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Ossip ( continued) …Twee Heren, 1989

Last week..the chance to add to the FTN art collection an early Ossip. It is the 1989, TWEE HEREN. A large photoprint of 2 Gentleman. One clearly visible, standing proud,  enhanced with many drops of wax and the other, the same figure less confident ….just a shadow, filled in with black sand and a thin contoured line done in pencil. The borders….newspaper clippings and red tiled paper. A great and classic  large OSSIP ( 166 x 107 cm.). which is now available at www.ftn-blg.com (the FTN art section).

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Gracia Lebbink (1963)

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This blog is long time overdue. I met Gracia for the first time when she was designing the artist book LA STANZA VEDE by Kounellis for the Haags Gemeentemuseum in 1990. She was introduced to the Haags Gemeentemuseum by Rudi Fuchs who was the director at that time and because trusted her skills after being introduced to Rudi by  Walter Nikkels some time before.

Since, she designed for the Gemeentemuseum many publications and posters and build a prestigious agency on the way, “designing” for many cultural institutions and museums. Always recognizable, simple , beautiful designs and with a typography that invites reading the texts.

I mentioned Nikkels and Lebbink in the same sentence and that is not without a reason … I consider both to be the very best from the generations to follow Sandberg and Crouwel and because I have known Gracia professionally, she is placed on the no. 1 spot, followed at some distance by Walter Nikkels. It proves Rudi Fuchs had a nose to pick not only the best artists, but also the right choice in commissioning a designer with a project. Gracia had to stop her professional career in 2003, leaving us some very beautiful and appealing designs.

Because of my personal interest in her works I have collected many of Gracia’s designs for FTN-books. Many are available at www.ftn-books.com…..just search for Lebbink and you will encounter over 30 Gracia Lebbink designed publications available.

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Gabriel Lester (1972)

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Yesterday a smaller sized blog on a recent addition, but this time you have to do more of an effort to learn something on this artist. Here is the text by Aaron Schuster on Gabriel Lester

More is Lester
On the cinematic in the work of Gabriel Lester

My title is in part inspired by a particularly felicitous slip of the tongue made during a lecture I attended in Brussels on the films of Marcel Broodthaers.  The speaker, wishing to express the great economy of Broodthaers’s productions, often made with meager means, presented the principle of his work as follows: Comment faire un minimum avec un maximum, or, as one would say in English, how to do less with more…  Of course, this ‘error’ is much more revealing of – in this case, not the speaker’s secret intention but – the actual situation, the essential wager, of contemporary art, especially in its relation to mass culture.  Put simply, the problem today is not so much maximizing scant resources or creating the greatest effect with relatively little means (think of the typical artist’s production budget compared with that of a Hollywood blockbuster), but how to introduce a cut or absence in the massive ballast of already existing things.  How to do ‘less’ with the ‘more’ of the world, or, if I can be forgiven this pun, how to lester it.  According to the Jewish doctrine of Tsimtsum, God created the world via a movement of self-contraction: in order for the world to emerge God first of all had to withdraw a part of Himself, to give up some of His all-encompassing Being, lest there be no space for anything to come into existence whatsoever.  Far from the world miraculously emerging from the void, the void itself is something to be actively produced.  What is fascinating about this mystical ontology is the way it puts negation at the very heart of creation.  The emergence of something new depends on the preliminary work of clearing away, of carving out a space in a universe that is already supersaturated, too full, too present, too much – the birth pangs of the new correspond precisely to the difficulty of this negative labor.  This particular understanding of the creative act has not escaped the attention of artists and philosophers.  Indeed, two of the most famous artistic pronouncements of modern times, Mallarm√©’s “Destruction was my Beatrice,” and Picasso’s “A picture is a sum of destructions,” point precisely to such a subtractive aesthetic.  Gilles Deleuze’s definition of painting is here exemplary: “the painter’s problem is not how to enter into the canvas… but how to get out of it.” (1) What does he mean by this?  Before any pigment has touched the painting’s surface, the canvas in a way already contains “everything [the artist] has in his head or around him,” (2) an amalgam of vague images, possibilities and visual clichés, so that the task of painting is to cut a path through the chaos.  (Balzac’s story “The Unknown Masterpiece,” one of the great programmatic texts of artistic modernity, spells out the dire consequences for the artist unable to find his way out of the canvas…)  Along similar lines, in her description of the writing process Marguerite Duras states, “What you’re going to write is already there in the darkness.”  Before the work of writing proper, a ‘pre-written’ text of amorphous ideas, half-formed phrases, and habitual formulas is already swirling about in the writer’s head, a kind of “black block” that must be broken up, pulverized if the sentences and paragraphs of the written piece are to take shape and become legible.  “I’m in the middle, and I seize the mass that’s already there, move it about, smash it up – it’s almost a question of muscles, of physical dexterity.” (3) To grasp what is at stake in this process, one needs to reverse that humdrum metaphysics which defines creation in terms of addition or filling in a void; on the contrary, the artist begins with an excess and his work is that of smashing up, stripping away, cutting through, getting out.  All artists are escape artists.

