Piet Dirkx cigarbox 221
Piet Dirkx daily ..221
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 221
Ettore Sottsass (1917-2007) ,first retrospective in the Netherlands in April-October 2018
Ettore Sottsass was one of the founding members of the Memphis group in 1981. He made some iconic designs for Alessi and Artemide and now is announced that a large retrospective will be held in the Stedelijk Museum in the April-October period in 2018 Prepare your self for this exhibition and look at the books available on Sottsass at www.ftn-books.com
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Piet Dirkx daily ..220
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 220
Anton Martineau (1926-2017)
Yesterday, AntonMartineau died. He proclaimed himself the last of a great generation , together with Appel and Lucebert ( personal friends) he became known as an abstract painter, but never belonged to the Cobra movement. Born in the middle of the Red Light district in Amsterdam a fortuneteller told him in his early youth that he would become a painter and a writer. He studied with one of the great designers in these days Paul Schuitema and was successful both as a painter and a writer. www.ftn-books.com has only one title of this fascinating artist available , but it is an important one. It contains both poetry and drawings by this great dutch artist.
The little documentary on Youtube is in dutch , but shows what a wonderful and colorful Martineau was
Piet Dirkx daily ..219
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 219
Marjolein Bastin (1943)
This morning i had a discussion with my wife about the qualities of the illustrations by Marjolein Bastin. Is it art?….NO…are these among the best illustrations one can find on nature and birds….YES. Bastin has become world famous over the years and her works are published all over the world and she even had a Museum presentation in Den Bosch, but this exhibition does not make it art. Specially her series of cards for Hallmark contributed largely to her fame. Her craftsmanship is without a doubt of the highest quality and her subjects appeal to practically all, but because her works have a feminine touch they therefore mostly appeal to women. For me this is not art as i look at art, but i can respect the meaning of others on this subject. What i personally do like about Bastin’s works is her illustrations for children books. Her VERA series is great to read to young children and fascinating to look at and discover the little details in her drawings. Since i discovered that her works are admired and collected all over the world i started to build a large inventory of her classic publications in my store. So there are many Bastin titles available at
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www.ftn-books.com. Please have a look and use for this weekend the discount code BASTIN10 to receive an immediate discount on all your purchases.
Piet Dirkx daily ..218
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 218
Mario Merz (1925-2003)
This was the first photograph i encountered on the Net of Mario Merz and i instantly was frightened. Here is an angry man if ever there was one. Mario Merz works are on show in the van Abbemuseum and the Stedelijk Museum and at the time Rudi Fuchs was director of the Haags Gemeentemuseum , there was one work on loan. What struck me at that time was the lightness and transparency of the works. Larger sized and as a work of art these works were changing the rooms in which they were shown and interacting with the space they were presented in. There is a nice example of such a presentation in the Castello de Rivoli in Torino which first exhibitions were also curated by Rudi Fuchs.
These works take time for an art lover to be appreciated, but when you do so. There is no artist equal to Mario Merz and you forget about the “angry” old man in the photographs , but only see the sheer beauty of the works he created.
There ares ome nice examples of Mario Merz catalogues availabel at www.ftn-books.com including the first series of catalogues on the Castello di Rivoli project by Rudi Fuchs.
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Piet Dirkx daily ..217
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 217
Yves Klein (1928-1962)
Yesterday i learned from a dutch TV program (DWDD / De Wereld Draait Door) that there is a large Yves Klein retrospective in the BOZAR museum Brussels.
Yves Klein , touched many currents in Modern Art, even was one of the participants in ZERO, but eventually developed a style of his own using in many of his works the iconic BLUE color he developed. Was it zero, action painting or performance art? Today art lovers around the world can not answer these questions , but one can see for one self what fits most, because there is a great retrospective on his art in BOZAR/ Bruxelles until the 20th of August. His monochrome blue paintings are on show together with his action paintings of blue prints of female bodies. A great show and possibly a once in a lifetime chance to see many important Yves Klein works together.
Nowadays Klein paintings fetch record prices at auctions all over the world, but in one of his first shows In Krefeld in 1961 nothing was sold. This was followed by an unsuccessful opening at Leo Castelli’s Gallery, New York, in which Klein failed to sell a single painting. He stayed with Rotraut Uecker at the Chelsea Hotel for the duration of the exhibition; and, while there, he wrote the “Chelsea Hotel Manifesto”, a proclamation of the “multiplicity of new possibilities.” In part, the manifesto declared:
At present, I am particularly excited by “bad taste.” I have the deep feeling that there exists in the very essence of bad taste a power capable of creating those things situated far beyond what is traditionally termed “The Work of Art.” I wish to play with human feeling, with its “morbidity” in a cold and ferocious manner. Only very recently I have become a sort of gravedigger of art (oddly enough, I am using the very terms of my enemies). Some of my latest works have been coffins and tombs. During the same time I succeeded in painting with fire, using particularly powerful and searing gas flames, some of them measuring three to four meters high. I use these to bathe the surface of the painting in such a way that it registered the spontaneous trace of fire.
To prepare your self for the exhibition, know that over the decades excellent books on Klein were published. There are some available at www.ftn-books.com
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