Hans de Vries’ (1947, Broek-onder-Akkerwoude, NL) artistic approach is characterised by a conscious and close relationship to his environment. He was deeply inspired by nature and daily reality.

In the ‘60s and ’70s, the political attitude in the Western world was becoming more critical towards an ideology that viewed nature as an inexhaustible source of energy, food, spectacle and beauty. The declarations of the Club of Rome, the rise of the Provos and the hippie movement were a response to new and highly complex relationships between man and nature, which were all too often treated light-heartedly by politicians and industry.

The visual arts responded in an archaic way by recording and measuring the day-to-day changes in nature, witnessing and registering the world’s inherent beauty through a combination of notations and photography, and using prosaic methods for making instruments, building furniture and harvesting food. This was seen as a counteraction to industrialised society. Their art was anti-commodity, aiming at inclusion and commitment and showing a back-to-basics, hands-on mentality.

Hans de Vries (1947) concentrated on the study and registration of processes and appearances that occur in and are created by nature. De Vries was a close observer, an onlooker, an eyewitness, whose aim was to discern and document the relationship between man and his natural environment. His practice has been referred to as “micro- emotive art”, a term coined by the Italian artist Piero Gilardi. Micro-emotive art was art that arose from the interest in minimal sensations and experiences (micro-emotions) – the results of slow processes otherwise not readily perceived. De Vries’s practice was fully integrated in his daily life. He lived in the countryside and registered every detail of his domestic existence. Developments in nature were studied and phenomena one might consider superfluous, were highlighted. This accumulation of facts and observations has been captured in his publications – the artist books of Hans de Vries.

Although not trained as an artist, De Vries, self-designated as an artist, participated in 1971 in some high profile exhibitions like Sonsbeek Buiten de Perken (Sonsbeek Beyond the Pale), Park Sonsbeek, Arnhem (NL) and Binnen en Buiten het Kader (Inside and Beyond the Frame), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (NL). In 1978 he showed his work in the Dutch pavillion at the Venice Biennial as part of a group of four artists as the Dutch entry ‘Nature <-> Art’ to the Venice Biennial in 1978. After that he stopped his artistic practice and pursued with his farming practice. In the 1974-art-publication R.A.N. no.9 (Rotterdam Art News run by Jan Donia and Gosse Oosterhof) Hans de Vries was described as ‘the foremost Dutch representitive of an international trend which derives its material from ecology’. In 2016 he had a solo exhibition at Kunstverein, Amsterdam. We presented Hans de Vries afterwards, that same year, in a group show with two other important Dutch conceptual artists from the ‘70s: Douwe Jan Bakker (1943-1997) and Krijn Giezen (1939-2011). In 2017 Hans de Vries was part of our groupshow Spurensicherung, a German forensics term that means literally “to secure traces”. The title is drawn from an exhibition in 1974 at the Hamburger Kunstverein, curated by the art historian Günter Metken (1928, Germany – 2000, Libya), which included some of the most interesting artists from the early Seventies. He analyzed in the eponymous catalogue the art historical notions of that period.

the following publication is now available at www.ftn-books.com

The artist book Stijgbeelden van vruchten [Growth Images of Fruits] is a folder with an original photograph published by the Haags Gemeentemuseum.

Bazile-Bustamante (1952)

Bazile Bustamente stands for the works by Bernard Bazile and Jean-Marc Bustamante. They made these works in between 1983 and 1987

GALERIE CROUSEL-HUSSENOT

Lately I’ve had a good feeling on entering certain shows—I’ve had to wonder what they’ve been about, what’s been standing there, what the point of the display might have been and what the reasons behind it. The Bazile-Bustamante show gave me this feeling, a feeling that the viewer, without being deceived by the work, has lost the points of reference one usually possesses on entering a gallery. An original Sonia Delaunay carpet lay on the floor, partly covering two lit fluorescent light tubes; on the carpet rested iron plates arranged in the silhouette of two chairs and a table. Facing this a wall piece reproduced soldiers silhouettes cut from 18th-century engravings and applied to Formica colored with a shadowy, transparent, reddish dye. Elsewhere was an imitation of an African mask or expressionist sculpture, modeled in plaster and painted green. Before the door, a yellow fiberglass display case supported by three iron columns contained the name “Francis Ford Coppola” cut from imitation blue felt. On the back wall was a color photograph of a table in Paris Camondo furniture museum; the light falls on the table in such a way that it seems to emerge three-dimensionally from the photograph, while the surrounding environment is as flat as the paper it is painted on.

