Category: art

A very good reason to write a blog again on Maarten Ploeg. Next Saturday a large retrospective exhibition will be opening in the KUNSTMUSEUM in Den Haag. The museum will be hosting a Maarten Ploeg exhibition after almost 40 years since he was part of the exhibition DE KEUZE VAN DE KUNSTENAAR. In the Schamhart building Maarten Ploeg presented some very large paintings of which one has become part of my personal collection. The “OK hoofd” will be an important part of the exhibition in which some other 90 paintings will be presented together with drawings, comics, video’s and photographs. A well deserved tribute to one of the most creative artists from the 80’s .

Here is the text the KUNSTMUSEUM published on the occasion of this Maarten Ploeg exhibition:

Painting was rediscovered in the exhilarating 1980s. Maarten Ploeg (1958 – 2004) caused a sensation as an artist and musician at the time. He was awarded the Royal Prize for Painting in 1982, and in the late 1980s he emerged as a pioneer of computer art. Yet his name is not well known and little of his work is held in museum collections. The 1980s are associated above all with artists like René Daniëls, Rob Scholte and Marlene Dumas, but there was a lot more going on besides. The work of Maarten Ploeg is of a very high standard and played a much greater role than previously thought. It is the job of a museum to correct such omissions, so Kunstmuseum Den Haag is proud to host the first retrospective of his work since his untimely death in 2004.

“What do I want for my art? The same thing I want in life! Excitement & calm, love & hate, order & chaos, success & deception. Basically EVERYTHING, so NOTHING. So ‘my art’ isn’t going to take me anywhere; I will simply go somewhere and then move on from there”, Ploeg wrote during his time as a student at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy. In the same piece, he described ‘tradition’ as nothing more than a series of pictures gathered by art historians, and things in books at museums. He wondered what had been left out. Kunstmuseum Den Haag bought work by Ploeg in the 1980s. “This exhibition will demonstrated that Maarten Ploeg absolutely deserves a place in Dutch art history”, says director Benno Tempel.

Search for abstraction
The exhibition at Kunstmuseum Den Haag will feature a cross-section of his entire body of work. As well as seventy paintings, it will also include videos and abstract video art. In his early days as an artist Ploeg was one of the Neue Wilde, making neo-expressionist work that was raw and colourful. Later, he developed his own unique visual idiom, richly imaginative and often humorous. Ploeg was in search of abstraction, often opting for vibrant colours and simple, largely geometric shapes. The digital forms he later discovered in his computer art influenced his painting. In contrast to the dominant trend at the time, his work grew more abstract, encompassing elements of De Stijl, Picasso and cubism, and suprematism (Paul Mansouroff). Ploeg never achieved full abstraction in his paintings. A face always crept in somehow, as he said himself at the time.

Groundbreaking video art
From 1987 Ploeg explored the potential of the Amiga computer, the first home multimedia computer. He actually used it as a new way of painting, and this did enable him to create fully abstract images. This took his career to a new visual and substantive heights, and served as an inspiration to many new computer and video artists. His Ophthalmology series (1992 – 1995) is like a sensual hypnotic journey through the visual brain of the computer. Ploeg’s computer art could be viewed at night on Park 4DTV, which he had helped to launch in 1991, after previously making innovative TV for the pirate broadcaster P.K.P. TV and the Avro and VPRO broadcasting organisations. At a time when it was unusual for computer art to reach a wide audience, Ploeg managed to achieve just that, broadcasting on local television channels in Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Berlin and New York, and on the internet.

Big role for music
Music had played a big role in Ploeg’s life since the 1970s, and he was a member of three bands. He founded the successful art punk band Soviet Sex with Peter Klashorst; his brother Rogier and, later, singer Ellen ten Damme and painter Bart Domburg were also members. Ploeg was the singer and guitarist in Interior, Blue Murder and Astral Bodies. Their videos bear the clear hallmarks of a visual artist, with Maarten moving around the sets like a Dutch David Byrne, the Talking Heads’ frontman. The exhibition will include a compilation of music videos with art direction by Ploeg.

Maarten Ploeg (whose name was actually Maarten van der Ploeg) trained in the audiovisual department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in Amsterdam, where he met his partner Ryu Tajiri. He later continued his training at Ateliers ’63. Ploeg was awarded the Royal Prize for Painting in 1982 and in 1985 received the Prix de Rome basic prize for painting. He started teaching at the Formerly Audiovisual department of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy in 1991, where he and Peter Mertens established the MediaLab workshop and introduced the Amiga computer.

The exhibition is being organized in collaboration with the Maarten Ploeg Trust.
A publication on the artist’s life and work, PLOEG + WERK 1958-2004, is available at the museum shop. 

