Bernardus Johannes (Bernard) Blommers (30 January 1845 in The Hague – 12 December 1914 in The Hague) was a Dutch etcher and painter of the Hague School.
He learned lithography early in his career, and then studied at the Hague Akademie under Johan Philip Koelman until 1868.His early paintings were mostly genre works depicting fishermen and their wives, heavily influenced by Jozef Israëls.The later works (from about 1890) are more loosely painted, although maritime and genre scenes remained the primary subject matter. His work was critically successful during his lifetime, being sought after by English, Scottish and American collectors.Blommers was also active as a teacher; among his pupils was the American painter Caroline van Hook Bean, who became his daughter-in-law in 1913
www.ftn-books.com has the Blommers catalogue for the Katwijk museum now available.
This is what i found Ruhenberg in his own words on his work:
Reiner Ruthenbeck in his own words
‘In my work I have often presented contrasts, polar elements, tensions, and tried to bring these into a formal unity. I have reduced formal structures as far as possible. The result seems to offer relatively little nourishment to the intellect. I would like thereby to bring the viewer to a contemplative, holistic acceptance of my art.’ –Reiner Ruthenbeck, 1986
‘I try to create something hovering, a balance. I want to maintain tranquillity. Everything can be traced back to polarity and unity – opposites that creation always builds on. Polarity has been a presence in my work almost from the beginning. Two different materials, hard and soft, or polarity based on colour, black and white. This pervades my whole work. We are moving towards immaterial art, yet we only approach it in small steps.’ –Reiner Ruthenbeck, 2006
Born in Buffalo, New York, in 1945, Susan Rothenberg became interested in art at an early age, inspired by her grandfather, a house painter, and trips to Buffalo’s Albright-Knox Art Gallery. After studying painting at Cornell University, she traveled, landing in New York, where she became involved in performance art, working with artist Joan Jonas. By 1974 Rothenberg painted her first picture of a horse, the animal that would soon become the subject of the iconic series of paintings she made over the next few years. “This image of a horse was also more emotionally charged,” she would later reflect. “People look at the image of a horse and they have associations—of power, movement, heaviness. It’s a living thing.”2 For the artist, the horse served as a device for undermining the prevailing conventions of painting. Though plainly representational, the subject allowed Rothenberg to experiment with new forms of abstraction, diverging from the largely minimalist and conceptual practices of her peers.
In 1975, Rothenberg had her first solo exhibition at 112 Greene Street, an artist-run space that was a nexus for artists in Soho. Comprising three large horse paintings, the show proved to be pivotal for the artist and was widely acclaimed by critics, who recognized then and now that Rothenberg’s paintings “introduced symbolic imagery into Minimalist abstraction.”3 The exhibition marked the beginning of Rothenberg’s 45-year career, and established her ability to translate nearly any subject matter into an emotionally charged and aesthetically innovative painting language.
By the 1980s, Rothenberg had expanded upon her horse motif and introduced new subjects, nearly always drawn from her surroundings: she painted disembodied heads and limbs, dancing figures, other animals, interior spaces. Throughout the decade she participated in many solo and group exhibitions, though never as the sole female artist: “I’m not going to tell them who they should put in,” she said in 1982. “But from now on I won’t be the only woman.”
Rothenberg moved from New York to New Mexico in 1990, joining her husband Bruce Nauman, who was living outside of Santa Fe. There, Rothenberg incorporated a new perspective into her painting, introducing a high vantage point inspired by the landscape. In addition to painting her environment and what she saw out of her window, she also began basing paintings on memories of observed events.
Rothenberg died in May 2020. Several years earlier, speaking to an interviewer about the public reception of her work, she remarked, “I certainly don’t expect to get a lot of applause for this. They getcha or they don’t.”
www.ftn-books.com has ao the Stedelijk Museum catalogue for the Rothenberg exhibition available.
