Category: art

Nicholas Pope (b. 1949) is one of a generation of talented British sculptors who acquired national and international prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Like others, such as Tony Cragg (b. 1949), Richard Deacon (b 1948), Bill Woodrow (b. 1947), Antony Gormley (b. 1951) and Edward Allington (b. 1951), Pope was interested in making sculpture that departed from the boxy geometrical object orders of American Minimalism and resulted from a direct, physical and emotional engagement with materials.

He worked on both large and small scale, carving wood, chalk and stone, whilst also working in lead and terracotta. He soon became known for his compelling lumpen forms, as well as for his columns and arches. In these works, he explored the precariousness of stacking, using rope to coordinate his sculptures’ gravity-defying logic and heighten the inbuilt tension of their compositions.

Pope was student of Bath Academy at Corsham (1970-73) and soon travelled on a number of scholarships abroad, including to Romania in 1974 and 1975, where his passion for Brancusi’s heritage further developed. Pope’s Oak Wood Column was included in The Condition of Sculpture (1975) at the Hayward Gallery in London, selected by the sculptor William Tucker, and Pope’s sculptures were shown in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980. That year Pope’s work was also shown across the USA in the British Art Now: An American Perspective touring exhibition.

In the early 1980s Pope’s life changed when, after visiting the Mbawala sculptors in the Ruvuma Valley in Tanzania, he contracted an encephalitic virus. Pope gradually came through this debilitating disease, looking determinedly ahead and learning again how to draw and write, think and make. Working on paper took on new meaning and, as well as making drawings and woodcuts, he carved some models for unknown landscapes in wood and alabaster.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Pope produced some of the most extraordinary artwork that he had made in his career up to that point. Eschewing the natural palette of his early work, he made works that were bright and bold, amorphous and effusive, crude and unabashed, as he took matters of life, sex and death head on – with a passion and a vengeance. Narrative acquired new importance as he explored the power of belief, reshaping its forms and translating its religious iconographies into ceramic, epoxy resin and oil pastel. He revisited its established allegories with newer story-lines that take us at once into the heart of the family home and out onto the open road. Amongst his works from these recent years, we find his ‘Motorway Service Station of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues’. We also watch as he embarks on new sculptures within his ongoing ‘Mr & Mrs Pope’ series of works, in which he depicts both himself and his late wife Janet together – and in different guises and diverse materials – across their married life, from the 1970s into the present.

Nicholas Pope is presently working on a series of new exhibitions staged in the summer of 2021 at The Holburne Museum in Bath, the New Art Centre at Roche Court and The Sunday Painter in Stockwell. Pope has also just completed a commission for Hellens Manor in his home village of Much Marcle, The commission “Weird” was made during the pandemic and inaugurates a biennial sculpture commission at Hellens for young artists. This mirrors Hellens Music Festival’s established tradition of fostering young musicians.

www.ftn-books.com has several scarce Pop publications availabel

Anne Poirier met her alter ego, Patrick Poirier (born 1942), while they were both students at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. They began to travel together regularly to the Far and Middle East and to the United States, before becoming residents of the Villa Medici in Rome from 1967 to 1970. From then on, they decided to work together as a unit. Their artistic activity reaches beyond the traditional categories of painting and sculpture in that it flirts with archaeology and architecture. Since the start of their collaboration, their work has focused mainly on the subjects of memory, fragments, and ruins. They make equal use of a variety of mediums, including scale models, photography, herbariums, sculpture, installations, and artist’s books. They first became known for their “reconstructions” of legendary sites of antiquity, Ostia antica (1970-1972) and Domus aurea (1975-1978), which associate archaeological precision with fiction.

Their work is steeped in mythology, dreams, and utopia, in the spirit of both Jorge Luis Borges and Nicolas Ledoux. It has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions, particularly at the Centre Georges-Pompidou (1978) and New York Museum of Modern Art (1979).

www.ftn-books.com has 1 important title available in which pPoirier is combined with Boltanski and Brodwolf.

