FTN-blog

In October 2021, the Dutch photographer Paul Blanca passed away in Amsterdam after a tumultuous life – he was born as Paul Vlaswinkel in 1958. A photographer who gained fame in the 1980s with provocative photos and self-portraits, often mentioned alongside photographers like Erwin Olaf and Robert Mapplethorpe. An image of his back with a carving of Mickey Mouse (1986) is considered one of the icons of Dutch photography, as well as the poignant image of a naked Blanca embracing his equally naked mother (1982).

In the 1980s, Paul Blanca caused a stir with his aesthetically staged portraits, in which he performed the most extreme actions – bordering on performances – on himself. He inserted half a dozen eels into his throat and had an arrow piercing his cheeks. The intention of this series of self-portraits was to create a profound and meaningful image in a state of ultimate self-control and concentration. In other words, the ‘moment’ as a ‘monument’; a perfect convergence of person, place, and time in one tightly-framed image.

Although Paul Blanca was self-taught, he did not see himself as such. He found his teachers in practice. From choreographer and photographer Hans van Manen (1932), he learned technical photography and how to work with models, while the famous American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946-1989) led the way in classically and unabashedly photographing personal fascinations, ranging from explicit sexuality to Zen-like stillness. Like his contemporary Erwin Olaf (1959), who followed a similar path, Blanca’s black-and-white portraits of fellow artists, actors, writers, dancers, and musicians were highly sought-after by progressive newspaper and magazine editors. These portraits could be confrontational due to their strict clarity, just like Blanca’s own work.

www.ftn-books.com has the invitation for the commemorative exhibition now available.

In the early stages of her career, in the mid-1980s, Siem designed clothing pieces with the intention of exploring the boundaries between art and design. Through her collection of dresses, hats, bags, shoes, alienating costumes and masks, she deliberately blurred the line between art and fashion, as they could be both worn as clothing items or considered as aesthetic objects. However, back then, critics dismissed these works as ‘failed fashion or design’. For the artist, it felt as though she was being denied access to the art world. Nevertheless, she continued to combine fashion and textiles with visual art. And by incorporating visual references to modern art with materials and techniques associated with femininity or masculinity, Siem still draws a historical parallel between sexism in the first half of the 20th century and her experiences as a female artist in the art world.

Throughout her career, Siem has also drawn from a wide range of ethnographic sources, including dolls, traditional furniture design, and (European) folk costumes. Examples of these can also be seen in this exhibition.

Goslarer Kaiserring
Although Siem is a well-known and respected artist in her own country, her work has rarely been seen abroad. Despite her timely themes, she seemed to remain under the radar for a long time. However, in 2014 she won the prestigious Goslarer Kaiserring. As a result, she joins the ranks of internationally renowned artists such as Anselm Kiefer, Rebecca Horn, Cindy Sherman, Christian Boltanski, William Kentridge, and Bridget Riley.

www.ftn-books.com has the invitation for her Kunstmuseum exhibition available.

Tala Madani (b. 1981, Tehran, Iran) crafts paintings and animations that merge diverse lenses of critique, provoking contemplation regarding gender, political dominance, and the portrayal of subjects in art. Her compositions feature predominantly nude, bald, middle-aged men engaging in actions that strain their physical limits. Bodily fluids and beams of light erupt from their orifices, serving as allegories for the tactile expressiveness of paint. In Madani’s art, slapstick comedy is inseparable from brutality and creation is synonymous with destruction, showcasing a multifaceted and visceral perspective on modern power imbalances. Her figuration style combines the groundbreaking morphology of a modernist with a contemporary understanding of sequencing, motion, and velocity. Thus, her work draws inspiration from mediums such as cartoons, cinema, and other popular forms of duration.

www.ftn-books.com has the KM21 invitation for her exhibition now available.

One hundred years ago, a group of young artists in Groningen founded De Ploeg.

