Category: art

Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles in 1944. In his twenties, McCollum briefly considered a career in theater and then attended trade school to study restaurant management and industrial kitchen work. In the late 1960s, he began to educate himself as an artist. Applying strategies of mass production to handmade objects, McCollum’s labor-intensive practice questions the intrinsic value of the unique work of art. McCollum’s installations—fields of vast numbers of small-scale works, systematically arranged—are the product of many tiny gestures, built up over time.

Viewing his work often produces a sublime effect—as one slowly realizes that the dizzying array of thousands of identical-looking shapes is, in fact, composed of subtly different, distinct things. Engaging assistants, scientists, and local craftspeople in his process, McCollum embraces a collaborative and democratic form of creativity. His drawings and sculptures often serve a symbolic purpose—as surrogates, faithful copies, or stand-ins for people—and are presented theatrically, transforming the exhibition space into a laboratory where artifice and context are scrutinized. Economical in form, yet curious in function, his work and mechanical-looking processes are infused with humor and humility.

Allan McCollum has had more than one-hundred solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, where his work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (most recently in 2007); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004); among others. He has also participated in many international exhibitions, including the Bienal de São Paulo (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (2009); Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston (2008); and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2006); among others. Allan McCollum lives and works in New York.

www.ftn-books.com has some interesting Allan McCollum titles available;

Ken Lum is known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture and photography. A longtime professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia. He was formerly Professor of Art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver where he was also Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art; Bard College, Annendale on Hudson, New York, and the l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris.  Besides English, Lum speaks French and Cantonese Chinese.

A co-founder and founding editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, he is a prolific writer with numerous published articles, catalogue essays and juried papers.  In 2000, he worked as co-editor of the Shanghai Biennale catalog. As well, Lum has presented keynote addresses at the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics world conference in 2022 held in Philadelphia, the Becoming Public Art conference held in Markham, Ontario in 2020, the inauguration of the Melly Project Space in 2020 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands,  the 2010 World Museums Conference held at the Shanghai Museum in Shanghai, the third conference accompanying the 15^th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia in 2006 and the Universities Art Association of Canada conference held in Vancouver in 1997. As an artist, he has a long and active art exhibition record of over 30 years, including major exhibitions such as Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Bienal, Shanghai Biennale, Carnegie Triennial, Sydney Biennale, Busan Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Moscow Biennial, Whitney Biennial, among others. In 2019, Lum completed a feature length screenplay dealing with comparative racism in post-civil war America.

Since the mid 1990s, Lum has worked on numerous permanent public art commissions including for the cities of Vienna, the Engadines (Switzerland), Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver. He has also realized temporary public art commissions in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun (Poland), Innsbruck and Kansas City.  He is currently working on a memorial to the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster for the Government of Cameroon.  Related to his public art, he has written several essays on subject formation and public space. Lum’s public art often deals with individual and social identity formation in the context of historical trauma and the complications of official and non-official memory.  In 2016, he completed a memorial to the Canadian war effort in Italy during World War 2.  The work is sited in Nathan Phillips Square of Toronto City Hall and depicts the town of Ortona, Italy, in the aftermath of war while four soldiers stand sentinel at each corner of the low-perspective work.

www.ftn-books.com has 4 Ken Lum titles available

Joseph Kosuth, one of the pioneers of Conceptual art and installation art, has initiated language-based works and appropriation strategies since the 1960s. His work has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art.

Born in 1945 in Toledo, Ohio, Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. From 1963 to 1964, he was enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art. In 1964 and 1965 Kosuth studied with Roger Barr at the American Center in Paris.

In 1965, Kosuth moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts, where he would later join the faculty. Soon after, he abandoned painting and began making conceptual works, which were first shown in 1967 at the exhibition space he co-founded, known as the Museum of Normal Art. In 1969 Kosuth held his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and in the same year became the American editor of the journal Art and Language.

From 1971-1972 Kosuth studied philosophical anthropology (with Stanley Diamond) and philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research, New York. The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, amongst others, influenced the development of his art from the late sixties to mid-seventies. His more than fifty-year inquiry into the relation of language to art has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia, including Documenta and the Venice Biennale on multiple occasions.

Joseph Kosuth lives and works in New York and London. He has been awarded the Brandeis Award, 1990; Frederick Wiseman Award, 1991; the Menzione d’Onore at the Venice Biennale, 1993; and the Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government,1993 amongst others. He received a Cassandra Foundation Grant in 1968. In June 1999, a 3.00-franc postage stamp was issued by the French Government in honor of his work in Figeac. In February 2001 he received the Laurea Honoris Causa, a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna, Italy. In October 2003 he received the Austrian Republic’s highest honor for accomplishments in science and culture, the Decoration of Honour in Gold for services to the Republic of Austria. Kosuth’s work titled, ni apparence ni illusion opened at the Musée du Louvre, Paris in 2009 and became a permanent installation in 2014. In May 2012 he was inducted into the Royal Belgian Academy. Kosuth’s internationally recognized work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia; the Kunstmuseums Thurgau, Warth, Switzerland; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia, amongst others. Most recently, in 2019 Kosuth installed permanent public installations at the Miami Beach Convention Center, in Miami, Florida and Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, California. His work is featured in major private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Tate Gallery, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Louvre Museum, Paris, France; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome amongst many others worldwide.

www.ftn-books.com has a few Kosuth titles now available.

