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Emily Carr (1871-1945)

Emily Carr was a painter and writer whose lifelong inspiration was the coastal environment of British Columbia. Her later paintings of the vast Canadian West Coast sky and monumental trees, with their sweeping brushstrokes, demonstrate her continued desire to paint in a “big” way that she felt was in keeping with the expansiveness of her environment.

Carr first studied at the California School of Design in San Francisco from 1890 to 1893 and sketched in the First Nations village of Ucluelet on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1899. Carr travelled to England in 1899, studying in London and at St. Ives in Cornwall. She returned to Canada five years later, first to Victoria and then moved to Vancouver to teach. In 1907 she travelled by ship to Alaska and determined to depict the monumental arts of the First Nations of the West Coast.

In search of a bigger vision of art, she went to France in 1910, where she was introduced to the work of the Fauves, French artists who were dubbed the “wild beasts” for their daring use of bright colours. In 1912 Carr made a six-week painting trip to fifteen First Nations villages along the British Columbia coast. After exhibiting the results in Vancouver, Carr settled in Victoria, where she lived by renting out rooms, growing fruit, breeding dogs, and, later, making pottery and rugs decorated with Indigenous designs to sell to tourists.

In 1927 Carr was invited to participate in the Exhibition of Canadian West Coast Art in Ottawa. The exhibition included thirty-one of her paintings, as well as pottery and rugs. She came east for the opening, and in Toronto met members of the Group of Seven, beginning a lifelong correspondence with Lawren Harris.

After the success of this trip, Carr returned to Victoria and began the most prolific period of her career. She painted Indigenous subjects until 1931, then took as her principal themes the trees and forests of British Columbia and the coastal skies. In 1937 she suffered a heart attack and devoted much of her time to writing. Her first book, Klee Wyck (1941), received the Governor General’s Award for literature in 1942. She had solo exhibitions in Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal prior to her death in 1945.

www.ftn-books.com has the 1977 Carr catalog now available.

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Gijs van Bon (1975)

Gijs van Bon is widely known for his abstract kinetic artworks, light art, and time-specific art installations. In his highly conceptual yet decidedly physical works, elements of technology, art, and theatrical performance seamlessly intersect. Van Bon makes use of an ever-growing repertoire of technical inventions and materials to design his slowly moving and carefully choreographed objects. These multidisciplinary objects and installations often ‘come to life’, becoming autonomous, theatrical events in and of themselves. Both his smaller and larger-scale pieces invite viewers to look closer while simultaneously expanding their notions of time, language and space.
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Van Bon (1975) attended Design Academy Eindhoven and received his advanced training at HKU at the Department of theatre Design. From 2001 onward, his work has been shown in galleries, art centres and at events and festivals all over the world. Van Bon lives in Nuenen and works in his dynamic studio ‘La Citta Mobile’ in the city of Eindhoven among other artists and designers.  

www.ftn-books.com has the rare THE MOVING ABSTRACT PIECES book now available.

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Tilman (1959)

Tilman was born in Munich in 1959,Germany, he is an abstract artist and art curator. He graduated from the University of Applied Sciences and Design in Munich, in 1978, he continued his training under the guidance of Günter Fruhtrunk and Hans Baschang at the Munich Academy of Visual Arts from 1981 to 1985. He is the founder and current conservation advisor of Dolceacqua Arte Contemporanea in Dolceacqua, Italy. Moreover, he was the founder and former chief curator of the Contemporary Art Center in Brussels. Tilman lives and works in New York and Dolceacqua, Italy.

Tilman is inspired by the traditions of tangible art and minimalism. His created objects use form and color to explain light and space, which trigger the spectators curiosity. The concrete elements of the common visual world, take up a whole new non-objective place in his mind. He then transforms these visual elements into tangible objects through a reducing process, as it removes the unnecessary elements and makes room for the essence of his discoveries, so that he can express himself again.

His creations include paintings, constructed environments, but also stacked and stratified objects. Tilman creates a range of aesthetic objects, these include paintings, drawings, etchings, 3D wall hangings, floor to wall objects and constructed environments. His paintings include several mediums, like paint, lacquer and pencils, but several surfaces too, such as wove paper, MDF and aluminum. His 3D wall hangings in MDF and aluminum are laid flat on the wall, giving them a frontal view, while creating new spatial possibilities which go beyond this view. His technique handles means of vision and perception, which makes the spectator explore even beyond the surface.

Tilman has exhibited several times in Europe, Asia, Australia and the United States during group and private exhibitions. A major exhibition of his work took place in Kunstnernes Hus (La Maison des Artistes) in Oslo, Norway in 2006. His work is part of several key publications such as ARTnews and Artnet magazine. Tilman’s work is also present in many private and institutional collections, these include Deutsche Bank, Pfizer, Teachers Insurance, The New York Public Library and the Museum of Modern Art in Neuchâtel, Switzerland.
www.ftn-books.com has the OBJECT catalog by Tilman now available.

