FTN-blog

Becoming increasingly more important each year. With a number of worldwide exhibitions also growing by the year, makes this a female artist who is becoming by the top 10 of female artists who created the most important post war contemporary art.

So she is a key postwar artist, Vieira da Silva’s early career in Paris among the avant-garde of postwar abstractionist lead to a storied contribution to modern painting. In the late 1920s, Lisbon-born Vieira da Silva came to the city to pursue formal arts training where she became established within the European abstract expressionist movement, Art Informel – a period which rejected American Ab-Ex exceptionalism and took to Eastern philosophy to reconsider standards of perception in modern painting. In Paris, she worked and lived among Cubist painters such as Joaquín Torres-García and Italian Futurists, whose styles became influential to her later signature style of maze-like tiling and depth-field play. During the 1940s following the start of the war, the artist moved from Lisbon to Rio de Janeiro, until 1947 before her eventual return to Paris.

Also influenced by contemporaries such as Fernand Leger, with whom she studied in her adolescence, Vieira da Silva cultivated a unique style of abstraction that broke rules of formalist tradition. Her representations responded to the impact of WWII atrocity on surrounding locales. Surveying street views and urban labyrinth – her paintings envisioned disorientation in the metropolitan modern perspective – they came to display a more globally-oriented and fragmented vision— reacting to the war’s onset of transnational displacement.

www.ftn-books.com has some Vieira da Silva publications available.

It now has been some years since i last told you about my admiration for book illustrators and Elsa Beskow has proven to be one of the greatest of them all. Rcently i discovered a very nice Monograph on her life and work in Swedish and this i want to share with you since this is now available at www.ftn-books.com. This together with some of the nicest of her children books ever published.

The first time i saw the photographs by Irina Ionesco was the time she pre published a series of her daughter EVA in the french PHOTO magazine in the mid Seventies. SInce i always have been admiring her very personal style. Mostly black and white creating an almost “dark” atmosphere.

From circus girl to cabaret dancer to femme fatale before shooting to almost instant photographic notoriety in the 1970s, Ionesco is perhaps best known for erotic stills of her daughter Eva shot from age four to 11.

The why’s, wherefore’s and moral connotations of those pictures continue to stir debate across the blogosphere. “It was another time, another age,” says Ionesco, whose actress-daughter currently plans a movie on her mother, with Irina to be played by French star Isabelle Huppert.Ionesco’s theatrically gothic touch and sensual frames has made her a style icon for many designers. On show in Paris in June and July is a selection of fashion shots for houses such as Givenchy and publications such as Stiletto and Vogue Japan

Born in Paris to a violinist father and trapeze artist mother, Ionesco was abandoned at age four and shipped off to Romania to be brought up by her grandmother and circus family uncles.

She dreamt of being a dancer but with a tiny frame and supple body wound up a snake-lady contortionist, touring cabarets in Europe, Africa and the Middle East with two giant boas for seven years, from 15 to 22.

“I was a slave to the boas, in the end I’d had enough,” she says, recalling the fastidiousness of feeding the reptiles, keeping them warm and hauling them from hotel bath to hotel bath.

Then came a dance routine until a partner accidentally dropped her in a theatre pit in Damascus, Syria. Convalescing, she began to draw, then paint, but before moving to Paris to study art, spent time travelling with a very rich Iranian gambler, who showered her in couture clothes and jewels.

Photography came late — and haphazardly, like much of her life.

The old pre-digital-era Nikon F camera she still uses — along with tungsten lighting — dates back to Christmas of ’64, a gift from her partner of the time, avant-garde Belgian artist Corneille.

Self-taught, she took her first shots of friends and friends’ daughters using candles for lighting, setting 400 ASA film on 800 ASA, and emptying her cupboardfuls of cabaret costumes and fancy clothes to drape the models.

From obscurity she hit fame on her first show of 1970, featuring women in theatrical and often enticing poses draped in — sometimes very little — lace, beads and fake flowers and surrounded by fetishist bits and pieces.

“Irina Ionesco’s sexual world,” wrote French surrealist Andre Pieyre De Mandiargues at the time, “belongs to a space where there is no licence to touch. It is the world of dreams.”

www.ftn-books.com has some nice rarities available by Irina Ionesco.

It took me almost 40 years to discover this. Because i listed the Gunter Tuzina tekeningen publication ( available at www.ftn-books.com) i took from my bookcase the DE KEUZE VAN DE KUNSTENAAR from 1984 f. …..Opened the book and found both my OK HOOFD by Maarten Ploeg and the Tekeningen publication Tuzina made for the Stedelijk Museum exhibition. Both artist presented their work at the same time at the Haags Gemeentemuseum and now i found both used the same form in the same year. Coincidence?…. i do not think so. It certainly must be admiration. Recently i (re) discovered the work by Maarten Ploeg and it will not be for long when i look again at the impressive OK HOOFD which has been stored for the last 20 years. All publications mentioned are available at www.ftn-books.com

Professor Renée Green is an artist, filmmaker and writer. Via films, essays and writings, installations, digital media, architecture, sound-related works, film series and events her work engages with investigations into circuits of relation and exchange over time, the gaps and shifts in what survives in public and private memories as well as what has been imagined and invented. She also focuses on the effects of a changing transcultural sphere on what can now be made and thought. in th early Nineties she was invited by Stroom to give her view on Den Haag. A book was published on this occasion which is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Her exhibitions, videos and films have been seen throughout the world in museums, biennales and festivals.

