FTN-blog

Not a history , not a personal opinion about this great composer, but letting you know that i have some nice Cage publications available and let you know that the official site on Cage : https://www.johncage.org

is marvelous!

For those living in the Nethelands the wok by Caro is not unknown. Exhibitions at the Kroller Muller Museum and being present is some publica collections his works are quite known.

Anthony Caro (1924 – 2013) played a pivotal role in the development of twentieth century sculpture. After studying sculpture at the Royal Academy Schools in London, he worked as assistant to Henry Moore. He came to public attention with a show at the Whitechapel Gallery in 1963, where he exhibited large abstract sculptures brightly painted and standing directly on the ground so that they engage the spectator on a one-to-one basis. This was a radical departure from the way sculpture had hitherto been seen and paved the way for future developments in three-dimensional art.

Caro’s teaching at St Martin’s School of Art in London (1953 -1981) was very influential. His questioning approach opened up new possibilities, both formally and with regard to subject matter. His innovative work as well as his teaching led to a flowering and a new confidence in sculpture worldwide.

Caro often worked in steel, but also in a diverse range of other materials, including bronze, silver, lead, stoneware, wood and paper. Major exhibitions include retrospectives at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1975), the Trajan Markets, Rome (1992), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo (1995), Tate Britain, London (2005), and three museums in Pas-de-Calais, France (2008), to accompany the opening of his Chapel of Light at Bourbourg. He has been awarded many prizes, including the Praemium Imperiale for Sculpture in Tokyo in 1992 and the Lifetime Achievement Award for Sculpture in 1997. He holds many honorary degrees from universities in the UK, USA and Europe. He was knighted in 1987 and received the Order of Merit in May 2000.

www.ftn-books.com has some nice publciations on Caro available.

The best way to remember one of the greats in dutch photogrpahy is by showing some examples of his magnificent photographs. 3 days ago Arno Nollen died, age 58, as “HET PAROOL described him….a photographer without any compromise…..

www.ftn-books.com has the scarce limited edition y the Annet Gelink gallery and the “Hooked” book now available .

The fiirst time i heard about Piet Paris was the time i read a short review on an exhibition by Viktor & Rolf. But since i have been a fan. His fashion illustration are highly recognisable and have a graphic quality.

Piet Paris has been working for more than twenty five years as a fashion illustrator for magazines and corporate clients all over the world. As an illustrator and designer he has always been concerned with design in the broader sense. Through his lectureships and masterclasses for fashion designers at various academies, as well as in his role as the co-founder of a post-graduate course for fashion designers, Piet Paris has developed a wealth of expertise and has gained a great breadth of experience in the world of design. In 2008 Paris received the Grand Seigneur, the most important fashion award in the Netherlands, an accolade for his achievements within Dutch fashion training, as artistic director of the Arnhem Mode Biennale and, of course, as a fashion illustrator who has garnered global renown. Piet Paris is also creative director at Harper’s Bazaar Netherlands.

www.ftn-books.com has two very nice publications by Piet Paris now available.

Frank Van den Broeck’s (1950) drawings and paintings have a characteristic and unmistakable handwriting. In mobile lines he draws performances that are concrete but ambiguous. The hovering often returns in Van den Broeck’s work, objects seem to be in a state of transition, on the way to another place or dimension. The artist’s universe is often the subject of his work.

Motives such as the painter’s palette and the open book, of which the butterfly is a derivative, play an important role in the drawings. Other representations are more threatening with ghostly creatures and mask-like faces that suddenly appear. There is always a sense of transition present, the objects and figures seem to refer to an underlying reality.

Both the above publications are available at www.ftn-books.com

In the 1970s and 1980s, Borofsky was instrumental in focusing the art world on the idea of “installation art” – that is, art that focuses more on how the entire room or space connects together as a whole, and less on the individual object. His blending of both spiritual and archetypal images focused on the human psyche and extended the perception of art beyond the existing imagery of pop and minimalism. During that time, his large-scale, interactive, multi-media installations were featured in many solo exhibitions around the world, including at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (1977), the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1979), the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art (1986), and the Kunst Museum, Basel (1983). A retrospective exhibition originating at the Philadelphia Museum of Art traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the University Art Museum, Berkeley, and the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (1984 – 1986).

In 1990, after living and working in New York City and Los Angeles for many years, Borofsky moved to Ogunquit, Maine, where he began to focus primarily on producing large sculptures for public locations around the world. Over 35 large scale public sculptures have been completed, including the 30-meter tall Molecule Man standing on the Spree River in Berlin, the 21-meter tall Hammering Man in Frankfurt, and the 30-meter tall Walking To The Sky in Seoul, South Korea.