In the case of Gabriel Lester, the kind of cutting involved in his work is paradigmatically cinematic.  That Lester’s work is intimately connected with film has often been noted, and the artist himself has evinced some interest as a filmmaker in his video pieces.  Travel Without A Course (2004), for example, offers a kind of ‘portrait of the artist as a young screenwriter’, narrating an autobiographical journey to ex-Soviet Georgia where Lester intended to hole up with an old typewriter and knock out a script.  The string of wayward encounters that follows recalls the meandering character of another video, All Wrong (2005).  This short movie recounts the exploits of what is known in the psychoanalytic literature as a ‘normal psychotic’, a perfectly well-adapted person who floats through life without any inner psychological core, an actor with no existence outside his roles.  The piece is remarkable for its novel use of the now standard practices of sampling and remixing: all the images in the video were found on the internet via various search engines and later edited together to illustrate the story.  Here form and content go together, the amoral adventures of the movie’s main character imitating the aleatory wanderings of the typical internet surfer.  Beyond these more overt video experiments, however, it is primarily the installations that address the question of the nature of cinema, breaking down and re-deploying its different constituent elements and techniques.  Unlike many contemporary artists who use film as the starting point for their practice, re-cutting existing movies, replaying them under modified conditions, making videos in the margins of classic films, and so on, Lester works on a much more formal level.  For him film is not a given material to be manipulated, a privileged part of the daily spectacle, but first and foremost a way of seeing.  Indeed, Lester’s installation work might well be considered a post-cinematic art, that is, an art that has been shaped and formed by a distinctly filmic kind of perception, one made by a film-lover who has grown up with the movies.

How To Act (2000), Lester’s first and arguably still most visually impressive installation, described by the artist as a “dramatic light edit,” treats projected light as an autonomous element with its own rhythms and configurations.  The effect of the piece is akin to seeing the luminous patterns and random flashes emitted by a TV set in a dark room; without knowing what images they correspond to, the dance of lights takes on a life of its own.  How To Act presents a kind of zero-degree cinema, doing away with the ‘moving picture’ or film qua imaged story.  What remains is the flicker of the screen, accompanied by soundtracks taken from old VHS tapes, now calibrated and choreographed as an independent work.  Through this reduction the installation provides a kind of anamorphotic view on the movies, a look unable to make out the figures on the silver screen but entranced by the abstract light blobs that they are.  Habitat Sequences (2000) plays as well with the possibilities of lighting, this time in relation to a fixed set whose physiognomy radically changes as it is differently lit.  A standard living room appears like a crime scene in some hardboiled detective story or the setting for a lovers’ tryst as strategically positioned lamps switch on and off, revealing multiple and sometimes contradictory surroundings: a cozy corner here, a menacing emptiness there, a phone about to ring with an urgent message, a washed out overview, a tiny light burning in the darkness.  There is definitely something cold and calculated about this work, almost mathematical in its precision, as it enumerates the possible permutations of mood and feeling enabled by alternate lightings.  Rosemary’s Baby (2002) achieves a similar ‘sequencing’ effect though without the use of lights.  A room is sealed off, inaccessible to the spectator, save for cuts in the walls that permit six different views into its interior.  Lester’s reference is to the mysterious second apartment in Polanski’s film, behind Mia Farrow and John Cassavetes’s, where the satanic intrigues take place.  Just as the space of this apartment is hinted at throughout the movie yet always partially out-of-frame, so too can Lester’s room only be peeped into.  The voyeurism is heightened by the room’s disheveled d√©cor, looking as if ransacked by a burglar or wrecked in a domestic dispute: someone has been here before.  Altar (2001) and Cross Section (2006) employ the same cutting technique, the former consisting of a pub divided by wooden sheets into separate lanes, the latter a building with slices take out of it allowing for different peeks inside its network of rooms and corridors.  Lester cuts a room as if it were a film, and many of his installation works can be conceived as spatial edits, introducing temporal movement to an otherwise fixed or static environment. 