Since the early 1980s, Rombouts has blurred the existing boundaries between words and objects. The idea of having objects speak for themselves, acts as a drive and utopic horizon behind his artistic practice. The result is a body of work that is idiosyncratic, poetic as well as conceptual. The artist’s very own bounded set of ideas has become a kind of art-producing machine: his ‘concepts’ make his works come about more or less automatically. The result is never egotistic, but invariably particular and tactile.Rombouts’ work — he is the son of a printer and trained to be a typographer — is rooted in a fascination with the shapes and the stuff language is made of. In the early ‘80s, when he made what could be viewed as his ‘primal’ work, he collected objects whose names consisted of three letters, and exhibited them in alphabetical order. Rombouts is probably best known for his Azart alphabet, which he developed in 1984 with his partner Monica Droste (1958-1998). The line-based alphabet allows words to take on an endless array of two/three-dimensional shapes.
Ever since it was first designed, it has served as a deliberately coincidental procedure for creating objects, sculptures, paintings etc.
Inspired by Azart, Rombouts has recently created new, graphic ways of translating words into images. Using the website www.azart.be, everyone can generate images in Azart.Guy Rombouts, (1949-, Geel, Belgium) seems to make a comment on how the flatness of letters and words can create a reality and make that reality non- existing without the words, in line with what the “linguistic relativity principle” suggests. Rombouts does this by inventing a new alphabet; the Azart, a name that refers to A-Z art, but also to the French word “hasard” meaning coincidence. In Azart each letter is translated by a corresponding line, on the basis of the first letter of the word which describes the line. A is angular, B is barred, C is curve, D is deviation and Z is a zigzag line. When the lines are linked together closed forms or word-images appear. What is going on quite literally on the paper when forming Azart words, goes on in our mind when forming realities of alphabetic words. The arbitrary letters of the alphabet also obtain meaning in our mind. Words written in Azart visually define them selves, forming isles of meanings, while words of the alphabet is defined by means of other words. These words, however, are formed by the same letters as the word they define. A circle of definitions are formed, referring again literally to the Azart circled words.
The first time i heard about Gerwald Rockenschaub is when he was introduced at the Haags Gemeentemuseum by curator Flip Bool. Since I have been an admirer.
Gerwald Rockenschaub is one of Austria’s most renowned fine artists and a successful techno artist and DJ. His music is part of his cultural background which has led to a complex sculptural oeuvre, from the geometrically constructed oil paintings of the early 1980s, which can classified as part of the Neo-Geo movement, through Plexiglas planes and huge inflatable PVC objects, to his more recent computer generated animations. Gerwald Rockenschaub’s work is shaped by analytic thought and the principle of reduction to a few central elements and structures. His spatial installations in the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennial in 1993 or MUMOK Vienna in 2005 can on the one hand be understood as minimalistic objects, while at the same time referring to the exhibiting conditions of contemporary art in the so-called white cube. He intervenes directly in the architecture of various exhibition spaces to expose or reverse the relationship between beholder, artwork, and the space, so that the exhibition visitors themselves become an aesthetic component of the installation.
In 1993, Rockenschaub worked with Andrea Fraser and Christian Philipp Müller in designing the exhibition at the Austrian Pavilion for the Venice Biennale. In 2007 he was featured at Documenta 12 with several works. In 2008, he designed the first external façade for Temporäre Kunsthalle Berlin and presented three large installations at Kunsthalle Bern.
The artist was born in 1939 in Wattenscheid (Germany). He now lives and works between Austria and the United States. Klaus Rinke is one of the major figures of German and international art. He was a teacher at the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Düsseldorf from 1974 to 2005. Seeking to understand reality in its physical and material dimension, an important part of his work aims at making the key abstract concepts that establish our relationship with the world perceptible: time, space, gravitation. It is in the light of such experiment that he produced in the 1970’s many performances using his own body as a tool to sense and represent these notions. These performances have contributed to the development of a simple yet refined visual language, that brings shapes, gestures and elementary energies all together. The clock, frequently featured in Klaus Rinke’s work, is just as valued for its obvious relationship with counted time, than it is for its perfectly circular geometrical shape; it is around its central point that notions of time and space are articulated. Treated as a material in itself, water also plays a prominent role in his work; he invokes its energy, its physical laws, and the symbolism of its vital role for his installations and sculptures “into action”.
