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Harry Buckinx (1944-1995)

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Harry Buckinx is one of the leading comic book artist from the late Sixties /early Seventies. Together with Joost Swarte he is responsisible for developing Comic art into a mature form of contemposrary art. here is what the Lambiek site tells about the artist.

Harry Buckinx was a Dutch underground artist, best known for his contributions to Hitweek and Tante Leny Presenteert. Born in Geleen, Buckinx attended the Jan van Eyck Academy in Maastricht and at the Royal Institute of Fine Arts in Antwerp, Belgium. His career took off when his drawings were published in the Dutch magazine Hitweek in 1968, and in Aloha in 1971-72.

Titula by Harry Buckinx

He was present in Evert Geradts‘ underground magazine Tante Leny Presenteert from the start in 1970. Together with Marc Smeets, he formed the Limburg delegation of the magazine. Buckinx created surreal stories about the world he knew, that of art dealing, nightlife and difficult relations with lovers. His main characters were ‘Titul’ and ‘Titula’. ‘Titula’ was also present in Aloha from 1972.

comic art by Harry Buckinx

Between 1972 and 1974 Buckinx drew the comic ‘De Familie Aepebroeck’ for the VPRO magazine Vrije Geluiden. The comic deals with the chaotic and intimate escapades of the Bertus and Truus Aepebroeck and gives a good portrait of Holland in the 1960s and 1970s. Harry Buckinx was one of the artists involved in the ‘Toon en Toos Brodeloos’ strip, which a team of seven artists produced in 1976 for VPRO-Gids, the magazine of broadcasting company VPRO. Each episode was a satirical story about one of the Dutch broadcasting companies, drawn by a different artist. Buckinx did the one about VPRO, while the other artists were Joost Swarte (AVRO), Evert Geradts (KRO), Joost Troost (EO), Rob Gorter (NCRV), Aart Clerkx (VARA) and Fred Julsing (TROS). The stories were collected in a book by Har van Fulpen’s Drukwerk in 1976.

www.ftn-books.com has one Buckinx title available.

titula

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Willem Snitker (1938-2015)

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Willem Snitker was a painter , graphic artist and art dfealer and a personal friend of Joost Zwagerman. Only 4 months after Zwagerman’s siucide , Snitker died. Too young, too early. I must have seen works by Snitker during the last 30 years or so, but only because of a recent book i bought on Snitker i started to appreciate his works and now i am on the look out and keen to add a works to the collection.

I also started to read about Snitker and he  appears to be one of the key figures in dutch art from the last few decades. Not only because of his gallery  ( de Bleeker) but also because of the friendships he build during his life. Gustave Asselbergs being one of them and much admired by me.

Snitker is an artist for the future and here are some worksni want to share with you so you can judge yourself.

The book Willem Snitker from 1994 is now  available at www.ftn-books.com

snitker

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Les Belles Endormies (2014)

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Les Belles Endormies / Sleeping Beauties is one of those exhibitions i wished i had seen at the Museum.

It was held at the LE MUSEE BONNARD in 2014 and its catalogue shows all of the magnificent paintings that were present in this exhibition. The Theme….sleeping woman. From almost real and raw up to dreamlike and abstract. What struck me was that most of these women were totally at ease and not aware of the presence of the painter. Excepet for the Gauguin contribution. The woman lyingon a bed is not sleeping. eyes half open she is looking at the artist.

sleeping hh

It is a truly great collection which has been collected for this exhibition by the curators and i wish i had known of it before. It would have been the perfect reason to visit the Bonnard Museum.

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Rein Draijer (1899-1986)

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Slowly…..very very slowly ….Rein Draijer is appreciated more and more outside the Den Haag region. He is one of the painters that belong to the “DE NIEUWE HAAGSE SCHOOL” and was presented regularly at the Haags Gemeentemuseum and galeries in Den Haag. But outside Den Haag his name was hardly known. But he is important for dutch painting and Modern ART. His landscapes are filled with atmospehere and breath SIXTIES painting. He even is compared to Saenredam and Mondrian at the time his works were presented at the MORE museum in 2016.

Personally i think his paintings to be too realistic to keep me intrigued for a longer time. Still i like his paintings . The way he looks at his subject shows that he leaves out too many details and tries to make his painting as “empty” and abstract as possible.

