Today's ES covers by (clockwise from top left) Jamie Hewlett, Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Tillmans, Gillian Wearing, Antony Gormley, and Ai Weiwei. All images courtesy of the London Evening Standard

Ai Weiwei, Anish Kapoor, Wolfgang Tillmans and Phaidon artists create ES covers to celebrate London's resilience

Antony Gormley, Gillian Wearing, and Jamie Hewlett make up all star cast of contemporary art talent

Within the past six months, London has endured a series of terror attacks, and the worst fire since World War II. How should the city recover from all this? The capital’s newspaper, the London Evening Standard, feels the answer might lie in art.

Wolfgang Tillmans' ES cover

The paper, now edited by George Osborne, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer, has commissioned six leading artists to create six covers for today’s edition of its ES supplement, each “celebrating London’s resilience in the face of recent tragedies.”

Ai Weiwei's ES cover

Ai Weiwei, Sir Anish Kapoor, Gillian Wearing, Jamie Hewlett, Sir Antony Gormley and Wolfgang Tillmans have all drawn up cover images which commemorate the lives lost at the Westminster, London Bridge and Finsbury Park terror attacks and the Grenfell Tower blaze, and also mark the 12^th anniversary of the 7/7 bombings.

Anish Kapoor's ES cover

Kapoor’s simple, sunny image expresses an "optimistic sensibility" says the artist; Ai’s images are drawn from the artist’s monumental 2017 frieze, Odyssey, which depicts the experience of migrants over the years; Gillian Wearing reprises her Turner Prize winning work 60 minutes silence (which also appears on the cover of her Contemporary Artist Series book) with an image of 52 Londoners observing a minute's silence for the 52 Londoners who lost their lives in the 7/7 attacks.

Meanwhile, Antony Gormley has created a figurative piece from a coffee spill, after “trying to think how resilience and common sympathy occurs with every precious existence potentially held in the mind of all and all held in the mind of each,”; Jamie Hewlett has drawn a multicoloured series of fists raised in solidarity; and Wolfgang Tillmans has overlaid his photograph of a underground station with a simple message: London Light Hope.

Gillian Wearing's ES cover

Londoners can pick up the covers, and perhaps their spirits, when ES magazine is distributed this evening. For more on Wolfgang Tillmans buy this book; for more on Jamie Hewlett read this interview; for more on the early works of Ai Weiwei get this one; for a great overview of Antony Gormley buy this title; to fully understand and luxuriate in the work of Anish Kapoor invest in this beautiful volume; and for more on Gillian Wearing get this one.

Wolfgang TillmansSurvey by Jan Verwoert, Interview by Peter Halley, Focus by Midori Matsui, Artist's Writings by Wolfgang Tillmans, Update by Johanna Burton

Price AUD$100.00 Price CAD$89.95 Price £49.95 Price USD$69.95 Price T69.95

Known since the early 1990s for his photographs of young people in their social environment – clubs, gay pride parades, warehouse parties – Wolfgang Tillmans created an enigmatic, sexy and highly innovative photography while inventing new icons of beauty and style for gallery goers and magazine readers alike. This book is an updated and expanded edition of his 2002 monograph, featuring a new survey on his work from the past ten years and new artist's writings.
Specifications:

Format: Hardback
Size: 290 × 250 mm (11 3/8 × 9 7/8 in)
Pages: 240 pp
Illustrations: 240 illustrations
ISBN: 9780714867045

Jan Verwoert is a Berlin based art critic and curator. He is a member of the advisory board of the Munich Kunstverein and has been a guest professor of Contemporary Art and Theory at the Academy of Umeå, Sweden, and the Royal College of Art, London. Since 2005 he has been a tutor and leader of the Imagined Communities seminar at the Piet Zwart Institute, Rotterdam. Verwoert is a contributing editor to Frieze magazine and also writes regularly for Afterall, Metropolis M, and Springerin. In 2001 he was awarded the art criticism prize of the German Kunstvereine.

Peter Halley is a New York artist. Exhibiting since the 1980s, Halley has presented surveys of his work at the CAPC Musée d’art Contemporain, Bordeaux (1991), The Museum of Modern Art, New York (1997), the Folkwang Museum, Essen, Germany (1998), and the Louisiana Art and Science Museum (2005). Halley has also written extensively on art and culture. His writings have been published in Collected Essays 1981–87 (1988), Recent Essays 1990–96 (1997), and Selected Essays 1981-2001 (2013). In 2001 he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award for art criticism from the College Art Association. From 1996 to 2006 he was the publisher of Index magazine.

Midori Matsui is anart critic, independent curator and scholar who has written extensively on Japanese and Western art and culture. She was a contributing author to Wolfgang Tillmans (Phaidon, 2002), Painting at the Edge of the World (Walker Art Center, 2001), and Takashi Murakami: The Meaning of the Nonsense of the Meaning (Abrams, 2000).

Wolfgang Tillmans (Remscheid, Germany, 1968) is an artist and a photographer based in Berlin. The intimate nature of his work is reflected in his writings, which include excerpts from early and most recent interviews and a personal discussion of his video piece, Lights/Body (2002), as well as examples of his many influential artist’s books.

Johanna Burton is Director and Curator of Education and Public Engagement at the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York. Formerly Director of the Graduate Program at the center for Curatorial Studies at Bard College and Associate Director of the Whitney Independent Study Program, Burton has curated a number of exhibitions as well as contributing catalogue essays for artists such as Cindy Sherman, Marilyn Minter and Anish Kapoor.

"The new monograph from Phaidon makes it clear that there is a lot more to Tillmans than his Turner (Prize) show revealed."—Observer magazine

"Excellent."—What's On in London

"As part of Phaidon's new Contemporary Artists series, the book Wolfgang Tillmans aims to dig deeper than the familiar format of career summary and pretty pictures, aiming instead to provide a fuller understanding of his work."—i-D

On the Contemporary Artists Series

"The boldest, best executed, and most far-reaching publishing project devoted to contemporary art. These books will revolutionize the way contemporary art is presented and written about."—Artforum

"The combination of intelligent analysis, personal insight, useful facts and plentiful pictures is a superb format invaluable for specialists but also interesting for casual readers, it makes these books a must for the library of anyone who cares about contemporary art."—Time Out

"A unique series of informative monographs on individual artists."—The Sunday Times

"Gives the reader the impression of a personal encounter with the artists. Apart from the writing which is lucid and illuminating, it is undoubtedly the wealth of lavish illustrations which makes looking at these books a satisfying entertainment."—The Art Book