This display of disparate objects did not pretend to bring anything new to the market. And though the viewer might desire a generous artistic presence, or alternatively the kind of rigorous absence that many shows offered in the ’70s, neither was offered here. Rarely have I found myself in a situation like this show’s, in which not only was nothing given to the viewer, but nothing was taken away.

If these thoughts sound too abstract to a reader who didn’t see the show, they are even more so for someone who did. The works are both so obvious and so unexpected that describing them might demand a Rabelais, who saw “the world in Pantagruel’s mouth.” Everything in the show was exactly like what was outside it, what was there was like what was here, except for the fact that it was there. Nothing was given to or taken from the viewer, but that didn’t mean that there was nothing there to be given or taken away. This violent concentration on the thinnest surface of exchange had little to do with a market situation. It wasn’t as if you had either to pay or to leave; the place was not a store, though neither was it a home.

Again, the association of the names of the two artists (Bernard Bazile and Jean Marc Bustamante, who have worked together only since 1982) connotes neither an affective relationship (as it does with Marina Abramović and Ulay) nor a married couple (like Bernd and Hilla Becher). This isn’t even aspiritual wedding under a Surrealist cupola, as in the case of André Breton and Philippe Soupault. This usage is more like a trademark. In France, when you register a trademark you always need a third partner; Bazile-Bustamante often refer to a third person (Delaunay, Coppola), a kind of straw person in the group. Truths can be shared by two people; to complete an exchange, the fiction of a third is necessary. This is perhaps the truth these artists share.

There is a strong analogy between the fundamental structure of Bazile-Bustamante’s work and the system of exchange in our society, as it is projected in the visual arts not as esthetic phenomena but as cultural exchanges. This aspect of their work is structurally linked with the production of disparate objects and their display, though it does not limit itself to a socioeconomic level. The inflationary aspect of an economy, the arbitrariness of a society, are presented here mostly poetically; rather than relating image to background, consumer to product, position to ideology, these objects turn away from the role of being “usual” or “unusual” to coexist in groundlessness. If nothing was “known” to the viewer of this show, neither was there any relation to an “unknown.” If everything seemed a little known and a little unknown, this was because there was no more than a little here of everything that makes a world possible. If the world in question was no more than what was here, this was because anything more would immediately mean inflation and arbitrariness, not only as a socioeconomic effect but as a desire for an economy, a social system. If Archimedes found physics in his bath, and Einstein worked out relativity on his violin, Bazile-Bustamante found art on a Delaunay carpet and worked out the relativity of this precious meeting place.

The Crousel Hussenot catalogue is available at www.ftn-books.com

It was Franz Kaiser who first showed me the works by Robert Barry and i was an immediate fan. His conceptual works are like minimal paintings with words placed on the surface. Poetic in their appearance and strong in their presence.

Robert Barry is an American artist best known for his Conceptual works. He focuses on the transitional and impermanent aspects of space in art, along with the people surrounding, reacting to, and artists rather than the objects themselves. Born in 1936 in the Bronx, NY, Robert Barry, studied Fine Art as an undergraduate at Hunter’s College of the City University of New York, graduating in 1963. He earned his MA from the same school.  In 1974, Barry moved to Teaneck, New Jersey. He gave up painting, and began making art using invisible media, including electromagnetic energy, ultrasonic radiation, and inert gases.  

He describes his art as affecting other things as much as it is affected by those things. He also began incorporating text into his artworks, aiming to make the viewer a part of his pieces. For his “word list” installations, Barry imprints capitalized words directly on walls or surfaces to evoke narrative and inspire contemplation. Barry encourages free association of meaning to his work. In 2007, an installation entitled “Art and War” included large words such as DOUBT, WITHOUT, and DESPERATE placed at random angles on the walls of a residential space. The title of the piece references Sun Tzu’s famous Taoist text, The Art of War, the chosen words a reflection on language, time, and human nature. 

 Even though, Barry has proven himself to be a prolific artist. In 2011 alone, he was part of 15 group exhibitions and four solo exhibitions, most of which were in Europe.  His work can be found in the permanent collections of renowned museums including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, DC; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; the Musée d’Orsay, Paris; the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; the Musée National D’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC. 

Robert Barry currently lives and works in Teaneck, New Jersey.  

Because of my admiration for Barry i have collected some nice publications on the artist which are available at www.ftn-books.com.

