Why a blog oon a swimwear and lingerie designer. One simple reason. Beside the designs she made herself, she had a lucky hand in choosing the right people for her catalogues. Gert Dumbar designed her catalogues and she commissioned Erwin Olaf and Inez van Lamsweerde for her fashion photographs. The result a highly appealing catalog which is now available at www.ftn-books.com
Born in 1952, Edy Brunner grew up during the 1970s and was inspired by the artistic culture of the time. The 1970s were a period of consolidation and progress in the arts, most often defined as a response to the central strains of the previous decade. Conceptual art emerged as a influential movement, a partial evolution of and response to minimalism. Land Art took the works of art into the sprawling outdoors, taking creative production away from commodities and engaging with the earliest ideas of environmentalism. Process art combined elements of conceptualism with other formal considerations, creating mysterious and experimental bodies of work. Expressive figurative painting began to regain prominence for the first time since the decline of Abstract Expressionism twenty years before, especially in Germany where Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz became highly powerful figures worldwide. A number of the artists who gained fame and successful in the 1960s remained dominant figures. For example, Andy Warhol branched out into film and magazine publishing, the first kind of pan cultural activity for a visual artist. This secured his reputation as a globally renowned celebrity in his own right. The largely Italian Arte Povera Movement gained global recognition during the 1970s, with artists like Jannis Kounnelis, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto attaining international acclaim.
www.ftn-books.com has the Edition Temmle book now available.
From his studio in the Belgian province of Limburg, Hans Lemmen creates drawings and sculptures that in a deeply philosophical way make the connection between man, time and space.
In his work he connects the things that are close to him with universality. A landscape, for example, is supplemented with electricity pylons, animals talking to people or mythological figures. The landscape carries the history, the figures carry the thinking. By working with the elements that his immediate environment offers him and by building his work layer by layer in an almost ritual way, he lays under his drawing an almost archaeological basis that both conceals and reveals the story.
Hans Lemmen’s work is regularly presented in a museum format. It was also selected in 2009 by Jan Hoet for his farewell exhibition Colossal in Osnabrück / Kalkriese (D).
www.ftn-books.com has 2 Lemmen publications available
I would not have heard of Emilio Kruithof if it was not Piet Dirkx who wrote the first few pages in Kruithof his first catalog/ Audition.
Emilio Kruithof graduated from the Sint Joost Academy of Fine Arts in Breda in 1995, and went on almost immediately to mount a number of exhibitions. Emilio’s fascinating portraits of women are highly regarded both in his native country and abroad, and were even featured in the US soap Gossip Girl.
He explained in an interview: “I go for what touches my heart. I find women beautiful: women are my subject. I used to collect illustrations of women from LP covers, internet and magazines. My female friends read Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and whenever I can I browse through their magazines. The colours of creams, make-up, lingerie… these are the colours of my palette.
The skin of models looks so magical. The skin must be unblemished, smooth to the touch. Silence of the Lambs? Ah, my favourite B-film. But I’m a painter, you understand. For me, the skin is everything. I can’t go for long walks along the beach, I have to paint. And when I do, I can’t have women around me. They are loved ones, my objects. They don’t mean any more to me than the form on which I project my love. Yes, they’re objects, like a vase for Morandi or celebrities for Warhol.
I paint for the same reason as women apply makeup. They do it every day with infinite care. I paint every day with the same care: erotic minimalism. The form, the appearance, the attitude, the tone, impasto, transparencies and the brush stroke. The final touch is what it’s all about. Once I’ve put my model on canvas, I’ve done everything I can. She has the right posture, the appropriate framing, a depth and structure. Finally comes my last, intimate ‘touch’, the brush stroke that justifies her slip or renders her lips monumental.”
When Dutch actress Halina Reijn was awarded the prestigious Theo d’Or in 2013, she commissioned Kruithof to paint the portrait of her that now hangs permanently in Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg theatre.
Chanel is arguably the most iconic fashion label of all time and the classic fashion of Coco Chanel and the great designers that worked for this fashion house resulted not only in some of the ultimate fashion of all time, but also in some of the greatest in house publications by a fashion label . The period of the late Eighties and early Nineties resulted in catalogues photographed by the very best of Fashion photographers and worn by the greatest of all famous models. Specially the photographs by Karl Lager field of his muse Claudia Schiffer belong to the very best of fashion photographs ever. www.ftn-books.com has bought a small collection of Chanel publications and can offer there’s now on its site.
Last Friday the exhibition MAARTEN PLOEG opened at the Kunstmuseum in Den Haag with impressive personal speeches by Ryu Tajiri and Rogier van der Ploeg. After the speeches it was time to visit the exhibition. Far too busy to have a good look at all these timeless works, but the day after I returned to make some photographs for my personal archives. Part of these I share now with you with just one reason……to encourage you to visit this exhibition. HET PAROOL reviewed the exhibition and concluded that beside the art of Marlene Dumas, Rob Scholte and Rene Daniels other great art was made by Maarten Ploeg….. a well-deserved retrospective.
www.ftn-books.com has some nice Ploeg books available.
There is a reason to write another blog on Michel Seuphor. Not only because his growing importance for Modern Art as we know it nowadays, but also because I just added a signed limited edition to my inventory. The book was published. by Galerie Het Mondriaanhuis in 19889 in an edition of 150 copies only . Numbered and signed by Seuphor. The book is published on the occasion of his 88th birthday and is dedicated to the 64 Hexagramms of the Yi-King. A highly collectible item and a rare occasion to add this to your collection.
