Michael Blum, born in Jerusalem in 1966, is a Montreal-based artist. Following studies in history at Université Paris I and photography at the École nationale de la photographie in Arles, France, he developed an art practice—comprising videos, books and installations—that aims at critically re-reading the production of culture and history. His work encompasses several exhibitions presented in such venues as the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon (2012); the New Museum, New York (2009); the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2008); Mobile Art Production, Stockholm (2007); and as part of the 9th Istanbul Biennale (2005). He has completed several residencies including at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff; the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam; ISCP in New York; IASPIS in Stockholm; and Very Real Time, in Cape Town. His book works include Monument to the Birth of the 20th Century and La dernière brève, published by Revolver-Archiv für aktuelle Kunst in 2005. Michael Blum has been a professor at the UQAM School of Visual and Media Arts since 2010.
www.ftn-books.com has now the Stanley Picker gallery publication from 2000 available
Nilbar Güreş is an artist from Turkey who lives and works between Istanbul and Vienna. Using photography, collage, textile, drawing, and video, she places images of everyday life in theatrical settings to explore cultural identity, especially female and queer identity. Her work is based on long-term research and cultural observation, and it is strongly political—it deals with, among other things, sexism, violence, and gender and social inequality. Güreş received her MA in painting and graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has exhibited at museums around the world, including MAXXI museum in Rome, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Schwules Museum in Berlin, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Mak–Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg. Her selected exhibitions include the 20th Yokohama Triennale, the 20th Biennale of Sydney, the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial, the 6th Berlin Biennale, and the 11th International İstanbul Biennial. Her awards include the 2013 Professor Hilde Goldschmidt Award (Austria), the 2014 Msgr. Otto Mauer Award (Austria), the 2015 BC21 Art Award (Austria), and the 2018 De’Longhi Art Projects Artist Award
www.ftn-books.com has currently one Gures title available.
Sam Havadtoy was born in London in 1952 and raised in Hungary. From there he moved to New York, worked as an interior designer and began painting. Among others, he designed homes for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and became their friend. The first stage of Havadtoy’s work consists of writing an autobiographical text, which he reduces and condenses and then copies onto canvas. He covers it all with a coat of paint, and at times glues onto it a layer of lace, also painted. The exhibition presents portraits the artist made inspired by paintings by Alexej von Jawlensky in the collection of the museum. In some of the paintings, the figure’s outlines are very clear, whereas in others, Jawlensky’s paintings take on a new interpretation by Havadtoy, almost devoid of figurative aspect. The process of work, combining painting and erasing and concealing the image, leads Havadtoy’s work towards minimalist, almost abstract painting that seeks to reach a sublime spiritual experience through its intensity.
www.ftn-books.com has now the Tel Aviv Museum of Art catalogue available
Maria Eichhorn was born in 1961 in Bamberg, Germany.1 She moved to Paris where she wanted to study languages but, instead, she became an artist. In 1983, she moved to Berlin, where she studied until 1990 at the Hochschule der Kunste in the class of the artist Karl Horst Hodicke. She then took a studio at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, a studio-residency programme in Berlin and showed in improvised, artist-run spaces such as Shin Shin or Galerie Vincenz Sala. In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and she continued to work with the changing situation in the city as well as beyond it.
Her work has developed since the late 1980s as an exploration of the relationship between the symbolic and the real, between the practice of art and direct – albeit limited and exemplary – actions geared towards the bettering of personal life, social relations and the human and natural environments. It demonstrates a strong sense of ethics and the belief that radical oppositional thought and action are still and will always be possible. Her work is rarely spectacular and most often discreet.
Eichhorn recognises and develops both Fluxus libertarian gestures and strategies of conceptual art. As with conceptual art, she is not interested in the production of artefacts for exchange and does not privilege the visual in art over other modes of sensual and intellectual perception. However, contrary to most idea-based art of the first period, she is not interested in hierarchically placing verbal language over the visual, nor in creating tautologies or eliminating self-expression from the work of art. As with Fluxus ‘histories’ and chronicles, the vitality and ephemeral nature of the events, relationships and processes that Eichhorn enacts within – and as a consequence of – her works imply a need for rigorous documentation and a chronological vision that positions her work as a sequence of emblematic and exemplary ‘oppositional’ projects. Her work is almost always context-specific and in some way useful. She redirects artistic resources, such as production budgets or the ‘free zone’ attributed to art by the authorities, and engages them to counter losses of freedom and individual well-being in contemporary Western society. Though these projects appear as political in the broadest sense, no explicit party or ideological affiliation of her own is ever declared. In fact, almost all her works relate to some need, experience or desire of the people living and working in the place where she is invited to exhibit. More often than not, her proposals reveal a strong critical undercurrent and an almost anarchic questioning of power itself.
The work of Maria Eichhorn is layered and complex, rich and textured, both literal and metaphoric and often highly poetic and allusive. Yet, emerging at the end of the 1980s from a generation of self-expressive ‘wild painting’, it remains as little as possible a reflection of her own personal, expressive behaviour. Instead, she bases her productions on the belief that there are already many highly expressive behaviours in the world and her task is to provide some form of manifestation or outlet for them.
www.ftn-books.com has the below Eichhorn publication available:
Not much info i can find on van Severen. Just a short biography, but that doe not mean that van Severen is not impoprtant. I think he is and if ever i have the opportunity to buy a work for our collection i will not hesitate to do so.