For Fabrizio Plessi (born 1940), one of the most internationally renowned pioneers of video art, art always means movement. Since the end of the 1960s, the element of water has been a main theme of his art. »Water, especially the sea, opens our minds.« For him, the flowing element of nature is a symbol of temporality, the flow of life, and a metaphor for memory. In his unmistakable signature and constant exploration of state-of-the-art, time-based technology, Fabrizio Plessi uses the medium of video to make the power of nature directly experienceable.

From the very beginning of his artistic career, Plessi began to develop water as the central theme of his art. His fascination with this primal element – based on the ubiquity of water in his adopted country of Venice – was already a source of inspiration for his numerous forays into action art and conceptual art during the 1960s and 1970s. Photographs document his actions. For example, when in Paris Plessi tried to punch a hole in the Seine with a large nail (Un Buco N’ell Acqua, Azione 1973) or sawed the Stichter See near Neunkirchen into two equal parts (Segare il Lago Stichter in due parti uguali, Azione 1975). Absurd actions in which water is treated less as a natural element than as a full-fledged medium to be shaped for the implementation of his ideas.
His first videotapes developed in 1974, and soon after the medium of video became the core of his art. In the 1980s, he began developing expansive video installations where he combined natural materials such as wood, earth, iron, or marble, as in the monumental video installation »Roma«, with state-of-the-art technology to create the exciting wholistic experience characteristic of his works. With the presentation of this video installation at Documenta 8 in 1987, Plessi, who first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1970, finally achieved international renown. Plessi has realized more than 120 video sculptures and expansive video installations on the subject of water worldwide. Later, the element of fire would also become a recurring theme.
Given the rapid pace technical innovations in recent years, Plessi’s formal language has also changed accordingly. Instead of combining sculptural elements with electronic media as he did in his earlier works, Plessi now reduces his more recent video installations to the simple form of the image carrier, the screen. Since 2015, his video installations have impressed audiences with their minimalist staging.

www.ftn-books.com has 1 Plessi title available

Hermann Pitz was born in 1956 in Oldenburg, Germany. He lives and works in Munich, He holds a Meisterschüler degree in painting from the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in West-Berlin (1980) and has had many solo exhibitions in different museums.
On an international level, He participated in shows like Documenta (1987 and 1992), Skulpturprojekte Münster (1987 and 1997), XLIII Biennale de Venezia, 1. and 2. International Biennale Istanbul. Next to his studio practice, he has a continuous curatorial practice since 1978 in international institutions. A possible entry point into Armin’s works is to trace the themes that recur in his work and overlap or mutually expand: mirror objects, photographs, light sources that can be assigned to the field of optics or objects that, due to their form or function, can be associated with the process of seeing: convexly or concavely curved objects, a mirrored sphere or drops of water. The motifs are familiar to the viewer from everyday life and at the same time stimulate him to reflect on the perception of reality: What is reality, what is fiction? The curtain, easel, and lighting are reminiscent of theatre and stage or evoke a studio atmosphere. Here, too, the themes revolve around appearance and reality, image and likeness, staging and presentation. Everyday reality mutates into artificial-artistic reality. For his complex concept, Armin also uses other metaphors from the cultural and scientific tradition as formal “containers” that connect his works like a network: the archive, the world map, the family tree, or the journey. […] The artist quotes himself, again and again, establishes a spatial and temporal continuity between works, develops his iconography. His art lives from the paradox of always progressing through references back.

www.ftn-books.com has several Pitz titles available.

Initially, van de Pavert became known for his sculptures, his early works referred to architecture and resembled parts from buildings, such as windows and doors. An example is the 1987 work Inversion: the work is a door and doorpost folded inside out, for which an original door and doorpost were used as a mold.

Later, the artist decided to use these architectural elements in films as well and eventually started using computer animations. As this developed, he focussed more and more on murals. In an interview he justified this as follows: “I could put an entire exhibition in one film. While I was working on that, I decided to add murals to the spaces. I asked myself the question: if these spaces were covered with murals, what kind of iconography would they show? What would muralism, like Diego Rivera’s, look like in this day and age?”