Jiro Sugawara was largely inspired by the 1960s. Artistically, the decade began with the twin movements of Pop and Minimalism emerging alongside each other. On one hand, Pop espoused the visual culture of the mainstream and mass media, and of products and consumerism. The work of art by artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenberg was inspired by the popular culture of the fast developing Capitalism of the United States, taking things like advertising, comic books and ideas surrounding celebrity culture as their main visual inspiration. A parallel movement was established on the West Coast in California – a strain that also related to language in art, and is viewed as the very first blossoming of conceptual art. The 1960s were a sensational decade internationally, witnessing a great increase of modernist philosophies and trends. It was the era of Kennedy and Kruschev, and the start of the Cold War, which would endure for most of the second half of the twentieth century, and was epitomised most symbolically by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The Iron Curtain divided Eastern and Western Europe, both ideologically and literally, and student political uprisings took place across the globe. Psychedelia, an massive increase in consumerism, and the associated trends of marketing and advertising further defined the era. Minimalism developed a formal language with no external references, predicated solely on line, colour and geometric form as key elements of both painting and sculpture.
The main figures of Minimalism included Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Agnes Martin. Colour Field painting, as practiced by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler, further developed some of the expressive philosophies of Abstract Expressionism, but reduced much of the rhetoric, instead approaching a more rule-based approach to surface and colour that associated this practice with Minimalism. Pop Art was a prominent offshoot of minimalism, a discipline made famous by through the work of artists like Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley. Globally, a number of artistic movements echoed the artistic concerns of the previously mentioned movements, often with regional fortes and nuance. In Italy, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni established Spatialism, and in Germany the Zero group under the leadership of Gunter Uecker adopted similar ideas. The influential school of Existentialist Philosophy was an important source of creativity for creatives, with artists like Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti achieving international prominence for their idiosyncratic approaches to the human form and the angst related to the human condition.
The Yamaki 1991 catalog is now available at www.ftn-books.com
IGOR GANIKOWSKIJ HAS TAKEN PART IN MORE THAN 50 ONE- MAN SHOWS, 13 OF THESE IN MUSEUMS, AND 100 GROUP EXHIBITIONS. HE HAS EXHIBITED AT ART-BASEL, ART COLOGNE, ARCO MADRID , ART LA AND ART LONDON. HE HAS BEEN WIDELY PUBLISHED, WITH 11 SOLO-CATALOGUES AND MORE THAN 300 ARTICLES ON HIS ART IN BOOKS, MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS. HIS WORK IS REPRESENTED IN THE COLLECTIONS OF MORE THAN 35 MUSEUMS.
www.ftn-books.com has the gaslerie Julia Tocaier catalogue from 1989 available
Throughout his 50-year career Robert C. Morgan has been lauded as an author, lecturer, curator, and art historian. For decades he has maintained a rigorous studio practice in parallel to writing, showing his work in exhibitions at the Whitney Museum of American Art (1976), White Columns (1987), and the 49th Venice Biennale (1999) to name a few. Despite these lofty achievements, his acclaimed reputation as a writer preceded his other modes of production. At Proyectos Monclova, the exhibition Robert C. Morgan: Concept and Painting highlights Morgan’s vibrant artistic achievements through a survey of his dedicated studio output.
Morgan is an undisputed authority on conceptual art, having written numerous books and countless articles on the subject. Yet in his studio he consciously sets aside predetermined methodologies that cast the artist as a researcher whose creative efforts require the support of an index of footnotes to be fully revealed. Instead he favors an approach to art-making that prioritizes the notion of what exists between concept and painting to inspire in the viewer an elucidatory moment of intrapersonal profundity.
The pieces on view draw from a range of media—among them documentation from Morgan’s early body performances, calligraphy, drawing and collage. Despite the differences in media, these works all exemplify an approach to painting where the forms seem to vibrate in living stillness. In his hard-edge geometric abstraction Morgan tunes in to the longing for spirituality hidden by the feedback loop of distraction that characterizes the present day.
Philosophical ruminations on presence, absence, space, gesture and organizational hierarchies take center stage in Morgan’s paintings and drawings, which operate with a strict focus. Their unwavering austerity demands that viewers confront and reexamine preconceived notions about what they assume contemporary art today to be (much less do). He highlights the values, priorities, and distractions that constitute post-internet space and social constructs by refusing to assume a reactionary position to them. Thus, he draws a parallel between space in painting and architectonic, psychological or even metaphorical space as construct rather than axiomatic.
Taking root in both western and eastern traditions, including phenomenology and Taoism, the interplay between presence and absence, reflection and absorption, in Morgan’s work suggests that dualistic forces are complementary aspects of the same thing, unified rather than opposed. For example, though he is committed to a practice of abstraction, the body isn’t dismissed. There is a subtle intimacy to be found in the scale of his paintings and drawings, which is deliberately chosen to reflect the concept of the body in space; his performances from the early 1970s highlight and reflect the corporeal forces and movements that constitute his forms. While the early calligraphy pieces are predicated on gesture—as the form demands—the geometric series seek to paint the space of a gesture.
www.ftn-books.com has now the artist book LEARNING TO SWIM from 1976 available
