I have written before on Leo gestel, but now I like to emphasize the importance of the commemorative LEO GESTEL catalog published on the occasion of his commemorative exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.
Only 20 pages but the cover contains 4 small original prints by Gestel making this one of the important 40’s catalogs published by the Stedelijk Museum.
A painter, draughtsman, and commercial artist, Schwann was born in 1893 in Germany and passed away in 1969 in East Berlin. He later worked in the German Democratic Republic (GDR) under the pseudonym Nilgreen.
Since 1912, Schwann mainly worked in Berlin and focused on creating industrial landscapes during the 1920s. In 1925, he became the leader of a group called “the abstract ones,” which later changed its name to “the up-to-date ones.” In the 1930s, influenced by East Asian painting, Schwann began experimenting with vibrant landscape watercolors. This artistic shift aligned with the Soviet cultural policy in the GDR, where socialist realism became the dominant artistic style starting in 1949.
Schwann studied at the Strassburger College of Arts and Crafts from 1908 to 1912. From 1912 until 1915, he trained under Emil Orlik and Emil Rudolf White at the teaching institute of the Museum of Arts and Crafts in Berlin. In 1921, he joined the storm movement. Then, in 1925, he assumed the leadership of the group known as “the abstract ones,” which later evolved into “the up-to-date ones.” In 1928, Schwann became a member of the Communist Party of Germany (KPD). Following the Nazi seizure of power in 1933, he faced an exhibition ban. After the end of World War II in 1945, Schwann served as a professor at the University for Screen and Art in Berlin Charlottenburg until 1951. During the years 1947 to 1949, he collaborated with Karl Hofer in publishing the magazine “Screen and Art.” In 1955, he became a professor at the Academy of Art Berlin Weissensee, where he remained until 1958.
www.ftn-books.com has the Nerlinger book from 1947 now available
From 1978 to 1981, Oehlen pursued his studies at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg in Germany, establishing himself swiftly in the art scenes of Berlin and Cologne. He became a member of the Junge Wilde group, alongside Martin Kippenberger and Werner Büttner, who aimed to create art that defied categorization and challenged the existing artistic conventions. Oehlen’s artistic practice involved examining the fundamental aspects of painting – color, gesture, motion, and time – in order to deconstruct the medium. This approach led him to experiment with various styles and techniques.
Throughout his career, Oehlen continued to explore new possibilities by incorporating technology into his work. He embraced inkjet printers, computer-aided design programs, and referred to the pixelated lines of computer screens. By doing so, he constantly altered the parameters he had set for himself, presenting new obstacles and challenges. For instance, he imposed limitations on his palette and combined perambulating black lines with carefully blended gradations in his Baumbilder (Tree Paintings). Additionally, he utilized techniques such as erasure and layering to juxtapose bright and muddy colors in his Elevator Paintings, a nine-part work created in 2016. In the late 1990s, Oehlen even spray-painted over collaged imagery on canvas, using large industrial printers typically employed for billboards.
Notably, Oehlen embraced the concept of “bad” painting, which allowed for a deliberate embrace of awkwardness and ugliness in his work. He incorporated unsettling gestures, crudely drawn figures, visceral smears of artificial pigments, as well as bold hues and flesh tones. Through this approach, Oehlen demonstrated that painting offers infinite possibilities for exploring form, and highlighted the artist’s ability to manipulate these combinations to create new perceptual challenges for the viewer.
www.ftn-books.com has the Kunsthalle Zurich book ao available.
Roger Bezombes, a French artist specializing in painting, sculpture, medal-making, and design, underwent his education at l’École des Beaux-Arts in Paris. In his artistic endeavors, Bezombes adopted the vibrant color palette famously used by Henri Matisse. His paintings and studies of landscapes and figures often drew inspiration from his observations of exotic cultures, particularly those in the Mediterranean and North Africa. Bezombes had a strong affinity for travel, exploring countries such as Belgium, Germany, Italy, Greece, Crete, Israel, North Africa, and the United States. His works received regular exhibitions in Paris through prestigious events like the Salon d’Automne, the Salon des Artistes Independants, and Les Tuileries. Influenced by notable artists like Gauguin, Van Gogh, and Matisse, Bezombes developed a distinctive and widely cherished style that has captivated audiences around the globe. Additionally, he contributed to various artistic ventures, including tapestry designs for Aubusson, posters (such as the notable image employed by Air France), and costumes and sets for ballet performances at the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Bezombes represents the quintessential French artist of our time — passionate, dedicated, and continuously engaged. These exceptional qualities resonated profoundly in his artwork, leading to its high demand and collection both within France and internationally.
www.ftn-books.com has now the Documents publication on Bezombes available.
Erwin Olaf has passed away at the age of 64, his management informed the ANP news agency. He was one of the most famous photographers in the Netherlands. Olaf has been suffering from emphysema for many years and a few weeks ago he underwent a lung transplant.
Erwin Olaf started out as a documentary photographer, but he later focused on stage photography.
The family said in a statement that Wednesday morning’s death was unexpected. Although he recovered after a lung transplant, Olaf “suddenly became unwell and resuscitation efforts were unsuccessful.”
Bernard Schultze was a German artist, considered part of the informal movement, a group of artists who placed great importance on intuition and the subconscious in the creation of art. In 1952 Karl He founded the artist collective Quadriga together with Otto Goetz and others, making informal art famous in Germany.