Auerbach was born in Berlin of Jewish parents; his father was a lawyer and his mother a former art student. In 1939 he was sent to England to escape Nazism. His parents, who remained behind, died in concentration camps. He spent his childhood at a progressive boarding school, Bunce Court, at Lenham near Faversham, Kent, a school for Jewish refugee children. During the war years the school was evacuated to Shropshire. He attended St Martin’s School of Art, London, from 1948 to 1952, and studied with David Bomberg in night classes at Borough Polytechnic. It was during this period that he developed a friendship with fellow student Leon Kossoff. Auerbach studied at the Royal College of Art from 1952 to 1955. He has used three principal models throughout his career: his wife Julia, who first posed for him in 1959; Juliet Yardley Mills (‘J.Y.M.’), a professional model whom he met in 1957; and his close friend Estella (Stella) West (‘E.O.W.’), the model for most of his nudes and female heads prior to 1973. Rarely leaving Britain, he lives and works in London and has had the same studio since the 1950s.

The dealer Helen Lessore at the Beaux-Arts Gallery, London, gave Auerbach his first solo show in 1956. He was criticised for his thick application of paint, but found support from the critic David Sylvester, who wrote of ‘the most exciting and impressive first one-man show by an English painter since Francis Bacon in 1949’. Sylvester countered remarks by various critics that the artist’s work was closer to sculpture than to painting: ‘in spite of the heaped-up paint, these are painterly images, not sculptural ones, have to be read as paintings, not as polychrome reliefs, and make their point just because their physical structure is virtually that of sculpture but their psychological impact is that of painting’ (Sylvester, ‘Young English Painting’, The Listener, 12 January 1956). Kossoff later echoed these sentiments: ‘in spite of the excessive piling on of paint, the effect of these works on the mind is of images recovered and reconceived in the barest and most particular light, the same light that seems to glow through the late, great, thin Turners … an unpremeditated manifestation arising from the constant application of true draughtsmanship’ (in Frank Auerbach, exhibition catalogue, Arts Council, Hayward Gallery, London 1978, p.9).

Auerbach exhibited regularly at the Beaux-Arts Gallery until 1963. From 1965 he exhibited at the Marlborough Gallery. He was given an Arts Council retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London in 1978, and had solo exhibitions at the British Pavilion in the 1986 Venice Biennale, and at the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh, Amsterdam, 1989. Group shows in which he has participated include Tooth and Sons, London, in 1958, Pittsburgh International Exhibition at the Carnegie Institute in 1958 and 1961, ’54/64 Painting and Sculpture of a Decade at the Tate Gallery, 1964, British Painting in the Sixties organised by the Contemporary Arts Society in 1964, and The Human Clay, selected by R.B. Kitaj, held at the Hayward, 1976.

www.ftn-books.com has the book on his etchings now available.

Armleder has always maintained a close relationship with New York City. By the end of the 1960s, he had taken particular interest in the development of the international Fluxus movement, which inspired him to co-found the Ecart Group in Geneva in 1969, an influential collective doubling as a publishing house and exhibition space, which came to host leading figures of the day such as Andy Warhol. In the 1980s, Armleder began to exhibit in New York and established a dialogue between the artists associated with the local ‘Neo-Geo’ scene, including Haim Steinbach and Peter Halley, in addition to Olivier Mosset and Helmut Federle, both linked to Geneva—Armleder’s home city. Most recently in New York, Armleder exhibited at Wade Guyton’s former Brooklyn studio space, Burning Bridges, in 2014. This survey exhibition of John M Armleder’s diverse practice from the late 1960s until the present day will include examples of painting and sculpture, as well as a series of historic drawings and conceptual wall paintings. Using simple brush strokes, applied without visible effort, some works draw on several of Armleder’s major influences: Zen Buddhism, the music of John Cage, and the work of Marcel Duchamp. Other drawings use geometric shapes in stark primary colors, celebrating the motifs of the Constructivists or Suprematists—movements that remain essential to the artist’s practice. In 1979, John M Armleder developed a series of works entitled Furniture Sculpture, which brought him international recognition. These works, composed of a domestic piece of furniture, such as a table or chair, are associated with an abstract canvas. Directly referencing the Duchampian ready-made, they endeavour to question the status of the work of art, the ideas of style and decoration, while freeing those from artistic categories and hierarchies. One of his first Furniture Sculpture works (FS18), originally presented in 1980 at C Space in New York, will be reassembled for this exhibition. The piece is comprised of a coffee table nailed to the ceiling. Another piece from this series, FS 230, is made up of three faux Louis XV style chairs, placed on a painted pedestal, while Blind Venetian Piece (FS) juxtaposes a Venetian blind with a black and white painting. The exhibition will also include a new Furniture Sculpture produced in 2016, in reference to the stalls of flowers in New York’s delis. A series of new paintings produced in New York last summer will round out the exhibition. These new diptychs blend the artist’s modernist distinctive stripe and polka-dot paintings, with a fluorescent, pop influenced aesthetic. These works are also associated with the now famous Puddle and Pour Paintings, which were created by randomly pouring paint on a vertical canvas or a canvas placed on the floor and gesturally mixing in a diverse range of experimental materials such as glitter or automotive lacquer.

www.ftn-books.com has one Armleder title available

I dare to say that Bas Jan Ader is one of the most important and even influential artists ever to appear. He was groundbreaking in his performances. Not to complicated , but all memorable.

