It is about 4 years ago that i bought at auction two smaller paintings by Richard Schur. One is in my study which i am daily looking at it. The other on our second floor.
Whenever i look at these paintings it strikes me that there is a perfect match of colors. Schur chose the colors in such a way that they blend and confront each other. I think the composition is far less important than the way the colors interact with each other. Great art to look at and still growing on me.
I have 2 Richard Schur publications now available at www.ftn-books.com
I have known Ap now for over 40 years and never have seen him as an accomplished and talented photographer. Ap was the man who made the exhibitions in the Gemeentemuseum and abroad possible . Arranging logistics and building with his team the many beautiful exhibitions at the Gemeentemuseum.
Next to the museum, within a distance of 200 meters of the main building by Berlage a small and unmistakenly typical ‘HAAGS’ coffeeshop can be found. The name ….” Koffiehuis ‘t STATENPLEIN #. This is the place where Ap takes his photographs. Locals that visit the koffietent are being photographed and because of the black and white photography it gives a highly authentic, even a classic feel.
The book itself is impressive in its simple design. Silver and blacks dominate the design. With 88 pages and from an edition of only 250 copies it is at a price of euro 12,50 an absolute steal and a must for the serious photography collector. Book is available at www.ftn-books.com ( sent and signed by Ap Gewald). For information and availability of the photographs please inquire at ftnbooksandart@gmail.com
René Korten paints his canvases in various directions with solid surfaces, in layers on top of each other and in transparent colours. Spontaneous, but flowing and energetic movements on -recently- a smooth MDF surface characterize his working process. The transparent layers of paint dominate and move with its fluid property to a new reality.
These landscape-like paintings balance between abstraction and figuration. The resulting spatial image is the result of a competition in his painting process, which Korten himself calls “Darwinism in the paint.” Korten thus proves the paint’s survival power.
A finished painting retains its vitality because of its potential to flow further into other forms or to take on new images. There is actually no beginning and no end. The image is soft in the atmosphere and at the same time powerful in composition. Because of the abstraction, René Korten leaves much room for freedom of ideas and interpretations. There are no dogmas in form or law; everything is open to all kinds of observations. His painting is a search for connection with the outside world.
Iris Bouwmeester lives and works in Breda in the south of the Netherlands. She graduated from the sculpture department at the Sint Joost Academy of Art & Design and obtained a master’s degree at the Sandberg Institute in Amsterdam. In recent years she has exhibited in artists’ initiatives, galeries, museums and at festivals in the Netherlands and abroad. In addition to her individual work, she is collaborating with composer Dyane Donck on various multimedia installations under the name BouwmeesterDonck.
Natural processes like arising, growing, transforming, deforming and vanishing are recurring themes in the works of Bouwmeester. Therefor geological and evolutionary phenomena have her special interest: Landscape, how it was formed, its history and appearance. Plants, flowers and primitive (marine) life, how they are shaped by their environment and how they in turn influence these surroundings. The way species and environment interact as one organism. These are all sources of inspiration for her sculptures and drawings.
Bouwmeester: ‘I like to start up my creative process by playfully interacting with materials. I work both with natural materials, like for example clay, as well as with contemporary environmentally friendly chemical products such as acrylic resin. I also use materials like aluminum or foam. I love sculpting with as few tools as possible to keep tangible contact with the work in progress. That is why, in general, I prefer materials that are light, flexible and easy to shape. The physical possibilities and limitations of the materials determine the shape and size of the sculptures that I make. I consider the handling of the material two-fold: on the one hand, I am gentle and docile and I let my actions be guided by the character and possibilities of the material. On the other hand, I do not want to settle for its well-known properties, so I force the material into new forms in an almost violent way, by breaking it, cutting it open or tearing it. All this resulting in objects that show cavities, holes and bulges, and play with shadow, light and color. They look light and coincidental, as if they can still take on a different shape, change position or perhaps disappear.‘
The paintings by Han Klinkhamer show landscape in two respects. First, the view of the land opens up, with the painting serving as a window that opens up the view of a horizon, a sky and contours of trees, shrubs or flowers. At the same time, each painting has a very independent rough structure, the artist has put a lot of work into the texture – it often looks like the magnification of a surface or a cutout from nature. These two perspectives – far away and close – are combined without the focus being affected. Or, in other words, Klinkhamer’s works combine a spiritual image with a material, physical view of real landscapes. The artist lives in a village directly behind a dike on the Meuse. He only has to climb this dike if he wants to see water, meadows or the moving sky. Nevertheless, one does not feel as if his paintings depict this outer world. Although his works deal with nature, his daily encounter with the elements undoubtedly serves as a framework for him. But the true landscape is created in the studio – “true” here means the landscape created with color, conjured up. Sometimes one gets the impression that plant stems or grains of sand are added to the colour. But the illusion arises from the thickness of the paint layer and scratching with a sharp tool, everything is painted. Klinkhamer’s works are about the transformation of nature into paintings – and about making this transformation look authentic and credible. As far as the colour spectrum is concerned, Klinkhamer is limited. One almost gets the impression that he is hiding the colors in the motifs. Is this perhaps due to the limited colour diversity of the Dutch river landscape, where Klinkhamer is at home? Hardly. The colours are determined in the studio, in the painter’s head, in the image he wants to create, by the inner truth of the respective image. There is always a primer, often in black or white, and the potential for color, which, however, is reluctant to appear – as if the viewer witnessed the moment of the first rays of sunshine when things take on color. Then we can indeed see a hint of green in the black, and a hint of pink in white. Do these images radiate a love of nature? Maybe, yes. On the other hand, however, there is also effort and struggle, a pulling and pulling. “With every picture,” says the artist, “you have to start from scratch as if it were the very first image.” Klinkhamer’s paintings thus address not only the outside world, but also the inner landscapes, moods and convictions – without words, and yet as an essential part of the paintings.
