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Domenico Bianchi (1955)

Bianchi seeks the harmony of the elements by identifying the spatial dimension that emerges naturally from the combination of lines, shapes and volumes, emerging from the exaltation of material, its manipulation and essence properties that are the origin of true expression in the artist’s work. To do. From sophisticated research-driven combinations. The two monumental marble seats were originally designed in the cloister of the 17th-century Donna Regina Vecchia church to match its rich Baroque style, but are now recreated in his 18th-century Madre atrium. arranged to emphasize its typical neoclassical lines. At the same time, it proposes a new definition of space, an invitation to linger and contemplate. Beyond direct references to the art historical tradition, these two works raise questions related to the spatial and structural purpose of the work and its relationship to its surroundings, and are evocative and sensitive. It is symbolic of the way an artist works because it lives in the work in a way.

www.ftn-books.com has several Bianchi books available.

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Adela Rodix / ADELA (1947)

Adela Rodix is an artist, thinker, writer. She exhibits her works of art in leading galleries in Europe and America, such as Galerie Maeght. In her artistic career she is also known as Adela, R.D. Adela and Adela R. Duflos.
She has a degree in History. Adela has also been a fashion and advertising model. From a Spanish-French family, she has been living in different countries, feeling herself as a pilgrim, a traveler. She lived for many years in Barcelona, Spain, and now she lives between Warsaw, Buenos Aires, Madrid and New York. She is also author of Light of Cultronia.
Her new book The Weary Angel. will come in september 2022.

WWW.FTN-BOOKS.COM has the Maeght edition form 1993 now available.

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Elly Strik (1961)

Elly Strick lives and works in Brussels and started teaching at the age of 25. She herself studied at the Academy in Groningen and at the Academy in Minerva and Jan van Eyck in Maastricht.
She specializes in working on paper and uses mainly materials such as graphite, pigments and oil paints, but she also uses wood stove ash and silver and gold leaf to achieve proper alchemy. increase. For them, the potential for transformation underlies our existence. Her exploration of human nature combines a visual language that is both poetic and radical. Ellie Strick held a solo exhibition at MHKA in Antwerp (B, 1999). De Pont, Tilburg (Netherlands, 2006). Van Abbe Museum, Eindhoven (Netherlands, 2006). Mainz Museum (Germany, 2012). Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid (Spain, 2014) and 1700 La Poste, Montreal (California, 2018).
Her work has won the Philip Her Morris Award, the Charlotte Koehler Award and the Jeanne Austing Award.

www.ftn-books.com has some very interesting Elly Strik titles available.

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Kijkduin an unknown artist village near DEN HAAG

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Kijkduin has became part of the City of Den Haag, but in its early years of its existence around 1920 it became part of a large plan . a new villa park  was planned. #Meer en BOSCH # was to become an exclusive part of the city near dunes and sea with architecture of the very best of dutch architects and best of all…..yes…. a large part of the original plans were realised, but Kijkduin is still unknown by the majority of architecture fans and vistors to Den Haag. Villa’s by Duiker made this one of the most wanted and exclusive parts of Den Haag and surroundings and very well worth a visit and a walk in the park and after a walk on the beach and for those who visit Kijkduin and still not tired please walk another 500 meters to the HEMELS GEWELF by James Turrell.

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A nice small book published by ARTOTEEK is now availabel at http://www.ftn-books.com. It tells the story of the artist village KIJKDUIN in the Interbellum

kijkduin bezield dorp

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Natasja Kensmil (1973)

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Natasja Kensmil is one of those talents that emerged in the last 10 years and proved tobe highly important for modern art. Her art is personal and her style can not be compared to anyone else’s. If any….. i immediately though of Basquiat, but these paintings and drawings by Kensmil practically all tell a story or contain a message for the viewer. Her series of REGENTEN PORTRAITS  is a tribute to women who held a position in boards and committees who took care of the old and sick. It was not possible for women to hold a position within a company or government , but these woman made charity in these years possible and took care of the old and sick in society.Schermafbeelding 2021-08-16 om 14.07.56

Another multi panelled work is the “HUWELIJKS PORTRET VAN JOHANDE WITT AND WENDELA BICKER “. Natasja Kensmill forces us to look at our (not so nice) history and beside the importance of the art itself it makes us aware of the message too.

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The book i now have for sale at http://www.ftn-books.com is different. Personal, horror like drawings bound and published by Boekhandel Broekhuis in 2003. Edition of only 500 copies, this book already shows the attraction of Kensmil’s drawing. They attract and repel at the same time. This is the kind of art one must admire and i will be on thelook out for work by Kensmil for our collection.

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John Szarkowski (1925-2007)

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Perhaps Szarkowski was more know for being curator at MOMA then for being one of the greatest photographers from last century.  Here is part of the text the Guardian place shortly after he had passed away.

Szarkowski was a good photographer, a great critic and an extraordinary curator. One could argue that he was the single most important force in American post-war photography.

