of world war, the fear of nuclear catastrophe and the revulsion for the devouring machine of Consumerism.