Category: art

Not much info to be found on Oscar Jespers, still , like his father, this artist has grown more important over the last few decades.

As his father, Oscar Jespers practised sculpture. He was formed at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. His first sculptures, dating from the 1920’s, are Cubists. Later, in 1930, his style changed and evolved towards Expressionism. He exhibited alongside artists of this movement as in 1934 at the Kunst van Heden exhibition held in Antwerp. The sculptor mainly conceived heads, and nudes.

Nowadays, his artworks can be found in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

www.ftn-books.com has some nice Jespers publications available.

Paul Joostens was a Belgian artist who was born in Antwerp in 1889 and who died there in 1960. He was a painter, draftsman, designer of collages and assemblages and poet. First apprenticed to the architect M. Winders, then training at the Academy in Antwerp (1909-1913). Initially painted in a post-impressionist style, until ca. 1915, then incorporated both Ensorian, 1900-style and Fauvist influences. Cubism and Futurism made their appearance in 1916. Abstract collages were also created during this period and from 1920 onwards he realized a series of Dadaist objects, composed of the most diverse materials. A number of satirical-erotic drawings and graphic work were created under the pseudonym Duco Of Malibot. In 1972 he turned his back on modernism and was inspired by the work of the Flemish primitives. This was followed by a religious-mystical period in a cubist-expressionist style from about 1930 to 1935. After 1935 his work became more subdued, almost intimate, in lighter colors and he realized a series of photomontages. Just before the Second World War, his work again reflect a certain symbolistic fantasy. After 1946 and until his death, his oeuvre can be divided into two themes. On the one hand, Dadaist assemblages and collages, on the other hand, the paintings and drawings in which his dreamlike figure of the woman, his ‘poezeloezen’, play the leading role. From the press: ‘The main theme, the woman, contains all of Joostens’ dualism: the Madonna and the Platonic glorification of the film diva, the public woman or the girl, on the other hand, barely affected by female perversion’ and about his work as a writer and poet: ‘In 1924 he marries a seventeen-year-old, travels to Paris, travels back and forth: Price, Bruges, but Antwerp remains the stopping place of his heart. In 1928 poverty starts to knock. Divorce followed in 1930. P.J. paints and writes. His writings are piling up. Also in the period 1930-1960. In Antwerp he moves from one studio to another, suffers from poverty, even bitter poverty, is physically ill, lonely and lapses into total isolation. At his death he left behind an extensive oeuvre and a mountain of writings. It was his last wish that a fund should be established to enable the publication of his literary work, because in the end he seemed to attach as much importance to his literary as to his pictorial oeuvre. ‘(Tijdschrift Vlaanderen, 1971) Werkte sporadically also under the pseudonym Jean Yostmans. 

www.ftn-books.com has several titles on Josstens available.

Born in Baghdati, Russian Empire (now Mayakovsky, Georgia) on July 19, 1893, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was the youngest child of Ukrainian parents. When his father, a forester, died in 1906, the family moved to Moscow, where Mayakovsky joined the Social Democratic Labour Party as a teenager in 1908. Due to his family’s financial situation, Mayakovsky was dismissed from grammar school. He spent much of the next two years in prison due to his political activities.

In 1910, Mayakovsky began studying painting, soon realizing he had a talent for poetry. In 1912, he signed the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which included two of his poems. In 1913, he published his first solo project, Ya, a small book of four poems.

Mayakovsky’s early poems established him as one of the more original poets to come out of the Russian Futurism, a movement characterized by a rejection of traditional elements in favor of formal experimentation, and which welcomed social change promised by technologies such as automobiles. Specifically, Mayakovsky’s early poems lacked traditional metrical structure, relying instead on forceful rhythms, exaggerated imagery, and—perhaps most importantly—street language, considered unpoetic in literary circles at the time.

In 1915, Mayakovsky published A Cloud in Trousers, his first major work. The long poem took the poet’s stylistic choices to a new extreme, linking irregular lines of declamatory language with surprising rhymes.

Living in Smolny, Petrograd, in 1917, Mayakovsky witnessed the early Bolshevik insurrections of the Russian Revolution. This was a fruitful period for the poet, who greeted the revolution with a number of poetic and dramatic works, including Ode to the Revolution (1918), Left March (1918), the long poem 150,000,000 (1920), and Mystery-Bouffe (1918), a political satire and one of the first major plays of the Soviet era.

Mayakovsky returned to Moscow to create propoganda graphics and verses for the Russian State Telegraph Agency, and became involved in Left Front of the Arts, editing its journal, LEF. The journal’s objective was to “re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art’s value for developing communism.”

In 1919, he published Collected Works 1909-1919, which further established his reputation. Mayakovsky’s popularity granted him unusual freedoms, relative to other Soviets. Specifically, he travelled freely, throughout the Soviet Union, as well as to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. In 1925, he published My Discovery of America.

Among the poet’s best-known longer poems are Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924), a eulogy to the Soviet leader; and All Right! (1927). Around this time, Mayakovsky also wrote two satirical plays: The Bedbug (1928) and The Bathhouse (1929).

Mayakovsky had been working on the long poem With Full Voice since 1929, when on April 14, 1930, he allegedly shot himself directly in the heart. Ten days later, the officer investigating the poet’s suicide was himself killed, fueling speculation about the nature of Mayakovsky’s death. www.ftn-books.com has some nice publications on Maiakovski currently available.