Seymour Likely was a fictional American artist as well as the trademark of an artists ‘ group: Alders Mantje (1954), Ronald Hooft (1962) and Ido Vinderink (1953). The Likely-brand was sponsor of a non-existent basketball team and propagated nepfilms with the members of the collective in the lead roles. They denounced corruption of art and money by making art banknotes, art copies and fictional events.

www.ftn-books.com has some publications by this famous fictional group of artists now available.

Since the late 1970s, Jonathan Lasker has developed a distinctive formal vocabulary based on different mark-making processes, including structural grids, graphic scribbled lines and thick impasto strokes of paint. Although he creates these forms intuitively, the compositions themselves are highly structured and controlled. At the forefront of artists who re-established the possibilities of painting after Minimalism and Conceptualism emptied the picture-plane, he has mounted a challenge to the medium’s status quo, creating a unique system of painting based on a figure-ground relationship, in which the figure and ground stand in a dialectical relationship to one another.

The artist uses doubled, transposed and translated forms to create paintings composed of distinct, clearly defined elements. ‘In Lasker’s work, forms […] are part of a larger schema, but independent in terms of form, colour, texture, and manner of paint application,’ describes art critic Richard Kalina. ‘Each image [in the picture] becomes a thing itself, an element to be examined, experienced and categorised; a component of the larger grammatical structure that Lasker has built.’ The pictures which form are arrived at by the viewer interpretively rather than literally, through an active engagement with the different abstract figures on the canvas and the relationships between them. Viewers are encouraged to experience themselves through the act of viewing and, in the end, they become the subject of Lasker’s paintings.

Born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1948, Lasker lives and works in New York. He initially pursued a career as a rock musician before studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Early solo exhibitions include the ICA Philadelphia in 1992 and a retrospective that travelled to the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Kunstverein St. Gallen, Switzerland in 1997–98, followed by exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA; Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, USA; and The Power Plant, Toronto. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2003 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. In 2015, the exhibition Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 2001–2014 was shown at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Saint-Étienne, France.

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

Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca’s distinctive cubistoid style masterfully reconciles abstraction with an illusionist form of figuration. Informed by the worlds of architecture, music, theater and cartography, Kuitca’s paintings seek to incite the potential for a theatrical experience. Shifting from gestural mark making to linear precision, and incorporating diverse motifs—spanning fragmented geographical maps and architectural plans—Kuitca’s work mines varied aesthetic styles and histories.

The artist’s distinctive visual language was initially developed in his Desenlace series of paintings, exhibited in the Argentinean Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recalling a cubist aesthetic and eschewing figurative references, Kuitca’s segmented forms and angular patterns act as the organizing principle of his compositions in this series. To create these paintings, Kuitca relied upon elementary human movements to map the surface of each canvas. Pacing to and fro, he marked the cloth with short diagonal strokes as he walked: a process inspired by the avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch’s notion of ‘Tanztheater,’ which he first encountered as a young man of 19 in Buenos Aires. Struck by Bausch’s dictum ‘walking is enough,’ in light of this experience, Kuitca sought to transform the narrative effect of his paintings to evoke theatrical fields of expression and reception.

Portals, doorways and transitional thresholds are recurring themes in Kuitca’s work. This stems, in part,  from a response to a series of wall paintings he completed—including a mural in his studio in Buenos Aires, a commission inside Durslade Farmhouse at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, as well as installations in New York and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris—which encouraged Kuitca to work on a larger scale: affording a literal incorporation of real space into his canvases, while enabling Kuitca to bridge two-and three-dimensional modes of working. Kuitca’s longstanding involvement with the theatre further informs his integration of architectural features and speaks to his works’ conceptual proximity to scenic design.

Kuitca first entered Argentina’s art scene at the young age of 13 with a solo exhibition at the Galeria Lirolay in Buenos Aires. Today, his work is represented in some of the most distinguished collections across three continents. Kuitca’s work has come to international renown through exhibitions including ‘Projects’ at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1991); his participation in Documenta IX in Kassel (1992); and his representation of Argentina at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His status as one of Argentina’s leading artist has been further confirmed by shows at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1995); the Center for Fine Arts in Miami (1993) and The Arts Club of Chicago (1999). Kuitca’s most recent solo exhibition venues include the Kunsthaus Centre d’art Pasquart (2017) and Hauser & Wirth in London (2016). In 2017, Kuitca conceived and curated the show, ‘Les Visitants,’ for the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

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

The artistic expression of Bernd Koberling is born out of the ongoing conversation he has with nature’s own world of ideas. The paintings are as extension of the Arctic vast expanses, but instead of depicting their landscapes, Koberling is capturing their essence in a flora of his own painterly associations. He says:  – ”I draw from nature but translate that which is seen and experienced into my own form language.” To this, an additional dimension is added by the recurring use of onomatopoetic titles, and by his main verse: color.

