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Bram van Velde (continued)

A special blog on a special artist on a very special publication.

Bram van Velde made this publication together with Pierre Hébey for one of the best publishers in the art world. This publication LE MOT “BUVETTE” was published by Yves Riviere and acquired by a longtime collector of his work at the publisher in 1975. Since it has been in his collection and now he made a request to me to sell this. Thre is only 1 other copy at this moment available and it will be a long time before this will appear on the market at a reasonable price. This 32 page publication comes in its original slipcase with the 2 sets of 4 signed and numbered lithographs. In Total 8 lithographs all signed and numbered 80/90. One set of 4 is printed on Arches paper , the other set of 4 is printed on Japon paper. Last month i photographed the set and was blown away with its quality. This is for me one of the best and most appealing sets from the 70’s i have ever encountered. The set is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Jouke Kleerebezem (1953)

With the touch screen as an interface and computer programs that translate and manipulate a simple pen stroke into a digital code, Kleerebezem rediscovered the primary expressive power of line, shape, and color. The frictionless digital liberation of his artistic handwriting proved to be the ultimate condition for the unrestrained lyricism and hybrid media use in his recent works, where he blends digital and analog methods together. Throughout the summer months, the artist works on new drawings, paintings, and (photo-)graphic works in the exhibition space. Through Instagram and his project’s own website, he reflects on the creative process and the context of the media used.

Digital formats also offer the work different modes of distribution and reception, such as through Instagram and self-publishing on the web. While under the title “Notes, Quotes, Provocations and Other Fair Use” between 1998 and 2005, he published his entire production on the internet without fail, in what was one of the first Dutch weblogs, analog and digital processes intersect in his recent work.

Kleerebezem’s imagination freely draws from both a direct and highly mediated experience of reality. The ways in which the world and reality are perceived, captured, “measured,” and represented in increasingly computerized media, shape our worldview and self-image. In Jouke Kleerebezem’s work, perception continuously falls apart only to be reassembled through improvisation, intertwining once again.

www.ftn-books.com has now several books on Kleerebezem available.

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Henri Jacobs (1957)

Since 2003, Henri Jacobs has dedicated himself to a continuous series of drawings that have become known as the Journal Drawings. Initially a project for his students, where they were instructed to draw whatever caught their eye or impressed them on a particular day, it has now become a method for his own artistic expression. The result is an ongoing collection of drawings, each one delving into new motives and forms before abandoning them to make way for new ideas and experimentation.

Jacobs’s drawings are a masterpiece of virtuosity, with a precise yet playful technique. The images range from abstract geometric and calligraphic shapes and patterns to stylized portraits, landscapes, and architectural forms. Often, there are references to art history and renowned artists such as Matisse and Jasper Johns, highlighting Jacobs’s deep understanding and appreciation for the art world. Ultimately, the Journal Drawings represent a continual process of creation, as Jacobs continually challenges himself to redefine and reinvent his craft through each drawing.

www.ftn-books.com has the van Abbemuseum catalog now available.

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Rodney Graham (1949)

For half a century, Rodney Graham meticulously weaved together the strands of cultural and intellectual history through the mediums of photography, film, music, performance, and painting. With a keen eye for wordplay and a penchant for allusions to literature and philosophy – be it the works of Lewis Carroll, Sigmund Freud, or Kurt Cobain – Graham spun cyclical stories that were peppered with his sardonic sense of humor, a nod to his roots in Vancouver’s post-punk scene of the late 1970s. In his nine-minute long piece, Vexation Island (1997), the artist assumes the role of a 17th-century sailor, discovered unconscious under a coconut tree with a visible bruise on his head. After eight and a half minutes, he awakens and shakes the tree, causing a coconut to fall and render him unconscious once again, triggering the repetition of the sequence. Graham reappears as a cowboy in How I Became a Ramblin’ Man (1999) and as both a city dandy and a country bumpkin in City Self/Country Self (2001) – fictitious characters perpetually trapped in an unending loop of actions. Drawing from his previous series of photographs featuring inverted oak trees, Graham’s fascination with dreamlike states and the ramblings of the unconscious are evident. As he puts it, “Inversion has a logic: you do not have to dig deep into modern physics to understand that the scientific perspective insists that the world is not truly what it seems. The eye sees a tree upside down before the brain rights it, just like how it appears to the glass back of my large format field camera.”

www.ftn-books.com has several scarce Graham publications available. Among them the 1989 van Abbemuseum catalog designed by Arlette Brouwers.