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The 1968 Draijer catalogue that was made for his exhibition at the Haags Gemeentemuseum is now available at www.ftn-books.com

draijer hgm

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Adolf Wölfli (1864-1930)

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Adolf Wölfli was a Swiss artist who was one of the first artists to be associated with the Art Brut or outsider art label.

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Wölfli was born in Bern. He was abused both physically and sexually as a child, and was orphaned at the age of 10. He thereafter grew up in a series of state-run foster homes. He worked as a Verdingbub (indentured child labourer) and briefly joined the army. He often attempted to perform sexual acts on young girls – often getting away unpunished. Eventually, he was caught in the act and institutionalized for his doings. After being freed, he was re-arrested for a similar offense and in 1895 was admitted to the Waldau Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in Bern where he spent the rest of his adult life. He was very disturbed and sometimes violent on admission, leading to him being kept in isolation for his early time at hospital. He suffered from psychosis, which led to intense hallucinations and that shows in his works.

wolfli bern b

The above text comes from WIKIPEDIA, …i did not know that he was conviceted for child abuse, but because of my interest in the Stedelijk MUseum i had encountered his publication for a Wolfli exhibition before and not only the Stedelijk showed an interest in this highly original artist. In the mid Seventies there was a tour which showed his works in Switzerland and Germany ( catalogue available at www.ftn-books.com). If there is one artist i feel who is connected to this kind of work and maybe inspired it must be Gunter Brus. There is so much to discover in these paintings and drawings by Wolfli that this artist deserves to be known and remembered for his art and not for anything else.

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Gerrit Veenhuizen (1925-2015)

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The art of Gerrit Veenhuizen takes decades to discover and the same time to grow on you.

I first discovered the work by Veenhuizen , when Hans Locher introduced the painter to us and organized an exhibition with the artist. A large book was published with the exhibition, knowing that it would not sell but because of the promotion by Locher a beautiful book was published. It still can be bought at reasonable prices, but more important it was my first introduction to the work by Veenhuizen and at first i was not such a fan. I think his worlds were too much a language already discovered by Heyboer.

But as said…. it takes decades to grow on you and now i finally see the quality of how his works were ahead of his time. Educated by Campendonck he developed soon a style of his own and stayed true to this style, creating a world with typical symbols and figures who populated his works. He is but could also have been achild of Heyboer and Klee.

www.ftn-books.com has some Veenhuizen publications available including the scarce galerie 20 catalogue from 1961.

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Horst Antes (1936)

 

Schermafbeelding 2021-05-04 om 15.04.17I never had many titles on Horst Antes until i recently bought a small collections from the heirs of gallery d’Eendt.

galerie d’Eendt has had many exhibitions with works by Horst Antes and published some great graphic works by the artist over a period of over 20 years. Personally i would say his works are not “My cup of tea”, but…..undoubtedly his work is original and so typically Seventies that it has become important and shows the way art was developing. On one side there is complete abstraction with MINIMALISM and on the other side there is dreamy almost abstract characters who populate paintings and present a world completely different from the real world. In the Netherland i consider Jan Snoeck to be part of this movement of artist and when you look at both these artists their works , you see why i think these are artistically related.

Horst Antes (born 28 October 1936 Heppenheim, Germany) is a German artist and sculptor.

After his Abitur, he studied from 1957 to 1959 under the important woodcutter HAP Grieshaber at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste (today known as the Staatliche Akademie der Bildenden Künste Karlsruhe) in Karlsruhe. In 1959, the artist’s work was honoured with two prizes, art prize of the city of Hanover and the Pankofer prize on the occasion of the German Youth Art prize.

In his early paintings, Antes sought a path somewhere between figurative painting and the L’Art Informel. One of his most important role models was Willem de Kooning. Around 1960 Antes discovered his ‘Kopffüßler’ (literal translation: Head-Footer), a form which preoccupied the artist in numerous variations and artistic techniques. By 1963 his ‘Kopffüßler’ was fully developed in its stylistic and contextual premises and became also compulsory for his sculptural work, which began the same year.[1] The artist was given several scholarships and awards in the 1960s, including the Villa-Romana-Prize in Florence in 1962 and the Villa Massimo scholarship in Rome in 1963. Three years later, aged only 29, Antes accepted a teaching post at the Akademie in Karlsruhe. This was followed by a post as a professor also in Karlsruhe which he held from 1967 to 1973, as well as a one-year guest-professorship at the Staatliche Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Berlin. The artist resumed teaching at the Akademie in Karlsruhe in 1984 and continued teaching there for another 16 years. The regional capital awarded him the Hans-Molfenter-prize in 1989.