If Klaus Rinke’s sculpture and performance work is at the frontier of science and art, his graphite paintings and drawings are the fruit of a research on “form”. They combine abstraction and organic reminiscences, and portray a quest for the origin of all things.
www.ftn-books.com has several Klaus Rinke titles at this moment available.
Born in 1941 in Büren an der Aare (Switzerland), Markus Raetz is a painter, sculptor, photograph and poet
Since the mid 1960s, Raetz has made a body of art which, while seemingly modest, straightforward, unpretentious, and playful, actually reveals layer after layer of complexity. Raetz’s work does not adhere to any ‘school.’ It is neither abstract, representational, nor purely conceptual. He works readily in a variety of media (drawing, sculpture, photography, painting) and dimensions (from miniature to gigantic). With the exception of large outdoor sculpture projects, Raetz works alone. The work is intimate, the means simple. His pieces are made of found materials such as twigs or eucalyptus leaves, or glass, polaroids, unprepossessing black and white photographs, simple shapes cut from tin in various sizes, little pieces of carved wood or stone, clay, small mirrors and panes of glass, corrugated cardboard, or an assortment of odd linear bits of metal. Like a poem in which no word is extraneous or wasted, each element in a piece is critical. In an age of rapid global communication, Raetz’s works, like poetry, require intimacy and attention.
For several decades, his sculptures destabilize our way to apprehend works of art. He enjoys using contrasting effects between full and empty spaces, reflection and reality, curves and countercurves, shadow and light. This search leads him to anamorphoses and mirror effects that invite to grasp how vision and perception may be ambivalent and depend on various points of view. It is the visitor’s responsibility to provide meaning to the shape that was deconstructed by the artist. « What matters to me is people moving around the work and perceiving it differently according their positions in space. », says Markus Raetz. The importance of movement and perspective endows Markus Raetz’s work with experimental, playful and metaphysical characteristics. In his own way, Markus Raetz is a bricoleur and philosopher, an amorous and generous moralist, constantly busy finding ways to rework reality, without adding anything useless, but always to see it anew, and ourselves with him, and always with that jubilant surprise that time quells in most mortals. Time has no hold over his works, never exactly the same nor entirely another.
RAETZ SCULPTURE IN GENEVA
Born in 1941 in Büren an der Aare (Switzerland), Markus Raetz is a painter, sculptor, photograph and poet. Represented since 1981 by Farideh Cadot, who has been showing his work at her galleries in Paris and New York and has curated exhibitions like ‘Markus Raetz and photographie’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Museum of Contemporary Art – Carré d’art of Nîmes, New Museum in New York or more recently at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris. In 1969, Harald Szeemann invites him to participate in his famous exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ at Kunsthalle in Bern. He has participated in Paris Biennale 1964, 1971, Sao Paulo 1977, 1998, Sidney in 1990; and Dokumenta Kassel in 1968, 1972, 1982. He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and has been exhibited in major museums in Bern, Basel, Geneva, Zurich, and Paris. The same year, a large retrospective was also organised by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum and at Farideh Cadot’s gallery in New York – part of the show travelled to San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. His works are in major public and private collections in Europe and the USA.
Roman Opałka (193 began to paint numbers from one to infinity in his studio in Warsaw, starting from the top-left corner of the canvas, finishing in the right one below, and after that taking a new canvas to continue the counting. Typically he would paint around 400 figures a day.
Every new canvas that the artist took, denominated Détail, continued the count where the last one left off. All the canvases have the same size of 195 x 35 cm and the height would correspond to the artist’s physical height, whereas the width was derived from the girth of the door to his Warsaw studio where the project began. All the works also have the same title: 1965/1-∞. “1965” stands for the year when Opałka’s counting started and “1-∞” signifies the beginning and the undefinable ending of his oeuvre. As his ultimate goal was infinity it was a project he never completed.
