Category: art

Hans van der Ham studied classical piano at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and the Utrecht Conservatory (graduated 1984). He then studied autonomous art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam where he graduated with paintings, drawings and graphics (graduated 1989). However, Van der Ham was mainly active for more than 30 years as a sculptor and became known for his black clay sculptures. Vulnerable souls, wrapped in rock hard material. But his indefinable worlds on paper, made of gouache or black ink, also characterize his oeuvre. Until 2020, the need arose to return to his old metier and to make a new start from the spatial work with paintings in various formats.

Van der Ham has been working as an independent visual artist in Rotterdam since 1989 and regularly has exhibitions at home and abroad. His work was represented by Galerie Nouvelles Images in The Hague until its closure in 2018. His work is included in various museum and corporate collections.

In 2012, Van der Ham cofounded Garage Rotterdam, together with a Rotterdam patron, where he was responsible until 2015 as curator and artistic director. Van der Ham makes exhibitions on a regular basis, including for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: as a guest curator in 2018 he produced the exhibition ANIMA MUNDI.

www.ftn-books.com has the Nopuvelles Images publication PERSONAE now available.

Jan Grosfeld (Valkenswaard, 1956 – Amsterdam, 2019) was a very well respected Dutch artist who’s works have found their way to the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and many other institutional collections. He lived and worked in Rotterdam. Several publications about his work have been published and his work was widely exhibited by renowned museums and galleries.

This is what I encountered on the internet, but the paintings I encountered in the Jan Grosfeld catalogue that I now have for sale at www.ftn-books.com surprised and amazed me. They are timeless and made me realise that my knowledge of Modern art is by far complete.

This is an artist that I will follow from now on and hopefully one day I can add a work by Grosfeld to our collection.

He was born in Maastricht, the Netherlands. After attending the technical school in Maastricht he joined the marines as war volunteer trained in Camp Lejeune, N.C., United States, to end the occupation by Japan in World War II. During his training the war was ended by the atom bomb and he was sent to the late colony of the Netherlands Indonesia. In 1947 he came back to the Netherlands, only to leave soon afterwards to the far East in an attempt to escape the poverty of his native surroundings. Ten years later he decided to emigrate to the U.S. Here he studied art and philosophy at the New York University. Combining his art classes with earning a living and visiting all art happenings, museums and galleries, for example the Tinguely happening at the MOMA in NY in 1960 he was overwhelmed by Abstract expressionism and left for the Arabian desert in Dhofar, a sultanate of Muscat and Oman where he worked in his former trade as a petroleum engineer. He did one more important job project, the erection of the Telstar Horn Antenna at the Andover earth station in Maine, then he traveled to California, inspired by the movie he watched while working in the Arabian desert Strangers When We Meet. He studied at the Monterey Peninsula College, California, the Monterey Institute of Foreign Studies and San José College (arts and humanities) subsequently at the University of California, Berkeley, a.o. with David Hockney, R.B. Kitaj, Elmer Bischoff and Richard Diebenkorn In 1967 B. A. in Philosophy, in 1969 M.A. in arts . He returned for a “short visit” to the Netherlands where he continued his art practice without realizing there is no intellectual resonance where he works but he is so possessed with his newly discovered Pentagonism that he does not realize he has landed on the moon. To this day he works continually, evolving new ideas, executes them, and making them public through exhibitions and publications, remaining optimistic, believing that ha has added a new chapter to the history of art self coined as Pentagonism. ( the above text comes from Wikipedia)

www.ftn-books.com has one Caris publication available.

This is what the press office of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag said on the Vaclav Cigler exhibition what was held in 2005 on their exhibition on Vaclav Cigler

The first ever presentation of modern glass from the Czech Republic and Slovakia in any Dutch museum. Thanks to the loan of a major private collection, the Gemeentemuseum is now in a position to reveal the skill and sophistication with which glass artists in these two countries exploit the optical effects of glass in their sculptures. The exhibition will be designed by the internationally renowned designer Václav Cigler (1929), who is regarded as the founding father of this school of glass art.