A central topic in van de Pavert’s drawings is the development of figuration. He took historical paintings originating in earlier centuries as his starting point, asking himself: what do these works mean to our world right now? The themes he developed in response to this question play an important role in the publication.

Starting in the 1990s, he began working on watercolors that served for computer-animated films. The representations in those watercolors were about the avant-garde movements and the political left. Later, he focussed more on youth, the 1960s and 1970s and the idea of freedom. In 2013, these murals were executed on a large scale for the first time for an exhibition at Art Centre De Appel in Amsterdam. 20th-century avant-garde clearly lives on through the artist’s oeuvre.

Jan van de Pavert (1960) lives and works in Rotterdam. He studied at Academy of Fine Arts Sint-Joost in Breda from 1979 to 1982, where he was taught by Hans van Zummeren and Theo Mols. From 1982 to 1984, he continued his studies at Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem with Stanley Brouwn and Carel Visser, among others. Van de Pavert established himself as an independent artist in Amsterdam in 1984. He moved to Utrecht in 1992, before he finally settled in Rotterdam in 1998.

www.ftn-books.com has an important artist book in an edition of 450 copies available.

Mimmo Paladino was born in Paduli in southern Italy in 1948. A prolific sculptor, painter and printmaker, he studied at the Liceo Artistico in Benevento between 1964 and 1968. His first solo exhibition was held at the Studio Oggetto, Caserta in 1969. Paladino gained international recognition in 1980 when he participated in the Aperto ’80 at the Venice Biennale with Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Nicola De Maria, central figures of the Transavantgarde movement.

A major retrospective of his work was held in Munich at the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in 1985. Other solo exhibitions include Museum of the Nineteenth Century, Milan (2011); Galerie Kluser 2, Munich (2009); Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2008); Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2002); South London Gallery (1999); Scuderie di Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Plebiscito and Villa Pignatelli, Naples (1995); Forte Belvedere, Florence (1993); and Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea; Trento (1992).  Paladino has created several installations with Brian Eno, the earliest of which was presented at the Roundhouse, London, in 1999. 

Paladino’s work is held in major public collections worldwide, including Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Tate, London; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf; Berlin Neue Galerie; Fonds Regional d’ Art Contemporain, France; Los Angeles County Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Setegaya Museum, Tokyo.

www.ftn-books.com has several Paladino titles available.

Olivier Mosset first became known in France for having been part of the famous BMPT group alongside Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Michel Parmentier. Since then he has been associated with a multitude of art historical movements, involving himself in both the European and American artistic and critical contexts.

In anticipation of many artists, who in the 1980s would use appropriation to critique Modernist authority, Mosset called into question the painter’s gesture and signature by sharing styles and dissolving authorship to reach a “degree zero” of painting. Mosset has remained committed to questioning painting as a historical object by, paradoxically, continuing to paint, turning to monochrome works on canvas and walls.

Mosset lives and works in Tucson, AZ. Since his emergence in the 1960s with BMPT, Mosset has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums worldwide. Recently he has been the subject of a solo exhibitions at Jean Paul Najar Foundation, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2017); Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, NY (2016); The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2015); Musée regional d’art contemporain Languedoc-Roussilon à Sérignan, France (2013), and Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2012), among others. A retrospective of his work, Olivier Mosset: Travaux/Works 1966-2003, was presented at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland and Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, Switzerland (2003). His work has been included in several group exhibitions including Manifesta 10, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2014); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2008); and he represented Switzerland in the 44th Venice Biennale (1990). His work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, among others.

www.ftn-books.com has one Mosset title now available.