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Like all good critics and curators, Szarkowski was both visionary and catalyst. When he succeeded the esteemed photographer Edward Steichen as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962, he was just 36, and must have been acutely aware of the long shadow cast by his predecessor. Steichen had curated the monumental group exhibition, The Family of Man, at Moma in 1955, which he described as ‘the culmination of his career”. Featuring 503 images by 273 photographers, famous and unknown, it had aimed to show the universality of human experience: death, love, childhood. The show had drawn huge crowds to the gallery and then toured the world, attracting an estimated 9 million viewers.

It was, as Steichen had no doubt intended, a hard act to follow. “We were different people”, Szarkowski later said, “with different talents, characters, limitations, histories, problems and axes to grind. We held the same job at very different times, which means that it was not really the same job.”

More revealingly, Szarkowski also said that Steichen and his predecessor, Beaumont Newhall, “consciously or otherwise, felt more compelled than I to be advocates for photography, whereas I – largely because of their work – could assume a more analytic, less apostolic attitude.” That difference in approach would prove to be a crucial one, and it underpinned a new photographic aesthetic that continues to shape our view of the world to this day.

When Szarkowski took over at Moma, there was not a single commercial gallery exhibiting photography in New York and, despite Steichen and Newhall’s pioneering work, the form had still not been accepted by most curators or critics. Szarkowski changed all that. He was the right person in the right place at the right time: a forward thinker who was given control of a major art institution at a moment when his democratic vision chimed with the rapidly changing cultural tastes of the time.

Szarkowski insisted on the democracy of the image, whether it be a formally composed Ansel Adams landscape, a snatched shot that caught the frenetic cut-and-thrust of a modern city or a vernacular subject like a road sign or a parking lot. “A skillful photographer can photograph anything well,” he once insisted.

In his still-challenging book, The Photographer’s Eye (1964), Szarkowski included snapshots alongside images by great photographers, and argued – brilliantly – that photography differed from any other art form because its history had been “less a journey than a growth”. “Its movement has not been linear and consecutive but centrifugal,” he suggested. “Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a centre; it has, by infusion, penetrated our consciousness. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.”

szarkowski a

www.ftn-books.com has the Szarkowski /Josef Albers Museum available

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A Willem Sandberg Xmas card

I found this picture at the Herb Lubalin center who has this in its collection. A very nice and typical Willem Sandberg card to wish you a Merry Christmas in 1958.

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an old wish, but a new one from me….. a Merry Christmas 2021

 

Many Sandberg and Lubalin items are available at www.ftn-books.com

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Martijn Sandberg (1967)

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Just a simple blog on a great artist and his ideas . I admire Martijn Sandberg for his art. Every few month i look at his site and find some new works that fascinate me . Just take a dive into Martijn’s ideas and visit the link below. An internet related project by Martijn Sandberg. An art work he exclusively made available on the internet

http://www.msandberg.nl/noimageavailable/

Martijn Sandberg ‘Image Messages’The work of Amsterdam based visual artist Martijn Sandberg (1967) constantly explores border areas, such as the tension between text and image, illegible into legible, the private and the public domain. ”I make Image Messages, image is message is image.” The image hides the message.
In the cut paintings, such as ‘Sorry No Image Yet’ and ‘Im Westen Nichts Neues’, there is a subtle play between the language of the image and the significance of the image, and this gives rise to questions. Here, even the lack of image seems to be elevated to an image by the artist.


The direct relationship between the image, the material bearing the image and the environment is also expressed in his site-specific works in public space and architecture. As in the ‘De Oude Weg Naar De Nieuwe Tijd’ artwork, integrated as a brick relief in the walls of the gates and the pavement of the Spaarndammerhart building, Amsterdam. Or in the sculpture ‘I Will Survive’ located at the border of a burial ground in Hardenberg, The Netherlands.

BTW. For those interested in the editions by Martijn Sandberg please visit his shop at :

http://www.msandberg.nl/shop.php?shop=yes

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Helvetica (1957)

Max MIedinger

Here is in short the story on one of the greatest and most popular typefaces from the last 100 years….HELVETICA by Max Miedinger.
Helvetica is one of the most famous and popular typefaces in the world. It lends an air of lucid efficiency to any typographic message with its clean, no-nonsense shapes. The original typeface was called Neue Haas Grotesk, and was designed in 1957 by Max Miedinger for the Haas’sche Schriftgiesserei (Haas Type Foundry) in Switzerland. In 1960 the name was changed to Helvetica (an adaptation of Helvetia”, the Latin name for Switzerland).

Over the years, the original Helvetica family was expanded to include many different weights, but these were not as well coordinated with each other as they might have been. In 1983, D. Stempel AG and Linotype re-designed and digitized Neue Helvetica and updated it into a cohesive font family. At the beginning of the 21st Century, Linotype again released an updated design of Helvetica, the Helvetica World typeface family. This family is much smaller in terms of its number of fonts, but each font makes up for this in terms of language support. Helvetica World supports a number of languages and writing systems from all over the globe.

