Category: art

Whether popcorn, batteries, water or bronze — no material is too uninteresting for Vanessa Billy (*1978, Geneva, lives in Zurich) not to use for research into sculpture and themes such as transformation and recycling. Her artistic work is poetic but at the same time remains anchored in the concrete physical qualities of the materials. Billy examines the cultural use of natural resources by contra-intuitively working on objects or placing them next to each other. For example, when a silicone lemon is confronted with a car engine. In the process the artist always investigates cycles in which humanity and technology are caught up. She asks what reactions follow actions, now or in the time continuum, and to what extent these influence our thought and behaviour.

www.ftn-books.com has the Pro Helvetia Vanessa Billy publication available.

At first i thought i recognized some influences of Toon Verhoef, Piet Dirkx and Jerry Zeniuk in the works of Jelis van Donderen, but when you see multiple works at one page you see that van Dolderen has a style of his own….and yes…. i like his paintings. He developed a pictural language that is typically van Dolderen and that is his strength. Bright colors, shapes typical for van Dolderen and best for the most of us, still available at reasonable prices. So check out van Dolderen and for those interested in his publications …i have the Centraal Museum Utrecht small artist book available.

Born in 1970 in Osnabrück, Silke Otto-Knapp majored in cultural studies at the University of Hildesheim and received her MFA from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Otto-Knapp works in the medium of watercolor on canvas and produces landscape paintings as well as paintings based on historical documentations of stage design and performance. Unlike traditional watercolorists, Otto-Knapp applies layers of watercolor that are washed down and then applied anew. These countless coats produce the coexistence of conflicting concepts of space – surface and depth, contour and corporeality, distance and closeness, reality and figurativeness – which give rise to a tension between the motif and the picture surface.

www.ftn-books.com has one Knapp title currently available.

The independent started his article on Metzger that he is probably the artist you have never heard of. Still he is one of the most influential artists for the decades to come.

‘Gustav Metzger remains a moral compass, a constant reminder that integrity comes at a price, and that fighting for your convictions can indeed change the world. Metzger has done more than raise awareness. His art and philosophy are a stark testimony to the alternative world for which he strove.’–Mathieu Copeland

Gustav Metzger was an artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. At the heart of Metzger’s practice was a passionate engagement with the notion of creation as a continual counterpoint to themes of destruction. This exhibition will look at works that explore nature, man-made environments and human intervention.

Gustav Metzger was born in 1926 in Nuremburg, Germany to a Polish-Jewish family. In 1939, at the age of 12, Metzger and his brother were evacuated from Germany to England on the ‘Kindertransport’. He lost his parents and most of his immediate family to the Holocaust. In his youth he decided to become ‘a kind of revolutionary’, but after living for six months in a Trotskyist-anarchist Commune in Bristol, Metzger decided this wasn’t what he wanted. He was later convinced to attend life-drawing classes by Henry Moore, after asking to be his assistant and went on to study in Cambridge, Oxford, Antwerp and London.

Metzger was the chief proponent of the Auto-Destructive Art (or ADA) movement and organised the DIAS (Destruction in Art Symposium) in 1966 with contemporaries such as John Sharkey. Other notable attendees and contributors were members of the Fluxus movement and Yoko Ono, who performed her seminal participatory ‘Cut Piece’, where members of the audience were invited to gradually snip away her clothing using a pair of fabric scissors.

Metzger dedicated much of his life and career to campaigning for environmental issues, nuclear disarmament and expressing his distaste for consumerism and the wider capitalist agenda.

www.ftn-books.com has 2 important Metzger publications now available.

Today it looks like a random title but it isn’t. A few days ago we walked our dogs in the Museum Voorlinden park. Nice weather, a typical dutch sky, cows in the meadow and the park never looked more beautiful and that is where I took this photograph…… a magical place to visit

It reflects the garden of Piet Oudolf, on top you can see the roof edge of the museum building (Kraaijvanger architects)and part of one of the corridors where at the end this magnificent Hiquily mobile is positioned. At first I thought it to be a Calder, but after some research I noticed that this must be a purchase from last year at ARTCURIAL. Impressive! and we just saw this from the outside!. As written before , a magic place which becomes more and more important for Modern Art in Europe. It still is not there where the Beyeler Museum is, but if they continue this way for another 5 years. ….This museum, this collection, this collector and their joint views and thought on Modern Art brings Museum Voorlinden into the major League of Modern Art museums. We are lucky to live nearby and everyone that values Modern Art should put this museum on his/her list to visit. Of course www.ftn-books.com has many titles available on the artists that Museum Voorlinden has in its collection.

