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Marian Breedveld (1959)

Marian Breedveld (1959, the Netherlands) has found her own way in abstract painting. In her paintings, the process, the result, the matter and the unimaginative representation are all equally important. Her goal is to make the boundaries of time and space tangible through matter. Breedveld plays in her work with the possibility that the spectator disappears in that spaciousness, but is always recalled by the presence of the paint as a substance.

Breedveld was artis in residence at De Ateliers’63 in Haarlem. Her work has been exhibited frequently, including at FRAC Auvergne, FRAC Haute Normandie and MUba Eugène-Leroy in France, and Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Her work has been included in various public and private collections, including those of Centraal Museum Utrecht and Gemeentemuseum Den Haag.

www.ftn-books.com has the important Breedveld publication published by Thieme Art now available.

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Hreinn Friðfinnsson (1943)

Hreinn Friðfinnsson’s conceptual work has been characterized as poetic and playful, dealing often with storytelling, nature and time. It can be almost anything: a photograph, a story, a tracing, an atmosphere, a quasi-scientific experiment, a paint stirring stick or a secret. A split second up in the air between the years 1975 and 1976, one shoe searching for the other one to form a pair. His works are often structured around dualities and reversals. Both in form and content they are hard to pin down. The works remain in state of flux even after their conception, often older works are reused or expanded upon.

Born in 1943 in Baer Dölum, Iceland, Hreinn Friðfinnsson has been living in Amsterdam since 1971. He has exhibited internationally since the 1970s and had solo exhibitions at respected institutions such as the National Gallery (Reykjavík), the Serpentine Gallery (London) and Bergen Konsthall (Norway). In 2019-2020 a major retrospective To Catch a Fish with a Song: 1964-Today took place at KW Institute of Contemporary Art in Berlin and Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. Amsterdam based venues such as Gallery 845 (1970’s), Galerie van Gelder (1990’s), Kunstverein (2015) and Eenwerk (2018) have hosted solo shows.

1971-72

The idea originated in the spring of 1971, but the gates were built in 1972. They were constructed in such a way that they would open when the wind blew from the south. They are situated in a remote place on the south coast of Iceland. The photos were taken on the day that the gates were installed. It was cold and rainy and the wind blew from the north. I have not seen them since. \

The scarce FIVE GATES FOR THE SOUTH WIND publication is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Antoine Mortier (1908-1999)

The reality that lies at the basis, leads me to an “abstract” form, I abstract ‘form’. This form is imagined as a basic thought. She is the structure that gives strength to the form. My work is at first ‘form’, the color comes later. My visual language is constructed and is not to make with the ‘informal’.’ (Antoine Mortier, 1986)

www.ftn-books.com has some interesting Mortier titles available

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Edouard Pignon (1905-1993)

Born in 1905, the son of a militant miner in Bully-les-Mines, near Lens, Edouard Pignon had humble origins that stood him in good stead at the height of the French Communist Party’s prestige in the 1950s. He left his village for Paris in 1927, and worked in the Renault and Citroen car factories, attending evening classes at the Universite Ouvriere in painting and sculpture.

In 1931, when the effects of the Wall Street Crash were taking their toll on the French art market and depression loomed, he joined the Association des Ecrivains et des Artistes Revolutionnaires. Here, in the politicised climate of the Popular Front, which inspired Pignon’s 1936 Portrait of Robespierre, young autodidacts such he and his friend Boris Taslit  …  Displaying 750 of 5843 characters.

www.ftn-books.com has several Pignon publications available .

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Piet Dirkx (continued)

I thought i had all publications on Piet Dirkx, but surprise surprise …….. last week I found a publication on artists with their origins in de Mierden-Reusel. For all those that followed my blogs on Piet Dirkx this is my latest addition:

for more publications on Piet Dirkx find these at www.ftn-books.com

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Peter Joseph (1929-2020)

Peter Joseph had, over the course of decades, dedicated his practice to seeking the potential in constraint. He rose to critical acclaim in the 1970s for his meditative, two-colour paintings, which set one rectangle within a frame of a darker shade. These early works were characterised by perfect symmetry, where every decision about colour and proportion could be seen to be redolent of time, mood or place. While comparable to the work of Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman, Joseph’s was an anomalous strain of Minimalism: his allegiance lay as much with Renaissance masters as with his contemporaries. More recently his format had departed from his established ‘architecture’ to divide the canvas into two planes, horizontally or vertically, wherein loose brushwork, natural tones and patches of exposed canvas tap into new feeling. As Joseph said: ‘A painting must generate feeling otherwise it is dead’.

www.ftn-books.com has the Kent Fine art Inc. catalog now available.

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Willem Sandberg and the Stedelijk Museum

Just a short anouncement today that i have added 5 important early Stedelijk Museum catalogs to my inventory. All designed by Willem Sandberg.

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Ian Whittlesea (1967)

Ian Whittlesea’s work has consistently been concerned with the intersection of language and space, using the lives, words and works of other artists as its source. He has been described as an artist of fascinatingly rigorous refinement and his work as a paradigm of concision and single-mindedness.

Collectively called Instruction Prints these works extend Whittlesea’s interest in the power of text to change the physical and psychic state of the viewer. Formally and conceptually they relate to the Statement Paintings that he made twenty-five years ago, but whereas those early paintings reproduced the didactic words of other artists the Instruction Prints use more generic and unattributed text. In their simplicity and directness they recall a parent’s instructions to a child, or perhaps the voice of a lover or a teacher. As with all of Whittlesea’s textual art they play on the tension between reading and looking, exploring the moment when language becomes object. As he has said of his earlier works:

When I first started making text paintings one of the important things was that it allowed me to side-step any debate about abstraction and representation. When you paint letters you are making the thing itself: as you paint a letter X you aren’t making a representation of a letter X, it just is the letter X.

www.ftn-books.com has the Marlborough catalog from 2013 available ( edition of 500 cps)

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Willem Sandberg / experimenta typografica

Readers know of my admiration for Willem Sandberg, who I can consider as one of the true geniuses of design. and ….typography. One who knows the series of publications on Typography : EXPERIMENTA TYPOGRAFICA, knows that he used these books to stretch the boundaries of typography, inventing in his own way a new series of fonts and designs. This series has been published over a period of some 10 years , making use of several publishers that supported the idea of the series. Andre Schwerz with Reflex and Galerie der Spiegel are among them. Some of these highly collectible titles are now available at www.ftn-books.com

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van Dongen vs Raoul Dufy

Another resemblance. The slketch-like landscapes by Kees van Dongen vs the ones by Raoul Dufy. Almost the same period and both have the same feel . On the left van Dongen.

www.ftn-books.com has on both artists publications available.