Category: art

For the past four decades, British artist Nicola Hicks’ practice has centred around a world of heroic sculptural figures, exploring an anthropomorphic relationship to the animal world through portraits of humanised creatures and beast-like humans. 

Hicks’ works are unashamedly raw, her subjects ranging from a herd of worn out circus horses balancing on shaking legs, to a decaying, crow covered, ornamental bridge. Never afraid to shy away from darker content, in Hicks’ 1986 work The Fields of Akeldama (The Fields of Blood) the artist repurposed a field in West Cork, carving the forms of dead and dying animals out of Irish clay; all only to be washed away by the rain, recalling scenes of animals revealed after a flood. Hicks now predominantly sculpts in plaster, casting her works later in bronze – due to this process her sculptures are at once monumental and vulnerable. Alongside her sculptural practice Hicks creates drawings using charcoal on brown paper. Hicks believes that both practices are mutually beneficial and reliant on the other. 

Nicola Hicks received a BA from the Chelsea School of Artin 1982, followed by an MA in 1985 from the Royal College of Art, London. In 1995 Hicks was awarded an MBE for her contribution to the visual arts. Hicks’ sculpture and drawings have been presented internationally in museums and galleries including a major 2013-14 solo exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art in New Haven. Hicks has numerous works on public display including the Crouching Minotaur at Schoenthal Monastery, Switzerland and Muscle and Blood at 600 Lexington Avenue, New York. 

www.ftn-books.com has the Momentum publication on her works now available.

Reg Butler was born April 28, 1913, in Buntingford, in the United Kingdom. In 1933, he began to train as an architect. From 1937 to 1939 he taught at the Architectual Association and was responsible for the design of two private houses and the clocktower of Slough Town Hall in 1936. After the outbreak of World War II, he became a blacksmith in West Sussex and wrote a series of 69 articles on Wartime building practice. At the end of the war he briefly resumed his architectual practice in London and started to attend art classes at the Chelsea School of Art.

His first solo exhibition was held at the Hanover Gallery in London in 1949. The following year he preceded Kenneth Armitage in receiving The Gregory Fellowship awarded by Leeds University. It was during his three years in Leeds that he fully developed his sculptural style. He abandoned his past methods of welding iron and turned instead to modelling in clay or plaster and casting the models in thin, light-weight bronze. In 1952 Butler was among eight sculptors chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, where his work was highly acclaimed. The following year he was awarded First Prize in the international sculpture competition for a commemorative memorial to The Unknown Political Prisoner. He used the prize money to buy a house in Berkhamstead where he lived and worked for the rest of his life. He continued to make regular trips to London to teach at The Slade school of Art where he became head of the sculpture department.

A retrospective of his work was held at Louisville, Kentucky in October 1963. Apart from occasional group shows, Butler did not exhibit again until 1973 when he held an exhibition at the Pierre Matisse Gallery in New York. The ten years of silence were the result of his disillusionment with sculpture’s value as public art and the rise of a new generation of abstract sculptors in the 1960s which he made his modelled bronze figures appear dated. Reg Butler died in Berkhamstead, Hertfordshire, on October 23, 1981.

Gerard Polhuis was born in 1952 and grew up during the 1970s and was inspired by the artistic culture of the time. The 1970s were a period of consolidation and growth in the arts, most often characterised as a response to the central tensions of the preceding decade. Conceptual art emerged as a key movement, a partial evolution of and response to minimalism. Land Art took the works of art into the extensive outdoors, taking creative production away from commodities and looking to engage with the earliest ideas of environmentalism. Process art combined elements of conceptualism with other formal considerations, creating esoteric and experimental bodies of work. Expressive figurative painting began to regain importance 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 renowned figures worldwide. New York maintained an prominent position in the international art world, ensuring that global artists continued to flock to the galleries, bars and downtown scene there. 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 type of pan cultural activity for a visual artist. This secured his reputation as a globally renowned celebrity in his own right. International movements began to gain popularity included feminism, which translated strongly into the visual culture, and photorealism which had begun in the 1960s and enjoyed substantial commercial and critical success. For the first time painters and sculptors from Latin America were embraced by the leading critical and institutional levers in New York. Towards the end of the decade, the emerging practices of graffiti and street art were beginning to gain attention in the fine art community. Artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were working in downtown Manhattan and ensuring that spray paint and tagging gained some validity as a fine art practice, a trend which would fully develop and dominate throughout the next decade. The predominantly Italian Arte Povera Movement gained world-wide recognition during the 1970s, with artists like Jannis Kounnelis, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto achieving global praise. In Japan and Korea, artists associated with the Mono-Ha movement explored on encounters between natural and industrial materials such as stone, glass, cotton, sponge, wood, oil and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, fleeting conditions. The works focused on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space, and had a strong interest in the European ideas of phenomenology.Show less

www.ftn-books.com has the Centraal Museum Utrecht catalog now available.

