The above item is really scarce and now available at www.ftn-books.com. At the time of publication Rudi Fuchs had a severe car accident in Italy and had to recover for a very long time. This annual publication was intended to be a series like the series of JAARBOEK publications he started in his time at the Gemeentemuseum. Those were designed by Gracia Lebbink and he had the idea to produce a same kind of annual publication on the Stedelijk Museum, but to my knowledge this is the only annual publication that was realised. Still …This is how an annual publication should be. It gives some great insight in the history of a large museum like the Stedelijk Museum and it reads like an adventure novel. It is a lot of work for any organisation to put a publication like this together, but for those of us , who are interested in the history of the Stedelijk Museum it is is nice that we can read what happened during the past year(s)
Text spoken by Ad van der Helm at the opening of the Opara exhibition at the Pulchri Studio in 2018
t is an extraordinary experience to contemplate the works of Vladimir Opara. I have been looking into his catalogue for some weeks and thought about the themes that he delivers us. These are religious themes. Not self-evident for an art gallery in a modern city like The Hague. For Vladimir heaven signifies a presence. It is for him a way of looking at the life of mankind. I also read his notes for this exhibition ‘Heavens’. Heaven is about mankind. Also about the catastrophes that might occur. Reflecting about heavens doesn’t mean to look away or deny these catastrophes. But looking at heavens gives consolation and offers the reason not to lose trust in mankind.
I want to share with you this afternoon the ideas and feelings that come up with me by the words and images of Vladimir. I want to share with you how I want to climb the ladder myself. Not in order to tell you how you have to do this yourself, but as an invitation to discover your own ladder and take hold of it.
What fascinates me in the words that Vladimir offers today, is living in the time of the eighth day. For us as Christians this eighth day returns every week when we celebrate Sunday. Sunday is the eighth day that follows the seventh day, the Sabbath. Sabbath is the restday of the Lord by with creation is completed. The Sunday after this restday is not the first day of the week, but it means the beginning of another life. The Sunday has therefor another, symbolic meaning. It is not about whether or not commercial Sundays are permitted; I don’t mind so much. For me it is not an issue anymore. I can do without them. But whoever gives him/herself the opportunity for a day different from the others, whoever makes room for the eighth day in his/her life, has started to climb up the ladder. He/she wants to rise above the ground level of our flat country. Our country is extremely flat. Vladimir is very impressed by the flatness of our country, and he also tells about the catastrophes that have occurred in the floods of 1953 and 1916. I am more negative on the flatness of the Netherlands: we can make our country so flat that there is no place to put our ladder.
Where else can a ladder find support than in heaven? Heaven is our focus for the other reality that surrounds us, like the oxygen that we breathe without seeing it. Heaven is like the huge firmament that opens up our regards to new distances and perspectives that we otherwise would ignore. I do not talk about looking up, because it is a misunderstanding that heaven is above us. Heaven is not a place, but an invitation to choose another perspective to contemplate our reality.
There is also another ladder that invites us and that you can find in the work of Vladimir Opara. That is the cross. Probably you are not used to see the parallel between a ladder and a cross. Yet the cross is also a ladder put against heaven. May be you will say: the cross is not a ladder, it is the end of life? Indeed it is a torture instrument used by the Romans for their slaves. The first Christians hesitated some centuries before they dared to show the cross as their symbol and sign of recognition. The apostle Paul struggles also with the meaning of the cross. It reveals itself not as an end, but as a passage. The cross is the ultimate paradox because with this instrument of torture love becomes visible. The ladder elevates us above our reality and gives another perspective on our own human life. On the cross, the climax of the life of Jesus Christ, it becomes clear to what love a person is capable of, even if life is made impossible and taken away. “Forgive them, because they do not know what they are doing” or “mother, see, there is your son; son see there is your mother” and other mysterious words and gestures make clear that on the cross life is not taken away, but life is given.
This is living on the eighth day. This is living in a world that is not flat. That is living in a world not threatened by a lack of vision about beauty. That is living in a world not lacking of a vision on real life. This is loving in a world not threatened by a lack of vision on what is lasting happiness. Of course there are catastrophes that menace the world and mankind. And people are angry with heaven: why this is done to us? But not heaven is to blame. Heaven is benevolent, and invites us to climb the ladder instead of lying down and remaining asleep like a depressive Jacob. We’d better get up and rise.