Yesterday, Linda and i walked the dogs at the surroundings of Museum Voorlinden and because this was our second visit in a month we immediately noticed the sculptures by Anton y Gormley. Many of the dutch people know his “EXPOSURE (2010)”, but never realize is was made by Gormley.

Now the Museum Voorlinden has organized and outside exhibition. Gormley scattered around 30 of his human sculptures over the entire estate. Around the museum, in the park, in the dunes and even in a small river.

The best is that these sculptures enhance the magic of the museum and one would wish these were acquired for their collection. The best is that the visitors can interact with the sculptures. They are frozen but because of this interaction, they become alive.

here is the text Museum Voorlinden has published on their site on this highly recommended exhibition

Gormley approaches the age-old subject of the human body in his own unique, yet universal and philosophical way, building on art history and conceptual sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s. GROUND will be one of the most ambitious exhibitions in the museum’s history, the first to occupy both the museum and the estate of Voorlinden. ‘As a museum, we want to do everything we can to offer Antony Gormley the stage he deserves’, says director Suzanne Swarts.

Antony Gormley: ‘Sculpture is no longer a medium of memorial and idealisation but a context in which human being can be examined. Sculpture is no longer representational: it is an instrument of investigation and questioning. I have called this exhibition GROUND to make this open invitation of sculpture clear. Without the viewer there is no show, without the gallery there is no context. The joy of this kind of exhibition is to allow the richness of the context itself to become activated by sculpture. For me, the body of the viewer is often the activating principle in a ‘ground’ of contemplation: the works become catalysts for awareness and grounds for physical and imaginative inhabitation.’

Groundbreaking works

The exhibition includes Passage, a 12-metre-long steel work on display for the first time in the Netherlands. Inside the sculpture, one travels through darkness into the unknown. The expansive work Breathing Room, in which you can experience standing in a three-dimensional drawing in the space, will also be shown. Extending outside, Critical Mass puts sculpture in dialogue with the museum’s extensive grounds: 60 solid cast iron bodyforms will be placed in relation with the trees, lawns, canals and reedbeds of the park. Gormley sees these ‘capturings’ of basic body positions as ‘industrially made fossils dropped into the Voorlinden’s verdant context, calling on embedded body-memory and our potential for feeling’.

Director Suzanne Swarts: ‘Antony is one of those rare artists who has built up a timeless oeuvre with a universal visual language, yet very own signature. For four decades, he has been making sculptures that are dear to people from all over the world. For him, sculpture and the human body are the starting point for an endless cosmological investigation that concerns, touches and encourages us all to reflect.’

www.ftn-books.com has some still some great titles on Gormley available.

Michael Peel’s vivid, campaigning text/image works have made a significant contribution to UK visual culture. Through his work Peel sought to expose the forces of power and control, with all their mechanised horrors, injustices and resulting social disintegration. Never straying into dogma, his practice was rooted in a genuine concern for the ordinary and everyday lives of others.

Born in Singapore at the outbreak of the Second World War, Peel and his mother were forced to flee the invading Japanese army, becoming refugees in search of safety and sanctuary. His father, taken prisoner to work on the infamous Burma railway, never returned. The artist and teacher that emerged from this childhood trauma was one of humanity and warmth, whose practice projected a visceral and graphic representation of the social and political excesses endured.

Peel’s practice revolved around photography and printmaking; combining text excerpts and grainy imagery culled from television and print with dynamic, attention grabbing composition. His pivotal poster works series ‘Modern World’, shown simultaneously in galleries and flyposted on billboards, hoardings and lampposts, were part of a strategy to reach a popular audience. Photography was appropriate because it was easily understood, a ‘public, contemporary language’. Its multiple manufacture, through the more commercial processes of silkscreen, moved it away from any ‘objet d’art’ preciousness, placing it within an everyday.

His poster interventions had their antecedents and influences in the visual and conceptual languages of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch along with the writings of Marshall McLuhan; the idealism of the post war period; the hedonism of 1960’s; the hardened realities of the political and social upheavals of the 1970’s to 90’s; and the dawn of the informational age. Later work explored ideas of chaos, uncertainty and insecurity.

Teaching was an important extension of Peel’s practice. His unique approach to a subject that had long been seen simply as a technical or craft based activity, helped redefine the role of print within artistic practice.