Borofsky continues to live and work in Ogunquit, Maine, and creates his large outdoor public sculptures at the La Paloma Fine Arts factory in Los Angeles. Most recently, he has completed the 20-meter tall People Tower for the Beijing Olympics, as well as several projects in the United States, including the 11-meter tall Human Structures sculpture in San Francisco, and the Humanity in Motion installation for the 43-meter tall atrium of the Comcast Center in Philadelphia.

From the beginning of his career, all of Borofsky’s work has been symbolic of humanity uniting together to build our world. People Tower (in which 136 life-size figures are connected together), the Molecule Man, the Hammering Man (which he often refers to as ‘the worker in all of us’), Walking to the Sky, and the Human Structures series are all efforts to encourage humanity’s understanding of our collective consciousness.

www.ftn-books.com has some nice Borofsky publications available at the moment.

In contrast to the spare documentary approach of Bernd and Hilla Becher and their students (including Thomas Struth), which has dominated German photography for the last thirty years, the Blumes’ work is refreshingly expressive and humorous. Bernhard Blume and his wife, Anna, with whom he has collaborated since 1980, studied art in the early 1960s at the Düsseldorf Academy, where both were tremendously influenced by Josef Beuys as well as the international happenings and Fluxus movements. Married shortly after graduating, they found jobs teaching high school and soon became the parents of twin daughters. Using their own middle-class backgrounds and new-found domesticity, they began to stage performances for the camera, posing as “Kleinbürger,” typical lower-middle-class Germans, in narratives in which aspects of everyday life go wildly out of control. By transforming the most mundane events into hysterical melodramas, as in this sequence in which Bernhard, in the role of a mild-mannered office worker, goes berserk devouring a head of lettuce, the artist seeks to trigger more serious thoughts about the meaning of life and everyday existence.

www. ftn-books.com has some small publication by Blume for sale.

Lives and works in New York.

Since the 1970s, Bloom has produced works in a wide range of media including photography. Though enthusiastically visual, her artworks seem to stem more from the traditions of literature or film than from the fields of painting or sculpture. Bloom has developed a working method of zeroing in on subjects of interest, and slowly researching – several subjects at a time – savouring all kinds of detours, until a work comes into being. Bloom has an ongoing interest in the value and meaning we collectively and individually bestow upon objects and images. She has not been concerned with showing single objects or images, rather with highlighting the relationships between them, and the meanings implicit in their placement and combination. The objects are placeholders for thoughts, and when they are situated in proximity to one another, meanings can reverberate and ricochet off of each other.
Bloom’s work has been shown widely including exhibitions at: Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Rotterdam; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the Venice Biennale; Kunstverein München, Munich; Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney; The Serpentine Gallery, London; Kunsthalle Zürich; Württembergischer Kunstverein, Stuttgart; Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh; Leo Castelli Gallery, New York; SITE Santa Fe; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark; La Bienale de Venezuela, Caracas; Museum Friedricianum, Kassel; Parrish Art Museum, Southampton; Wexner Center for the Arts; Cooper-Hewitt Design Museum; International Center of Photography, New York; Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin; The Jewish Museum, New York.

www.ftn-books.com has the early Gemeentemuseum Arnhem catalogue now available.

One can not underestimate the importance of Sheila Hicks and for that reason The Stedelijk Museum was one of the first in Europe to organise an exhibition with her (large) textile works. Maybe this exhibition was the one that inspired Ferdi to make her own textile sculptures, but i can not say that for sure. )www.ftn-books.com has on both artists some nice publications available).

The reason for this blog is the raiseed interest in her works nad ofcourse that i finally have obtained 2 copies of the Sheila Hicks / Irma Boom boo that was published by Yale.

Irma Boom designed book for the Sheila Hicks exhibition

Born during the Great Depression in Hastings, Nebraska, Sheila Hicks spent much of her early life on the road, with her father seeking work where he found it. This “fantastic…migratory existence,” ¹ as she has described it, has come to define her six-decade career as an artist. Extensive experiences traveling, living, and working around the world continue to advance her exploration of textiles, the pliable and adaptable medium with which she is most closely associated.

“Textile is a universal language. In all of the cultures of the world, textile is a crucial and essential component,” Hicks has said. ² Captivated by structure, form, and color, she has looked to weaving cultures across the globe to shape her work at varying scales, from small hand-woven works called Minimes and wall hangings; to sculptural fiber piles like The Evolving Tapestry: He/She (1967–68); to monumental corporate commissions, among them Enchantillon: Medallion (1967), a prototype for an installation at New York’s Ford Foundation. More recently, Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column (2014) demonstrates Hicks’s intense fascination with experimental materials: a whirling structure of multicolored synthetic fibers cascades from the ceiling, as if breaking through from the sky above.

