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Aki Kuroda (1944)

Born in 1944, Aki Kuroda relocated from Kyoto to Paris in 1970 to pursue his artistic calling. Through his early works, he showcased a mature and sensitive perception, garnering praise from art critics and collectors alike. As his art gained recognition, Kuroda’s exhibitions spanned the continents, exhibiting his pieces in Europe, the United States of America, and even across the globe in Chicago, the South of France, and at the Yugoslaia Museum of Modern Art. In 1976, his skill and talent were acknowledged with the prestigious European Painting Prize Ostende Belgium.

Kuroda’s first solo exhibition was held in 1978 in Bermerhaven, Germany, and he continued to showcase his works at the esteemed Galerie Maeght in Paris. As his reputation grew, his masterful pieces were also exhibited at other prominent European galleries, starting from the year 1980.

From the very beginning of his career, Kuroda has experimented with a diverse range of art forms, spanning from traditional drawing and photography to more contemporary forms such as painting and sculptural work. He has also delved into the world of theatre and opera, designing set pieces that showcase his artistic brilliance. Apart from this, he has also dabbled in editing magazines, creating installation works, and even performing live art pieces.

Kuroda’s almost metaphysical approach has resulted in his involvement in a variety of projects, such as his collaboration with renowned architect Tadao Ando in creating a mural for a residential building in Osaka, Japan. He has also worked with the Contemporary Museum of Art in Strasbourg, France, and in the 1990s he created captivating stage sets for the Paris Opera Ballet. In addition, he has lent his artistic vision to various prestigious projects, promoting the intellectual and aesthetic rigor of theatrical endeavors, often collaborating with universities. In 2003, he worked with Richard Rogers to design a theatre and education center in his hometown of Kyoto, Japan. For this project, he created masterful sculptural walls and murals, along with painting the theatre’s safety curtains and mosaic floors.

www.ftn-books.com has now the Maeght Barcelona catalog from1993 available.

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Patrick Fleury (1951)

Space-time and the interplay between the visible and the invisible are the two primary axes that define the essence of Patrick Fleury’s achievements. The dialogue between nature and the artworks that present themselves to it, plays with the rules of perspective and its illusions. The sun creates shadows that vanish into darkness, embodying the duality of day and night. These works exist both within the flow of time and outside of it.

www.ftn-books.com has a photo press set on a Fleury exhibition ow available.

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Rineke Marsman (1955)

Rineke Marsman’s paintings, created since 1996, are dominated by figures and portraits of children. After the discovery of the monumental book “Children’s Monument”, published in France and edited by Serge Klaasfeld, Lineke Marsman long used the photographs published there as a starting point for his paintings. Did. Not to achieve a moral effect, but rather to express the concept of impermanence in a certain way. This transience was achieved in two ways for her. One concerns the content of the work and the other concerns the painting techniques used. The photographs presented in the book have been copied onto the canvas as accurately as possible. She then paints the selected images, applying layers of transparent paint, often brushing them off, to create moments when presence and disappearance are visually integrated, sometimes in diffused light. I asked for it. We hope that the new images will evoke lasting memories through the sought-after mystical power. A new painting, if the painting is good, brought back memories as a moment of respect. This series ended in February 1999 when her almost complete series Le Memorial des Enfants was exhibited at the Van Her Riecum Museum in Apeldoorn. Her current work focuses on the possibilities of painting itself, and photographs of children remain the starting point for her paintings. They are still children and are destined to live unstable lives on the margins of society. Sometimes they disappeared without a trace or died. By combining abstractions such as flowerbeds and landscapes with new subjects in more complex paintings, the possibilities of painting expand and more complex content can be expressed.

www.ftn-books.com was lucky to acquire several Marsman titles.

