This book turns traditional art history inside out. Not styles or forms or movements or artists or art theories are its point of departure, but the reason for being of art in civilization. Since the very beginnings of society art has raised and responded to the existential questions of the human kind. The history of the arts is the history of those questions and from that angle art should be presented: here it is. When reading this book, unfolding like a novel, we think yes, of course, no dou...

Splendid Isolation is a group exhibition that seeks to explore the particular conditions of life in solitude, and more precisely the creative impulses it can nourish. Bringing together an intergenerational and international group of artists, it centres on the artistic output that is induced by life under self-imposed or forced restrictions and foregrounds herein a number of positions. They include working conditions in which artists have been brutally cut off from their environment, have opte...