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Anita Groener ( 1958)

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The first impression was Jakob Gasteiger, but certainly this is not the case….. there is much more to the work of Anita Groener. The swirls and lines look like Gasteiger but there is much more depth in her paintings. She uses small dots and lines to accentuate the lines making these much stronger than expected. Born in the Netherlands she now lives in Dublin/Ireland and making a name for herself in Ireland. Here is the info on her i found on her artist site.: www.anitagroener.com

Asking what it is to be human today, Anita Groener explores the substance of trauma and loss rooted in this question. She makes work for what needs language, experimenting with both figurative and abstract geographies. The artist focuses on specific current events, their archetypal and psychological resonances, tracing urgent connections between people driven from their homes through armed, economic or political conflict and her own life and family. The deliberately modest means of Groener’s installations and line drawings—twigs, cut paper, straight pins, gouache, twine—speak to the fragility of life and society that refugee crises expose. Her art implicates herself and us, asking questions about the ethics of witnessing and aesthetic response.
Anita Groener was born in The Netherlands and is based in Dublin, Ireland. In 2005, she was elected a member of Aosdána, the prestigious official association of Ireland’s preeminent cultural producers. Until 2014 she was a professor at the Dublin Institute of Technology where she was also the Head of Fine Art from 2004 to 2006.
www.ftn-books.com has one title available on Groener
groener a
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Piet Dirkx weekly

The official invitation for the BIOTOOP installation at the Haags Gemeentemuseum in 1995. I remember that this was the last exhibition my mother witnessed.aaaa a memorable occasion.

The card design by Gracia Lebbink is superb it is totally different from the invitation that are nowadays used by the Kunstmuseum Den Haag. For me these are far superior with the little embossed yellow rectangle. Simplicity makes these stand out and all are designed in the best of dutch design tradition.

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Sérgio Camargo (1930-1990)

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Camargo was an almost forgotten sculptor until there was a sudden raise of interest in Brazilian art in the Nineties. This meant that his works were considered to be important for the development in Modern Art and sculpture in Brasil. When you look at the studio pictures in the books that is for sale at www.ftn-books.com, you will soon conclude that Camargo was inspired by Brancusi and Chillida, but still there is so much of his own .

Where Brancusi was inspired by nature, Camargo is much more inspired by the minimal forms. It has been over 20 years now that the last show took place in Europe. Time again to present Camargo again and put his works into context with European and minimal sculptors.

The Nineties catalogue is available at www.ftn-books.com

camargo

 

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Jacques Tardi (1946)

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One of the iconic creators of great (french) comics is undoubtedly Jacques Tardi. Tardi managed to find the balance between classic comics/BD ( Bandes dessinee), graphic novel and Art. His series on Adele Blanc-Sec are among the very best in comic art from the last half century, but beside the series of ordinary BD’s he produced some great adaptations of “classic” french literature. Tardi successfully adapted novels by controversial writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline and crime novelist Léo Malet. In Malet’s case, Tardi adapted his detective hero Nestor Burma into a series of critically acclaimed graphic novels, though he also wrote and drew original stories of his own.

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With a style of comic art, highly recognizable and very much a style of his own, Tardi crossed the border into the world of art and his pages of comics are now sold in galeries all over the world. www.ftn-books.com has some very nice Tardi publications available.

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Carlo Battaglia (1933-2005)

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Intrigued by the catalogue i found on Carlo Battaglia, i started to look into the life of Carlo Battaglia and noticed he became friends and worked together with Robert Motherwell, Ad Reinhardt and Mark Rothko. But i noticed other aspects in his works. after seeing a large room with Battaglia paintings on photo at studio LA CITTA. I was impressed and at the same time it reminded me of Mondriaan and LeWitt

Schermafbeelding 2019-08-30 om 15.47.59 he must have been influenced by Piet Mondriaan, because just look at the similarities ….just coincidence?

left is Battaglia / right is Duinlandschap by Piet Mondriaan

On the other hand he could have been an inspirator to Sol LeWitt in later years. Battaglia is first and then comes Sol LeWitt with his Horizontal Lines.

left is Battaglia/ right Sol LeWitt

Still i like his works, This is the kind of art that inspires me and never bores.

www.ftn-books.com has publications available on all the artists mentioned

battaglia

Battaglia served in the Italian Air Force from 1958–59, and in 1962 moved to Paris. In 1967, he lived in New York City, where he established friendships with Reinhardt, Motherwell and Rothko.