In 2021, Inevitable Distances, a survey of four decades of Green’s work was organized in by KW Institute for Contemporary Art and daadgalerie in Berlin, traveling in 2022 to the Migros Museum for Gegenwartskunst in Zurich; in 2009, Ongoing Becomings, another extensive survey of her work was organized by the Musée cantonal des Beaux-Arts in Lausanne, Switzerland.

Since her arrival at MIT in 2011, Green has had solo exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art, New York; MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House, Los Angeles; Lumiar Cité, Lisbon; Galerie Nagel Draxler, Berlin; Bortolami Gallery, New York; Fondazione Antonio Ratti, Como, Italy; Prefix Institute for Contemporary Art, Toronto, and the Carpenter Center for Visual Arts, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA. In addition, her work has been featured in group exhibitions at the following institutions: Whitney Museum, New Museum, and the Studio Museum in Harlem, New York; Hammer Museum, and Museum of Contemporary Art, both in Los Angeles; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston; Museum Moderner Kunst, Vienna; Centro Andaluz de Arte Contemporáneo, Seville; Museum der Moderner, Salzburg , and many others.

A prolific writer, Green has published essays and fictions in Transition, October, Frieze, Texte zur Kunst, Spex, Multitudes, Sarai Reader, and Collapse, among other magazines and journals. Her essays have also appeared in an assortment of international cultural and scholarly books.

Last month i sold one of those special books from my inventory that i most probably will not be able to sell again.

It is the signed LOGOGRAMAS book by Pedor Xisto. It is because this is such a scarce item that i photographed all pages to share this wonderful publication with all……enjoy and for other Concrete Poetry publications please visit www.ftn-books.com

ROGER-EDGAR GILLET

Roger-Edgar Gillet’s pictorial itinerary revolves around widely differing periods that often resulted in his voluntary isolation from the Paris art scene. Although, at the start of his career, he associated himself with the Art Informel movement alongside Michel Tapié and Charles Estienne, with whom he experienced the passionate controversies sparked by their exhibitions, he asserted his desire for expressive freedom at a very early stage and from then on consistently refused to attach himself to any sort of movement – witness his return to subjective figuration towards the 1960s, which placed him outside the trends then in fashion. Gillet went his own way, producing an oeuvre in which caustically traced, ardent forms that are expressionistic only in appearance are brought forth from highly-worked material. The subjects lend themselves to a ferocious style of painting rendered oblique by dreams, irony and humour.

Between 1939 and 1944, he studied at the École Boulle, where he acquired a thorough technical grounding and an appreciation of fine workmanship, and trained under Brianchon at the Arts décoratifs. After the dark years, life gradually resumed. Galleries opened, introducing painters such as Wols, Dubuffet, Fautrier, Poliakoff, Tobey and Michaux. Saint-Germain-des-Prés was already becoming the stamping-ground of the new generation of artists. Gillet shared a former tanning workshop in the leather market with friends (it was subsequently occupied by Corneille and Appel). He attended Antonin Artaud’s funeral (1948) and went to a lecture on Picasso by the Abbé Morel that degenerated into a riot, himself ending up at the police station. Presently he acquired the middle name “Edgar”, courtesy of Michel de Ré, who thought he looked like Edgar Allan Poe. In 1950, while taking part in a group exhibition at the Galerie Mai, he re-encountered his future wife Thérèse, whom he had first met two years earlier at a Wols exhibition at the Galerie Nina Dausset.

He had overseas solo exhibitions at the Galerie La Licorne, Brussels, in 1954; at the Palais des Beaux-Arts, Brussels, in 1957; at the Galleria Blu, Milan, in 1960; at the Galleria La Bussola, Turin, and the Galerie Lefebvre, New York, in 1961; at the Galerie Moos in Geneva and Galerie Birch in Copenhagen in 1962. In 1964, the Galerie Dina Vierny, in Paris, showed a set of his drawings and the Galerie Françoise Ledoux exhibited prints by him. Drawing and printmaking were techniques Gillet used regularly, alongside oil painting. He saw drawing as an exploratory medium and an aid to memory.

www.ftn-books.com has the Galerie de France catalogue from 1961 now available. It has an original lithograph used as cover.

The following text comes from wikipedia.

Carlos Mérida is best known for his canvas and mural works, most of which was done in Mexico. However, he also did engraving, set design and mosaic work.