These avant-gardists, including Jan Wiegers, Jan Altink, H.N. Werkman, and Johan Dijkstra, felt it was time to abandon the 19th-century ideals and plow through the landscape of art. A chance encounter between Wiegers and German expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner in Davos, Switzerland, accelerated the group’s development. In a time when the horrors of World War One caused many artists to halt their experimentation, this group continued with dynamic brushstrokes, creating brightly colored landscapes and expressive portraits, thus establishing their own Northern expressionism. They also utilized printmaking as a medium for their experimentation. The Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, a collector of De Ploeg’s work since the 1930s, held a major exhibition of their graphic art in 1960. To celebrate 100 years of De Ploeg, Groningen organized a grand event, with the exhibition at the Groninger Museum as its centerpiece. The Gemeentemuseum, located on the other side of the country by the sea, joins in the celebration with a small but exquisite exhibition showcasing De Ploeg’s graphic work once again.

www.ftn-books.com has now the invitation for this exhibition available.

Trained as an architect, Nick van Woert (1979) is primarily interested in materials, their functions, and their potential meanings. He scours local supermarkets, trash containers, and street corners for usable ingredients for his remarkable sculptures, whether it be cat litter, PVC, or plastic. Van Woert seeks out what can still be understood as “nature.” The modern society may be artificial, but it fits us perfectly, almost like a second nature. Van Woert plays with this idea in his beautifully harmonious – almost poetic – installations, where he attempts to bring back the natural aspect from the artificial. He combines elements from classical antiquity with objects from contemporary disposable culture. Both the overpowering nature and American history and culture are key themes in his work. His work has an extraordinary topicality. The exhibition at GEM, Museum for Contemporary Art, is his first solo show at a Dutch museum and its invitation is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Born in 1951 in the bustling city of Los Angeles, California, James Brown was a man of many talents. He honed his skills in painting and printmaking at the prestigious Immaculate Heart College in glamorous Hollywood, before graduating from the renowned École des Beaux-Arts in Paris in 1974. The following years saw him blossom in the City of Light, living and creating amidst its vibrant artistic community.

In 1978, Brown made his solo debut at the esteemed Gemeentemuseum in Arnheim, the Netherlands, and the Christiane and Eric Germain Gallery in Paris. The year 1979 brought a new chapter as Brown relocated to the bustling heart of the art world, New York City. Here, he found himself rubbing shoulders with rising talents of the Neo-Expressionism movement such as Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Julian Schnabel. Exhibitions in top galleries such as the Shafrazi Gallery and the Leo Castelli Gallery soon followed, cementing Brown’s stardom. He also collaborated with the famed Lucio Amelio Gallery in Naples.

Though renowned for his abstract paintings, Brown’s artistry knew no bounds. His portfolio boasted a diverse range of techniques and media, including ceramics, bronze, textiles, and printmaking. In 1995, Brown ventured south to Mexico with his young family, where he continued to redefine artistry.

A new millennium brought new horizons for Brown as he, together with his wife Alexandra, established the Carpe Diem Press in the charming city of Oaxaca, collaborating with esteemed artists and writers to produce unique, limited-edition artist books and prints. Brown’s work was sought after by leading museums in America and Europe, including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Oaxaca, the Anahuacalli Museum in Mexico City, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. His art also graced the collections of prominent public and private institutions, such as the Museum of Modern Art, The Metropolitan Museum, and the Whitney Museum in New York, the Kolumba Museum in Cologne, and the Contemporary Art Centre of Malaga in Spain. Sadly, James Brown passed away in February 2020, leaving behind an irreplaceable legacy.

www.ftn-books.com has several Brown pub;lications now available.

Lauded artist Zhivago Michael Duncan (born 1980 in Indiana, USA) currently resides and creates in both Los Angeles and Mexico City. With a versatile range of skills, Duncan’s artistic endeavors encompass installation, painting, ceramics, and works on paper, all deeply rooted in his explorations of the intricate interplay between human cognizance and fabricated concepts of reality. With a blend of ancient creation myths and modern analyses of subjects ranging from physics to metaphysics, astronomy to artificial intelligence, and contemporary philosophy, Duncan’s oeuvre reveals a personal and unique mythological universe, conveyed through a hieroglyphic language and iconography that embody aspects of consciousness and emotional states.

www.ftn-books.com has the Livingstone gallery invitation nowe available.