Peel was one of a generation of artists who thought of art as a mechanism for social change, and that artists were uniquely qualified to reveal the often hidden iniquities of contemporary society. This exhibition demonstrates that the work of Peel remains powerfully fresh and relevant, and will continue to be so while his childhood experiences are relived through new generations of the displaced and disenfranchised.The 1989 Watermans publication on his psoter art is now available at www.ftn-books.com

After Graduating from the California Institute of Arts, Oursler started to work primarily with video and installation.

He truly revolutionized certain aspects of projection by supressing the frame of the screen. Oursler uses different mediums such as video, film, photography, handmade objects, sculpture, computers, the web, and also elaborate soundtracks. Noise, image, and light are important devices composing the artist’s work. The visual sensations of the viewer are heightened as the artist ingenuously occupies the space with these projections (characters hidden under the stairs, projections of faces on clouds of smoke and trees in the middle of New York).

Oursler’s works seem like animate effigies in their own psychological space, often appearing to interact directly with the viewer’s sense of empathy. These installations are consistently disturbing and fascinating.

These confusing, enigmatic, and obsessive virtual characters deliver a message, and present a parable of miscommunication.

The artist manages to create a sensory universe that raises the question of human and non-human, and tries to reproduce the emotions of the human face onto a monstrous or inanimate object. Yet, there is no aggression in Oursler’s installations. They appear as puzzles that appeal to all our senses, and manage to awaken a certain tenderness and compassion for the human race. This aspect diverges from the Neo- Conceptualism or Post-Pop.

Among the artist’s best known works are: The Watching (presented in 1992 at Documenta 9, made of handmade soft-cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection); Judy (1993), which explored the relationship between multiple personality disorders and mass media; Get Away II, which featured a passive-aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress confronting the viewer with blunt direct address; Eyes in 1996, and Climax in 2005.

Signature works have been Oursler’s talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura.

In his website «TimeStream», Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura, noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peep holes. Oursler’s interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image lead to largescale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.

The Public Art Fund and Artangel commissioned the Influence Machine in 2000. This installation marks the artist’s first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead. Oursler used smoke, trees and buildings as projection screens in Madison Square Park in New York and Soho Square in London. He then completed a number of permanent public projects in Barcelona, New Zealand, Arizona and «Braincast» at the Seattle Public Library. He is scheduled to complete a commission at the Frank Sinatra High School in Astoria, New York.

Oursler was part of the musical and performance group, Poetics, with fellow California Institute of the Arts friends Mike Kelley and John Miller. The artist created the background videos that played at David Bowie’s 50th birthday party concert in 1997, as well as the video to accompany Bowie’s single «Where Are We Now?», released in January 2013.

Oursler ‘s work has exhibited in many prestigious institutions including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Documenta VIII and IX in Kassel, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Sculpture Projects in Munster, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington D.C., and Tate Liverpool.

www.ftn-books.com has a few Oursler titles available at this moment.

Just last week at Art Rotterdam , my wife told me that she liked the different ways textiles are used in Modern Art nowadays and she had encountered some that fascinated her. There were the works by Sheila Hicks and Mirjam Hagoort and ow I add to these the work by Karin van Dam

She is known for her installations composed with materials such as buffers for boats, ropes and insulating casing. At one time she even used entire pre fab polyester ponds which she hung in the medieval hall of the centre for contemporary arts De Vleeshal in Middelburg, The Netherlands. She sees her installations as spatial drawings, that the viewer is able to walk through, as it were. Currently she is CHURCHMASTER in Veere in which she has made an installation.

The three dimensional works are prepared in pencil drawings on a small format in which she often also integrates objects like rubber plugs, rope or wooden sticks. Urban structures, both above and below ground level, are a recurring theme in her work. To her the city is a living organism that continually develops and expands. Karin van Dam works highly intuitively, using a combination of materials that, together, develop into a new, coherent system.

www.ftn-books.com has now an early artist book by Karin van Dam available in which she shows a 3 dimensional sculpture in paper.

195 MILLION DOLLAR was paid for the Andy Warhol/ Marilyn. It is one of the iconic modern art works from the 20th century, but still…a ridiculous amount . This led me to a search on the internet and i found a nice report on the art market. Not a report on new trends , but far more inside information on the development of the value of art. The report sponsored by UBS bank and Art Basel gives insight in the mechanism of the ART MARKET. Click on the link to download the report.