FTN-blog

Hoekstra publications are scarce, but finally i have found at a reasonable price PIG. A Hoekstra/Hofsted artist book. Designed by Rutger Fuchs and published on the POLYNESIAN INSTANT GEOGRAPHY project at the Stedelijk Museum. A true artist book. Folio sized and one of the few Stedelijk Museum publication with a non standard size (The others BEWOGEN BEWEGING and PAUL THEK, both from the Sixties). This is ag reat publication and one that has a place in the art collection of the Stedelijk Muzseum and many other museums too. PIG is now available at www.ftn-books.com.

In my (humble) opinion, Arp is one of the greatest artists from the 20th Century, together with Pollock, Brancusi and all Minimal Art artist they are my favorites. I say this because last week i encountered a catalogue with works by Arp for sale at galerie Neher in 1987. The catalogie is great , but what makes it special is the price list which was inserted in it . A relief/sculpture for around 100K makes this at todays prices outright cheap and a painting for around 200K is hard to believe. Still …..this certainly is my kind of art, but for me personally i just draw as much energy and satisfaction from art from artists that are still cheap and can be had for a couple of hundred euro. To prove my case here are some recent additions of paintings i truly love.

The catalogue of the Arp exhibition and its price list is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Rose Stach is an interdisciplinary artist from Germany working in the fields of installation, object, textile, video, photography, and performance. The works of the artist are characterized by underlying social commentary, reflection of current events, and psychological manipulation. Employing various means of artistic expression, the author exposes the controversial nature of the reality by stating that the meanings of well-familiar objects may be changed. Spatial installations of Stach are constructed based on the principle of paradoxical combinations, where the viewer becomes involved in a Kafkaesque situation filled with aimless action. Quite often transformed objects stepping beyond the limits of daily routine acquire symbolic meanings and through them the author speaks of the problems of the world that she is most concerned about, such as exploitation of developing countries, emigration, crisis of values, growing consumerism, narcissism, and war. The author also often uses autobiographic details, personal experiences, pursuits of artistic identity, and explores the psychological and social obstacles burdening the contemporary society and offers an opportunity of getting rid of them. Stach received the2014 BundesGEDOK Art Prize and on this occasion of her show at the Frauenemuseum Bonn this UnderCover publication was published. It is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Readers of this blog know of my admiration for the Galerie Denise Rene. In all past decades they were the first to present Avant Garde artists and in the sixties they were one of the first to show ZERO artists and their works. One of these shows was the legendary UECKER exhibition in 1968. The catalogue is like a “ghost” catalogue since it is rarely seen or offered, but now I have a copy for sale. This is certainly not cheap , but extremely scarce and a solid investment. available at www.ftn-books.com

POne of the most memorable paintings i recently saw was at the Pompidou museum in Metz. Together with a magnificent large Miro the Delaunay impressed me most.

Robert Delaunay, and his wife Sonia, were influential artists from the 20th century who combined strongly in the same abstract movements

Orphism is the movement in which they are most strongly linked and this artistic style involved colourful, geometric shapes, similar to the Kandinsky circles painting, known as Farbstudie Quadrate. The Delaunays are generally regarded as having been involved from the very start of this movement. There are clear similarities between their work and other related artists such as Piet Mondrian, Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Paul Klee.

This website will look into the careers of both Sonia and Robert. Robert Delaunay had a highly impressive control and understanding of colour and this was a crucial element for modern abstract artists, where objects would be symbolic but simple, making colour choices even more fundamental to each art work that they produced. Many from this era had the technical methods at hand to produce art in more traditional styles but they simply preferred the sort of art that you can see spread across this website.

Robert Delaunay was born and bred in France, though his career was to achieve success across Europe, once he had been embraced by other notable modern artists like Kandinsky who appreciated the direction that he was going in and also wanted to encourage the further spread of modern art movements down as many avenues as possible. French art had also had a history of leading from the front and so it was beneficial to have French artists who wanted to push abstract art onwards.

The original title of the painting above was Rhythm, Joie de Vivre and is one of the best known from this painter. Artist Delaunay began his career with many landscapes which held a touch of abstraction but it was only later in his life when he really took it further into the realms of what we consider Orphism with exceptionally simple displays of geometric shapes, complicated only slightly by his use of tones and colour.