Schultz’s work is associative, expressive, and colorful, and poses strange questions to me as a viewer. Flipping through his monograph, Bright Breath, Sparkling Wind, we discover wonderful paintings, watercolours, and drawings, but also incredibly ugly paintings that leave an impression because they are completely formless. The photo was taken by a mentally handicapped person during a writing class, while the image on the other side is clearly of the same man.
Schulze lived from 1915 to 2005. Since Schulze was born in 2015, 100 years before him, a major retrospective exhibition has been held in Cologne, and several excellent books have been published, including this fascinating book which gives an excellent overview of his work. Published. Many of his paintings are truly breathtaking, his drawings are sophisticated and beautiful, but his papier-mache images continue to amaze me with their fantastical forms. Even if the same whimsical figures appear in the painting, it is still strange that they do not mind being there. This keeps the piece attractive.
www.ftn-books.com has several Schultze titles available
The reality that lies at the basis, leads me to an “abstract” form, I abstract ‘form’. This form is imagined as a basic thought. She is the structure that gives strength to the form. My work is at first ‘form’, the color comes later. My visual language is constructed and is not to make with the ‘informal’.’ (Antoine Mortier, 1986)
www.ftn-books.com has some interesting Mortier titles available
Gerco de Ruijter is a Rotterdam-based visual artist working in the field of photography and film. In the late 1980s he started using kites, balloons and fishing poles to create images of situations far removed from our own vantage point. Since 2012 he has been mining Google Earth as a source, resulting in films like CROPS (2012) and Playground (2014). His art explores how far presentation of the landscape can be reduced and yet still remain recognisable.
De Ruijter studied at the Academy for Visual Arts in Rotterdam, graduating with honours in 1993. Since then he has had numerous solo and group exhibitions both in the Netherlands and elsewhere, including at the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, The Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, and The Harnett Museum of Art in Richmond. His work features in several important private and public collections.
www.ftn-books.com has the ALMOST NATURE now available .
Simmons’s understanding of American consumerism was shaped by the suburbs—full of mass-produced appliances, automobiles, and furniture—that sprung up after World War II. Born in 1949, Simmons’s formative years were spent on Long Island, surrounded by homes much like the one pictured in Walking House. This period saw economic expansion that ushered in unprecedented material prosperity for the middle class, but it also enforced a potent impulse to conformity. Imagine a familiar scene from any suburban tract house: a kitchen full of anodyne, impersonal surfaces. The woman of the house peers into an open refrigerator; behind her is a table laden with food. The scene has a nostalgic beauty, but its appeal is wholly simulated: the woman is a doll and the room around her a carefully constructed miniature environment. This is just one of many “interiors” that Simmons staged and shot in the late 1970s, only a few years after she graduated from the Tyler School of Art and settled in New York City. This body of work, which brought Simmons to public attention, reveals the uncanny superficiality of suburban life by using photography to deceive rather than accurately report the facts.
Simmons’s early work treats the domestic environment as a distinctly female space, but one where artificiality casts doubt on the reliability of conventional gender roles. A decade later, Simmons’s “Walking Objects,” with their elegant, bare or stocking-clad legs, similarly take aim at omnipresent media images of women transformed into sexualized objects. Her recent series titled How We See is no less incisive. Here, Simmons photographed fashion models that have been made up and attired to resemble dolls—in a particularly disquieting touch, the oversized, luminous eyes of these women are painted onto their closed eyelids. Simmons’s attention to male identity is equally sensitive to questions of convention and superficiality. One image from 1985 is barely legible as a person—using a microscope, Simmons and Allan McCollum photographed a tiny figurine used to populate model trains—but a shirt and tie, the most generic attire of an urban working man, is clearly visible.
Ultimately, however, Simmons is drawn to a different kind of artificial male figure: the ventriloquist’s dummy. In the mid 1980s and 1990s, she produced several series of photographs that use these articulated dolls to explore masculine experience and self-presentation. Years later, a film Simmons directed in 2006 would prominently feature the same dummies alongside a lead performance by Meryl Streep. Like the domestic interior, the motif of ventriloquism speaks to Simmons’s suburban childhood: “I kept returning to the image of an early, almost pre-memory Christmas present given to my older sister. It was a ventriloquist doll…. I feel as though we spent the better part of our childhood trying to talk without moving our lips.” This autobiographical subtext came to the fore in 1993, when Simmons commissioned a ventriloquist’s dummy in her own likeness. In photographs that depict this doll, the confusion of object and person, as well as reality and illusion, reaches new heights, suggesting that even Simmons’s artistic self-fashioning cannot fully escape the culture of artificiality and pretense we inhabit.
www.ftn-books.com has the , until this date, most important Simmons publication ” BIG CAMERA LITTLE CAMERA ” now available.
iampaolo Bertozzi and Stefano Del Monte Casoni, better known as Bertozzi & Casoni, stand out for their original and innovative ceramic sculptures. From their early studies at the Ceramic Art Institute of Faenza, their interests gravitated towards a dialogue with the great traditions in art and they nurtured an original vocation for experimenting with sculpture, seeing in ceramics the possibility of painted sculpture. Bertozzi & Casoni went on to attend the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna, and participated in exhibitions that focused more on the artists and the motivations for a “new ceramics” in an effort to bridge the gap in support of an expressive medium viewed as a minor art with respect to other artistic forms.
www.ftn-books.com has now the Sperone Westwater book from 2005 available