In one of his essays André Bazin argued for a “mixed” cinema, that is, for a cinema that would be enriched by its borrowings from the other arts. (4) Alain Badiou, taking up and radicalizing this thesis, describes cinema as “an impure art,” “the ‘plus-one’ of the arts, both parasitic and inconsistent.” (5) For Badiou cinema is an inherently hybrid medium, taking from theater, literature, music, painting, and so on, without having a ‘proper’ domain.  “Cinema is the seventh art in a very particular sense.  It does not add itself to the other six while remaining on the same level as them.  Rather, its implies them […] It operates on the other arts, using them as its starting point, in a movement that subtracts them from themselves.” (6) What is unique to cinema is the way that it mobilizes the different arts so that they become contaminated with one another, thus creating an impure, heterogeneous space: a supplement or a ‘plus-one’, not a Gesamtkunstwerk-style synthesis.  What Lester does is retranslate the impurity characteristic of cinema back into the realm of the plastic arts.   His installations isolate and examine different component elements of film like lighting, set design, music, and image, while subjecting them to a cinematic treatment (cutting, multiple takes, frame/out-of-frame tension, etc.).  In my mind, the two works that best exemplify this technique are Clock & Clockwork (2003) and Highlight (plan B) (2004).  The first involves a modish waiting room with a rotating wall – an old horror movie trick – that opens onto an eerily antiseptic clinical setting, a labyrinth of waist high tables with glass and metal partitions.  The installation’s menacing yet pristine aesthetics is an homage, according to the artist, to Kafka and Cronenberg.  The two versions of the waiting room (one brightly lit with a white cubical bookcase, the other with softer yellow lighting and chic wooden armoire) explore in a way similar to Habitat Sequences the effects of lighting on the creation of a space.  Even more than the latter, Clock & Clockwork feels like a virtual movie set, the backdrop for an imaginary, non-existent film, with small objects placed on the immaculate laboratory tables – a sponge, a pencil – suggesting elements of a story that remains untold.  Following a certain modernist logic, Lester’s installations evoke a hole or an absence, a missing film, an unknown narrative, a mystery figure, multiple perspectives that don’t add up.  If Clock & Clockwork conjures a quasi-cinematic atmosphere, Highlight (plan B) deals with the cinematic apparatus itself.  The viewer was first stuck by the impressive appearance of the object in the main hall of Brussels’s Palais des Beaux Arts: a cantankerous yet sleekly designed white machine, consisting of a large L-shaped support with multiple rectangular tubes jutting out the front.  The tubes function as periscopes, cutting up reality on the other side of the machine into small viewable chunks and vertically displacing them via a system of meticulously calibrated tilted mirrors.  You bend down and peer into the screen at your feet to see the designs on the ceiling; at eye level you view the tiles on the floor. (This inverted universe of mirror reflections is also reflected in the thin mirror strips that Lester discreetly attached to the sides of the columns in the hall).  An escape artist is above all an illusionist, a trickster like Houdini, and here Lester’s funky contraption charms his audience even though its trickery is perfectly transparent.  What is especially remarkable about Highlight (plan B) is the contrast between the elegance and simplicity of its visual illusion and the massive presence (even ugliness) of the technical apparatus needed to produce it – so great a device for such a rudimentary trick!  It is as if the material correlate of the transformation of the real into images was this huge stain in reality itself.  This is, of course, highly ironical, since today the means of technological reproduction have shrunk to tiny, pocketable proportions, while the capacity for image manipulation has become nearly infinite.

The Gabriel Lester publication is available at www.ftn-books.com

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Sigurdur Gudmundsson (continued)

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Just a simple message today…. I have added the very best book on Sigurdur Gudmundsson to my inventory. Published by Zsa Zsa Eyck who presented Gudmundsson several times in her gallery. A very large publication with over 300 pages and arguably the very best and most important book on the artist.