LODE DE LEEDE THEO (1934-2004), commemorated with fond remembrance, edition 1/1, gelatin silver print, 39 x 27 cm. This photograph can be found in the photographer’s opus book: ‘The unbearable lightness of seeing’, Amphora 2001. Lode de Leede, born on Christmas Day, only came into contact with photography later in life. Initially, he captured travel and art scenes in color, but gradually he became captivated by the more expressive possibilities of black and white photography. He specialized in nude photography. In his later years, he struggled with declining eyesight. Quote: People often ask: ‘What was your most beautiful photograph?’ Answer: ‘My last one!’

www.ftnhttp://www.ftn-books.com-books.com has now the de Leede publication: The Unbearable Lightness of Seeing available.

Moshekwa Langa is an artist whose oeuvre encompasses myriad forms of creative expression, ranging from drawing and installation to video and photography. Drawing inspiration from his immediate surroundings, Langa adeptly amalgamates materials, chronicling his personal history and emotions. Influenced by his upbringing in a non-descript rural “Homeland” during the apartheid era, Langa diligently traces his own memoirs in his pieces, utilizing significant individuals, events, and locations from his life as a framework to reflect upon physical and psychological boundaries. Central to his artistic project, Langa’s large-scale works on paper possess an otherworldly quality, resulting from the accumulation of ephemeral marks and actions, and the mediation of seemingly disparate elements. Infused with poetic and sentimental elements, Langa’s work strives to visually depict experiences and emotions that elude verbal description, grappling with the ever-elusive nature of meaning.

Residing and creating in Amsterdam, Moshekwa Langa’s work is currently showcased in a group exhibition titled New New Babylon at Kunstmuseum Den Haag in The Hague, Netherlands, on view until August 31, 2025. In 2022, Langa’s work was the subject of a solo exhibition at KM21 in The Hague. In 2021, Andrew Kreps Gallery presented the first solo exhibition of Langa’s work in New York, aptly titled The Sweets of Sin. Previous solo exhibitions featuring Langa’s oeuvre have been held at esteemed institutions such as Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, and Modern Art Oxford in the United Kingdom.

www.ftn-books.com has the KM21 invitation for his exhibition now available.

Born into a Basque family in Getaria, Spain, Balenciaga founded his fashion house in San Sebastián in 1919. His work was quickly admired, leading to the opening of new stores in Madrid and Barcelona. His clientele consisted mainly of the aristocracy. However, with the decline of the Spanish monarchy, the country’s prosperity decreased, impacting Balenciaga’s clientele. He made the decision to move to Paris, where he opened his house on Avenue George V in 1939. His first couture collection was a resounding success, prompting him to reopen his three houses in Spain.

His reputation continued to grow and couturier Christian Dior referred to Balenciaga as “the master of us all.” Other fashion giants such as André Courrèges, Emanuel Ungaro, and Óscar de la Renta learned their craft under Balenciaga’s tutelage before starting their own fashion houses.

Balenciaga’s style was revolutionary: he played with proportions, volumes, and drapes of different fabrics around the shoulders and skirts. His silhouettes often featured a pronounced hourglass figure, achieved by centering his suits and flaring out the hips with a tulip skirt underneath. He used minimal prints and vibrant colors, with polka dots being a signature print in his work.

In 1960, he designed the wedding dress for doña Fabiola Mora y Aragón for her marriage to King Boudewijn of Belgium.

In 1946, Balenciaga launched his first perfume, Le Dix, named after the house number of his fashion house in Avenue George V in Paris. After the 1950s, haute couture gradually lost its importance and in 1968, Balenciaga closed his house in protest against the vulgarization brought on by the modern age. He passed away in Jávea, Alicante in 1972.

www.ftn-books.com has the invitation for his Kunstmuseum exhibition now available.