Vladimir Opara offers much more to reflect upon and to let feelings come up. It is up to us to understand what this means to ourselves and what ladder we want to climb. Lying down is no option. I hope that you discover by this exhibition what height, width and depth surround us en that in this universe the reality of life of the eighth day is opening up to us. This gives comfort, peace and trust in a restless and a cruel and sometimes ugly world. Life can be so beautiful!
The Opara book/ The Permanance of the Changing is now available at www.ftn-books.com
This is going to be a continuing story. I have known Frank van Hemert for over 3 decades now and from his earliest show at galerie Nouvelles Images I have followed his career and visited his exhibitions. From one of his very first solo exhibitions at the Haagse galerie Nouvelles Images I remembered a series of pastel drawings in the corridor of the gallery. A series od approximately 12 “pastel on paper” drawings. A nice series of drawings that were the sketches for the very large paintings at show at the gallery. I am not 100% sure, but I now have acquired what I believe to be part of the drawings that were on show at gallery Nouvelles Images. As I remember a great series and I am fortunate to add this to our growing Frank van Hemert collection.
www.ftn-books.com has also some nice Frank van hemert publications available
Elburg is mainly known for his poems, but since the mid NIneties his artwork ( Paintinsg and drawings ) is recognised as being important. He was not the most famous of all COBRA artist , but certainly he was one of the most original ones and because he was a teacher at the RIETVELD academy for over thirty years his influence is there for many genartions that attended the academy.
www.ftn-books.com has the VROEGER KOMT LATER publication available.
The following text comes from the Anne van der Waerden site:
More than to modern ceramic art, I’m attracted to the ancient, simple signs of mankind from all over the world as they are made in clay and baked in fire. In the world of modern ceramics the pot and vase forms seems to be out. Personally they constantly intrigue me. In that sense I feel connected with the English potter Hans Coper.
Throughout the years, integration of contradictions, expressed in form and shade, is a repeating theme in my work. I found ways to go from square to round, from dark to light, from inside to outside (see Introduction: first picture). Instead of objects from earlier years which are standing heavily on the ground, some vases from the eighties almost seem to levitate like balloons (see Introduction: last picture).
In 1985 Kees Hoogendam and I made jointly man-sized high pots. His quick way of working and his technical skills helped me to overcome my slow process of creation due to my own tendency towards perfection. Where our opinions about material and form diverted, it became a challenge to find joint solutions. This process resulted in a large series of vases.
Hans Paalman director of the Stedelijk Museum of Schiedam, said in 1988, at the opening of the exhibition Survey of the cooperative works of Anne van der Waerden and Kees Hoogendam: ‘Starting from discussion and experiments, it has developed into cooperation in the real sense
www.ftn-books.com has the Reekumgalerij catalogue from 1978 now available.
It is a rare occasion that i can offer a catalogue on Francesc Abad. The Spanish conceptual artist who at one time of his artistic career visited the Hague and where an exhibition at HCAK took place.. The project ABOUT CHAOS, was realised in Den Haag in 1992 and with this project a small but important book was published which is now available at www.ftn-books.com
The works of multidisciplinary artist Francesc Abad have always turned around a concern with the fragility of memory (individual and collective) and its recovery, and with manifesting how history is reconstructed and manipulated by each present. Using objects, audiovisuals, montages, photographs, installations, etc., Abad reconciles art and thought, often highlighting their contradictions, by recovering the words and texts of thinkers, writers and poets such as Walter Benjamin, Hannah Arendt, Simone Weil, Paul Celan and Primo Levi.
Outstanding among his most recent work is El Camp de la Bota, which takes its title from the site of execution of 1704 people by the Francoist dictatorship between 1939 and 1952, which was recently covered over and is now concealed by building for the Forum of Cultures. This work was awarded the 2004 City of Barcelona Visual Arts Prize.
