195 MILLION DOLLAR was paid for the Andy Warhol/ Marilyn. It is one of the iconic modern art works from the 20th century, but still…a ridiculous amount . This led me to a search on the internet and i found a nice report on the art market. Not a report on new trends , but far more inside information on the development of the value of art. The report sponsored by UBS bank and Art Basel gives insight in the mechanism of the ART MARKET. Click on the link to download the report.
One of the artists originally represented in the Netherlands by one of my favorit dutch galeries of all time….the now closed galerie Onrust. Droese fitted in this galerie with his abstract works. A pupil of Joseph Beuys he commented on society with his works. From 1970 to 1976 he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the class of Peter Brüning, but worked mainly in the Beuys class. In his art, Droese deals in particular with questions of money, economics and economisation and because of this higly personal view on art he truly deserves a place among the greatest German artists of his time.
www.ftn-books.com has one Droese title currently available.
The best way to introduce Claudia Kölgen is to use a text I found on the internet page by Michael Gibbs.
Light, space, image, screen and language are the elements that form Claudia Kölgen’s artistic practice. Yet rather than dealing with these elements in a formalistic sense, she employs them in a poetic, almost abstract, metaphysical way, drawing attention to the specificity not of the medium but of the picture, the object, as well as the specific way these are perceived.
Her book objects are beautifully crafted, and extend our sense of what a book means – a sequence of identical pages in a closed form that invites an opening, a filigree of strands conducting the charge of meaning to a reader/viewer, a breath of air whispered between the leaves. Stéphane Mallarmé, who once compared the printed page to an elusive white butterfly would certainly have approved of Claudia Kölgen’s books. Mallarmé described the book as a ‘spiritual instrument’, but whereas he envisaged a Total Book containing ‘everything that exists’, Claudia Kölgen reduces the book to its essence. Her infra-red photograph of a still-life arrangement of open and closed books allows us to conceive of the book as a warm comforting object, as a body.The page of a book is analogous to a screen, so it should come as no surprise to learn that Claudia Kölgen has worked extensively with film and film installation. The first time I ever saw her work was at a group exhibition of film installations in a decrepit building on the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam. Claudia’s work stood out for the simple economy of its means and its utter effectiveness. The piece was entitled ‘Choreographie der Bilder’ and consisted of two loop films of candle flames photographed in slow motion projected through a board (with a grid of circular holes cut out of it) onto a double screen cantilevered like the open cover of a book. The random, organic tongues of flame thus became transformed into a computer-like grid of dancing circular spots of light. In one cinematic jump we are carried from the primeval to the electronic age.
A similar breadth and economy is achieved in her previous film installation ‘Lighthouse’ in which a vertical beam of light is rotated from a central, beacon-like axis around the walls of the space, which includes a sheet of copper and a glass frame. At the same time a film is being projected, which we occasionally get glimpses of. A lighthouse usually projects beam of light into the distance – it is meant to be seen from afar, but Claudia Kölgen’s lighthouse is just that: a light house, an enclosed space whose internal contours and surfaces are made visible reflectively, as a sign of introversion. The continuously moving beam of light intersecting with the film being projected challenges the spectator’s sense of space as something static. The viewer’s gaze becomes mobilized, disoriented.
The interference of one space with another is also the theme of her film ‘Ricercar’. The title is a musical term meaning to start again anew, and this is interpreted by the cello music on the sound track. The film is a journey through an abandoned industrial building, but it is really two films in one, since the centre of the frame is occupied by another moving image taken from a second camera placed at a right angle to the first, so that what we see are two views literally interfering with one another in a continual, vertiginous process of change. What we are left with is a vision of the pure relativity of space. This is not the modernist, fractured space of cubism, but a completely conditioned, reductive sense of space – one that offers not progress but recurrence. And this is where the element of time comes in – the endless, repetitive time of the film loop, or the steady revolving of a tower, or the pace of walking. Time is not a simultaneity (as in the modernist vision) but an ordered, self-effacing sequence.
Kölgen’s film ‘Wende’ (Turn) epitomises the dualities and dialectics that inform her work. The undulations of a sandy beach are filmed in positive and negative and overlaid with enlarged typewritten letters. On the sound track we hear layers of random spoken words which gradually disintegrate into phonemes and consonants. Language becomes reduced to what Barthes refers to as the ‘grain’ of the voice/text, a polysemy without origin or end.