Cypriot in origin, he lived in Larnaca until the age of twelve. He studied Law and Political Science at the University of Athens while he was a self-taught painter though he had shown an inclination for it from his boyhood. In 1947 he started his career in the diplomatic service, from which he resigned in 1959 when he was elected Professor of Painting at the Athens School of Fine Arts. He remained in this position till 1982. During the period 1950-1952, working as a diplomatic employee in Paris, he had the chance to study modern art trends.

He began to exhibit in 1948 with the artistic group “Armos” (Junction), of which he was a founding member. He has also organized many solo shows and taken part in group exhibitions in Greece and abroad, among which are the Biennales of Sao Paolo in 1955 and 1957, where he was awarded honorable mention, Alexandria in 1961 and Venice in 1966. In 1986 his work was presented in a retrospective exhibition at the National Gallery.

From time to time he has been involved with stage design, while in the context of his broader intellectual interests he has published literary texts in magazines and published a collection of stories called Mirrors (1947).

Experimenting with oil and tempera, water color and encaustic, he paints landscapes, still lifes, portraits and dressed or nude female figures; expressionistic in nature his work is characterized by heavy distortion and powerful color combinations.

www.ftn-books.com has the 1966 Venezia Biennale publication available

He took his first drawing lessons from Konstantinos Maleas, studied sculpture at the Academie Colarossi in Paris (1934-1936) and became friends with Thanassis Apartis. He also studied at the Law School, University of Athens and attended theatre and violin courses at the Athens National Conservatory. An artist of broad intellectual interests, he published and translated many articles on art. In 1963, he was awarded by AICA’s Greek section and in 1971 received a Ford scholarship. The following year, in protest against the Greek junta, he rejected the first national prize. He was founding member of “Armos” [Junction] group as well as of the “Group for Communication and Education in Art”.

His work was presented in solo exhibitions and group events, including Panhellenic exhibitions, the Salon des Independants in Paris, exhibitions of the “Armos” group, the Biennale of Venice in 1956 and 1966, the Sao Paulo and Alexandria Biennale in 1959, the Europalia in Belgium (1982) and “Metamorphoses of the Modern” at the National Gallery, Athens (1992). In 1997, a posthumous retrospective exhibition of his work was mounted at the Vafopouleio Cultural Centre in Thessaloniki.

Beginning with realistic, anthropocentric works, invoking Archaic sculpture or folk art, Klearchos Loukopoulos joined abstraction, after a period of transition, when he was inspired by Mycenaean figurines. At the same time, he abandoned marble and stone and switched to metal, creating works featuring polyhedral forged metal forms, invoking Mycenaean stone wall masonry. Based on various combinations of geometric forms, extended in vertical or horizontal patterns in space, his work after 1970 developed constructivist traits. In a broader context of creative activity, he collaborated with architects in projects for the Hellenic Tourism Organization (E.O.T.) stores and hotels.

www.ftn-books.com has a Loukopoulos publication available

Simon Adjiashvili was born in Tbilisi, Georgia. He received his MFA from Tbilisi State Academy of Arts. Simon Adjiashvili had first solo exhibition in Europe in 1993 at Group 2 Gallery, Brussels.

Since then he had international solo and group shows at galleries and museums, including M.L. de Boer Gallery, Gallery Borzo, Amsterdam; Francis van hoof Gallery, Antwerp; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; Museum of Israeli Art, Ramat Gan. 

He reinvents Chiaroscuro Tradition in the Contemporary Painting, working with light, space and their mutual fragmentation on the border of recognition and memory.

The main themes of his recent works are rooms, doorways, staircases and other architectural fragments.

www.ftn-books.com has the van Hoof exhibition catalogue from 1996 now available.

