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Etienne Martin (1913-1995)

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Etienne Martin was one of the most colorful sculptors from France from the last 100 years. Ofcourse France has brought us great sculptors like Rodin and Camile Claudel, but in this long tradition, Martin must have a place in history too. His sculptures are a combinbation of abstract art and recognizable human body parts. The result …. a typical Etienne Martin sculpture of which his LE MANTEAU from 1962 is probably his most well known and famous sculpture.

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A large work which is intended to be worn by the artist.

What made me realize that Etienne AMrtin is important is the catalogue i recently acquired. The catalogie was published by galerie Breteau and is from 1960. It has a classic kind of cahier stitching and in between the black and white pages foils with Etienne Martin sculpture designs are inserted. A typical and highly collectible Etienne Martin catalogue which is, beside the Sandberg designed Stedelijk Museum catalogue available at www.ftn-books.com

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New site for FTN books and discount code

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It was a necessary step to make the site more accessible, so i changed the lay-out made it much more clear for all visitors to find their way among the 8000+ items that are for sale at www.ftn-books.com.

The result a clean and pleasing site in a blue and creme color scheme. Pleasing to the eye, with a great search engine to find those titltes you are looking for . Please take a look at www.ftn-books.com and when you order use the discount code: FTNnew (10% discount on all items), which is valid until the 6th of February 2019.

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Gerry Schum ( 1938 -1973)

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Rightfully he may be called one of the true pioneers of Video art.

Because of his early contribtions to the collection of the Stedelijk Museum resulted in an exhibition ( which catalogue is available at www.ftn-books.com) and the hsitory and development of Video art during the last 50 years. Th Stedelijk has made a permanent presentation of his :

Schum made Land Art as part of his Fernseh-Galerie Gerry Schum. The German television station Sender Freies Berlin broadcasted this film on 15 April 1969. Schum was looking for a way to show modern visual art to a wide audience. He achieved this by broadcasting his film and video productions on television, bypassing the traditional institutions. The TV programme showed recordings of artistic interventions in the landscape by eight artists, including Jan Dibbets, Barry Flanagan and Richard Long. Schum’s own sober camera work is an essential element of the visual end result. Jan Dibbets’ contribution 12 Hours Tide Object with Correction of Perspective shows a tractor leaving behind a trapezium-shaped track on a beach. The position of the camera and the effect of the perspective mean that the viewer sees this shape as a rectangle. Dibbets was casting doubt on the reliability of representation via the camera and on the perception of the eye, as he had done previously in his ‘perspective corrections’.
It takes time to appreciate Video as an art form , but when you finally do so , there is an artist not te be missed and that is Gerry Schum.

btw. The Gerry Schum catalogue was designed by Wim Crouwel.

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Sarah Lucas (1962)

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Another young bBritish artist who emerged in the early Nineties in a wave of young British artists. Others from her generation rose to fame in the same years. Among them Gary Hume and Damien Hirst. They had one thing in common. All were added to the Tate collection at a very young age and collected by Saatchi. Personally i am not a great admirer of her works. For the same reasons  i am not a great admirer of Hirst his works, but sometimes you have to look twice and try to discover the meaning of her(in many cases) masculine constructions to confront and dissect their nature.

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Her pieces represent a fantastical world and playfully employs unrealistic ideals to unearth obscene paradoxes created by those very constructions. These works are constructed and well thought over and perhaps that is the quality i do not like about them.

www.ftn-books.com has some Sarah Lucas titles available

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Michel Cardena a conceptual artist ( 1934-2015)

 

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MIGUEL ÁNGEL CÁRDENAS was born in El Espinal, Colombia, in 1934 and died in Amsterdam, the Netherlands, in 2015. He studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional in Bogota (1952-1953) and visual arts at the Academia de Bellas Artes (1955-1957) and the Escuela de Artes Gráficas in Barcelona (1962), before moving to the Netherlands where he lived for the remainder of his life and adopted the artistname Michel Cardena. In 1964 Cardena was included in the seminal exhibition “New Realists and Pop Art,” which travelled from the Gemeentemuseum The Hague to Vienna and Brussels. In 1972 Cardena established an artist-run space called the In-Out Center along with a group of Amsterdam-based international artists. The In-Out Center hosted exhibitions of early video and performance art in addition to supporting conceptual and collaborative projects. Cardena’s work is in the collections of the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Netherlands; Moderna Museet, Sweden; Gemeentemuseum, The Hague, Netherlands; and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, Netherlands, among others. His work was recently exhibited at the Instituto de Vision, Bogota, Colombia (2015) and at Andrea Rosen Gallery in New York (2017) and will be part of the exhibition ‘I am a native foreigner’ opened at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in September 2017.