Here is another artist who ia have followed since his exhibition in the early Eighties at the Haags Gemeenetemuseum ( catalogues are available at www.ftn-books.com).
When painting itself is the subject, as is the case with Piet Dieleman (1956, the Netherlands), a radical approach becomes essential. He has chosen to work with strict, self-imposed constraints: six colors in a fixed order. He himself describes them as ‘fantastic tools’ that enable him to find enough disruption to justify the image. It isn’t abstract art as we know it from the modernist tradition, which strove to strike a balance between form and color. This is a more radical, ruthless form of abstraction that is not an end but only a means.
Dieleman studied at the Rotterdam Academie voor Beeldende Kunsten in the Netherlands and won the Van Bommel-van Dam prize in 1984. His work has been exhibited frequently in solo and group exhibitions, and is held in numerous important collections, such as Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the Netherlands, M HKA in Belgium and Museo Reina Sofia in Spain.
One of the books on Dieleman published by HEDEN, is a very special artist book. Almost 2 inches thick and only 20 pages. A true artist t book.
Yves Velter lives and works in Ostend, Belgium. An awareness of displacement and alienation constitutes the basis for his work, in which an interest in human (and humane) values comes to the fore. The muted characters in his work are based on existing people who have been made unrecognizable by making them abstract to a certain extent. They are placed in situations in which they create an opening in reality, thus enabling them to break through the impossibility of showing emotions. The images show the contrast between representation and abstraction. It is an aspect that works on several levels: the elusiveness of emotions, sensuality, fears, desires, individuality
n contrast to science, art is a domain where unconventional reasoning remains a possibility. The artist immerses himself in the world of a woman who is caught up in a closed-off logic of writing letters in a code all of her own. He considers these intimate scripts to provide a parallel with the world of the arts, where an artist also creates codes in order to translate his own world of thoughts. In the eyes, the mirrors of the soul, of his figures we can see small pieces of the aforementioned letters. Other objects and materials from several origins that carry a comparable tension within them (red dots, soil from his parents garden, cardboard, clothing) are also being used as ingredients in his works. In a world of his own he investigates and reorders the experiences, objects and metaphors which possess this tension. With connection to this, the artists speaks of making corrections of ratio which enable him to use his very own code of images in order to give expression to the unanswerable.
Born in 1931, Joop Vegter was predominantly inspired by the 1950s. Abstract Expressionism, a form of painting that explored notions of spirituality and the sublime, dominated the 1950s. Many artists focused on the formal properties of painting, and action painting was influenced by the political freedom of the United States, in opposition to the strict nature of the Soviet bloc. New York City became the focus for modernism on an international scale during the Post-War period. Many artists had travelled to the city during the Second World War, fleeing in exile from Europe. This led to a substantial pooling of talent and ideas. Influential Europeans such as Piet Mondrian, Josef Albers and Hans Hoffmann provided inspiration for American artists whilst in New York, and influenced cultural growth in the United States for many later decades. Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Mark Rothko, Frank Kline, Barnett Newman, Clyfford Still and Adolph Gottlieb were influential artists of this period. The male dominated environment has been subsequently revisited to recognise the contributions of female artists such as Lee Krasner, Joan Mitchell, and Louise Bourgeois, amongst others.
Maria van Kesteren emerged as one of the first prominent female woodturners in the late 1950s. She makes simple, beautifully proportioned bowl and box forms. Her simple forms and smooth surfaces contrast the material she shapes. The wood is secondary to the forms she creates, which is almost always a circle. She uses the circular form as a starting point and utilises the tension between inner and outer forms. Surfaces are evenly stained or painted so that the detail of the grain becomes secondary to their formal properties and fine definitions of interior and exterior space. She applies similar principles in style to her glass and ceramic objects. Even though her objects appear severe, when carefully examining the subtle curves and transitions one will no doubt be fascinated by the unquestionably tender side of her work.
Maria trained with the woodturner Henk van Trierum in Utrecht in the late fifties and is based in Hilversum, Netherlands. Although most celebrated for her works in wood, she has also designed glass for Royal Leerdam and ceramics for factories including Koninklijke Tichelaar Makkum. A major retrospective exhibition of her work was held at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1995.
Maria’s work is widely collected and can be found in private and museum collections including the Boymans-van Beuningen Museum Rotterdam, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Cooper Hewitt Museum in New York.
www.ftn-books.com has the book OM DE VORM and the special edition of the multiple now available.
Because of my 25 year career at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag i have seen many Piet Mondriaan paintings from very close up and always admired the transition from realistic into abstract art by the artist, but last month I encountered a painting by Mondriaan I had never seen before. A painting temporarily on loan to the Singer Museum Laren and it really impressed. A dutch windmill under a bright multi colored sky , showing the first signs of abstract elements on an impressive-sized canvas. Here it is and when it is still there try to visit the museum to see it yourself.
Artist/ Author: Oliver Boberg
Title : Memorial
Publisher: Oliver Boberg
Measurements: Frame measures 51 x 42 cm. original C print is 35 x 25 cm.
Condition: mint
signed by Oliver Boberg in pen and numbered 14/20 from an edition of 20