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René Daniëls ( continued )

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Over 3 years ago I published my first blog on René Daniëls, who I consider to be one of the great dutch artist from the last century. It took me some time but  I now have the most important publications on René Daniëls in my inventory. recently I have added Lentebloesem (1990) and The words are not in their proper place (2011). These together with the van Abbemuseum publications makes the best collection of René Daniëls. possible. All books are now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Gerald van der Kaap (1959)

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Of course I can tell you that since his breakthrough exhibition HOVER HOVER at the Stedelijk Museum ( catalogue available at www.ftn-books.com) the conceptual works by Gerald van der Kaap have been shown all over the world and that he received public acclaim for practically all his installations and projects. Everything he takes up turns into a work of art. Whether it is a book, museum catalogue, Video, record or print everything turns into something special. Best is to show you what I mean with presenting two links.

the first the Gerald van der Kaap site at : https://www.geraldvanderkaap.com/

and the second at the Hollandsche Meesters series which devoted one of his video to Gerald van der Kaap:

 

these 2 books are among others at this moment available:

 

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Chris Evans (1967)

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This article on Chris Evans comes from FRIEZE. He is one of the younger artists to feature in this daily FTN blog.

Artistic processes that involve commissioning others to produce work have often been fraught with unease. From the confused parameters of collaborative authorship to the unforeseen conflicts of interest that frequently arise, it is often difficult to sidestep the undercurrents of exploitation that vex this field of practice. One might imagine that in order to work with or within the corporate sector, an artist might need a degree of brashness and swagger. We might assume that he or she is intent on agitating, exposing or critiquing institutional structures. But what if, as in the work of British artist Chris Evans, this could be a far more generous proposition than preconceptions might suggest? ‘Clerk of Mind’ – Evans’s first solo exhibition in Ireland – highlighted the artist’s role as facilitator and translator between seemingly incongruous specialist fields, including international political relations and high-end jewellery design.

Praxes Center for Contemporary Art

Sensitively curated by Kate Strain, the show comprised the reconfiguration of three existing artworks never presented together before. Plans are currently underway for Project Arts Centre to commission new work by Evans in response to the Irish context. Probing the vehicle of co-authorship, CLODS, Diplomatic Letters (2012–ongoing) is a series of drawings of invasive plant species, sketched by invited members of the international diplomatic community, which were subsequently photographed by Evans, inverted and then printed as silver bromides. The tentative, almost courteous quality of the diplomats’ lines contrasted robustly with Evans’s cement and marble sculptural clods, and the slippery strips of PVC matting arranged across floor-level, custom-made platforms. Punctured with boreholes, the clods seemed to memorialize the negative space left behind when weeds are pulled from the ground. As co-authored works, these art objects are remnants of exchanges that remain partially hidden – an aesthetic in keeping with the wider curatorial approach at Project, which often presents the residual artefacts of earlier interventions in the gallery or elsewhere. In a similar vein, the textual remains of corporate negotiations featured in Evans’s concurrent exhibition ‘Untitled (Drippy Etiquette)’ at Piper Keys, London, which presented correspondence relating to the proposed rebranding of a dwindling socialist newspaper.

A Needle Walks into a Haystack (2014), named after the main exhibition at last year’s Liverpool Biennial, for which it was commissioned, comprises a vitrine housing a jemonite base and a dazzling, jewel-encrusted ring, crafted at Evans’s invitation, by high-end jewellers Boodles. The impish features of a golden ‘flowergirl’ are discernible amidst the ring’s glittering frondescence. Given that companies like Boodles might typically sponsor biennials or similar events, Evans proposed an alternative form of exchange, probing the space where art meets patronage. His design brief requested the creation of a piece of jewellery in response to the biennial’s press release – a rather excessive promotional statement including the key words ‘intimate’ and ‘domesticity’ – upon which the jewellers based their response, as explained in the literature accompanying ‘Clerk of Mind’. Mindful of their existing clientele and general perceptions of luxury brands, Boodles carefully scrutinized the terminology used to define the parameters of the commission. Treating the ring as an ‘artwork’ necessitated a contractual agreement outlining its shared ownership, the fact that it cannot be sold as a piece of jewellery and future transportation arrangements, to be implemented by Boodles’ own couriers.

