Piet Dirkx cigarbox 505
Gotthard Graubner (1930-2013)
I can not describe the qualities of Graubner better than the text on Wikipedia i found on this fascinating German artist.
Graubner’s art is characterised by his unique philosophy and the use of color in his work. He began developing his own style in 1959, while he studied under K.O. Götz. Before that, Graubner’s work had been characterised by using color sparingly, in shapes and on the edges of the canvas, but, from 1955 onwards, he had already experimented with different approaches towards color, at first with watercolor and later on canvas. Instead of focusing on shapes, he began to use color lavishly.
About 1960, the artist produced flat panel paintings with surfaces built up of differentiated nebulous color formations, the application of color in layers of varying degrees of transparency opening up the picture surface, producing a color formation of indefinite depth comparable to the paintings of Mark Rothko.
In the 1960s, Graubner mounted picture-size colored cushions onto his paintings and used Perlon fabric in an attempt to enhance the spatial effect of color surfaces. These works were displayed in Alfred Schmela’s gallery in Düsseldorf.
Between 1968 and 1972 he did what he called “Nebelräume” [“Fog Spaces”].
Graubner never allowed his style to be dictated by the current fashions or trends. He developed his own style of using color as the medium through which his work announced itself, allowing it to work independently of any connection to any kind of representation or theme. According to Helga Meister, his works have sensibility, feeling and meditative force.[50]However, his paintings are only at first glance monochrome; as a closer look reveals, they are in fact polychrome. They “breathe”; they live; their colors, even though fixed on canvas, have movement that stirs the imagination as much as his “fog-spaces” of the sixties, in which he continued the romantic tradition of Caspar David Friedrich. Moreover, his “color-space bodies” (“Farbraumkörper”) have been described by art historian Max Imdahl as “picture-objects” in which “color-space and body, intangible vision and tangible facticity cooperate in a special interrelationship.”
The following titles are available at www.ftn-books.com
Piet Dirkx daily …505
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 505
Wessel Couzijn “iI” now for sale
Here is the link for the blog i wrote on this beautiful and impressive Sandberg designed special by Wessel Couzijn. It is now for sale at ftn-art
https://wordpressstrato-pacfwc5kp0.live-website.com/2017/11/08/wessel-couzijn-1912-1984-ii/
Artist/ Author: Wessel Couzijn
publisher W.A. Palm a La Haye
Text / Language: french
Measurements: 22 x 17.1 inches.
Condition: mint for the prints, nm++ for the book
This is a rare publication from 1966. Published in a signed and numbered edition of 75 copies. . This no. 11
Book contains ( loose inserted ) 12 original prints at the inside and 1 on the cover by Wessel Couzijn.
10 prints measuring 20 x 15.7 inches
and 2 double prints measuring 40 x 15.7 inches
All prints are in MINT condition
price is : USD 2950,–
for more information pleas inquire
Felim Egan (1952) and the Stedelijk Museum
I had never heard of Felim Egan, but when i saw one of his paintings ( for the first time at Seasons gallery in Den Haag) i became an admirer. A free kind of constructivist abstraction in soft colors, which looks like Irish mist over a landscape. Later i found 2 publications on this artist which are now available at www.ftn-books.com so when i encountered these i decide to write a blog on an artist of whom i did not know very much except that he had exhibited in the Stedelijk Museum. I searched and found this article on his Felim Egan’s own website : www.felimegan.ie
FELlM EGAN was born in lreland in 1952 and studied at Belfast and Portsmouth, England before attending the Slade School of Art in London. He then spent a year at the British School at Rome in 1980 before returning to Dublin. Since then he has lived and worked at Sandymount Strand and the Docklands, on the edge of Dublin Bay.
He is known as a painter of restrained eloquence, who sparingly deploys a vocabulary of hieroglyphic motifs over monochromatic expanses of colour. His paintings are built up slowly with layers of thin colour applied to the surface and stone powder ground into the acrylic. The work is universal in spirit and at the same time emotionally intimate. His paintings are epiphanic, in that they convey to us the essential nature or meaning of something of which we were previously unaware. He is an abstract artist, a painter of quite formal abstract images, and yet his work is tied to the place he lives and works, to the long horizons, big skies and empty sands of the Strand and sea. In this way his abstract paintings are almost landscapes, with a magical quality that his neighbour, the poet Seamus Heaney, has aptly described “a balance of shifting brilliances”.
Egan has exhibited widely across Europe with 72 solo exhibitions since 1979 including major shows at the lrish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin,1996 and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, 1999. In 1981 he represented Ireland at the Xie Biennale de Paris and in 1985 at the San Paulo Bienal. In 1993 he won the prestigious UNESCO prize in Paris, and in 1995 the Premiere Prize at Cagnes-sur-Mer. His work hangs in numerous public collections including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin; the Ulster Museum, Belfast; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the collection of the European Parliament. Major Commissions include; Dublin Castle; National Gallery of Ireland: O’Reilly Hall, UCD; Meeting House Square, Temple Bar; Pavilion Theatre, Dunlaoghaire; City Quay Building, Dublin; New Providence Wharf, London; the National Gallery of Ireland; Deutsche Bank, UK and Dublin and a large scale public ‘sculptural work’ at Cork Street, Dublin.
In 2005 he completed an installation of paintings at Deutsche Bank Headquarters, Dublin.
Felim Egan is a member of Aosdána.
Piet Dirkx daily …504
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 504
Raoul Hausmann (1886-1971)… DaDa and photomontages
For me Hausmann stands for Dada and photomontages. He , together with Hannah Hoch ( his longtime lover) developed a style of photomontages typical for Dada. Combining classical elements together with industrial elements set on o a colorful background these photomontages are among the very best from that period.
The photomontage became the technique most associated with Berlin Dada, used extensively by Hausmann, Höch, Heartfield, Baader and Grosz, and would prove a crucial influence on Kurt Schwitters, El Lissitsky and Russian Constructivism. It should also be pointed out that Grosz, Heartfield and Baader all laid claim to having invented the technique in later memoirs, although no works have surfaced to justify these claims.
At the same time, Hausmann started to experiment with sound poems he called “phonemes”] and “poster poems”, originally created by the chance lining up of letters by a printer without Hausmann’s direct intervention. Later poems used words which were reversed, chopped up and strung out, then either typed out using a full range of typographical strategies, or performed with boisterous exuberance. Schwitters’ Ursonate was directly influenced by a performance of one of Hausmann’s poems, “fmsbwtazdu”, at an event in Prague in 1921.
Raoul Hausmann and Dada publications are both available at www.ftn-books.com
Piet Dirkx daily …503
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 503
Lotti van der Gaag ( 1923-1999)…the forgotten Cobra artist
A 100% percent Cobra artist who has almost been forgotten by the public is Lotti van der Gaag. She began with sculpture on advise of Bram Bogart with who she was living in the late 40’s. In 1950 she moved to Paris where she met Karel Appel and Corneille with whom she stayed befriended during her entire life although Corneille had his objections of her joining the COBRA group. In 1974 she started with painting using the same fantasy figures she already had developed in her sculpture. When you look at these early paintings you can only draw one conclusion….Lotti van der Gaag is a Cobra artist!
What i did not know is that she was married to Kees van Bohemen , who has made a name for his abstract expressionist paintings in dutch art. www.ftn-books has a few Lotti van der Gaag publications.
Piet Dirkx daily …502
Piet Dirkx cigarbox 502