Last Month Linda and I visited Malaga, Cordoba and Ubeda. In Malaga the big surprise was the Pompidou museum . Situated near a pier at the harbour it has clear views over the harbour and the sea, making the colored glass panes by Daniel Buren stand out at a distance. The museum itself is not very large , but the collection is over some 200 works of art of many were well worth to study and admire. Among the many highlight were some grat paintings by Matisse and Leger , but the one that stood out for the both of us was a small painting by Frantisek Kupka.

An early painting of a storefront and in front of it a sleeping dog. A few brush strokes with maximum result.

www.ftn-books has some great titles on Kupka available.

Born in 1951, Villiger trained in sculpture but discovered photography at the end of the 1970s. From 1981 until her death in 1997 she concentrated on taking photographs of herself. She emphatically believed in the power of the body even though, or rather because, she was already coping with the isolation caused by tuberculosis, which she had contracted at the age of 29. She believed not only in a life lived to excess, but also in the idea that photography can somehow renew the physical self.

A retrospective of Villiger’s photographs is somewhat overdue, given her significance within the realms of body art. This show opened with the single pieces, then groups of works entitled ‘Work’ from the early 1980s, and led into the ‘Sculpturals’ from the 1980s and 90s. Villiger arranged single photographs into blocks that defy the logic of the original image. The result is a broken, anagrammatical body, twisted and dislocated by the photographic act. You can imagine this approach as a kind of performance, whose only viewer is the artist herself. The 15 panels of the blocks condense into a kaleidoscopic inquiry into subjectivity and sexual difference. Almost unidentifiable extremities – an embraced neck, a stimulated clitoris – were at the mercy of the artist’s camera. Sigmund Freud and Marshall McLuhan described the camera as a type of prosthesis, an extension of the body’s organs; it’s a viewpoint that becomes abundantly clear in Villiger’s work.

In the way they reveal and construct poses these photographs recall the early work of Cindy Sherman or John Coplans. If occasionally Villiger reached for little hand mirrors, like Beckett’s Winnie, her intention was not so much to learn to recognize herself better, as to disrupt the act of looking, directing the camera to places where she couldn’t reach, the remotest parts of her body, ‘the outside of it, the inside of it, traversing it’.

www.ftn-boks has currently the most important book on Villiger from the Kunstmuseum Basel available.

Among the great innovators of contemporary painting, Pat Steir first came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s, her inventive approach to painting—the rigorous pouring technique seen in her Waterfall works, in which she harnessed the forces of gravity and gesture to achieve works of astonishing lyricism—attracted substantial critical acclaim. Informed by a deep engagement with art history and Eastern philosophy, and a passion for artistic advocacy in the both the visual and literary realms, Steir’s storied five-decade career ­­continues to reach new heights through an intrepid commitment to material exploration and experimentation.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1938, Steir attended New York’s Pratt Institute from 1956-58, where she took painting classes from Richard Linder and Philip Guston. Steir transferred to Boston University College of Fine Arts where she studied art and philosophy from 1958-60, before returning to Pratt, where she received her BFA in 1962. It was during her days as a student that she first became acquainted with many of the most influential conceptual and minimalist artists of the day, figures that would become Steir’s lifelong friends such as Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden and Lawrence Weiner. Shortly after graduating, Steir was invited to participate in her first group exhibition at The High Museum in Atlanta and only a year later was featured in group shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. These shows helped position her among the first group of women artists to gain recognition in the male dominated art scene of the time, paving the way for numerous long-term relationships with well-respected international galleries. In the mid-1960s, Steir worked as a freelance illustrator before being offered the role of Art Director at Harper and Row Publishing Company in New York. In the early 1970s she taught illustration at Parsons the New School for Design and then painting at the California Institute of the Arts where Ross Bleckner and David Salle were among her students. Steir simultaneously worked as an editor for Semiotext(e) magazine and was a founding board member of both the Printed Matter bookshop and the landmark feminist journal Heresies.

Steir also became friends with artists Mary Heilmann and Joan Jonas in the early 1970s, participating in an early improvisational film by Jonas and joining Heilmann and artist Joan Snyder in a three-person exhibition at the Paley & Lowe gallery. It was also during this time, at the invitation of Douglas Crimp, that Steir first travelled to New Mexico to visit artist Agnes Martin, a trip she would continue to make over many years until Martin’s death in 2004.

In the mid-1970s Steir showed her first iconic and critically acclaimed series of works—paintings of roses that were then completely crossed out, transcending the divide between figuration and abstraction. She also began to make site-specific wall drawings and room-sized installations. These installations transformed her paintings into a three-dimensional experience formed by light and line, allowing the viewer to step out of their reality and into an illusionary world connected to both nature and the progression of time. As Steir has said, ‘Installation allows the artist to paint out of the painting and into space and the viewer to move from space into a painting—the space where the act of painting takes place is in the imagination of the viewer.’