Louis Nallard is not well known in the Netherlands, although at one time Edy de Wilde commented on his art in the late Fifties. As a typical Fifties artist he had most of his exhibitions at galerie Jeanne Bucher in Paris of which one of the catalogues is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Although he had only just turned 16 in 1934, Louis Nallard exhibited his works for the first time at the Thomas Rouault Gallery/Bookstore. While a student at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Algiers in 1940, he made the acquaintance of Fiorini, Bouqueton, Maria Manton and Bernard Lavergne, who presented him several years later, in 1949, to Jean-François Jaeger. Already noticed by Max-Pol Fouchet during an exhibition in Algiers in 1941, Louis Nallard left Algeria in 1947 to move to the Paris area. His style modified. A new severity appeared in his palette and chopped up his forms. That was enough to earn him the prize of “La Bataille” at the Drouant-David Gallery. It was also the year of an essential encounter with the oeuvre of Bissière at his exhibition at the Drouin Gallery. A short time after his arrival in Paris, he would encounter an enlightened mentor in Roger Chastel, who won the Grand Prix National des Arts in 1932 and was professor at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris.

An indefatigable worker, he produced little, working obsessively on his canvases, calling them into question again and again at each new approach. He drew his inspiration from the exoticism of his native Algeria and the soil of his Burgundian origins. The painting of Nallard evokes a profusion of sensations and sentiments, where Nature is omnipresent. However, his works do not express the real. They incarnate veritable plastic meditations at the beginning of a site which would have marked them. The external landscapes thus come to confuse themselves with internal landscapes in a fascinating harmony.

Exhibited in the group exhibition of 1951, the first of his solo exhibitions at the gallery took place in 1957.  Eddy de Wilde, curator of the Van Abbemuseum of Eindhoven said of him “The quality of color is his light, the quality of light is his space, the quality of the form is his rhythm. A canvas of Nallard is a living organism, self-evident like nature.”

MISHIMA KIMIYO is one of the most prominent and widely exhibited woman sculptural ceramists. For the past forty years, her work has been shown at museums throughout the world. Like many women clay artists, she began as a painter. In her work, clay became the canvas for silk-screen and transfer renderings of “breakable printed matter”—discarded newspapers, magazines, cardboard boxes and posters. More recently, she has honed her techniques and enlarged her perspective to create monuments to popular culture, focusing on the theme of printed information and wastefulness in a comical, political, and critical fashion. Ever sensitive to the current state of the environment and the overwhelming flow of information in today’s world, Mishima hopes that her work will compel viewers to take notice and even action.

www.ftn-books.com has the ANNE MOSSERI MARLIO galerie catalogue from 2018 available.

As a graduate in biological sciences prior to his master degree in art & research, Mark Swysen reflects on human conduct. Yet the human figure itself mostly remains absent in his work: the artist primarily wishes to incite the visitor’s imagination.

Mark swysen embraces Joseph Kosuth’s basic proposition of conceptual art: “the idea is the most important aspect of the work”. Next Mark follows Arthur Danto’s credo of “art being an embodied meaning”. The artist is constantly in search of the most eloquent visual stimuli in order to mould content into an intriguing shape. He enjoys the freedom of using any material, object or phenomenon as an instrument in his visual language. Swysen snatches everyday objects out of their usual context and the result of his deconstruction and re-assembling charges them with new layers of meaning. His artefacts question the one-dimensionality of our perception and open new possibilities for interpretation.

Danto added a third aspect to his definition: a work of art is an awaken dream that can be shared with others. To Mark Swysen this is a major ingredient: it adds the indefinable sauce of poetry, mysticism, fantasy, disequilibrium and unpredictability that lifts a work of art. Because of its conscious and even more because of its subcutaneous impact on the human brain light and motion belong to Mark’s preferred mediums.

www.ftn-books.com has some of the most important flyers for from Swysen projects from the last decade

I wish i had seen this exhibition. Just a few years after Pettibon transformed the GEM museum in Den Haag into a true Pettibon paradise. The Che Guevarra poster is exhibited in the staircase of the CAC in Malaga. I tried to buy the poster , but there was only a small one available and besides….the shop was closed. So this is what remains. I have a feeling that Pettibon is becoming more and more important for modern art and i am lucky to have in my inventory the 3 comics that were published in an edition of 100 numbered copies at the GEM. www.ftn-books.com