I love her works, Spontaneous and intelligent abstraction, reminding me of Pollock and Sam Francis , but in her own style and highly original. The painting is not thought out but emerges from her hands when she paints.
Born in Vienna in 1940, Martha Jungwirth rose to distinction early in her artistic career: she received the Monsignor-Otto-Mauer Prize in 1961, followed by a volley of awards such as the Theodor Körner Prize (1964) and the Joan Miró Prize, Barcelona (1966). Jungwirth’s characteristic painting style is widely regarded as one of the most innovative of the 1980s Neue Wilde painters in Austria, oscillating between the gesturally abstract and formal composition.
After completing her studies at the Academy of Applied Art Vienna in 1963, Jungwirth went on to become the only woman in the artists’ group Wirklichkeiten (Realities), among five male colleagues; it was brought together in 1968 by Otto Breicha, later director of Salzburg’s Rupertinum, as an improvised group for an exhibition at the Vienna Secession. Jungwirth was identified in a review by art historian and museum director Alfred Schmeller with this: “The first crocodile is a female crocodile.” Jungwirth would marry Schmeller a year later, and this union has long been perceived by many as one that made the art world hesitant to embrace Jungwirth.
Despite this hesitation, Jungwirth pursued her practice with a fervor, working with an intuitive and explosive spontaneity. With a deliberative understanding of aesthetic principles, she creates subtle color symphonies with dabs and washes of paint. Receding and advancing, this layering of oil paints and watercolors on packing paper and cardboard, which embodies her dynamic working
Martha Jungwirth in her studio, 2019; Photo by Christa Kodolitsch
style with a fragility made visible by delicate marks and occasional drips.
www.ftn-books.com now has the Haas catalogue available
British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934) paints uniquely recognizable, colorful, and exuberant compositions that at first glance are instantly accessible, not seeming to align with any discernible style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. As curator Clarrie Wallis notes, “[Wylie’s] large pictures are painted in a kind of visual shorthand that is direct and legible. The ability to elicit a range of responses is made possible precisely because of her reduction of form to an essential vibrancy that incorporates, via the very physicality of her medium, not just what the artist sees but an accompanying multitude of thoughts, feelings, and memories. Wylie’s work is a sophisticated transmutation, or sifting of perceptual experience, carrying as it does a wealth of affective and allusive resonances, into the painted form.”
www.ftn-books.com has the galerie Michael Janssen catalogue now available
Tzuri Gueta, a graduate of Shenkar College in the Tel Aviv area, is a designer and textile engineer who has been based in Paris since 1996. Growing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, he was in direct contact with the elements of nature, and his work reflects his roots.
After settling in Paris, Tzuri worked at Trend Union, an agency run by Li Edelkoort, and went on to concentrate on textile design. He challenged the conventions of the trade by approaching traditional handicraft with unprecedented techniques. This innovative approach gave rise to surprising materials that verged on sculpture – materials that deceive the senses of touch and vision. Good publications on this artist are scarce, but www.ftn-books.com has the Tel Aviv publication from 2010 now available.
People are the focus point of her work. Main characters are usually girls or women. Especially mutual relative power and relations have her interest. Frictions and inequality in these relationships is a recurrent theme. For instance between man and woman, or adult and child, or children amongst each other, group behaviour versus the loner. When the pursuit of harmony fails, it becomes interesting for her work . Several examples of ‘girlpower’ series Karin Bos has accomplished are ‘Showgirls’, ‘Gamegirls’, ‘Fairyqueens’ and ‘Feel Good’
www.ftn-books.com has the A TRIP TO THE COUNTRYSIDE from 2009 now available
The works of Mike Strauch (born in 1966) are always intensive painterly confrontations with the landscape and architecture that surround him, sometimes also imagined and composed.
On closer inspection and prolonged examination, the pictorial world emerges as a contemporary version of a lyrical, Arcadian, not always cheerful landscape painting. The visible traces of painting, such as drops, splashes, noses and colour gradients and undifferentiated parts of the picture, visualise the artist’s processual and open way of working. He does not hide, smooth or paint over but rather openly presents his work to the viewer. In this way, Mike Strauch takes us as recipients into his studio. He lets us have a look as he works and lets us participate in the process of finding a motif, even though we are studying a seemingly completed work.
Landscapes are the overriding theme in Strauch’s works. Since time immemorial, the landscape and the forest have been seen as symbols of the possibility of self-renewal and of the dimension of the unknown that needs to be explored. Strauch explores seemingly unknown dimensions with his painterly, expressive odes to nature. Architectural theory understands the concept of landscape and architecture as one. Architecture is landscape, and landscape is architecture. In this light, Strauch’s pictorial cosmos with its solitary, seemingly abandoned “residential cubes” in rampant, sometimes blurred flora acquires a kind of explanation. www.ftn-books.com has the Schwerin publication available ( edition of only 400 copies)
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