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André Masson (1896-1987)

French painter, sculptor, illustrator, designer, and writer, born in Baragny (Oise). He spent most of his youth in Brussels, working as a pattern designer in an embroidery studio and also studying at the Acadu00e9mie des Beaux-Arts. He then moved to Paris and studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts from 1912 to 1914. He served in the French army from 1914 to 1919 and was seriously wounded. From 1919 to 1922 he lived in the south of France before returning to Paris, where he met Gris and Derain, and later Miru00f3 and Breton. In 1923, he held his first solo exhibition at Galerie Simon in Paris. He painted forests, card players, still lifes, and later experimented with automatic drawing. He participated in the Surrealist movement from 1924 to 1929. In addition to his sand paintings, he also created other works that explore the effects of chance, such as paintings depicting the transformation of animal and human forms, with an emphasis on violence and eroticism, and themes such as germination, combat, and slaughter. did. He lived in Spain from 1934 to 1936. He painted bullfights and Spanish mythology. From 1941 to 1945, he lived in exile in the United States in New Preston, Connecticut, where he created work inspired by the primal forces of nature. He returned to France in 1945 and in 1947 he settled in Provence. He painted landscape themes such as mountains and waterfalls for several years, after which he created several almost completely abstract paintings. His work also includes theater sets and costumes, book illustrations, and a series of small sculptures. He has written various books, including 1971’s  Mythologie d’Andre Masson.

www.ftn-books.com has several Masson titles available

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Henk van Putten(1936)

Henk van Putten (Amsterdam, 1936) trained at HTS and initially worked as a designer in various studios. In 1965 he founded his own consulting company. However, from his 1970s onwards, while living in Ibiza, he began to devote himself to art (although he could not help but design chairs and tables from time to time). He returned to the Netherlands in 1972, had his first solo exhibition at the Fodor Gallery in Amsterdam in 1978, and became a teacher at the Academy of Fine Arts. In 1980 he founded ‘Art Stable Amsterdam’, a loose group of artists (including Constant), which occasionally publishes its own magazine containing artistic reflections. Van Putten has since exhibited in many galleries, including abroad (Germany, Spain, Switzerland, Belgium, Guernsey) and had a retrospective exhibition at the Museum Commandery Van Sint Jan in Nijmegen. . Since 2001 he has lived and worked in India (Auroville) and exhibits there regularly.

www.ftn-books.com has several van Putten publications now available.

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Ni Pollok (1917-1985)

Adrian Jean Le Mayeur de Merpre was born in Brussels, Belgium. He traveled to Bali in 1932. He originally planned to stay for a few months, but he was so captivated by the people and nature of Bali that he decided to stay permanently. Inspired by light and color, he painted in the style of post-impressionism. He met nee Pollock, a 15-year-old “legon” dancer who became the model for his paintings. They married in 1935, but she continued to be his role model. In 1957, his house and works were donated to the Indonesian government as a museum. This was proposed by Indonesia’s Minister of Education and Culture, who was deeply impressed by Le Mayeur’s research. The museum still exists. The houses of Le Mayeur and Nu00ed Pollock have been preserved in their original condition ever since.

www.ftn-books.com has 2 different sets of memorabilia on Pollok now available.

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Ronald Medema (1956)

Ronald Medema (1956) is a Dutch painter who lives and works in Labelveld, Friesland. He completed his painting studies at the Academy of Fine Arts “Vredemann de Vries” in Leeuwarden in 1979. His interest in the meaning of icons in the Orthodox tradition, especially in the discovery of Orthodox spirituality, was already noticeable, which later led to his decision to become Orthodox. On this occasion he received the name Siluan. Medema went on study tours to Egypt, Mount Athos, Greece, and Turkey. Since 2002, Medema has focused solely on the “writing” of icons, the interpretation of the “words” of lines and colors within the Orthodox experience. She took lessons from Bernard Flinking from 2000 to 2004 and from Elena Antonova from 2010 to the present. On Orthodox Sunday, March 1, 2015, he was ordained a reader in Paris and received a blessing as an iconbearer from Job, Archbishop of Termessos, Ecumenical Patron of Constantinople. On April 21, 2018, he was ordained a deacon by His Highness Athenagoras, Metropolitan of Belgium, Governor of the Netherlands and Luxembourg.

www.ftn-books .com has the small publication on Medema written by mariette Josephus Jitta now available.