Over the years, Opałka made slight adjustments to his ritual. In his first Détails, he painted white numbers on a black canvas. Two years later he opted for a grey canvas with an explanation that for him grey is not a symbolic color, not an emotional one. From 1972 he gradually lightened his grey canvases by adding one percent of white pigment to the ground with each Détail. He was envisioning the slow disappearance of his notes in white on white, the numerals that would finally dissolve into the surface, embody the surface. There would be no distinction between the numerals and the white surface as a form of blankness, tabula rasa
In each composition, tiny numbers are organized in narrow horizontal rows, without commas or number breaks, and Opałka himself was painting by hand and without the help of rulers.
Opałka introduced a tape recorder, speaking each number into the microphone as he painted it. He also began taking black and white photographs of himself – frontal headshots in front of the canvas in his studio upon the completion of a day’s work, where each self-portrait is created in the same way with him wearing the same white t-shirt. Every portrait was selected by Opałka and accompanied each painting. In this way, his paintings recorded the passing of time and artistic evolution through the gesture of a hand, and his recordings and photographs captured his aging process.
From the day his project began until his death, Opałka combined clear conceptual thinking with painterly materials. His search for infinity through painting became a form of phenomenology, which in retrospect might be seen as a parallel to the philosophy of Hegel. Through his attention to a paradoxically complex, reductive manner of painting, Opałka focused on infinite possibilities latent within his project. He would count aloud each numeral while coordinating the tiny movements of his brush.
Since 2008, he has painted in white on a white background, a color he called blanc merité (a well-earned white) and the numbers for the last three years of his life were white.
Though his artistic quest might have seemed bloodless and abstract, Roman Opałka described it passionately as a grand metaphor for human existence:
It is difficult to envision a life made up of numbers. His Détails do not offer insight into his inner life, thoughts, or identity. Their content is not personal and yet, we are left with something incredibly intimate: the actual minutes of the artist’s lifetime.
While Opałka’s work has been shown internationally for years, including at Documenta in Kassel in 1977, the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1987, and the Venice Biennale in 1995 and 2003, it never received the widespread recognition it deserves. In his uncompromising devotion to systematic art practice, Opałka relates to such artists as Daniel Buren, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven, and Cy Twombly (grey paintings).
Opałka’s synthesis became an idea of painting as a result of a numerical destiny. He calculated that he would reach the stage of white on white at 7,777,777. Consistent with his calculations, he passed away near Rome ten days before his 80th birthday in 2011 and he never met his declared goal to “get up to the white on white and still be alive”. The final number he painted was 5,607,249.
www.FTN-books.com has currently 2 Opalka titles available
Royden Rabinowitch (born 1943) is an internationally renowned Canadian sculptor closely associated with the non-figurative sculptural movement.
Born in Toronto and twin brother to David Rabinowitch, Royden Rabinowitch studied at the University of Western Ontario. He was Chairman of Fine Art at the Ontario College of Art for a year before he moved to New York in 1970.
His early work was influenced by the Modernists Alberto Giacometti, David Smith and Constantin Brancusi. Through the years his interests evolved through Constructivism to non-figurative sculptural works. His sculpture explores the relationship between the sculptural form and the human body, in contrast to other sculptors whose focus is on architecture or landscape.
Often working in series, Rabinowitch repeats seemingly simple geometrical forms using steel, wood and metals. He is best known for bent steel plates and curved barrel sculptures, often placed low to the ground.
In 2012 Rabinowitch was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts honouring his nearly 50-year career as a sculptor. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and the only artist who is a Life Member of an Oxbridge college (Clare Hall, Cambridge).
His artwork is in some of the most prestigious museum collections worldwide including the Guggenheim in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin amongst countless others.
In 2014, a private gallery in Ghent, Belgium opened, which holds the largest private collection of Royden Rabinowitch’s work.
www.ftn-books.com has the most important Rabinowitch title available.
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