As a student at Yale University, Hicks studied painting with artist and designer Josef Albers, whose book The Interaction of Color heralded new approaches to the study of color, and left a lasting impact on Hicks’s work. She became fascinated with textiles and weaving while working with George Kubler, an art historian specializing in pre-Columbian art from South America, who encouraged her to travel abroad to expand her understanding of the medium. Upon completing her undergraduate degree in 1957, Hicks received a Fulbright grant to study ancient Andean weaving in Chile, using the funds to travel across the continent and explore its rich artistic traditions.

From 1959 until 1964, Hicks lived and worked in Taxco el Viejo, Mexico, honing her skills as a fiber artist and learning from traditional textile craftspeople. In 1964, she made her way to Paris, where she continues to operate a studio. She has traveled extensively throughout her career: setting up workshops in Mexico, Chile, and South Africa; developing commercially woven fabrics in India and tufted rugs in Morocco; and realizing large-scale commissions in the United States, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. In each place, she has mined local knowledge to inform work that transcends geographic boundaries.

Her diverse approach to textiles put her at the center of the burgeoning Fiber Art movement of the 1960s and ’70s, in which artists, including Lenore Tawney and Magdalena Abakanowicz, were inventing new possibilities for pliable mediums. They created sculptural and three-dimensional fiber works that upended conventions, establishing a new order in the largely male-dominated arena of two-dimensional tapestry-making.

Hicks continues employing intensely saturated color and the raw materials of textiles—wool, synthetic thread, linen flax—in works that are rigorously constructed by wrapping, piling, and weaving her materials. “I don’t want to go do something I know how to do. I want to go do something I don’t know how to do,” she has said. “I don’t want a legacy. I just want to

Born during the Great Depression in Hastings, Nebraska, Sheila Hicks spent much of her early life on the road, with her father seeking work where he found it. This “fantastic…migratory existence,” ¹ as she has described it, has come to define her six-decade career as an artist. Extensive experiences traveling, living, and working around the world continue to advance her exploration of textiles, the pliable and adaptable medium with which she is most closely associated.

“Textile is a universal language. In all of the cultures of the world, textile is a crucial and essential component,” Hicks has said. ² Captivated by structure, form, and color, she has looked to weaving cultures across the globe to shape her work at varying scales, from small hand-woven works called Minimes and wall hangings; to sculptural fiber piles like The Evolving Tapestry: He/She (1967–68); to monumental corporate commissions, among them Enchantillon: Medallion (1967), a prototype for an installation at New York’s Ford Foundation. More recently, Pillar of Inquiry/Supple Column (2014) demonstrates Hicks’s intense fascination with experimental materials: a whirling structure of multicolored synthetic fibers cascades from the ceiling, as if breaking through from the sky above.

As a student at Yale University, Hicks studied painting with artist and designer Josef Albers, whose book The Interaction of Color heralded new approaches to the study of color, and left a lasting impact on Hicks’s work. She became fascinated with textiles and weaving while working with George Kubler, an art historian specializing in pre-Columbian art from South America, who encouraged her to travel abroad to expand her understanding of the medium. Upon completing her undergraduate degree in 1957, Hicks received a Fulbright grant to study ancient Andean weaving in Chile, using the funds to travel across the continent and explore its rich artistic traditions.

From 1959 until 1964, Hicks lived and worked in Taxco el Viejo, Mexico, honing her skills as a fiber artist and learning from traditional textile craftspeople. In 1964, she made her way to Paris, where she continues to operate a studio. She has traveled extensively throughout her career: setting up workshops in Mexico, Chile, and South Africa; developing commercially woven fabrics in India and tufted rugs in Morocco; and realizing large-scale commissions in the United States, Japan, and Saudi Arabia. In each place, she has mined local knowledge to inform work that transcends geographic boundaries.

Her diverse approach to textiles put her at the center of the burgeoning Fiber Art movement of the 1960s and ’70s, in which artists, including Lenore Tawney and Magdalena Abakanowicz, were inventing new possibilities for pliable mediums. They created sculptural and three-dimensional fiber works that upended conventions, establishing a new order in the largely male-dominated arena of two-dimensional tapestry-making.

Hicks continues employing intensely saturated color and the raw materials of textiles—wool, synthetic thread, linen flax—in works that are rigorously constructed by wrapping, piling, and weaving her materials. “I don’t want to go do something I know how to do. I want to go do something I don’t know how to do,” she has said. “I don’t want a legacy. I just want to have fun while I’m here.”