Helvetica World, an update to the classic Helvetica design using the OpenType font format, contains the following Microsoft code pages:
1252 Latin 1,
1250 Latin 2 Eastern,
1251 Cyrillic,
1253 Greek,
1254 Turk,
1255 Hebrew,
1256 Arabic,
1257 Windows Baltic,
1258 Windows Vietnamese,
as well as a mixture of box drawing element glyphs and mathematical symbols & operators.
In total, each weight of Helvetica World contains 1866 different glyph characters!

Many customers ask us what good non-Latin typefaces can be mixed with Helvetica World. Fortunately, Helvetica World already includes Greek, Cyrillic and a specially-designed Hebrew in its OpenType character set. But Linotype also offers a number of CJK fonts that can be matched with Helvetica World.

Helvetica didn’t start out with that name. The story of Helvetica began in the fall of 1956 in the small Swiss town of Münchenstein. This is where Eduard Hoffmann, managing director of the Haas Type Foundry, commissioned Max Miedinger to draw a typeface that would unseat a popular family offered by one his company’s competitors.

Miedinger, who was an artist and graphic designer before training as a typesetter, came up with a design based on Hoffmann’s instructions, and by the summer or 1957, produced a new sans serif typeface which was given the name “Neue Haas Grotesk.” Simply translated this meant “New Haas Sans Serif.”

 

The Stempel type foundry, the parent company of Haas, decided to offer the design to its customers in Germany, where Stempel was based. The company, however, felt it would be too difficult to market a new face under another foundry’s name and looked for one that would embody the spirit and heritage of the face. The two companies settled on “Helvetica,” which was a close approximation of “Helvetia,” the Latin name for Switzerland. (“Helvetia” was not chosen because a Swiss sewing machine company and an insurance firm had already taken the name.)

Over the years, the Helvetica family was expanded to encompass an extensive selection of weights and proportions and has been adapted for every typesetting technology.

Helvetica is among the most widely used sans serif typefaces and has been a popular choice for corporate logos, including those for 3M, American Airlines, American Apparel, BMW, Jeep, JCPenney, Lufthansa, Microsoft, Mitsubishi Electric, Orange, Target, Toyota, Panasonic, Motorola, Kawasaki and Verizon Wireless. Apple has incorporated Helvetica in the iOS® platform and the iPod® device. Helvetica is widely used by the U.S. government, most notably on federal income tax forms, and NASA selected the type for the space shuttle orbiters.

 

One of the greatest books. Published in Japan on the Helvetica is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Paul Blanca (1958-2021)

Paul Blanca

Last Saturday dutch photographer Paul Blaca died. His body was worn out after years of drug and alcohol abuse. Without Blanca dutch photography would have been half as interesting as it is now. He was self taught and discovered and explored portrait photography in a very special and own way, transforming it and perfecting it into his preferred form of photography.

the following text comes from the Paul Blanca site:

Paul Blanca (1958) is a Dutch self-taught photographer who started with a Canon F1 and later switched to a 6×6 cm Haselblad camera. In the 80s he created a series of violent self-portraits inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 – 1989) and Andres Serrano. Mapplethorpe introduced Blanca into the art world to artists like Grace Jones and Keith Haring stating “Paul Blanca is my only competitor”. Mapplethorpe’s favourite was Blanca’s self-portrait ‘Mother and Son’.

Hans van Maanen and Erwin Olaf call Paul Blanca the photographer of emotion. That ties in with his work. His self-portraits run like a thread through his overall work. For some things you can’t ask a model. For example, to hit a nail through someone’s hand. And like the self-portrait Mickey Mouse. In which a smiling Mickey Mouse is carved into his back with a thumb up.

For his series ‘Par la Pluie des Femmes’ women were captured in tears by thinking of their most traumatic experience. When he lived in Spain for 2 years, he stood with his camera at the front of the Spanish bullfighting arena. This resulted in the portfolio Sangre de Toro (Blood of the Bull): silk-screen prints with Bull’s blood.

In the beginning of the 90s he photographed the facial expression of speedball hookers for the series ‘Wit en Bruin’. Speedball is a very dangerous mixture of cocaine with heroin or morphine and has a substantial risk of overdose.

In the series ‘Deformation’ he was inspired by Rob Leer‘s SM scene. Models mutulated by fishline and hanging in the air, supported by the same fishline. This series was made for Amsterdam International Fashion Week (AIFW), in collaboration with fashion designer Hester Slaman, and exposed in Apart Gallery Amsterdam.

With the series ‘Kristal’ and ‘Mi Matties’ he had a double exhibition at Witzenhausen Gallery in 2008. Kristal is a series about the sweet and the bitter in relation with women. Presented in Witzenhausen Gallery Amsterdam in 2008. Mi Matties (my friends) is a series made in one of the neighborhoods of old Amsterdam. The portraits show young men who are presenting themselves as a group, sort of a gang.

In 2014 he created a self-portrait ‘Mother and Son’, 32 years after the first self-portrait, where he carries his mother, just like he carried her to bed for 4 years because she couldn‘t walk.