FTN BLOG for ftn-books.com

Ger Dekkers (1929-2020) stands as a seminal architect of Dutch landscape photography, a visionary who dismantled the pastoral myth to expose the skeletal grid of civilization. He famously posited that his true subject was the “cultural colonization of the landscape,” treating the quintessential Dutch polder—with its regimented dikes and surgical tree-rows—as a laboratory of human imposition. His lens acted as a scalpel, peeling back the verdant facade to reveal the stark, geometric heartbeat beneath. While his pulse beat in synchronicity with the avant-garde tremors of his era—navigating the cerebral waters of Land Art, conceptualism, and fundamentalist rigor—Dekkers remained an unclassifiable nomad. The conceptual zephyrs drifting from America found in him a receptive harbor, yet he transmuted these external currents into an idiom uniquely his own. As his career deepened, he fixated upon reclaimed territories, those desolate, nascent Edens where the void meets the rigid diktat of human engineering. He dubbed these visual inventories “landscape observations.” His methodology was akin to an obsessive cartographer; he would plant his tripod like an anchor, then execute minute lateral deviations. By slicing a single vista into rhythmic sequences, he rendered the horizon a recurring motif, a monotonous chant that highlighted the severe, clinical straightness of the ditches and furrows. Born amidst the ancient geography of Twente, Dekkers honed his ocular discipline at the AKI in … Read more

There’s a particular kind of artist whose reputation grows in the shadow of a bigger name, then slowly steps out of it. Bram van Velde is one of them. For decades he was “the painter Samuel Beckett wrote about”  a footnote to literary history rather than a headline in art history. That’s changing, and it’s … Read more

M.C. Escher spent a lifetime turning flat sheets of paper into puzzles of birds becoming fish, angels becoming devils, and one shape sliding seamlessly into the next. It’s easy to forget that his art was made for the page — because so much of it seems built to wrap around something. That instinct is exactly … Read more

Since 1993, Henri Jacobs has maintained his residence and professional practice in Brussels. His formal artistic education comprised studies at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam, as well as the St. Joost Academy in Breda and the Academy for Visual Arts in Rotterdam. Throughout his career, his paintings and illustrations have been featured in numerous solo and … Read more

A native of Genoa, Italy, where he was born in 1940, Giulio Paolini is presently based in Turin, where he continues his artistic practice. Since emerging within the Arte Povera movement during the mid-1960s, his artistic output has fostered an ongoing conversation with the concepts of History and Time. His aesthetic is defined by a … Read more

Cotton batting, porous foam, ephemeral powder puffs: the oeuvre of Henk Peeters (born in The Hague, 1925; died in Hall, 2013) constitutes a radical inventory of the mundane, procured with deliberate fervor from the aisles of HEMA or V&D. By decoupling these utilitarian trinkets from their predictable habitats, he precipitates a disquieting inquiry into the very architecture of authenticity. This methodology coalesced seamlessly within the Nul movement, which Peeters inaugurated in 1960 alongside Jan Henderikse, Armando, and Jan Schoonhoven—a brief, incisive detonation of static art that subsided by 1965. Preceding this, the 1958 genesis of his ‘Hollandse Informele Groep’ signaled a final departure, a decisive abandonment of traditional aesthetics where the tired prescriptions of ‘beauty’ were jettisoned into the ether. The Nul ethos functioned like a cold, bracing wind, eroding the cult of the singular masterpiece; seriality and mechanical reproduction were no longer obstacles but essential pillars. Monochromatic austerity reigned, and the artist’s idiosyncratic touch—once … Read more

Emerging as a cartographer of industrial whimsy, Van Genk inaugurated his trolleybus epoch during the amber-hued eighties. Each vessel stands as an intricate sedimentary formation—a bricolage wrought from fastidiously chosen components. Across their fundamental architecture, he grafted an array of quasi-mechanical appendages; gargantuan headlamps loom like cyclopean eyes, while cerulean beacons and vitreous window trims shimmer under the weight of their own artifice. Chaotic nerve-endings of tangled wiring snake toward enigmatic, tactile switches, suggesting a subterranean intelligence. Occasionally, these coaches appear shackled, their power-collecting antennae tethered to low-slung bumpers by iron-wrought chains, though more frequently, they dangle in liberated, frantic suspension. Human silhouettes are ghosts within the machine, rarely surfacing to claim these hollow conduits. Instead, the glass acts as a mnemonic substrate, plastered with relentless advertisements and typographic fever dreams that dilate until they lose all semantic clarity. These vehicles exude an aesthetic of “over-engineered solitude.” Wheels, swollen to hubristic, gargantuan proportions, dominate the silhouette, claustrophobically … Read more

Years prior to the 1940 inauguration of the Walker Art Center, T. B. Walker envisioned a dedicated space for the arts and sciences for his community. A prominent entrepreneur with interests ranging from Minnesota to California timber, Walker started amassing his collection in the 1860s. He later launched the Walker Art Gallery in downtown Minneapolis … Read more

Born in Paris in 1927, Gisèle Celan-Lestrange was an artist who captured life’s fleeting essence through lasting visual form. She honed her foundational skills at the Académie Julian, dedicating herself to drawing and painting, before eventually perfecting the intricate craft of etching while studying under Johnny Friedlaender. Throughout her life, which ended in 1991, she … Read more

A seminal personality within the twentieth-century avant-garde movement, the poet and theorist Michel Seuphor established the humanist and literary publication *The overview* in 1921, a platform dedicated to championing abstract art, modern music, and experimental visual expression. Throughout his career, he crossed paths with influential figures such as Mondrian, Gropius, Gabo, Moholy-Nagy, and Marinetti; furthermore, … Read more

Annalies Klophaus and the Color of Words Among the many artists who shaped concrete poetry in the second half of the twentieth century, Annalies Klophaus occupies a quiet but distinctive place. Born in Germany in 1940, Klophaus worked as an artist, writer, and concrete poet, focusing much of her practice on a single, deceptively simple … Read more