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Hendrik Johannes Jesse (1860)

Jesse hailed from a Leiden family and was the son of a pharmacist in Zaltbommel. Along with his two brothers and one sister, he attended the three-year HBS from 1874 to 1877. With the ambition of becoming an architect, he moved to his grandmother’s home in Leiden to explore more opportunities. Under the tutelage of carpenter/architect W. Kok and evening classes at Mathesis Scientiarum Genitrix, a technical school, he furthered his knowledge. After three years, he joined famous architect Gerlof Salm in Amsterdam as a junior draughtsman.

In 1882, Jesse began his studies at the Delft Polytechnic School where he was taught by E.H. Gugel, Adolf le Comte, and J.A. van der Kloes. His architectural career commenced in 1884 with the construction of the Nieuwe Kerk in Katwijk at the young age of 24. In 1890, he married Anna Adriana Meerburg, daughter of a shipowner, and they had two children: Jan Jesse, born in 1891, and Hendrik Johannes Jesse, born in 1905. Their youngest son, Henk Jesse, was the first Dutchman to make a radio connection with the United States at the age of 18 in 1923. He accomplished this feat from the family home, De Keet, which the architect designed and where he lived from 1906 until his death on February 11th, 1943.

www.ftn-bowww.ftn-books.comoks.com has the Nai publication on Jesse now available.

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Ina van Zyl (1971)

Ina van Zyl, born and raised in Ceres, South Africa, matriculated from Charlie Hofmeyr high school before studying art at the University of Stellenbosch from 1990 to 1994. During her time there, she became a regular contributor to Bitterkomix, an infamous Afrikaans comic magazine created by fellow students Joe Dog and Conrad Botes. Graduating with a BA in Fine Arts, with a focus on Drawing, she merged her studies in Graphic Design and Fine Arts.

Van Zyl’s journey to Amsterdam began in 1995 as a guest of the Thami Mnyele Foundation for a four-month residency. This led to her participation in the prestigious De Ateliers postgraduate program from 1996 to 1998, ultimately leading her to settle in the Netherlands. Van Zyl currently resides and works in Amsterdam.

Although her career began with comics, the foundation of her paintings today still centers around the same themes – feelings of claustrophobia, shame and humiliation, eroticism and sexuality, and the complexity of human connection, or lack thereof.

In her Amsterdam studio, van Zyl spends a majority of her time focusing on oil painting, which remains her primary medium. In addition to this, she also creates drawings, comics, watercolors, and occasionally ventures into printmaking.

In the Netherlands, van Zyl has been honored with various awards for her paintings and has had numerous exhibitions, both nationally and internationally. Three monographs have been published, showcasing her artwork. One of these, Fly on the Wall, features all of her comics from 1992 to 2000, accompanied by an introduction written by Dominic van den Boogerd.

www.ftn-books.com has the SHAME _ PIECES publication now available.

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Aldo van den Nieuwelaar ( 1944)

Born in Tilburg in 1944, van den Nieuwelaar studied at the Academy for Visual Arts in Breda. Before establishing his own studio in 1969, he worked for various architectural firms. Designer and architect Aldo van den Nieuwelaar was renowned for his creations of lamps, furniture, cabinets, and rugs. One year prior to becoming an independent designer, in 1968, Aldo van den Nieuwelaar designed an innovative series of fluorescent lamps where the light source served as the starting point. The shape of the light source determined the design of the different fixtures in the TC Series (Tubular Construction) with the TC-6 Circular Lamp being its most iconic symbol.

www.ftn-books.com has now a great poster with van den Nieuwelaar designs available.


