Whether it be an abandoned factory, an attic or a kitchen table, it is the artist’s studio where the great art of our time is conceived and created. Through painting, sculpture, installation, film and photography, this definitive volume maps the wide-ranging possibilities of these crucibles of creativity.

This book brings together over 80 artists and collectives from Africa, East and South Asia, Australia, China, Europe, the Middle East, North and South America. They range from modern icons such as Francis Bacon, Louise Bourgeois, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Helen Frankenthaler, Lucian Freud, Inji Efflatoun, Gordon Parks, Pablo Picasso, Egon Schiele and Andy Warhol, to contemporary figures such as Mequitta Ahuja, Walead Beshty, Lisa Brice, Nikhil Chopra, Tracey Emin, Kerry James Marshall, Cindy Sherman and Stephen Shore.

Essays by Dawn Ades, Iwona Blazwick, Inês Costa, Richard Dyer, Hammad Nasar and Candy Stobbs explore the public studio – as the artist’s stage, a space of collaboration, an environment or a performance platform; and the private studio, a space for staging relations between artist and sitter, a place of refuge, reflection and experimentation.