the last forgotten Piet Dirkx cigar box
Piet Dirkx daily …740
the last forgotten Piet Dirkx cigar box
Category: art
Stefan Szczesny (1951)
Stefan Szczesny (born on the 9th of April 1951 in Munich) is an European and international painter, draughtsman and sculptor. After studying successively in Paris and at the Villa Romana in Florence, he came back to Germany where he organized the first exhibition “Rundschau Deutschland” in Munich and Cologne in 1981 and founded, with other figurative artists, the “Neue Wilde” movement which marks the return of figurative art inspired mostly by “The Fauves”. In 1994, Szczcesny moved to New York and then founded the Szczcesny Factory in 1996. In the middle of the 1990’s, he relocated his Studio on the Mustique Island. The Caribbean and tropical environment incarnates for the artist the continuity of the Mediterranean spirit and “way of life” and inspires his work which becomes even more opulent, sensual, colorful and radiant. Travelling all around the world, taking part to numerous and famous exhibitions, Stefan Szczesny moved in 2001 to Saint-Tropez where he lives and works in his Atelier.
www.ftn-books.com has Galerie Hans Barlach catalog available on this artist.
Roos Theuws (1957)
All through her oeuvre, Roos Theuws (1957, the Netherlands) has been dissecting her medium, slowly, radically, and on a razor’s edge. Light and sound are physical phenomenon, their coherence a product of interpretation. Her awareness of this fact is beautifully exploited in both her photography and video installations, causing the image in front of the viewer to fall into irreconcilable pieces, so that we too can’t help but share her awareness.
Theuws teaches at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam. Her work has been shown at, among others, the Tokyo Biennial in Japan, The Kitchen in New York, US, the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Germany and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in the Netherlands. Her work is held in various public and private collections, such as Huis Marseille in Amsterdam and Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
www.ftn-books.com has a few Theus publications available
Martin Kippenberger(1953-1997)
Martin Kippenberger was one of the most influential German artists of his generation. Emerging alongside Albert Oehlen and Günther Förg, Kippenberger’s work often featured caustic commentary on the art world and reactionary takes on iconic art-historical tropes. “My style is where you see the individual and where a personality is communicated through actions, decisions, single objects and facts, where the whole draws together to form a history,” he once explained. Born on February 25, 1953 in Dortmund, Germany, he attended the Hochschule für Bildende Kunst where he was influenced by the work of Sigmar Polke. After graduating, he became a member of the burgeoning Cologne art scene and developed a reputation for his politically charged and provocative work. Though he employed a number of artistic disciplines, many of Kippenberger’s best-known works are paintings, including his series of self-portraits from 1988. Kippenberger’s life was cut short at the age of 44 on March 7, 1997 from liver cancer in Vienna, Austria. Posthumously, the artist has been subject of several exhibitions including the large-scale show “Martin Kippenberger: The Problem of Perspective” held at The Museum of Modern Art in New York in 2009. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Migros Museum in Zurich, among others.
www.ftn-books.com has one collectable invitation currently available ( sorry….it is now sold, but here are the pictures)
Kazuo Katase (1947)
Born in Japan into the tradition of Jodo Shin Shu Buddhism (Buddhism of the pure land), Kazuo Katase moved to West Germany in the ’70s. His work combines elements of both European and Asian culture, particularly the sacred arts of Buddhism and Christianity. Katase filters these traditions through contemporary technology in order to express a meditative bridge between two different ways of encountering the world. The resulting mood is perhaps more philosophical than religious.
For his gallery-size installation entitled Nightwatch, 1990, the walls have been painted red, the lights turned off, and the windows covered with blue gel to block the red portion of the spectrum of natural light entering the gallery. At first the walls look black, but on closer inspection, they seem a kind of emptied-out red. One piece within the larger installation, The Battle of Nancy, includes a back-lit photographic negative of Delacroix’s painting by the same name, as well as a red aluminum globe with a circular opening the size of a second, smaller globe cut into its side. The globes are positioned next to each other, in the middle of the room, with the opening in the larger orb facing the smaller one. Both globes are painted the same red as the room and hence they are both also characterized by a chromatic absence. Minimalism has influenced Katase’s work but its emphasis on angular geometry is replaced by the spherical forms. This substitution, along with the Delacroix, helps to create in the viewer a sense of Katase’s work as a meditation on the relation between these various traditions.
The other red (black) work in the exhibition, entitled Nightwatch, consists of an enlarged black and white photographic detail of Rembrandt’s painting divided into two adjoining panels. The two panels are backed by a red glaze and hence again the work acquires a numinous quality.
Katase’s work is, in one sense, about an absence intended to elicit thought. Walking into the exhibition is a little like walking into an undisclosed room of the space-age Versailles at the end of the film 2001: A Space Odyssey. Though the installation as a whole suggests a contextual integration of art, magic, and ritual; the exhibition of two works in another room, in which the light was not filtered nor the walls painted, historicizes the exhibition as art. This gives these elements or works (this distinction is left intentionally vague in Katase’s own remarks about his project) an uneasy but charged synecdochic relation to the ephemeral quality of the installation. Similarly, Katase’s pieces that use back-lit photographic negatives derive a certain amount of their charge from the fact that photographs can be reproduced ad infinitum, but the use of a negative instead of a print reintroduces an irreplaceable and unique origin.
www.ftn-books.com has 1 publication currently available on Katase
Observations continued, Richard Schur
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
Ap Gewald (1954)
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 (1957)
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.
www.ftn-books.com has the Diver’s Eye book by Korten ow available.
Iris Bouwmeester (1969)
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.‘
www.ftn-books.com has several titles on Bouwmeester now available.
Han Klinkhamer (1950)
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.
www.ftn-books.com has several books on Klinkhamer now available.