In 1970, 1978 and 1980, he was invited to the Venice Biennale, exhibiting his series about Maree (“Tides”) for the first time in 1970, which introduced a theme that would be prominent throughout his life. Battaglia’s most prominent exhibitions include retrospectives at Palazzo Grassi, in Venice in 1967, Palazzo dei Diamanti in Ferrara in 1976 and the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in 1978.

He also participated in a number of group shows about Italian contemporary art held in many international venues, including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington in 1974, the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam in 1977 and the Hayward Gallery in London in 1978. In 1978 and 1980, he participated to the 40th and the 43rd Venice Biennale. From 1980 on, he increasingly isolated himself and painted in total solitude.

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Madeleine Vionnet (1876-1975)

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Madeleine Vionnet….one of the great fashion designers from last century and by far the most gifted of couturiers according to Ietse Mey,  former curator of the Kostuummuseum in the Netherlands. At one time she explained that the reason why Vionnet has been so important for the world of fashion is that she had a special way of cutting the fabrics.

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She became known for clothes that accentuated the natural female form. Influenced by the modern dances of Isadora Duncan, Vionnet created designs that showed off a woman’s natural shape. Like Duncan, Vionnet was inspired by ancient Greek art, in which garments appear to float freely around the body rather than distort or mold its shape. Her style changed relatively little over her career, although it became a little more fitted in the 1930s.[6]

In the 1920s, Vionnet had created a stir by developing garments utilizing the bias cut, a technique for cutting cloth diagonal to the grain of the fabric, enabling it to cling to the body while stretching and moving with the wearer. While Vionnet herself did not invent the method of cutting fabric on the bias, she was the first to utilize bias cuts for the entirety of a garment.

www.ftn-books.com has 2 publications on Madeleine Vionnet available. One by Ietse Mey

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Stephan Fritsch (1962-2014)

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It is impossible to know every artist that ever had a gallery or museum presentation in the last 50 years or so. But sometimes you encounter work by an artist in a way you did not expect an artist who you did not know of, but who fascinates with the first works you see. In this case i had bought a lot of mainly German books on German artists , because i wanted to have the two titles on Richard Schur included in the lot. I had the winning aftersale bid and bought together with the Schur books, books ( all sealed) on other German contemporary abstract painters. One of them Stephan Fritsch.

For me an unknown painter, but with a fascinating approach to his abstract expressionist art. His works reminded me somehow of the ones i had seen in the past by Kirkeby, but where Kirkeby has a link with nature, i only see abstracttion in the works by Fritsch and …..COLOR!

Still Fritsch is a painter to get to know and to explore , however i also learned that he died in 2014 and now it is unfortunate that he died at such a young age and only leaves us a limited amount of works.

The Stephan Fritsch book is available at www.ftn-books.com

fritsch

 

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José Guadalupe Posada (1852-1913)

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You can not write about Posada without thinking of Manuel Manilla, his artistic mentor. Both are extremely important for the development of Modern Art in Mexico. He has been a great influence to Diego Rivera. I am still searching for the reason why van Gennep published 2 very important monographic titles on Manilla and Posada. Is it interest or because of the worldwide reach of these publications that he thought these were interesting?….i really do not know.

Academics have estimated that during his long career, Posada produced 20,000 plus images for broadsheets, pamphlets and chapbooks. Posada was studied by key figures of Mexican muralism. Mural artists inspired by Posada, such as Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco catered to a Mexican elite that rejected foreign styles as part of their new-found bourgeois taste.

Posada is now a part of the Mexican art legacy and just a quick look into the book that is now for sale at www.ftn-books.com shows immediately why his art is timeless and a part of the Mexican folklore.

posada messenger

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Sam Francis (continued) and Nico Delaive

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As long as i remember i encountered the works by Sam Francis at the gallery Nico Delaive. From the early days of Swatch specials  (Sam Francis special) and the space occupied by Nico Delaive together with Art Unlimited the publisher i took an interest in Sam Francis  and even now , many years later,  i am always keen on the publications by Sam Francis. The copy that i recently added to my inventory is a rare one. Only 1500 copies worldwide of which not many will be on the market. The copy is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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