Since 1990 Antes has been living and working in Karlsruhe, Florence and Berlin. His oeuvre includes not only paintings and graphic art, but also sculptures in public spaces. His works are exhibited throughout the world and are represented in all the most important German collections, et al. at the Kunsthall Hamburg, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Nationalgalerie Berlin, and the Museum of Modern Art.

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Romano Frea (1945)

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An artist who had no connection in the Netherlands was known by Will Hoogstraate from gallery d’Eendt , but according to my information had no exhibitions at this gallery, but……. just look at the similarities with Will Leewens . Here is a work by Will Leewens (on the right) from roughly the same period. (Frea on the left)

Artist who worked over 1500 km apart from each other and were progressing and developing their works into the same world of abstraction. I still find this fascinating to discover and see that artists , working apart from eachother and probably not knowing the other person, are developing their art into the same direction.

I recently added two scarce Frea publications to my inventory. Both are still available at www.ftn-books.com

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Susana Solano (1946)

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Susana Solano’s creative structure has taken shape all throughout her career like one of the metallic meshes that are a constant feature of her works. It has shaped a map of communicating vessels in which material, space, senses and life experience make up a fluid continuum. Susana Solano’s works, regardless of the materials used and their size, correspond to an underlying idea of witnessing existence through its materialization as a memory of her emotional relationships with spaces, shapes and people. For this reason, every sculpture absorbs and expresses personal experiences that radiate out over the setting and transform them, as if it were a cosmic game.

Jack Shainman Gallery, West 20th St Susana Solano A Meitat De Cami-Halfway There-1My ideal space is a unique space, empty of stories, with which I could fall in love. A space unknown to me, an atmosphere of thought. I want now to concentrate on a life in which there is nothing and to work with the minimum possible.

–       Solano, Susana. Susana Solano: Dibuixos, Escultures, Fotografies, Instal·lacions : Muecas. Barcelona: Museu D’Art Contemporani De Barcelona, 1999.

Solano is best known for her abstract sculptures made from a range of materials that includes iron, steel, lead, glass, rattan and wire mesh. She belongs to a generation of pioneering female sculptors who expanded a realm conventionally dominated by men. Within the traditions of post-minimalism, Solano’s work conveys a connection to personal memory, domestic space, and the natural world. With the artist’s hand leaving traces of her process, the rigidity of the materials is counterbalanced with the personal. Her approach is one that channels architectural forms and consideration of space with a delicate quality that balances the natural and the industrial.

Susana Solano lives and works in Barcelona. Her group exhibitions include Skulptur Projekte Münster and Documenta 8 in Kassel, Germany (1987), São Paulo Biennial (1987), the Spanish Pavilion at the Venice Biennale (1988), the Carnegie International (1988), and the Museo Nacional del Prado, Madrid (2007). She has also had solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. (1989-90), the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1991), the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (1992 and 2003), Whitechapel Gallery, London (1993), the Museu d’art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) (1999), and Museo Casa de la Moneda, Madrid (2012-13). Her work is included in numerous public collections, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao; Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien, Vienna; Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh, among others.

www.ftn-books.com has one Solano title avaialble.

susana solano

 

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Bernd Zimmer (1948)

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I have been following the careeer of Bernd Zimmer from the time he had his first exhibition at the Groninger Museum in 1982( catalogue available at ww.ftn-boooks.com). At that time i had a great interest in Zimmer and his fellow artists Elvira Bach and Rainer Fetting, but somehow, after a few years, i lost interest in these artist, but lately works are appearing at auction and sometimes at very reasonable prices. So maybe now is the right time to renew my interest in Zimmer and his friends from the NEUE WILDEN group.

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Bernd Zimmer is a contemporary German artist. Often discussed as representative of the Neue Wilde group, Zimmer’s paintings are characterized by their monochromatic palettes—primarily greens, yellows, and chartreuse—and recurring imagery of abstracted nature created through poured and splattered paint. Zimmer’s work is influenced by his extensive global travels, spanning numerous countries on five of the seven continents. Born on November 6, 1948 in Planegg, Germany, the artist has enjoyed widespread acclaim for his work, including exhibitions at institutions such as the H2 Center for Contemporary Art in Augsburg, Germany, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, and The Berlin Gallery.

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