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Herman Hertzberger (1932)

Herman Hertzberger is renowned as one of the most influential figures in international architecture over the past fifty years. He champions a contemporary, humane style of architecture that remains rooted in place and history, while also embracing innovative forms. Hertzberger is widely recognized as the foremost designer of schools, a genre for which his designs have single-handedly redefined. His groundbreaking designs for offices and workspaces often serve as the most compelling modern reinterpretation of this genre.

In this monograph, acclaimed architecture critic Robert McCarter delves into Hertzberger’s most significant works through a detailed analysis of the design process and underlying principles, particularly where they reflect Hertzberger’s integration of modern tradition, architectural history, and urban space experience.

Robert McCarter is an experienced architect, writer, and professor of architecture at Washington University in St. Louis. His monographs on Louis I. Kahn and Frank Lloyd Wright were both shortlisted for the 2006 International Book Awards of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA).

WWW.FTN-BOOKS.COM HAS NOW THE NAI PUBLICATION ” NOTATIONS” AVAILABLE.

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Marian Plug (1937)

My mother had aspired to become a painter, though it never quite materialized. Yet her originality and intense gaze were evident. On Sundays, she would assist my brother and me with painting, each of us on opposite sides of the table.

The training for art teachers, located in the gardens of the Rijksmuseum, was timeless. It was the second half of the 1950s, as if nothing was happening at all. It exuded contentment. We studied Dufy, memorized the floor plans of cathedrals, and took trips to Paris. In our art appreciation class, Mark Kolthoff taught us to observe the classics. After school, we would paint each other or hire a model. It was a thorough education, emanating a sense of calm. In the world of visual arts, it seemed as though nothing was happening. No Documenta or major American artists were making waves here. At the Stedelijk Museum, there was Tinguely, another example of complacency. Art had yet to become a mass-produced commodity. Of course, this peace and solidity were a strong foundation for the profession, but it took a long time to break free from them. For years, I continued to make beautiful etchings – on a shoemaker’s press from the Waterlooplein – with the feeling that I had all the time in the world.

My first exhibition was in 1963 at the Anne Frank House, organized by friends as encouragement after a long illness. The opening speech by Dick Hillenius was about dowsers, who reminded him of artists, myself included. What is made visible is different from what is seen. The artist sees more than others – ultraviolet, infrared, or inaudible knocking signals. At the end of the speech, there were sounds of whales in the sea.

Fortunately, the romantic image back then – that the artist sees more than others, pleasing as it may be for everyone – is now a thing of the past.

From an autobiographical note (1989).

www.ftn-books.com has several Marian Plug titles now available.

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Marijke van Warmerdam (1959)

In the beginning, Marijke van Warmerdam crafted sculptures encompassing a wide array of mediums: wood, plaster, metal, glass, textiles, and rubber. However, her artistic pursuits have since expanded to a diverse repertoire, incorporating video, photography, audiotape, silkscreen, and even wrapping paper and stickers. Through her commissions and installations, she delves into the realm of intangibility, boldly experimenting with concepts such as time and movement. This is most apparent in her 16-mm films, where she chooses and captures moments from life, setting them into fluid motion.

For instance, in “Handstand” (1992) a girl can be seen repeatedly performing a handstand, while in “Douche” (1995) a man stands under a shower, the actions playing out ad infinitum. The films are presented in a continuous loop, with no discernible beginning or end, seamlessly connecting the two. The duration between the return of the exact image is intentionally ambiguous, creating a mesmerizing rhythm that draws the viewer into the enthralling world of repetition. Observation turns into fixation, as the repetition conjures a sense of enchantment while simultaneously diminishing the significance of the actions being shown. Time simultaneously moves forward and stands still, as there is no overarching narrative to follow. The focus is on the process, not the storytelling.

Despite their close resemblance to reality, these short films exist in the realm of art, specifically in the museum setting. They are projected onto a white wall or screen within the exhibition space, rather than a typical movie theater. The projector is always visible, emphasizing the artifice of the medium. As a viewer, you physically move through the projections, further blurring the line between the art and reality. It’s as though you’re entering a liminal space, but never fully immersing yourself.

www.ftn-books.com has several van Warmerdam titles now available.