In the late 1970s, after traveling extensively both in the United States and in Europe, Steir and composer John Cage became good friends while working together at Crown Point Press. His embrace of chaos or randomness and non-intention in creative activity became especially influential on her practice, inspiring her to see new potential for accident and chance in artmaking. In the early 1980s, Steir made her first trip to Japan where she became fascinated by Japanese woodcuts and Chinese literati landscape painting, particularly ancient Chinese Shan shui (mountain water), which evoked nature rather than trying to replicate it. By the late 1980s, Steir began experimenting with the technique that has since come to define her oeuvre, no longer strictly using a brush which allowed her to take herself out of the picture. Subject to the influence of time, the finished work is what gravity and the weight of the paint has made. They are not paintings of landscapes but landscapes in and of themselves, an image that both evokes a waterfall and is a waterfall. As much as Steir’s process embraces chance, she retains complete command over the basic parameters. It is a harmonious collaboration between control and chaos, ‘chance within limitations.’ A remarkable synthesis of conceptualism, minimalism, and abstraction that challenges the postwar American canon, Steir’s practice remains limitless.

www.ftn-books.com has several Pat Steir publications now available.

A few eeks ago i received an announcement of the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in which they announced the closure of the Niki de Saint Phalle exhibition. It is such a charming photograph that I which I never encountered before so I want to share this with you. and please know that I still have some very nice Niki de Saint Phalle books for sale at www.FTN-books.com

Toni Grand was born in 1935, in Gard, France. He began his education in literary studies and then went to l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier. At the age of twenty, he chose to specialize in sculpture, working with lead, polyester, steel, cast iron and various other materials. His first exhibition was held at the Paris Biennale in 1967.

Since Grand decided to immolate his oeuvre, the pieces that escaped the conflagration are conserved in private collections or renown museums that have yet to produce the retrospective his work deserves. He used mainly elements of wood, stone, bone and fish of the congridae family to produce image-forms whose recognizable features are not the attributes of a signature style, but of authentic imagination.
Grand’s production has been considered a response to American Minimalism and Process Art. If his ingenuousness rivals Carl Andre’s artlessness, his steel sculptures weigh in with Richard Serra, and his experiments with anti-form compare with Robert Morris, Grand manages sin machismo. The Ceysson gallery is proud to present the manly art of Toni Grand.

www.ftn-books.com has the Venise 1982 catalogue now available.

Hantaï began creating pliage paintings in 1960, conceiving of the process as a marriage between Surrealist automatism and the allover gestures of Abstract Expressionism. The technique dominated the work he made during the rest of his career, re-emerging in diverse forms—sometimes as a network of crisp creases of unpainted canvas spanning the composition, and at other times as a monochrome mass manifesting in the center of an unprimed canvas. His technique of “pliage” (folding): the canvas is first folded in various forms, then painted with a brush, and unfolded, leaving apparent blank sections of the canvas interrupted by vibrant splashes of color. The technique was inspired by the marks left folding on his mother’ apron.

From 1967 to 1968 he worked on the Meuns series where he studies the theme of the figure. Meun is the name of a small village in the Forest of Fontainebleau where the artist lived starting 1966. Hantaï stated: “It was while working on the Studies that I realized what my true subject was – the resurgence of the ground underneath my painting.”^[3] In contrast with the Meun (1967–68), the figure, in the Studies (1969), is absorbed and the white detaches from being the background and becomes dynamic.

www.ftn-books.com. Has three publications on Hantaï available

The poet, painter and graphic artist Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) is regarded a protagonist of French Tachism.
Camille Bryen was born Camille Briand at Nantes in 1907. He is an all-rounder and was not only active as visual artist, but also as writer. In 1932 he published a collection of drawings, collages and poems with the title “Expériences” under the pseudonym Camille Bryen.
As painter Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) followed a path of subjective, expressive abstraction. Together with Georges Mathieu he started the movement “Non-Figuration-psychique” in 1947. A year later Camille Bryen, Georges Mathieu and Michel Tapié organized the first exhibition for this “psychic-abstract” painting called “L’Imaginaire”, “HWPSMTB” as well as “White and Black”.
Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) executed his expressive-abstract works, which are close to Tachism, in various techniques. In 1947 he made abstract watercolors called “Structures Imaginaires”, as of the late 1940s Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) became increasingly occupied with oil painting and graphic techniques.
Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) was quite successful with his strong abstraction as of the 1950s: He had his first grand retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes as early as in 1959, in 1973 another large exhibition at the Paris Musée National d’Art Moderne followed. International museums are in possession of works by Camille Bryen (Camille Briand), among them the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCS) in Strasbourg, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

www.ftn-books.com has now the Christian Fayt Art gallery catalogue from 1985 available