After a few years of silence and not contributing any new news nor items on Piet Dirkx I finally found a reason to write again on Piet. Last week I found the BEELDEN IN DE KOEPEL II catalogue on Piet Dirkx. An important catalogue since it also shows some “‘t Venster” rooms in which Piet had one of his first exhibitions. The catalogue is now together with many art works available at www.ftn-books.com. Inquire for more information at www.ftnbooksandart@gmail.com

Just the focus on the early Frank van Hemert pastel that I acquired yesterday. I bought a series of 6 pastels of which two will become available in the coming months. Opened the frame to make the perfect photographs and examined the pastel in detail. Without the glass you can see the delicate pastel drawing as it should be. Signed and dated on the back and this week becoming available at FTN art at www.ftn-blog.com

One of the most internationally established contemporary Spanish painter, sculptor and draughtsman, Manolo Valdés was born in Valencia in 1942. He attended the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Carlos de Valencia and began his career in the 1960s as one of the founding members of Equipo Cronica, a group of artists who took inspiration from Pop Art to challenge the Spanish dictatorship of Franco and the History of Art itself. When the movement ended in 1981, Valdes continued his own artistic exploration centered on the appropriation and reinterpretation of masterpieces. He currently lives and work between Madrid, Spain and New York city, USA.

Manolo Valdés has developed an individual style that reviews History without detracting from the original subject. Quoting figures from well-known works of art by old masters such as Velázquez, Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fra Angelico, as well as twentieth-century masters such as Matisse, Picasso, and Lichtenstein, Valdés revitalizes these familiar images by taking them out of their original context. In both paintings and sculptures, he inflates the figure’s size, abstracting form and minimizing detail, while incorporating a lot of roughly applied paint and unusual materials. The timelessness of the image as the axis of the visual experience is the determining factor in his creations. In his works, image and matter are fused in a body of work that wanders between Pop Art and material art, between social and political commitment and a continuous search for reinvention.

www.ftn-books.com has the Beelden aan Zee catalogue now available.

David Diao (1943, China) is one of the key figures in the recent history of conceptual painting. Entering the New York art world in the late 1960s and throughout the 1970s, Diao first engaged in the complex position of painting in the aftermath of the Abstract Expressionists and the formalist critical debates that followed them, successfully pushing painting into conceptual territory while allowing him to deal with aesthetics, history as well as personal narrative in his painting. Diao’s unique aesthetic sensibility has undergirded a long career that is now attracting renewed interest from major institutions, critics, and curators around the world. www.ftn-books has the important HET KRUITHUIS catalogue now available. This is the catalogue in which Diao was introduced to a European audience. Text by Kees Broos

Artistic Statement: Conscious Abstraction!

In an abstract work, the materials step forward and become a significant part of the work itself. A good painting is conscious of its own physical properties and of the space around it, and inquires into its own existence.

Abstract painting has a central role in my artistic practice. I use abstraction in various media – such as fabric collages and flags – as a tool with which to dissolve and open up rigidly-defined categories and forms. My paintings and fabric collages have a special dialogue. Often the fabric collages may be recreated as paintings, or vice versa. In terms of content, I work to create meanings that deal with gender history – as indicated, for example, through the juxtaposition of works and materials.

The abstract paintings arise on the basis of systematic compositions, geometric divisions, forms and colours that mimic or utilise visual techniques and structures drawn from the craft traditions of various cultures. Several of the works contain for example references to Navajo rugs, Swedish rag rugs and patchwork quilts. The various references are combined in the painting, where they are absorbed in each other’s logic. In the abstract expression, the intention is thus not to find the universal form, but rather to seek to achieve a form that is constantly changing. When, in the individual works, I operate with several signals at once, the aim is to open up the work in both sensual and symbolic terms. My ambition is that the works should have a simultaneously tactile and spiritual quality. I work with their physicality. They refer to the body and to the physical conditions with which each individual is endowed.

In relation to media, I work a lot with textiles in various formats. The flag, as object, phenomenon and symbol for identification, is something that interests me. I use the authority and authenticity of the flag to deconstruct and reconstruct ideas and concepts about ourselves and others. In several works dealing with issues of identification, I am interested in the possibilities and limitations, as well as the hierarchies, that we ourselves create and pass on – particularly in relation to the position of women.

Besides the material itself, I often use the title of a work to clarify its statement, such as in the painting Bedcover for Sonia Delaunay, 2006. Delaunay sewed an abstract bedspread for her son with the title Blanket, 1911, which was originally considered to be a craftwork, but is today regarded as a work of art. For me, this bedspread stands as a symbol of the relationship between art and life which is essential in my artistic practice.

The Revolver Winckelmann publication is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Alf Lechner is one of the most important German sculptors.
His material is massive steel. Since 1960 Lechner has been designing constructive and concrete sculptures, which gain their form through calculated dividing, cutting and splitting of cubes and globes. Clear, rational thoughts precede the technical work and can be understood in the actual produced works. Even though he achieves freer solutions in techniques like compressing, folding and bursting of steel, they are still results of a controlled action while being fully aware of the material along with decades of experience in the use of strength, energy and the consequential physical reactions.

Here, in his hometown Munich, there are several large-size sculpture in public spaces, like the collection of the Städtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus, the sculpture space at the Alte Pinakothek or the monumental stele at the Gasteig.
In 1995 Alf Lechner became a member of the Bayerische Akademie der Schönen Künste. Since 2001 he has been living and working together with his wife Camilla in Obereichstätt, where he turned an old ironworks and former stone pit into a spectacular sculpture park with living space, studios and exhibition halls. The Alf Lechner Foundation with its impressive Lechner Museum in Ingolstadt is the keeper of his extensive work.

www.ftn-books.com has now the 1968 galerie Heseler catalog available. The catalogue has an original silkscreened cover.

The last 2 years i acquired several works by Fons Brasser. Some I have kept in my personal collection, but now I have acquired 2 more works. One bleeding drawing and one zink object. To day I will focus on the drawing. The drawing is in pristine condition. framed behind passe partout by Brasser and signed, dated and titled in pencil. The pictures will tell the story but know that the drawing is now for sale at ftn art.