Bas Jan Ader was born in Winschoten and studied, together with people such as Wim T. Schippers and Ger van Elk in Amsterdam at the Institute for Applied Art (now the Rietveld Academy). In the early 1960s he studied art and philosophy in California. Photography and film play an important role in his work that is largely made up of performances. He exhibited regularly in the United States and Europe. In 1975, he set off alone to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a small sailing boat as part of his work ‘In search of the Miraculous’. He disappeared during this trip; a year later his empty boat was found off the coast of Ireland. 

https://youtu.be/aqJTellOG3I

The above video tells the story of his disappearance and of course www.ftn-books.com has some important ader publications available.

The Danish artist Asger Jorn (1914-1973) wrote and drew “Troels Jorn’s Book about the Hungry Lion, the Happy Elephant, the Little Mouse and Jens pissant” for his son Troels Jorn (born 1945) in the winter of 1949/1950. It was a gift from afar for his youngest, as at this time he was no longer living with his wife, Kirsten Lyngborg, and their three children. 

Troels Jorn’s Book, published for the first time in English, is both a picture book for children and an artist’s book. 

This is one of those rare exemples where artists made for the you a special book. Beside this book i know of a few others.They all have one thing in common. Now that they have reached artist book status . the reprints are perhaps even better than the originals. The book i have now for sale at www.ftn-books.com is published by the Silkeborg Kunstmuseum in 1981 and has kept all the qualities of the original.

Gradually, year by year and decade by decade, the importance of these two Russian designers is growing. One look at the 1997 Museum of Modern ARt catalogue shows why ( available at www.ftn-books.com). A design language that was new and fresh and one to become adapted by many in the decades to follow ( Piet Zwart, Schuitema and many dutch great designers have known of these works and at their turn were influenced in many ways.

The brothers were at their prime during the revolutionary period of politics and artistic experimentation in Moscow when there was a shift from the illustrator-as-creator to the constructor-as-creator or nonlinear-narrator-as-creator.^[2] In the visual language of the constructor or constructivist, the Stenbergs and other graphic designers and artists assembled images, such as portions of photographs and preprinted paper, that had been created by others.^[2] Thus, the Stenbergs and others realized wholly new images (or compositions) which were no longer about realism. As a result, graphic design as a modern expression eschewing traditional fine art was born in the form of the printed reproductions of collage or assemblage.

One of the causes of the avant-garde artists in the new Russia, who considered fine art to be useless, was served when the Stenbergs and others as constructors-as-creators produced posters that had a use, particularly to serve the state.^[2] (In fact, painter Nadezhda Udaltsova resigned from the UNKhUK in protest against the replacement of easel painting by use-intended industrial art.)

The Stenbergs’ radical approach was spurred by their graphic talent, their knowledge of film theory, constructivism, Malevich’s suprematism, avant-garde theater — and Bolshevik promotion of propaganda to reform the peasant class, and communicate with a widely illiterate population, which rendered commercial graphic design and advertising a desirable and honorable practice.^[2][4][5]

Radical even today, the posters by the brothers were realized within the nine-year period from 1924 to 1933, the year Georgii died at age 33.^]His motorcycle hit a truck, a few months after the brothers had become Russian citizens, and “around the time that Stalin came into power, Vladimir considered it to be the work of the secret police, since independent art was being attacked under Stalin’s rule.”

It is over 30 years now that i have followed Uwe Poth and his works . Erik Bos showed me for the first time his works in his gallery, but since they were far too expensive for me i never acquiredone. A few years ago finally a large work came up for sale at the Venduehuis and it was luckily bought by my sister, but at a pricelevel which made it interesting for me to follow the auctions and hoping another work would become for sale and yes!…… about a year ago i bought a large drawing and now i am waiting for a reasonable priced painting. Not too large, not too expensive….. his works still fascinate me after so many decades and i think it is finally the time for an acquisition. Books on Poth and by Erik Bos are still available at www.ftn-books.com

The visit of the Beyeler meant that i was inspired to write another blog on Georgia O’Keeffe. Not only her paintings were worth the visit. The first room was dedicated to the photographs that were taken of her by the very best and famous of 20th century photographers . Beside the paintinsg i thought this was a wonderful introduction to her works. Here are the photo that were presented in the frist room.

Some nice O’Keeffe books are still available at www.ftn-books.com