The grid of circular holes used in her film installation recurs in her recent photoworks. In one piece, circular pieces of colour film negatives are sandwiched between two sheets of perspex and lit from behind – we cannot make out what is depicted; the images remain imaginary, waiting as it were to be realized through the action of light and chemicals. Kölgen’s screens are at once opaque and transparent – their grid structure makes them indices of infinity, like so many zeros, but we are reminded too of the mental screen that each of us possesses which filters everything that we perceive. Whether we call this screen rationality or the unconscious, it is always resisted by the immediacy of lived experience and by the knowledge (or at least the suspicion) that our perceptions are more than just fleeting shadows on the walls of a cave.
Photographs are traces of experience, not the experience itself; their logic is that of an absent presence, of what Barthes calls a ‘having-been-there’. Yet the photograph is also a type of icon, a model of that which is represented. As André Bazin has written, ‘The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.’ The images that appear in Kölgen’s photoworks – clouds, a room, a figure on a beach – are not documents; they need no captions to explain them. They are models within a larger model having to do with seeing and not seeing. Natural light is combined with artificial light, reality with construction. We are no longer certain of what we see, since we are made conscious of the very determinants of seeing – the screen separating blindness and insight, the spectacle and the spectator.
Michael Gibbs
February 1989
Now that she is introduced properly I like you to know that I have added 2 important publications by Kölgen. The one that stands out is the HEFTIG ALS EEN STORMWIND. Published in an edition of 10 copies. Each numbered and signed. Package contains 20 cigarettes all printed with different texts by Claudi Kölgen , each package is signed and numbered
available at www.ftn-books.com
I held this book for over 10 years in my inventory and never…yes never looked at the last page. I knew it was an artist book, but never had any idea by which artist and because I recently bought among other artists books a second copy , i was forces to look at it again. I recognized the orange little book immediately and now I looked at the last page and notice all that I need to know. Name of the artist….Sipke Huismans, publisher Kalamiteit . Huismans I knew from the publication he made together with Pieter Holstein (available at www.ftn-books.com) and now I had even two copies of this Huismans artist book. Drawings by Huismans and a personal letter written to Lucebert make this book a highly collectible item and both publications are now available at www.ftn-books.com
Marwan Bassiouni’s detailed photographs question how Islam is represented in the West, and show a society in which several cultures exist alongside and with each other. His celebrated series New Dutch Views is a symbolic portrait of his double cultural background, and it highlights the fact that a new Western Islamic identity is emerging.
Marwan Bassiouni (1985) holds a BA in photography from The Royal Academy of Art in The Hague and a photographer CFC from the Photography School of Vevey (CEPV). In 2019, he had a solo exhibition at The Hague Museum of Photography and published the book ‘New Dutch Views’. His work has been exhibited at Bienne Festival of Photography (CH), Photobastei /VFG prize, Zürich (CH), Sharjah Art Foundation (UAE), Circulation(s), Paris (FR), Fotomuseum Winterthur (CH), Aperture (USA), Paris Photo (FR), Athens Photo Festival (GR), SBK Galerie, Amsterdam (NL), Kunsthal Helmond (NL), De Warande, Turnhout (BE) and galerie Ron Mandos, Amsterdam (NL).
Work by Bassiouni is held in private and public collections, including Kunstmuseum Bern, Nederlands Fotomuseum Rotterdam, Kunstmuseum Den Haag, Fenix Museum of Migration, AEGON Art Collection, Dutch Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Amsterdam UMC, Menzis Art Collection, KPMG Collection and Dutch Ministry of Social Affairs and Integration. Bassiouni is the recipient of the W. Eugene Smith Student Grant, the Harry Pennings Prize, the Prix Circulation(s)-Fujifilm, the Ron Mandos Photo Talent Award and the Emerging Artist Grant of the Mondrian Fund.
Bassiouni’s work is currently on view in the exhibition ‘Gallery of Honour of Dutch Photography’ at the Nederlands Fotomuseum in Rotterdam.
the following Leporello is now available at www.ftn-books.com
Not just because he is one of the leading dutch artists. He shaped conceptual art and stood at the cradle of conceptual art in the Netherlands. He signed the sky, shaped a forrest and worked together for his oeuvre catalogue with Irma Boom in 1999. This is the reason i write this blog, since i bought at auction some of the scarce Boezem publications that i am now selling at www.ftn-books.com
In 1999, well before Irma Boom became world famous, Booom designed the Marinus Boezem oeuvre catalogue. Size…typical Irma boom….. but this is one of the first publications in which the “fore-edge” was used in the design. It looks like a starry sky which has been placed /printed on this part of the book. All in all a very special publication.