Cardena is becoming more and more known and gaining importance for the conceptual art of the Sixties and Seventies. www.ftn-books.com has two important publications on the artist.

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Hans van Hoek (1947)

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Hans van Hoek, a typical dutch artist who’s work is rooted in the classical approach to painting. You can recognize parts by Rubens and Cezanne in his painting but overall it is typical Hans Van Hoek. Look closely and you can distinguish figures…from a distance it is different and it is almost like looking at an abstract painting.

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van Hoek was a very well known and appreciated painter in the Netherlands and he had his exhibitions in the large museums over here. Stedelijk Museum and van Abbemuseum had their exhibitions with this great artist, but people lost interest in his works when he decided to move to South Africa where he stayed in Barrydale for a period of 12 years. In 2008 he returned to the Netherlands and he had to build his reputation as an artist once again, but somehow he has lost momentum in the period he stayed in South AFrica because when he left he was a welll appreciated and colelcted artist and recently i encountered work by van Hoek at auction for prices as low as euro 600,–

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Hans van Hoek will prove to be important in the near future so i can only recommend his works to be collected. www.ftn-books.com has some nice hans van Hoek publications available.

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Piet Dirkx weekly ….5

Another heart by Piet Dirkx is this Heart on Wood executed in wax. Originally part of the Biotoop presentation this has recently become part of my personal collection. The heart is a bright yellow in a brownish /red wax underground. If you look carefully you can distinguish rectangles in the red background. Wax Heart on wood , aprox size  55 x 40 cm.(collection W. van den Elshout).

dirkx weekly hart ap

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Marlene Dumas and the MD publication

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Another blog on Dumas….. an artist i admire very much and who’s name is now settled in the art world as one of the great living contemporay artists. It is important these last few words….. This last sentence shows the appreciation of Dumas worldwide, but still there are institutions like eBay, Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram that are so shortsighted and puritan that they can not recognize a great work of art because it shows some nudity. It is allowed to say and write the most horrible things and even show complete massacres on these sites but a great work of art is removed because it shows a nipple or a womans breast. Unfair for the artist and it shows the puritan nature of those who manage the greatest sites and social network on this earth. So specially for those of you who like myself still admire Marlene Dumas and her great watercolours , here are some examples from her MD publication which was made for her travelling exhibition and showed at MUHKA, Henie Onstad and the Camden Art center. The book is available at www.ftn-books.com and lets please keep an open mind on nudity in photographs and paintings.

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Richard Artschwager (1923-2013) and the Utrecht projekt

Richard Artschwager in his Studio

It took me 20 years to finally find another copy of the UTRECHT PROJEKT by Richard Artschwager. The only copy i had was sold some 10 years ago and since i have had numerous requests for this very hard to find edition. It is from a very small edition ( rumoured to be less than 500 copies) and an additional problem is the flexi disc which is in many cases lost or damaged. These making this a very collectable artist book by Artschwager. The book and discs are in the collection of the MOMA in New York and i know of the Centraal Museum andStedelijk libraries having copies, but collector libraries are in many cases without this rare title. Now there is possibly a final chance to add this to your colection, because i expect not to find any more copies in the future. The copy that is now for sale at www.ftn-books.com can be graded as having 7 points on a scale of 10 and for the flexi disc i can grade itat 10 out of 10.

Here are some pictures:

the UTRECHT PROJEKT by Artschwager
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added more Alechinsky rareties

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At auction I was lucky to find and buy a “lot” with some more Alechinsly rare books and among them there was one one publication of which i did not know it existed. It was the Alwechinsky catalogue for his Caracas exhibition from 1989. A catalogue published in only 1000 copies and spectacular because i am convinced that is a hard to find collectable Alechinsky publication. The full title is LITOS PERPETRA PIERRE ALECHINSKY and the exhibition was held at the Museo de Bellas Artesde Caracas. There is only one copy available and the first who orderes it at www.ftn-books.com and uses the discount code Caracas will receive a 15% discount on this specific item.

alechinsky caracas a