FTN-blog

You might find his sculptures a bit outdated, but they are still strong and are in most cases part of dutch history. There is Lely , the man who designed the AFSLUITDIJK, the DOKWERKER and many others that are equal iconic. Andriessen was one of the most important sculptors from the first part of 20th century in the Netherlands, but his works seem to be almost forgotten. That is the reason of this blog. Andriessen is important for dutch art and deserves some extra attention. 

A nice touch is this cinematictribute from the  POLYGOON JOURNAAL in which his 70th birthday is commemorated.

The following Andriessen publication are available at www.ftn-books.com

I had not heard of Kemeny before i visited the Cobra Museum where an exhibition was held on Zoltan & Madeleine Kemeny in 2004 (items available at www.ftn-books.com)

Zoltan Kemeny was born on March 21, 1907, in the hamlet of Banica, Transylvania, then part of Hungary. As an adolescent he learned to paint under the tutelage of a naïve sign painter. Apprenticed to a cabinet maker in 1921, he began to study technical drawing for furniture making in 1923. From 1924 to 1927 Kemeny took courses in architecture and interior decoration at the School of Decorative Arts in Budapest. Thereafter he enrolled in the School of Fine Arts in Budapest, where he studied painting from 1927 to 1930.

In 1930 Kemeny settled in Paris; he abandoned painting and for the next decade worked as a designer of forged metal objects, a fashion designer and at other trades. After spending the years 1940 to 1942 in Marseille, Kemeny moved to Zürich. There he resumed painting and supported himself as a fashion designer and, from 1952, as an editor for a fashion magazine. His first solo exhibition took place at the Galerie des Eaux-Vives in Zürich in 1945. The following year the artist’s first one-man show in Paris was held at the Galerie Kléber, and he met Dubuffet. Subsequent to this encounter with Dubuffet, Kemeny began to introduce commonplace found objects such as pebbles, beads and dried grass into his works, to produce collage and reliefs with crude, rough surfaces.

The character of Kemeny’s work changed markedly in 1951 when he made his first translucent, colored reliefs, in which objects are attached to glass sheets. He sometimes enhanced the luminosity of these reliefs by placing an electric light behind the glass. By 1954 the artist began to renounce crude materials in favor of metal, the medium he continued to use throughout his life. Kemeny obtained Swiss citizenship in 1957. In 1959 he was honored with a retrospective at the Kunsthaus Zürich. He gave up his work as a fashion designer to devote himself exclusively to sculpture in 1960, the year of his first one-man exhibition in New York, at the Sidney Janis Gallery. He executed several major commissions in his last years, including a brass sculpture for the municipal theater in Frankfurt. Zoltan Kemeny died on June 14, 1965, in Zürich.

The day before yesterday i wrote a blog on the ZEVEN series by Frank van Hemert. But it was far from complete. On another bookshelf i found the book Reconstructie , published by the Haags Gemeentemuseum and written by Franz Kaiser . This contains several more paintings from the ZEVEN series. The reason why i had missed this is that i put the book apart from the rest of the Frank van Hemert publications, since most of the paintings it contains have been painted with the Red/Pink color that has caused so much trouble for Frank. Most of these paintings are considered to be lost, since the paint drips literally on the floor and unfortunately there is at this moment no solution to preserve them. I am a collector and i have been warned to be careful with these paintings and therefore i had placed the catalogue at hand….just to remember to be careful, but here are the paintings still in their prime condition, but after 30 years it is highly probable that most of these have been damaged beyond repair and must be considered lost.

(except for the painting above the text, the condition is excellent of this superb painting)

The first time i encountered work by Morandini was at the occasion of his special exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop in 2001.

Marcello Morandini was born in Mantova in 1940, but in 1947 he moved to Varese. He attended the school of Arts in Milano, where he works as an assistant designer. He is one of the most important exponents of the “Arte Costruttiva” in Europe.  He started his artistic career in 1963 and since then has been holding many personal exhibitions in Europe, USA and Japan. He was invited to historical expositions and to International Biennials, among which the ones in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 1967 and in Venice in 1968. He has always been professionally interested in design and architecture collaborations, but for me the quality that impressed me most was the OP ART . Most of his works being executed in Black/White and greys. Making these for me like a bridege between the multi colorod POP ART from the sixties and the ZERO art from some years later.

www.ftn-books.com has some Morandini items available among them the Bottrop poster which is an original silkscreen print.