Since the mid-1990’s, Kirsten Geisler has been investigating the representation of the three-dimensional body in a virtual space and with the construction and manipulation of beauty. In Geisler’s works the virtual person is a symbol for the reflection of our dreams: young, beautiful, slender, normal, healthy, and of course, never aging. Thus, Geisler contributes to the social debates about virtuality, digitization and the construction of identity. Geisler’s works comment on the ideal of beauty and its delusions in contemporary society, as well as on the increasing digitization and virtualization of the world.
Kirsten Geisler studied at the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and at the Rijksakademie voor beeldende kunsten in Amsterdam. Her computer animations have been shown at video festivals in the Netherlands and abroad. Geisler’s work has been exhibited all over the world
www.ftn-books.com gas the scarce Geisler artist book from 1993 available. Text in this “My warmth in Absentia” is by Flip Bool, edition of only 400 copies.
Jan van den Broek, also known as Jan Karel van den Broek, was a Dutch painter and photographer, whose work was mostly non-representational……..
This is all the information i found on this dutch artist. Based in Rotterdam he showed his works on several exhibitions at Galerie Delta . Delta is arguably one of the best dutch galeries from the Sixcties and Seventies so i value their judgement on the quality of the artist, but it is hard to find information ( btw. Delta catalogue from 1970 is now available)
From what i have seen his art resembles in some ways Francis Bacon his large paintings, but they also have a Seventies touch and feel in them. it is a pity that i do not have more info, but i will keep this artist in mind since his work intrigues and as soon as i have more info i will share this.
Artist in various media, and teacher, born in London. She did a foundation course at Bristol College of Art, 1973–4, followed by Sheffield College of Art, 1974–7, then Chelsea School of Art, 1977–8. She was a Gulbenkian Rome Scholar, attending British School there in 1978–9. From 1979 taught at various art schools and was a sessional lecturer at Reading University. Her exhibitions included Northern Young Contemporaries, at Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester, from 1975, being a prizewinner in 1977; Rassegna Internazionale di Scultura Contemporanea, San Marino, Italy, 1979, where she was a prizewinner; and Woodlands Art Gallery touring show, 1981–2, of Greater London Arts Association award winners. Had a solo show at Kettle’s Yard, Cambridge, 1996, of sculpture and photosculpture.Arts Council holds her work.
www.ftn-books.co has currently the Miscetti/Roma exhibition catalogeu available,
the following text was found on the artetc.nl site.
Luis Gordillo was born in Seville in 1934. As a painter he rebelled against the prevailing informal art of the 1950s, and as such he is today regarded as the pioneer of figuration and Pop Art in Spanish art of the 1960s.
Gordillo began law school in his youth, but soon discovered that he was more interested in art. He enrolled at the Escuela de Bellas Artes. In 1958 he traveled to Paris and became acquainted with the work of Jean Fautrier (1898-1964) and Jean Dubuffet (1901-1985). During this period, he still followed the aesthetics of Art Autre and Dau al Set, as shown at his first exhibition in 1959 in Seville.
After a new visit to the French capital, he created the Cabezas and Automovilistas series, underscoring the influence of Francis Bacon and the American Pop Art movement. With his new approach to figuration, he became the first true Spanish pop artist. He ironizes, among other things, the rise of the mass media.
Not long after, he transfers his experiences with psychoanalysis to his work, opening new avenues. He even temporarily left painting to devote himself entirely to his so-called dibujos automáticos, drawings that were put on paper in one line. In 1971 they were exhibited in Madrid. This exhibition has been of great importance to a new generation of young artists, who represented the movement of the Madrid figuration.
In the 1970s, Gordillo transfers the technique of his dibujos automáticos to linen, making use of color as well. Between 1980 and 1990, however, his theme changes. His pallet is also getting cooler. He ends up between his earlier figuration and a postmodern abstraction.
In 1981, Gordillo received the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas in his native country.
www.ftn-books.com has the Marlborough Madrid catalogue now available.