According to the book that I now have for sale , this exhibition was held 30 years after Cigler’s solo exhibition at the Museum Boymans van Beuningen. Of course this does not mean that the Gemeentemuseum was not important…..it was….and its catalogue is one of the best that was published on Cigler ever. But is is not true that it was the “first ever”

exhibition. I love the works of Cigler , but I prefer the lesser known Boymans catalogue, because of the small sketches that are included at the end. Both catalogues are now available at www.ftn-books.com

A legend of Czech artistic glassmaking, Cigler has played an active role both domestically and internationally since the 1960s. He studied at the Nový Bor Glass School and with Professor Josef Kaplický at the Academy of Arts, Architecture and Design in Prague. He established and subsequently headed (1965–1979) the Glass in Architecture studio at the Academy of Fine Arts and Design in Bratislava. He participated in dozens of group as well as solo exhibitions around the world. In addition to his country of origin, his works can be found in both public and private collections in Germany, Switzerland, the Netherlands, Denmark, France, Great Britain, USA, Canada and Japan. On the occasion of winning the Czech Grand Design award, he was inducted into the Czech Design Hall of Fame in 2018.

Baskin is known for his sculpture and graphic arts, especially monumental woodcuts. He was committed to figurative art in a time when the art world focused on abstract expressionism. His work emphasized portraiture and the human condition, often malformed, exaggerated, and animal-like. Common themes include natural history, the Hebrew bible, Greek mythology, and poetry. As the son of a rabbi who grew up in a Jewish community in Brooklyn, Judaism and the Jewish Orthodox community are commonly featured. He was a frequent collaborator with many writers, especially Ted Hughes. Baskin’s work is included in the collections of most major institutions in the United States. He is recognized as a key contributor to the revitalization of fine art presses in addition to his distinction in sculpture and woodcut.

www.ftn-books.com has a few Baskin titles available.

The reason of this short blog is not the mechanical body fan by Rebeca Horn ( see photo above ) but the garden sculpture she made for the Gemeentemuseum Arnhem and which was executed in the garden in 1989. Together with the sculpture “Venus Funnel” a book was published in a very small edition. Only 28, but very important pages on this Rebecca Horn project. Small edition now available at www.ftn-books.com

Jane Louise Reumert was born in Gentofte, Denmark, and worked as a professional ceramist since the 1960s.^[Reumert’s influences range from nature to calligraphy. She has stated that she was interested in nature and especially birds from her early youth. Those motives are found in her work of the 2000s. She used European and Asian calligraphic lettering styles.

In the late 1980s Reumert began working with porcelain and made thin salt glazed vessels, fired to 1330 °C. In the early 1990s, she experimented with adding fiberglass and other fibers to her clay, allowing thinner forms. She often displayed her work on wire tripods to create the illusion of the item floating in thin air. In 1994, Reumert was awarded the Torsten and Wanja Soderberg Nordic Design Prize.^[3] In 2011, she took part in the Nordic Woodfire Marathon, and was a guest artist at the International Ceramic Research Centre in Denmark.

Reumert had published writings and books on ceramic techniques and on her own work. She wrote in Danish and some of her books, including Transparency and Contemporary Pottery, have been translated into English.

In 2003, Jane Louise Reumert moved away from the island of Bornholm where she created some of her salt-glazed pieces with a gas-fired kiln to Copenhagen, where she used a wood-fired kiln.

www.ftn-books has the Rohska Museum catalogue from 1994 now available.

Painter and draughtsman. A painting and graphic arts graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw, he was one of the most vibrant characters on the Polish art scene, with a presence in popular and mainstream culture. To Dwurnik, Nikifor Krynicki was the most important artist and inspiration in the choice of themes, working methods, and style. Dwurnik’s oeuvre, ironic and grotesque, chiefly includes expansive painting cycles, rendered with a fine paintbrush in semblance of Nikifor, with recurrent social, political, and social drama motifs, produced in multiple copies, often simultaneously. His bird’s-eye-view cityscapes created over a number of decades from the mid-1960s are the cycle he is best known for. He painted his first set of abstract paintings, which he called “pollocks”, in the early 2000s. He participated in Documenta 7 in Kassel in 1982. Winner of numerous awards, including the Cyprian Kamil Norwid Award (1981) and the Coutts Contemporary Art Foundation Award (1992). He lived and worked in Warsaw.