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Gustave van de Woestyne (1881-1947)

Gustave van de Woestyne was a troubled man. He didn’t make life easy for himself. And even though in his work he gives the impression that even strangers are welcome, sources prove quite the opposite. Almost no one was allowed into his house. When he saw someone approaching the house, he put on his hat and mischievously asked them to come with him as he was just taking a walk. Artist Van de Woestyne was torn between a simple and successful life (he was an outstanding portrait painter) and an unstoppable urge to achieve the unattainable spiritual enlightenment. I continued to hold her.
Van de Woestyne, 1929: “I believe that the artist must rediscover a new virginity every time he completes a painting. The memory of the previous job must be banished from his mind. Every job is a new beginning. If two pieces resemble each other, they are crafts, not art. u201d
Such expression requires an intense and tiring artistic life.
The editors, Robert Hooze and his girlfriend, Catherine Verleysen, have done an excellent job. We now know that Van de Woestyn, rather than being immediately at odds, enters into interaction with his contemporaries and his great source of inspiration, the Flemish primitives of the 15th century. We will have to wait for a new large-scale exhibition. and can carry out extensive technical and scientific research.

www.ftn-books.com has the Scheringa Museum publication on van de Woestyne and de Saedeleer now available.

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Seamus Nicolson (1971)

Here is what Nicoslson says on his site about himself.

I feel that I am still trying to paint but with another medium. The way I conceive and construct images, is more informed by art history and cinematography, than the traditions of documentary photography. The creative act can be encapsulated in the decisive moment, but it can can also occur when an event is seen, re-imagined and re-made.

I prefer to work in the directorial mode, constructing images that are drawn from my immediate surroundings, using the visual language of tableaux and Old Master painting. The characters depicted are from the locale where the images are made. My recent work explores a more abstract territory, using landscape to reflect psychological space. All my work is a celebration of the everyday, and an investigation into that paradoxical moment when our surroundings can seem familiar, and yet uncertain and mysterious. The photographic fragment and what it can suggest to the viewer is more intriguing to me than more direct and explicit means of visual communication.

Primarily, I make work for the gallery wall, but I also work commercially shooting editorial portraiture and fashion. I am interested in the potential for cross-over between the different areas of photographic practice: Fine Art, Fashion, Portraiture and Documentary. These genres mainly operate separately with distinct and different visual codes that are intended for different audiences. There needs to be more dialogue between these areas, if the medium is to evolve further and truly reflect the experience of life in an increasingly complex and inter-connected digital world.

I have exhibited extensively nationally and abroad and have works in private and public collections such as the Arts Council, the Tate and Government Art Collection. As well as the editorial portrait and fashion work, I have also created two advertising campaigns for Vivienne Westwood.”

www.ftn-books.com has the Bommel van Dam catalog available..

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Anke Roder (1964)

Anke Roeder (1964) studied at the Academies in Maastricht and ‘s-Hertogenbosch. After setting up studios in ‘s-Hertogenbosch, on the river Heerewaarden and in Rotterdam, he has been living and working in Sandewehr, North Groningen since 2009. The Wadden Sea environment, the impression of light and travel, and the colors of the large artist’s garden around her home resonate in her abstract landscapes. In addition to oil and encaustic paintings, she also creates works on paper. She has exhibited at numerous national and international trade fairs including PAN Amsterdam, Kunstrei, Art Rotterdam, Art The Hague, Art Ghent, List Berlin, FIAC Paris, and the London Art Fair. Her work has been exhibited in Denmark at the Ribe Museum, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Belvedere Heerenveen Museum, Van Bommel van Dam Venlo Museum, Isselstein Museum, Kranenburg-Bergen Museum, and Ketelfactory Schiedam. Masu. Her works are collected all over the world. Since 2015 she has been regularly writing articles about contemporary art.

Recently www.ftn-books.com acquired a small collection of books on Anke Roder.