Art Is Magic is artist Jeremy Deller’s attempt to connect the key works of his career with the art, pop music, film, politics and history that have inspired them.

Much has been written about Deller over the decades, but this is the first time he has pulled together all of his cultural touchstones.

The book features work from across Deller’s life and art – much of it never seen before – alongside images which have inspired him.

These include his inflatable Stonehenge for the Glasgow International Festival, his miners' strike film The Battle of Orgreave, bats (a subject in at least three of Deller’s works), Andy Warhol (whom he met in 1986), the links between the Industrial Revolution and heavy metal, and hen harriers pecking out the eyes of a Tory MP (featured in his mural against grouse shooting created for the Venice Biennale).

Jeremy Deller studied Art History at the Courtauld Institute and at Sussex University. He won the Turner Prize in 2004 for his work Memory Bucket and represented Britain in the 55th Venice Biennale in 2013.

His projects, such as The Battle of Orgreave (2001), We’re Here Because We’re Here (2016) and the documentary Everybody in the Place: An Incomplete History of Britain 1984–1992 (2019), have influenced the conventional map of contemporary art.