Born in London in 1931, Malcolm Morley lived in and around New York City from 1958 until his death in 2018.  He is acknowledged as one of the earliest innovators of Superrealism, which developed as a counterpoint to Pop Art in the 1960s. Over the course of his distinguished career, Morley defied stylistic characterization, moving by turns through so-called abstract, realist, neo-romantic, and neo-expressionist painterly modes, while being attentive to his own biographical experiences. Morley studied at the Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art. Since his first New York show in 1964, he had numerous exhibitions in Europe and North America and participated in many international surveys including Documenta 5 (1972) and Documenta 6 (1977). His first retrospective, organized in 1983 by the Whitechapel Art Gallery, travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum. In 1984, he was awarded the inaugural Turner Prize

Subsequent noteworthy presentations of Morley’s work include an exhibition of watercolors at Tate Liverpool, which travelled to the Kunsthalle Basel, Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY (1991-92); a retrospective at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris  (1993); an exhibition organized by Fundación La Caixa, Madrid, which travelled to the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (1995-96); a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London (2001); and the survey “The Art of Painting” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2006). Other notable exhibitions include “Malcolm Morley in a Nutshell: The Fine Art of Painting 1954-2012” at the Yale School of Art (2012), an exhibition exploring the role of paper in Morley’s art-making process at the Parrish Art Museum (2012-13), and an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, organized in collaboration with the Hall Art Foundation (2013-14). Most recently, the Hall Art Foundation’s Schloss Derneburg presented a solo exhibition of his work (2017-18). In addition to the Turner Prize, Morley was awarded the Painting Award from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1992 and the Francis J. Greenburger Award in 2015. He was inducted into both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2011). Morley became a citizen of the United States in 1991. His work can be found in museum collections worldwide.

www.ftn-books.com has ao. the Boymans catalogue on Morley available.

Annette Messager was born in Berk-sur-Mer in 1943. She lives and works in Malakoff, just south of Paris. From the 1970s onward, Annette Messager’s work has been known for a heterogeneity of form and subject matter, ranging from the personal to the fictional, the social to the universal. Through an embrace of everyday materials, and principles of assemblage, collection and theatrical display, her diverse media has included construction, documents, language, objects,  taxidermy,  drawings,  photographs, fabric, embroidery, image collections, albums, sculpture and installation. Messager has explored fairy tales, mythology and doppelgangers throughout her œuvre. Often using reminiscence and memory as a vehicle for inspiration, Messager’s wide range of hybrid forms has had an affinity with traditions as varied as the romantic, the grotesque, the absurd, the phantasmagoric.

Annette Messager was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture in 2016. She won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art presented a major exhibition of her work in 2022. Recently she has exhibited at the Institut Giacometti in Paris (2018), the Institut Valencià Art Modern (IVAM) in Spain (2018), and the Villa Medici in Rome (2017). In France, an important exhibition was put in at the Musée des Beaux-Arts and at the Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode in Calais, in 2015–16. In 2014 Messager had major exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art MCA, Sydney, and at K21 in Düsseldorf. Earlier solo shows have been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico (2011); the Hayward Gallery in London (2009); the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA), Finland (2008); the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea (2008); and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2008). A major retrospective of her work was organised by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2007.

www.ftn-books.com has several Messager titles available .

A skilled painter and draughtsman working within a wide range of pictorial genres, Stephen McKenna viewed modernity through a rubric of classicism. Using formal elements of shape, structure and light, his works often seek the abstract and indeterminate within the physical world, imposing a geometric clarity onto cityscapes, still life and mythological scenes. Like the early 20th-century metaphysical paintings that inform them, his paintings capture more than the sum of their parts – hinting at an intangible, spiritual realm beneath the surface. The serenity of McKenna’s paintings is often punctured by eccentric birds, animals, or animated figures, while domestic interiors, landscapes and seascapes are invigorated by atmospheric conditions of light, air, space and water. Born in London and living and working in County Carlow at the time of his death in 2017, McKenna traveled extensively within Europe, having lived and worked in Germany, Belgium and Italy. Erudite and cosmopolitan, McKenna responded to the classical European tradition, as well as developments in Modern and Postmodern painting, to develop a highly personal and idiosyncratic approach to the medium, creating contemporary works that continue to intrigue.

www.ftn-books.com has the Isy Brachot title on McKenna now available.