Unicorn Press

In early 1910s, two pioneering women entrepreneurs, Nadezhda Dobychina in St Petersburg and Klavdia Mikhailova in Moscow set up two of the first art galleries in Russia. Skilfully balancing current art market trends and daring avant-garde experimentations, Dobychina and Mikhailova soon transformed their establishments...

In 1972 Leo and Philippa Bernard bought Chelsea Rare Books, a small antiquarian bookshop in the King’s Road, Chelsea, advertised for sale in The Times. The Bernards had no previous experience of bookselling, but Chelsea in the 1970s was a lively place. The stock...

In the 1980s David Thomas was an unemployed plumber with a seemingly impossible dream: to become a fashion stylist. He ran away to London, landed a job selling cassettes in Tower Records, spent weekends and evenings washing dishes and working as a lavatory attendant,...

From the human truths, brutalist architecture and packed tube trains of 1970s London to the vineyards, Renaissance châteaux and riotous festivals of Gascon France, Michael Fell (1939 – 2023) chronicled the world he saw. His exuberant paintings and prints explore the sadnesses, humour and...

Chris Orr, the well known British painter and printmaker, takes us on a tour of his prodigious and penetrating vision of the world over the last twelve years. Chris Orr was made a fellow of the Royal College of Art in 1985, a Fellow...

Bangladesh has been shunned by tourists from the moment it was created in 1971. Henry Kissinger described it as a basketcase. Poverty and humanitarian disasters defined Bangladesh in the ensuing decades. When Rupert Grey arrived in Dhaka in 1992, a sign announced that arrivals...

When Darran Rees first drove northward toward Transylvania he felt he was being transported back in time. These remarkable landscapes were like visions of the past with such odd beauty and majesty that betrayed little of their recent history. Over the following fifteen years he...

The Architect’s Edge is a bold exploration of architecture, leadership and business, offering invaluable insights for creative entrepreneurs and industry leaders. Gareth Stapleton, an award-winning architect and project manager, shares practical wisdom from decades of global experience. Drawing from real-world projects, Stapleton demonstrates how architects...

Prince Albert was the first Chairman of the first Royal Fine Art Commission, appointed by Queen Victoria to commission art for the new Houses of Parliament. At the age of just twenty-two, he deftly navigated the complex project, leaving a remarkable artistic legacy and...

Christopher White explains why he chose this title for his new book: ‘The often intimate, reflective and personal side to Rembrandt’s work in treating subjects from history or the Bible reveals an increasingly more introspective interpretation than his contemporaries.’ Rembrandt’s sharp eye draws inspiration...

Elizabeth Waterman is an American photographer exploring female sexuality, sex work and obsessions through portraits of performance artists. Waterman’s style has been described as both transcendent and transformative. “Goddesses of sex and light, fully owning their own bodies and sexuality with innate empowerment.” This...

Light is the material of Architecture. Ian Ritchie is one of the UK’s most visionary architects, and remarkable for synthesising multiple creative disciplines to bring the essence of his architectural projects into focus. A poet and artist as well as an architect, Ritchie distills...

The phenomenon of recognising faces in everyday objects, called face pareidolia, is experienced widely. Once thought of as a symptom of psychosis, it is increasingly understood that pareidolia images are processed by the same mechanism that would normally process emotion in a real face....

Few have heard of the Shakespeare Head Press, although it ranks alongside William Morris’s Kelmscott, Emery Walker and Cobden-Sanderson’s Doves, Eric Gill’s Golden Cockerel and St John Hornby’s Ashendene. Its origins date to the 1860s, when a young Arthur Henry Bullen, dreamt of printing...

William Harry Rogers was one of the finest artist-designers of the Victorian period in Britain, to be considered in the same company as Pugin, William Burges, Owen Jones and Christopher Dresser. His designs won several prize medals at the Great Exhibition of 1851, the event which provides a...

Manchester International Festival (MIF) has invited some of the world's greatest living artists to delight and often challenge crowds in spaces of all shapes and sizes; from disused railway stations to atmospheric concert halls. It’s crossed boundaries and artistic disciplines, leapt over them, determinedly...

This is the first biographical study of the women who made the Royal College of Art's School of Fashion a household name. Madge Garland, Janey Ironside, Joanne Brogden and Wendy Dagworthy, a quartet of remarkable educators and doyennes of style and skill, encouraged their...

The significant influence of the periodical Signature on fine art has long been overlooked. While few people nowadays will have read it, no journal has greater claim to have stimulated the taste that became British neo-romanticism in the mid-20th century. Oliver Simon, its editor,...

Alexander (1927-2023) was a British born artist living in California. After studying at St. Martin’s School of Art in London, he took to the road, with exhibitions in Sydney, South Africa and New York. His works encompasses three and four dimensional sculptures, paintings and,...

There is surprisingly little, and certainly nothing comprehensive, written about the contemporary Russian art scene now. What appear in the West are mostly reports about so-called ‘dissidents’, not about what is happening in this vast culture, taken as a whole. Too often, these reports...