The van Abbemuseum catalogue which was published with the Dwurnik 1985 exhibition is now available at www.ftn-books.com

In 1911 the founder of Futurism, Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, invited him to join his artistic and social movement, but Magnelli declined. Although he exhibited with the group, he instead followed the path of abstraction, even while retaining some Futurist elements.

Early in his career, Magnelli traveled to Paris to visit fellow artists; in 1914 he bought works by Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Carlo Carrà, and Alexander Archipenko for his uncle, the collector Alessandro Magnelli. In this period, Magnelli’s work was primarily figurative, as in Man on a Cart (L’Homme à la charrette, 1914). The artist’s first abstract works appeared during the winter of 1914–15. He made a series of what he called “invented works,” such as Painting No. 0528 (Peinture No. 0528, 1915), characterized by bright areas of colors and elliptical patterns. In 1916 he started his military training, and upon his release began experimenting with geometric figuration, as seen in the series Lyric Explosion (Explosion lyrique, 1918). These pictures celebrate the end of the war, creatively integrating Fauvist color, the dynamism of Futurism, and the armature of Cubism. After the war, Magnelli traveled to Germany, Switzerland, France, and Austria before eventually settling in Paris in 1930. A trip the following year through the Carrara marble region in Italy inspired the series Stones (Pierres, 1931–36): haunting, Surrealistic portrayals of massive marble blocks rendered in simplified lines, an abstracted and heavy plasticity against an otherworldly background.

During World War II, the artist lived in Grasse, France, keeping company with artists Robert Delaunay and Jean Arp. Beginning in 1936, Magnelli created textural geometric collages, such as Cahiers d’Art (ca. 1937), using materials including corrugated cardboard, emery cloth, music paper, stitched wire, and metal plates. He also executed a number of paintings on schoolchildren’s wood-framed slate boards (1937–43). Many of these works were luminous geometric compositions constructed from flat areas of color and inscribed white lines (e.g., Untitled [Sans titre, 1937]), while others were inscriptions of purely geometric lines (e.g., Ardoise no. 33 [1937]). During this time, Magnelli also participated in the activities of the Abstraction–Création group with Vasily Kandinsky, Piet Mondrian, and Arp. He returned to Paris in 1944, and soon began making refined geometric works such as Diffuse Light (Lumière diffuse, 1950). In 1959 he moved to Meudon, France, where he died on April 20, 1971.

www.ftn-books.com has some Magnelli titles available.

For three decades, bamboo painting has been part of the everyday life of artist Shan Fan. He first became familiar with the techniques of traditional Chinese painting as a student in China, but when he moved to Hamburg, Germany, in the mid–1980s, his study of abstract western art altered the way he viewed his own traditions. Whether in ink on rice paper, in oil on canvas, in copying a traditional classic, or in the medium of performance, Shan Fan’s work reflects upon and transforms the medium of bamboo painting, which already has potentially abstract characteristics. For him, lines become planes, seconds become hours, entropy becomes a physical experience.

To this day, Shan Fan is persistently continuing his work on his Alphabet of Bamboo Painting. Parallel to this, he has been working since 2008 on transferring twelve selected bamboo paintings to large canvases, using oils and the finest brushes. Gradually, they are building the foundation for a series of pictures whose details make them seem almost like film close-ups. ‘Since I keep transferring increasingly smaller sections of a piece of bamboo onto the same size canvas, I eventually reach a point where it is no longer possible to recognize them as bamboo.’ (Shan Fan) In accordance with the aesthetics of the artist’s material and production methods, he uses concentrated, rapid brush strokes, slowly panning the ink, as it were, across the surface, creating planes millimeter-by-millimeter. In deciding to use a circular brush movement, Shan Fan gives his images a vortex-like effect. The final result of this development is a black or–in the case of the white-on-white paintings–a white plane.

www.ftn-books.com has the HOMELAND catalogue published in 2010 now available.