His artistic direction has been compared to that of Rufino Tamayo, generally rejecting large-scale narrative paintings, preferring canvas^,]being more interested in becoming a painter than in politics (with an exception in the 1950s when he was horrified by nuclear testing). He experimented with color and form as well as techniques. Music and dance were lifelong interests and they influenced his paintings with rhythmic, poetic and lyrical pieces.^[2]

He had three major epochs, a figurative period from 1907 to 1926, a surrealism phase from the late 1920s to the mid-1940s and from 1950 until his death, geometric forms characterized his work. His early work is marked by experimentation.^[16] He was in Europe when the avant garde was transitioning from Impressionism to Cubism and he was influenced by the works of Modigliani and Picasso His surrealist phase again came from time in Europe, meeting not only Paul Klee and Miró but also fellow Guatemalan Luis Cardoza y Aragón.^] At this time, he abandoned his former figurative style and became one of Mexico´s first non-figurative artists, leaning to abstractionism and separating him from other Mexican artists.^[2][12] This focus on the non-figurative continued into his later work, but with focus on geometric elements, especially those linked to New World indigenous cultures such as the Maya.^[2][3] His work is considered highly intellectual, not representing things, but rather a concept of them. Salvador Novo wrote “The pre Hispanic world, in Carlos Mérida, attains a perfect synthesis, an ideal sublimation of numeric rhythm sprung from geometry. The debt owed by the abstract painting of our time to Carlos Mérida is thus as great as his work is perennially solid and relevant.

While heavily influenced by trends in Europe, especially his earlier work, Mérida felt it important to emphasize his American (New World) identity and culture. He fused European Modernism with forms and subjects specific to the Americas.^[12] One reason for this was that in Europe he found that European artists were not interested in what was happening on the other side of the Atlantic.^] He became convinced of the need to establish natively American art which would express the “original character which animates our nature and our race will inevitably engender a personal artistic expression.”^[2] His work reflects on both the Mayan and Aztec civilizations along with the colonial period representing the indigenous as symbols of post Revolution Mexico.^[He even integrated indigenous amate paper in to some of his works.^[12] While part of Mexican muralism, he predated it slightly by promoting indigenous motifs seven years before Rivera led Mexican painting to fame.^] Luis Cardoza y Aragon called him a pioneer of Latin American art, painting elements such as indigenous people, Mexican and Central American landscapes without oversentimenalizing which had not been done before.^] This emphasis on the New World not only was expressed with folkloric images, especially in his early work, but also in his later work. The discovery of Bonampak motivated him deeply, taking new ideas from the ruins and eventually led to his interest in integrating painting and sculpture into architecture.

www.ftn-books.com has the Paris 1962 available

Antoine Poncet (b.1928) is a highly regarded exponent of post-war sculpture in Europe. He grew up in Switzerland he was surrounded by art from a young age. His father was a painter and his grandfather was the famous artist of the Nabis movement, Maurice Denis, whose theories contributed to the foundations of cubism, fauvism and abstract art. At the age of 14, Poncet studied under the sculptor Germain Richier in Zurich. From 1942 he attended the École des Beaux Arts in Lausanne, before moving to Pairs and it was at this point in his career that he turned towards abstraction.

The search of form was always his primary concern; ‘I have to create a sculpture that is able to live in a space with its equilibrium of volumes, its movement of and plenitude.’ Poncet was highly influenced by the work of Brancusi and Jean Arp, specifically their focus on shape, form and volume. Poncet creates bronzes that appear to be still taking shape in front of the viewer creating a sense of dynamism and transience. Surface texture is of real significance in his work; his sculptures are smoothly polished in order to enhance the play of light. From 1952 Poncet exhibited regularly at the major salons such as the Salon de la Jeune, the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles; and the 1953 a group show at the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris. In 1956 he participated in the international sculpture exhibition at the Musée Rodin in Paris, and was selected to represent Switzerland at the Venice Biennale. During his career he received several awards including the ‘Henry Moore Prize’ in Japan 1983.

www.ftn-books.com has the 1961 monograph by Les Rose des Vents available

Artist/ Author: Rob van Koningsbruggen

Title : Rob van Koningsbruggen

Publisher: Stedelijk Museum

pages : 4

Text / Language: dutch and english

Measurements: 10.6 x 8  inches .

Condition:  MINT-

Yes… it exists!

 In spite of what is believed a few pamphlets were published with the Fundamental exhibition from 1975. Rob van Koningsbruggen, had withdrawn himself from the FUNDAMENTELE SCHILDERKUNST exhibition and therefore was officially not included  in the exhibition , but thanks to Christiaan Braun, who lent some Koningsbruggen works ( with permission of van Koningsbruggen ), his works were included and the Stedelijk Museum decided to publish this 4 page pamphlet. This was published in an extremely small edition, but this 4 pages proof its existence.

This pamphlet is now availableat www.ftn-books.com