Koberling’s compositions capture the gazing eye, pulling it into a world of color and movement. Here, it will find basic elements in conflict with each other; a pastel landscape penetrated by a red awl, or a bright void penetrated by a strobe-like line extended over the image plane, color fields that in one moment rests in stillness, while in the other is twisting and turning, like a dazzling microcosm. Spending time in the wilderness is said to raise an understanding of how nature’s fundamental structure is both reflected and merged with the structure of the human essence; if this is true, then Koberling is depicting this relationship like no other.

Bernd Koberling has since the 60’s been exhibited at museums and art galleries worldwide. In 2006, he was awarded with the Fred Thieler Award for his oeuvre and his contribution to the development of German contemporary painting.

www.ftn-books.com has some interesting Koberling items available.

Because of the opening of Maarten Ploeg i remembered Peter Klashorst who both rose to fame in the early eighties. Klashorst a painter “pur sang” with a very large production of realistic paintings in which many a time beautiful women were the subject.

Klashorst was born in Santpoort and graduated cum laude from the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam in the early nineteen eighties. During this period a new art movement arose in Europe, “The New Wild Ones”. Klashorst became one of its leading personalities. In 1983 he received a prestigious Dutch Royal award (Koninklijke Subsidie voor de Vrije Schilderkunst) from Queen Beatrix.

Klashorst was one of the initiators of “After Nature”, an international art collective that aimed at reinventing painting and bringing art back to society and taking it out of the official highbrow art world. The collective “After Nature”, including co-founders Klashorst and the artists Roberto Cabot, George Dokoupil, Jurriaan van Hall,  Bart Domburg, Donker brothers and Ernst Voss, opposed the prevailing non-figurative style and was interested in just painting what they saw.

During this period Klashorst could often be found in New York’s East Village art scene where he showed his work in galleries at Manhattan’s Lower East Side, for instance the Daniel Newburg Gallery and the International With Monument Gallery. He hang out with Robert Mapplethorpe, Keith Haring,  and Jeff Koons still at the beginning of their careers.

Tired and disillusioned with the whole commercial art world and all the time consuming networking in expensive restaurants, he started travelling to distant places without an art market or top galleries. Just as his heroes the poet Arthur Rimbaud and the painter Paul Gauguin he went to Africa full of romantic ideas, but of course the harsh reality of the African city life is no picnic. During this time he exhibited in the National Museum of Kenya and gave lectures and workshops to local artists and street kids, but was also arrested and imprisoned a few times for his uncompromising sculptures and paintings.

Since 2000 Klashorst lives and works in Thailand and Cambodia. And in different countries in Africa.

www.ftn-books.com has some classic Klashorst publications available and at the site of Peter Klashorst himself, paintings and drawings are sold directly to admirers https://peterklashorst.com/

Amsterdam based pharmacist-artist Oey Tjeng Sit (1917-1987) invited visitors of an art fair to throw paper balls toward tin cans, decided to set fire to cages filled with balls of newspapers, or to fill warehouses with the same second hand paper material. He liked to add bizar titles to his works such as ‘Bicycling against the wind one might forget the invention of the wheel’, ‘An artist who is fashionable is a victim of good taste’ or ‘The only thing I know is that I trust blindly a feeling that promises me secrets.’
Oey Tjeng Sit, whose name means Yellow Clear Solid was born in Purwokerto (Java) at the foot of the Klud Volcano, that erupted just at the time of Oey’s birth. Born in the Year of the Dragon he found himself released of the duty to take care of his parents; that is why – after visiting high school in Bandung – he traveled to the Netherlands in 1938 in order to study pharmacy. Twenty years later he opened Apotheek Oey (Oey Pharmacy) at the Prinsengracht opposite the Anne Frank House. He took away the pills and potions out of the window display and started a small art gallery there. One of his nicknames was a ‘Dragon Man with a Dada Passion’ who showed the art work of colleagues and friends which gave him another epitheton: ‘the nestor of Amsterdam window art’. Oey’s work as an autodidact is characterized by a wide artistic range of disciplines: after a period of surrealistic drawings and paintings he started making wood and linoleum cuts, collages, assemblages and editing books through his own editorial ‘The Finger Press’.
In his collages, often together with Chinese ink and brush, as well as in his installations he used frequently news papers, of which he wanted to extend their short life, tied as they are to daily actuality. The newspaper was a source for many questions for Oey ‘Can we measure the weight of printed news?’ and ‘What contains more wood than newspaper letters?’ ‘If there is an order, then is it a temporary one.’

Oeys oeuvre – light-hearted, playful with a subtle feeling for the hidden esthetic quality of daily life – can be a longlasting confirmation of these words.

www.ftn-books.com has several Oey Tjeng Sit publications available and added to its collection 2 works by Oey Tjeng Sit which are now for sale. Inquire at wilfriedvandenelshout@gmail.com