Description: Arturo Di Stefano is an anomaly in the modern art world: a figurative painter when the prevailing orthodoxy favors neo-conceptualism and other non-figurative movements. His work -- drawing on literary sources as diverse as The Odyssey and The Waste Land -- engages in a dialogue with the past while remaining utterly contemporary in its methods and achievements. From mythological subjects to unpeopled London cityscapes, the world he presents through his art is one of unusually haunting power, perhaps demonstrated to best effect in his penetratingly intense portraits. Arcades and corridors stretching off into the distance recur over and again in his work, emblems of an obsessive need to imbue the most apparently empty of scenes with an immanent -- and enigmatic -- narrative quality: the narrowing perspectives and repetitious forms are redolent with suggestions of exile and home. This, the first monograph on one of the most unusual and compelling artists working in London today, offers previously unpublished images and statements from Di Stefano, displaying the full range of his utterly original creative spirit.

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