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Patrick Raynaud (1946)

Patrick Raynaud

Patrick Raynaud was born in Carcassone in 1946. From 1964 to 1966 he studied Modern Literature at the University of Toulouse; and from 1967 to 1970 he attended the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques (IDHEC), Paris. Afterwards he worked almost exclusively in film. He lives in Paris.

In the 1980s, alongside his continuing work in film, Raynaud started to create flat figures and houses made from wooden boards. At the same time he began to take a great interest in the container as an art object. In order to address three issues – the context in which a work of art is presented (in particular, contemporary sculpture), the art market, and art history – Raynaud displayed crates of the sort used for the transportation of art works. These contained large illuminated ciba-chrome photographs of celebrated works of Classical Modernism. A related approach to the same themes is reflected in other groups of works from the early 1980s, in which Raynaud drew a parallel between the display of the relics of saints in reliquary caskets and the positive revaluation of works of art through the style of their presentation. Illuminated cibachrome photographs of the life-size bodies of naked, sleeping male figures cocooned in velvet or in various packing materials, were placed in transportation crates made of wood and metal. Similar motifs are to be found in some of Raynaud’s transparent, illuminated colourful neon crates. Raynaud has also treated the theme of the transience of the human body in a series of works in which he placed large-scale photographs of parts of the skin surface in a series of small, illuminated plastic tanks linked together by coloured neon tubes. 

www.ftn-books.com has several Patrcik Raynaud titles available.

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Charles Ray (1953)

Charles Ray

For almost fifty years Charles Ray has been making art that engages the mind and the eye. His earliest works often included his own performing body. More recently he has focused on his work’s relationship to the long history of sculpture. This can be seen not only in his engagement with the fundamental elements of the medium — space, mass, texture — but also in his adoption of historical themes, including the equestrian portrait, the reclining nude, and the relief. At the same time, Ray’s works are firmly embedded in their time and place, with subject matter and techniques finely attuned to our historical moment.

Ray has devoted most of the past decade to creating sculptures of figures, animals, and inanimate objects, often carved from solid blocks of stainless steel or other metals in a state-of-the-art process that combines skilled handwork with industrial technology. He works slowly, often spending years studying his subjects and sculpting different versions at various scales. His attention to detail is meticulous, the faintness or sharpness of each part carefully calibrated to guide the viewer’s attention around the work as a whole.

Charles Ray (b. 1953) grew up in Chicago and moved to Los Angeles in 1981, where he currently lives and works. His art has been featured in Documenta, three Venice Biennales, and five Whitney Biennials, and his sculptures have been the subject of two retrospectives. The first was organized in 1998 by the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and traveled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. The second was from 2014 to 2015 at the Kunstmuseum Basel and the Art Institute of Chicago. In 2019 a large exhibition of his plaster patterns was organized by the Reina Sofía in Madrid.

www.ftn-books.com has one Ray title available.

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Pepe Cerdá (1961)

Pepe Cerdá began his interest in the artistic world at the hand of his father, the painter and caricaturist José Cerdá Udina. In 1982, Pepe was awarded the first prize for drawing in the National Youth Contest of Plastic Arts, thus initiating his artistic career. During his youth he created the artistic group La Nave, although he later decided to move to Paris, where he stayed for eight years. It was in the capital of light that he held his first individual exhibition at the Catherine Fletcher Gallery, which was the beginning of the consolidation of his work in France.

www.ftn-books.com has the invitation for the Cerda/ Pat Andrea exhibition now available.

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Piet Tuytel (continued)

Another reason to emphasize the importance of Piet Tuytel. I more and more appreciate his works and since a few months I am looking to OCTAGOON nr. 8 . A sister work from the same series has been a gift by NOG and is now on permanent display in the entrance hall of the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. Here is Oktagoon nr. 8

Some sculptures appropriate space, while others structure and define it. The works of Piet Tuytel (Alblasserdam, 1956) are among the latter sort. Tuytel likes the flat landscape of the polders, whose emptiness is made palpable by the occasional appearance of a farm or a power pylon. At times even those sparse elements are missing and you need—as he says—to start slamming poles in the ground in order to focus on something.
Tuytels sculptures involve that type of intervention. In order to give ‘shape’ to space, he makes use of existing objects. At first those ranged from pipes and tubes to bathtubs and chairs; later he opted for more neutral objects that were less charged with meaning. Over the past ten years, he has worked with construction materials such as T-bars and H-beams, heightening their spatial effect with the aid of color and a well-considered placement on a metal base plate. In De Pont’s project space this use of elementary forms expands to include a new element. The wall sculptures, to be on view as of March 21, consist of radiators, sometimes in combination with treaded aluminum plates.