December 2021 i wrote a blog on Peer Veneman , not knowing that I could offer a nice work by Veneman within a year at FTN art. It is a very nice multiple in a small edition of only 12 . Signed and numbered by Veneman. Numbered 3/12 . depicting a scene with a semi nude girl on a bar at a burlesque theater. The thing that won me over for this multiple was the rather strange clamcat / kikker that is fixed to the work. One wonders what the meaning is? what should you fix? …..but because of the clamcat I keep looking at it. The work is now for sale at www.ftn-books.com
Jaroslav Kozlowski (Srem near Poznan) is one of the most outstanding Polish contemporary artists. His work is closely associated with conceptual art, usually in the form of installations that include other disciplines and media such as drawings, light, sound, photographs and objects. Kozlowski is also the author of numerous books, prolific photographer, artist, painter and performer. His work is characterized by critical and analytical discourse about art and the mechanisms of perception, self-reflection and creating links between the grammar of artistic language and realm of meaning. In the seventies Kozlowski became interested in the position of artists and art in modern civilization, believing that the system, whether it was socialist or market economy, or any other, necessarily affects the art production, so the alternative practice of conquering space of freedom is necessary and constant. He implemented this thesis in his own practice in 1972 with a project of autonomous networking of artists. The project had an international character and began by creating a mailing list and a manifesto that was written by Kozlowski and his friend Andrzej Kostolowski, although they denied authorship in the manifesto. The project resulted in a large international rhizomatic (non-hierarchical, with many inputs and outputs) network of personal relationships, which surpasses all political and geographical constraints. The response of artists from around the world was excellent, and when Kozlowski decided to present the received materials in his apartment to ten of his close friends, because of the report of one of the participants, the presentation was interrupted by the police and secret agents. On the legal basis of the culpability of the unregistered gathering of people in private premises that cannot be thought of as family – and the police further considered that it was an anarchist gathering that threatened the country – the appropriate charges were brought against Kozlowski. All of his materials were confiscated, then partially restored, and he alone was repeatedly questioned at the police station or in the apartments used by the secret police. Although the trial was adjourned the last day, Kozlowski was not allowed to teach at the academy for years, he was forbidden to travel abroad for five years, and his persistent and continuous art, gallery and publishing activities were closely monitored until the fall of the ruling system.
Robert Zakanitch was born in 1935 in Elizabeth, New Jersey and grew up in Rahway. He lived and worked in New York City.[1] At the time of his June 3 through September 17, 2017 exhibition in the Hudson River Museum, he had recently moved his residence and studio to Yonkers, New York (as stated in the exhibition’s literature).
In the late 1960s he began experimenting with Color Field painting but would go on to be one of the founders of the Pattern and Decoration movement in the mid 1970s. While working in the Color Field he was strict to adhering to an abstract style inspired by Minimalism until he learned about decorative imagery. He kept the same color schemes and structures, but incorporated floral motif and a more painterly style. Zakanitch was exhibiting in New York as early as 1968. In 1975 he met Miriam Schapiro while he served as a guest instructor at the University of California, San Diego. A year later, in New York, the two artists would organize an organization around Pattern & Decoration artists.
www.ftn-books.com has the Robert Miller 1985 catalogue now available.
Marjolijn van der Assem is a really established artist in the dutch art scene from almost 50 years now. She has had exhibitions at the very best of dutch galleries. Asselijn, weakens and Phoebus all presented nd represented her at one time. She has had numerous museum exhibitions and group exhibitions and yet….her name is not the most well known in dutch art , but her works deserve to be known by a much larger number of art lovers.
The following text comes from the CBK Rotterdam site:
Cycling along the Schaardijk along the Nieuwe Maas is a beautiful journey to the studio of Marjolijn van den Assem, which, together with her husband’s house and architectural office, is located in a barely conspicuous sleek box above the river. Once inside I am surrounded by beautiful vistas and special works of art. On the built-in bridge to her workspace, Van den Assem draws my attention to a beautiful small painting. She painted it when she was 11 years old. It is the beginning of a conversation that takes us from misunderstood desires via Friedrich Nietzsche to one twig.
Marjolijn van den Assem (Rotterdam, 1947) has been at the forefront of Dutch drawing for decades. Her work can be seen in many places at home and abroad and is also included in many collections. As is often the case, however, this was not without a struggle. “In my youth I was extremely shy for a while and felt misunderstood. I identified with artists and poets, but found no resonance with my environment. My father had his own business and so his ideas about the future of his children. Of course, an artistry did not fit in at all, at most as a fun hobby. I went back to Rotterdam from Emmen, where I moved with my parents at a young age, to do the Academy there. In the end I didn’t finish because I was pregnant with our daughter and suddenly felt ten years older than the rest of my academy class ”.
Van den Assem can hardly remember anything of the earliest years as a professional artist (“I think you are born as an artist!”). “That is a blind spot. I do remember that I had an exhibition at Albert Waalkens in Finsterwolde (1978) and in the Groninger Museum (1981, 6 Dutch artists in the Mohr-Mathon collection). At that time, an article by Hans Vogels appeared in the Volkskrant about fundamental drawing. “That’s when I realized I was being seen.”
