Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds: A Philosophy of Painting is the first book to give the famed Spanish artist the critical attention he deserves. Born in Tomelloso in 1936 and still living in the Spanish capital today, Antonio López has long cultivated a reputation for impressive urban scenes—but it is urban time that is his real subject. Going far beyond mere artist biography, Benjamin Fraser explores the relevance of multiple disciplines to an understanding of the painter’s large-scale canvasses. Weaving selected images together with their urban referents—and without ever straying too far from discussion of the painter’s oeuvre, method and reception by critics—Fraser pulls from disciplines as varied as philosophy, history, Spanish literature and film, cultural studies, urban geography, architecture, and city planning in his analyses. The book begins at ground level with one of the artist’s most recognizable images, the Gran Vía, which captures the urban project that sought to establish Madrid as an emblem of modernity. Here, discussion of the artist’s chosen painting style—one that has been referred to as a ‘hyperrealism’—is integrated with the central street’s history, the capital’s famous literary figures, and its filmic representations, setting up the philosophical perspective toward which the book gradually develops. Chapter two rises in altitude to focus on Madrid desde Torres Blancas, an urban image painted from the vantage point provided by an iconic high-rise in the north-central area of the city. Discussion of the Spanish capital’s northward expansion complements a broad view of the artist’s push into representations of landscape and allows for the exploration of themes such as political conflict, social inequality, and the accelerated cultural change of an increasingly mobile nation during the 1960s. Chapter three views Madrid desde la torre de bomberos de Vallecas and signals a turn toward political philosophy. Here, the size of the artist’s image itself foregrounds questions of scale, which Fraser paints in broad strokes as he blends discussions of artistry with the turbulent history of one of Madrid’s outlying districts and a continued focus on urban development and its literary and filmic resonance. Antonio López García’s Everyday Urban Worlds also includes an artist timeline, a concise introduction and an epilogue centering on the artist’s role in the Spanish film El sol del membrillo. The book’s clear style and comprehensive endnotes make it appropriate for both general readers and specialists alike.

This volume explores the transformation of public space and administrative activities in republican and imperial Rome through an interdisciplinary examination of the topography of power. Throughout the Roman world building projects created spaces for different civic purposes, such as hosting assemblies, holding senate meetings, the administration of justice, housing the public treasury, and the management of the city through different magistracies, offices, and even archives. These administrative spaces – both open and closed – characterised Roman life throughout the Republic and High Empire until the administrative and judicial transformations of the fourth century CE. This volume explores urban development and the dynamics of administrative expansion, linking them with some of the most recent archaeological discoveries. In doing so, it examines several facets of the transformation of Roman administration over this period, considering new approaches to and theories on the uses of public space and incorporating new work in Roman studies that focuses on the spatial needs of human users, rather than architectural style and design. This fascinating collection of essays is of interest to students and scholars working on Roman space and urbanism, Roman governance, and the running of the Roman Empire more broadly.

The Spanish artist Antonio López García is revered worldwide not only for the extreme realism he brings to his paintings and drawings, but because he conveys through this extreme realism a wonderful sensitivity to light, color and space, enabling each to breathe with a tranquility that allows for the encroachments of everyday life. Interior scenes of dining tables, bathroom sinks, toilets, dressers are depicted in sober light that recall Chardin or the intimisme of Vuillard--though López García surpasses even these masters in his ability to make unforgivingly prosaic subject matter, such as a brick wall or a refrigerator, sparkle and throb with mood. The artist's statement that you work until the whole surface has an expressive intensity equivalent to what you have before you, converted into a pictorial reality conveys something of the labor he brings to his works: López García is not a prolific artist, and as a result shows rarely (his 2008 exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, consolidated his already strong audience in the U.S.). His drawings and paintings are equally esteemed, but until now, the drawings have never been the subject of a monograph. All of the work in this superbly designed publication has been carefully selected by the artist's daughter, Maria; much of it has never been reproduced until now. Including 200 color plates and a moving text by the artist himself, it stands as a powerful testimony to López García's astounding achievement. Antonio López García (born 1936) studied at the School of Art in Madrid in the early 1950s, and quickly became part of a nucleus of realist painters, such as Francisco López Hernández, Amalia Avia and Isabel Quintanilla. López García was the subject of Víctor Erice's 1992 film El Sol del Membrillo (The Quince Tree of the Sun), which closely chronicles the artist's attempts to paint a quince tree.

Other Cities, Other Worlds brings together leading scholars of cultural theory, urban studies, art, anthropology, literature, film, architecture, and history to look at non-Western global cities. The contributors focus on urban imaginaries, the ways that city dwellers perceive or imagine their own cities. Paying particular attention to the historical and cultural dimensions of urban life, they bring to their essays deep knowledge of the cities they are bound to in their lives and their work. Taken together, these essays allow us to compare metropolises from the so-called periphery and gauge processes of cultural globalization, illuminating the complexities at stake as we try to imagine other cities and other worlds under the spell of globalization. The effects of global processes such as the growth of transnational corporations and investment, the weakening of state sovereignty, increasing poverty, and the privatization of previously public services are described and analyzed in essays by Teresa P. R. Caldeira (São Paulo), Beatriz Sarlo (Buenos Aires), Néstor García Canclini (Mexico City), Farha Ghannam (Cairo), Gyan Prakash (Mumbai), and Yingjin Zhang (Beijing). Considering Johannesburg, the architect Hilton Judin takes on themes addressed by other contributors as well: the relation between the country and the city, and between racial imaginaries and the fear of urban violence. Rahul Mehrotra writes of the transitory, improvisational nature of the Indian bazaar city, while AbdouMaliq Simone sees a new urbanism of fragmentation and risk emerging in Douala, Cameroon. In a broader comparative frame, Okwui Enwezor reflects on the proliferation of biennales of contemporary art in African, Asian, and Latin American cities, and Ackbar Abbas considers the rise of fake commodity production in China. The volume closes with the novelist Orhan Pamuk’s meditation on his native city of Istanbul. Contributors: Ackbar Abbas, Teresa P. R. Caldeira, Néstor García Canclini, Okwui Enwezor, Farha Ghannam, Andreas Huyssen, Hilton Judin, Rahul Mehrotra, Orhan Pamuk, Gyan Prakash, Beatriz Sarlo, AbdouMaliq Simone, Yingjin Zhang

This volume of Transport and Sustainability focuses on how spatial and social mobilities are intertwined in the reproduction of spatial and social inequities in Latin American cities.

Arranged alphabetically from Magdalena Abakanowicz to Tadaaki Kuwayama, this volume provides a biography of the artist, a selected list of exhibitions, a list of public collections that include work by the artist, and more.