As overseer of this kind of co-production, Evans acts as functionary (or ‘clerk’) – tracking the thoughts and intentions of his collaborators, while administering the practical arrangements and textual material which support the process. The artist has stated that he harbours no intention to critique particular groups, institutions or procedures; instead he hopes to forge relationships built on trust with figures whom he perceives to be especially misunderstood by the art world. Though the artworks are ultimately credited to Evans, the fact that he makes very visible the cooperative processes that lead to their production is an attempt to invalidate Romantic claims about the artist as ‘lone producer’ or ‘creative genius’. Conversely, Evans focuses on the capacity of artists to engage with a range of institutional, commercial and bureaucratic frameworks in a continuous process of reciprocal exchange. www.ftn-books.com has one Evans title available. The “Goofy Audit” is a future classic.

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Theo Schepens (1961)

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A key element in the works by Theo Schepens is “balance”. A physical balance but also a spiritual balance between man and women. The result sculptures of male and female figurines interacting with each other taking poses in which they try to find and hold their balance. It all starts with the smallest and extremely speedy sketches he makes and then uses these as a starting point for his sculptures.

These sculptures have a rare quality. These do not take any effort to understand the meaning of the artist and the world he has created with them is highly recognizable. since his figurines have not changed for over 30 years. The males and females in his sculptures still look the same as 30 years ago, but what has remained is the timeless quality of his sculptures. This is he kind of art that children will interact with when they see it for the first time and remember it because of the shiny quality and the highly understandable action they are in. Kissing on horses, on a wire and even love making . all these actions come along . Schepens has created a “shiny” world in aluminium to love.

 

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Reinoud van Vught (1960)

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It must have been around 1990 when I first heard about Reinoud van Vught. Not because I saw work of him, but because during that period I met marc Mulders and because of a publication we were selling by Mulders in which the other painters of the Tilburgse School were included I, for the first time, some work by van Vught. (Geelen, van Dongen and Zuurmond are the other painters from the Tilburgse School).

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de Tilburgse School

What makes van Vught and Mulders stand out for me is that their works from a distance are realistic, but…..come close by and they transform into pure abstract works of art. Powerful, paintings and drawings. In these works, many natural elements find their way into its composition. Flowers, branches, animals and birds are present. The tree trunks and branches have found their way in a series of oil paintings on paper which was presented at the Museum ‘t Coopmanhus in Franeker in May/June 2000.

An impressive series which catalogue is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Berlinde de Bruyckere (1964)

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For me Berlinde de Bruyckere stands for “poetic discomfort”.

The first time I encountered a work by de Bruyckere was the very fragile “donkey” Sculpture which is in the Caldenborgh collection. In the middle of the woods from his estate, the sculpture can be found on a semi-open space between wood and leaves. Made from lead and highly detailed this shows that the lead is soft, fragile and shows the vulnerability of the composition and the materials.

The second time was when a sculpture by de Bruyckere was presented in a showcase together with the walls hung with magnificent Bacon paintings in one of the rooms of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. It was a rare occasion that these two great artists were combined and I rarely have seen a more impressive and beautiful presentation of both these great artists.

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She makes three-dimensional sculptures, installations and aquarelles. Her older work has a minimalist character. Steel, stone and glass were her materials of choice. Gradually she leaves abstract motifs to seek recourse in recognisable forms and things, introducing the blanket, malleable lead and straw as materials.

More recently, she has extended her personal iconography with striking sculptures of (stuffed) horses and giant (once-) cuddly animals. The beauty of the materials she uses always has something of the fatal in it. The blankets in her sculptures protect and suffocate, the lead roses seduce and poison, the carpet of begonias bear witness to bloom and decay. She intentionally uses familiar forms to inspire thinking in viewers, to provide them with memories. Her preference lies with materials and forms that mirror ambiguity, something characteristic of the human experience. Beneath the delicate and sometimes deceptively endearing skin of her work is a yawning abyss. Death, fear and loneliness are recurrent themes, though never disconnected from life, love and beauty. Despite the great formal diversity of her works, there is a common thread running throughout her oeuvre in terms of choice of materials, techniques and the repeating of symbols and motifs.

Aside from her three-dimensional works, the artist has also always put her ideas on paper. These works (drawings and aquarelles, or aquarelle and gouache combined on old paper or cardboard) are often preparatory material for the sculptures but are autonomous works in themselves. Berlinde De Bruyckere does not impose ‘the’ interpretation of her works. She consciously leaves the door open for diverse understandings.

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www.ftn-books.com has now the book available which was published on the occasion of the 55th Biennale di Venezia. Text by J.M. Coetzee and of course the photographs on the installation by de Bruycker