A decisive event in her artistic career Van den Assem calls the meeting with Josine de Bruyn Kops (1940-1987), who was director of Museum Gouda from 1976-1986. “The meeting with her and later also with Liesbeth Brandt Corstius, their support and encouragement have been very important to me. My way of working was very monomaniacal and withdrawn, it was my way of survival. De Bruyn Kops and Brandt Corstius gave me solo exhibitions in their museums in Gouda and Arnhem because they felt that my work should be seen in the outside world, they thought that could also be encouraging for other female artists! ”
At that time, Van den Assem was already working on work that arose from her intense interest in the work of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. “I fought for Nietzsche’s work and gained a lot of self-confidence from it. But I didn’t tell anyone about that, because that was not a job for me, but an inevitability, the only way to get my brain going. From the artist John van ‘t Slot I received a not yet opened copy of Ecce Homo, which I myself cut open page by page and ‘conquered’, it became my favorite Nietzsche book.
After that, I started reading Nietzsche’s entire oeuvre and many interpretations of it in a very disciplined way, even if I sometimes didn’t understand much of it at the time. However, a good friend and guide, who was important to me at the time, said: If it ever comes up, you will be amazed at what you know. “
Marjolijn van den Assem thus discovered Nietzsche around her thirtieth birthday and began to trace the journeys he made and to visit the places where he worked. A few years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, while traveling through eastern Germany, she arrived in Naumburg (an der Saale), a town in a deplorable state. A note was attached to the derelict Nietzsche-Haus stating that a Nietzsche Gesellschaft would be established, including the address of the founders. “When I got home, I wrote a note that I would like to become a member and I added the German marks that we had left from our holiday as a deposit. Never heard anything again, until about ten years later I received a pass as member. Years later I received a call from Paul van Tongeren (Nietzsche Research Group, Nijmegen) who had been asked by the director of the Nietzsche Dokumentationszentrum Naumburg to mediate for a solo exhibition there.
As it turns out, you will be given space, but nothing else is being arranged, no transport, no jetty, no assistance, no fee. You really see that more and more, also in museums, everyone is paid, except the artist. The artist is often screwed, the child of the bill. Unfortunately, you cannot live off your artistry, despite regular good sales and stipends.
I jumped in the air! I was more or less instructed to make a work especially for a space of six meters high. But I rarely do commissioned work, it does not suit my working method. Fortunately, Jisca Bijlsma (now director of the Chabot Museum, Rotterdam) knew my curator for this exhibition Seelenbriefe, to convince me that I could do it in this particular case. I then retired to my studio and made a work that eventually gained a place of honor next to the bust of Nietzsche, which I am still extremely proud of. I made small drawings on a roll of ten meters, which slowly became more and more spatial, in the end they literally crawled out of that roll. ”
Van den Assem leads me through her studio and tells about an exhibition that she is currently working on, Big Art in the Bijlmerbajes (2018). She wants to show the monumental work she showed in Naumburg there in a gym, but while she talks about it, her irritation increases. “I feel more and more called upon to protect my profession. As it turns out, you will be given space, but nothing else is being arranged, no transport, no jetty, no assistance, no fee. You really see that more and more, also in museums, everyone is paid, except the artist. The artist is often screwed, the child of the bill. Unfortunately, you cannot live off your artistry, despite regular good sales and stipends. Fortunately, I still have my ‘work of the month’, my own materials fund on my blog, with which I can use the proceeds to buy materials from Harolds every month. Marjolijn is commercial, colleagues say, yes, fortunately, because that means I can continue to work and do not have to take out loans that I have to pay back later. ”
Marjolijn van den Assem has learned to use her voice. For example, she is one of the few of her generation who is very active on social networks and has her own blog on which she regularly posts and shares her views. “As an artist you have to have character to survive in life. Many people say that I am so nice and cooperative, but in the meantime I am one through all the experiences twig become when necessary. So in the end I became an adult. ”
Artist/ Author: Oliver Boberg
Title : Memorial
Publisher: Oliver Boberg
Measurements: Frame measures 51 x 42 cm. original C print is 35 x 25 cm.
Condition: mint
signed by Oliver Boberg in pen and numbered 14/20 from an edition of 20
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