Most contemporary artists show a development into the abstract rather than an immediate start there, particularly those who came at the start of this period. Franz Marc is another artist whose work may interest you if you enjoy the art featured here from the careers of both Robert and Sonia Delaunay. That artist produced many abstract works of animals but he was not quite as pure abstract as the Orphism styles of the Delaunays, who really took their work down to the most simplistic possible, whilst still maintaining symbolic messages in the background.

The early stages of this artist offered some similarities to the work of post-impressionists like Vincent Van Gogh and it seems that as the artist grew in experience and confidence that he began to forge his own original style which was later to create the Orphism movement, in conjunction with the similar style of his wife Sonia, who herself was a contemporary artist. Red Eiffel Tower in Paris is shown above and is a brilliant adaptation of this world-famous piece of architecture which has been included in the careers of countless artists, not all of whom have been French.

There is a beauty to the structure but also a highly symbolic nature to it as France’s most recognisable building. The role of French artists in European art has also ensured that many of these paintings of the Eiffel Tower have also been well-publicised. It was the artist’s depiction of the Eiffel Tower which really drew in a lot of new fans who found his work exciting and at that time it was not quite as radically abstract as he later became, thus appealing to a wider audience who were only just starting to embrace the ideas and techniques of abstract artists.

French art fans would always respond well to interesting depictions of their national symbol, and things were no different when Robert unveiled his Red Eiffel Tower. Colour was unquestionably the key to success for both of the Delaunays and they would go for bright tones which was very much the hallmark of contemporary art. Up until the French impressionists there had always been a relatively unoriginal use of colour, normally just to replicate exactly what the artist could see with their own eyes. Nowadays, there is a far great experimentation with colour and artists like those here helped to establish that. www.ftn-books.com has from both Delaunay artist books in its inventory.

For a short 10 months i lives in Paris. 16th Arrondissement, Rue La Fontaine, just a 20 minute walk from the Avenue Wilson where the Musee d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris was located . It witnessed the opening of the Centre Pompidou, but in the short period before the opening. The Modern Art Museum at the Avenue Wilson was the only modern art museum in Paris worth visitinbg. At that time they had Brancusi studio on show and at one of the months in 1977 an Andre Masson exhibition and yes….. i now have the catalogue of this exhibition available at www.ftn-books.com

He was born in Belgium. In 1908, he graduated from the painting courses at the Brussels embroidery school and entered the local Academy of arts. In 1912, he continued his studies at the Paris School of fine arts. At the beginning of WWI, he volunteered for the front and was seriously wounded. He lived mainly in Paris, initially earning as a ceramist and newspaper proofreader. Having signed a contract with the famous art dealer D.-H. Kahnweiler, he managed to devote himself entirely to art from mid-1920s.

He had a strong color-symbolist manner in his early works,. However, his works went through a period of cubism later. In 1924, he found himself in the mainstream of surrealism, having met A.Breton after Masson’s first personal exhibition. He developed cubist forms in a surreal manner, then, in 1926, he worked in the technique of “automatic painting”, creating pictorial and graphic compositions (graphics always played a full-fledged parallel role in his works), where individual figures and symbols are increasingly were subjected to the spontaneous play of rhythms, colors and strokes.

In 1940, he moved to the United States, where his art directly boosted the formation of abstract expressionism, Masson himself was deeply impressed by the works of classical Chinese painting in the American collections. Returning to France (1945), he created impressionistic local landscapes.

His work of 1953-1959 attributed to the” Asian period ” by their dominant echoes with the far Eastern ink painting.

Miriam Cahn was born in 1949 in Basel, Switzerland. Her Jewish parents had left Germany between the two World Wars and had settled there. The artist spent a large part of her life in Switzerland and started her career as a graphic designer there. In the 1980s, Cahn also produced works, in black and white, before devoting herself from the 90s onwards to painting and colour, which she mastered perfectly. Her artistic abilities don’t stop there: she also makes performances inspired by her interest in the body, along with videos and practices a form of experimental writing, where language is a material to be processed like any other. She attributes a similar significance and importance to each of her modes of expression: her writings have the same status as her paintings or drawings.

In Miriam Cahn’s works, the body passes from ‘object of contemplation’ to ‘medium’, thus creating a new bodily expression. At the beginning of her career, the artist painted in the street, squatting or kneeling on her large format drawings, allowing her to play with the dust of charcoal and chalk and thus being in physical contact with her matter. She then left urban space, her ‘open-air studio’ to use her own words, and worked in a large warehouse, a ‘warehouse workshop’. She then raised the canvases off the ground, began working with smaller paintings, before gradually moving to large formats. The creation of her works is also characterised by performance: she involves her body completely and imposes a time of measured activity.

Space is of great importance to the artist who considers the hanging of her pictures as a performance in itself. The eyes of the characters must be located at eye level. It takes a few minutes of reflection before instinctively hanging her paintings, multiplying perspectives within a global set.

As for the figures that she features, Cahn opts for blurred silhouettes rather than marked outlines that generally distinguish the shape of the environment in which it is located. Cahn favours transitions between characters instead of constraining them within their outlines. This last point is probably explained by her interest in topics related to the Gulf War, the Balkans or immigration. Painting allows the artist to show solidarity without reverting to what she calls ‘political kitsch’. She prefers to tackle this kind of issues while remaining poetic and abstract.

Miriam Cahn is an artist associated with the feminist cause. War, sex and death are her main themes of predilection. Influenced by the egalitarian and utopian spirit of May 1968, her feminist approach is reflected in her paintings and in her reflective journey: “An artist needs a good dose of feminist consciousness,” she writes. I do not want to generalise but since I create bodies, I am nevertheless forced to give it is place.” She questions the role of the body in social and cultural life. By painting asexual figures, Cahn is emerging as a feminist activist. She reinterprets the classical themes of painting by seeking to reach a world before culture where man, woman and animals were not yet distinguished and separated.

Miriam Cahn’s reputation is international: many museums around the world have paintings by the artist. Her large formats make the news. In 1982, when she was 33 years old, she took part in Documenta 7 in Kassel and, in 1984, at the Biennale in Venice. In 1983, Jean-Christophe Ammann dedicated a personal exhibition to her at the Kunsthalle in Basel. Exhibitions followed in France, Germany, Bosnia, Spain, England, etc.

www.ftn-books.com has some scarce Cahn publication available at this moment

Araki Takako was a very well-respected and collected ceramic artist who pioneered the way for many female artists in Japan. She did many sculptural works, especially of decaying bibles. This slender vase has a passage from the Bible and is a very rare-unique work because it was fired after her passing.  Not much more information on Araki, but her work is unusual and appeals to many and the catalogue niw available at www.ftn-books.com shows why

Born in Cagli, in the province of Pesaro, in 1940, Mattiacci graduated from the region’s Istituto di Belle Arti in 1959. After relocating to Rome, the sculptor mounted his first solo exhibition at La Tartaruga in 1967, which included historic works such as Tubo, nearly five hundred feet of yellow, nickel-plated, iron pipe that snaked its way throughout the gallery, traveling up a staircase and from one room into another. Mattiacci participated in international group shows such as the Paris Biennial; the Fujisankei Biennial in the Kanagawa Prefecture, Japan; and the São Paulo Bienal, and represented Italy at the Venice Biennale twice, in 1972 and 1988.

Recent notable exhibitions include “GONG” (2018), a presentation of twenty of his outdoor sculptures at Forte di Belvedere in Florence; a major 2016 retrospective of his work at the Museo d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea di Trento in Rovereto, Italy; and “Eliseo Mattiacci,” the inaugural exhibition at the Fondazione Prada in Milan. Among his many accolades were the first prize at the 1995 Fujisankei Biennial at the Hokone Open Air Museum in Tokyo and the Feltrinelli Sculpture Award of the Accademia dei Lincei in Rome in 2008. Today, his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Museo Arte Contemporanea di Cassino in Italy; the University of California, Los Angeles; and the Zagreb Contemporary Art Museum in Croatia.

www.ftn-books.com has the 1987 Isola Roma catalogue now available.

Not much info on Arie de Groot. However his children say that he was the best story teller in the world nad that shows…His works are like continuing stories divided into chapters. Timeless art and still at affordable prices.

Arie de Groot was born in Hendrik-Ido-Ambacht, but lived and worked his entire life in Rotterdam. He followed his own imagination and created a characteristic visual language. His large oeuvre consists mostly of work on paper with additions of ‘worthless’ materials.