The wall sculptures have the standard sizes of two types of radiators: long and narrow ones (50 x 250 cm) and square ones (90 x 90 cm). He shows a number of them from the front and others from the back side. With the connections for pipes and the attachment points for brackets being clearly visible, the radiators remain recognizable as such. As an artist Tuytel has always sought turning points at which the ordinary allows itself to be experienced in terms of art, but rarely has the existing object taken on its new role so matter-of-factly and serenely as it does here. The heavy and unwieldy radiators have been transformed into abstract fields in which light and shadow play a leading role. In a series of four, the strict vertical rhythm of the convectors is counteracted in a much less predictable horizontal pattern. What seems, from a distance, to be thin lines proves, on closer inspection, to be the frayed cuts of a power tool. The position, the number and the distribution of the incisions bring motion into the square field in various ways and cause the visual space to recede or contract.

In his intuitive search for rhythm, Tuytels takes an approach which hardly differs from that of an artist like Mondrian, but his concern for materiality is that of a sculptor. In the series of vertical wall sculptures, narrow radiators have been turned sideways and combined with aluminum plates. The choice of this material, used for such things as loading ramps, has been deliberate. Due to its raised surface, some amount of space remains between the radiator and the plate. And the slight curve caused by the rolling process gives the material a certain spatial quality. Tuytel exploits this by spray-painting the aluminum black or by polishing it to a mirror-like shine. The black or silvery color of the aluminum plate and the white of the radiator each have their own three-dimensional effect. Tuytel makes use of that in constructing the wall sculptures, in which he ‘stacks’ various spatial qualities. In others the dynamics between figure and ground are evoked through the use of plates cut in angular shapes. The visually expansive effect of these forms is further heightened by the bright red in which the plate has been spray-painted.
Tuytel’s wall sculptures attest to the intense observation of an artist who takes inspiration from the spatial dimension of landscape and translates this into a play of formal relationships. The precision with which Tuytels zooms in on his subject parallels his location of a point by latitude north and longitude west, manifest in the exhibition’s title 51° 34′ 4″ N 5° 4′ 29″ E: these are the coordinates of the project space at De Pont.

www.ftn-books.com has now the Piet Tuytel book” Ruimte” available

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K.R.H. Sonderborg (1921-2008)

German Informel is closely associated with K.R.H. Sonderborg. Inspired by the gestural painting of American Abstract Expressionism, his paintings and drawings reveal a fascination with technical constructions and their traces of movement. It shows the form in its process of creation. In doing so, Sonderborg used a spontaneous application of paint. He thus created a dynamic structural system. His brushstrokes were rather strokes with the painting tool, executed in a quick gesture. His preferred colours were black and white with red elements, which he applied with a rubbing or wiping technique. From the 1970s onwards, his work increasingly approached a controlled, almost representational formal language. He limited himself to a few high-contrast colour tones, usually black on white. He distilled motifs from private and press photographs, isolating them from their narrative context and using them as a basic optical structure to inspire him. He remained true to his preference for technical constructions, whereby the graphic structure of car windscreen wipers and overhead cables inspired him just as much as harbour cranes or gas tanks. 

www.ftn-books.com has multiple Sonderborg publications available.

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Sterling Ruby (1972)

Sterling Ruby (*1972) has created a complex, ever-evolving artistic universe that oscillates between raw abjection and aestheticizing abstraction. His ceramics, sculptures, installations, textile works, videos and paintings are associated with a post-humanist view on culture. The Los Angeles-based artist is working on a map of our collective unconscious, with a particular focus on social topologies, as well as traumas and ruptures in post-war art history.

Ruby’s oeuvre is diverse, formally and thematically, and difficult to characterize. While his SP (spray painting), BC (bleach collage) or more recent WIDW (window) series include color abstractions with a composition and materiality that explores traditional and contemporary senses of beauty, they also bristle with a clear subtext of psychological unrest. The artist’s geometric solids series consists of monumental minimalist sculptures made of Formica composite that Ruby has covered with graffiti, scratchiti, smears, fingerprints and other vandalizing methods. His SCALES series comprises mobile sculptures that merge modernist forms with such unusual readymades as paint buckets and industrial steel drums. Ruby’s SOFTWORKS recall labyrinthine bundles of amorphous, stuffed fabric figures with an unsettling corporeality. Apart from their aesthetic dimension, some of Ruby’s STOVE sculptures also serve as functional wood-burning stoves. The artist’s ceramics, which he produces in a variety of series and sizes, have organic shapes and sumptuous glazes and are often reminiscent of charred animal and human remains. His large-scale, totem-like sculptures made of polyurethane resin have a similarly visceral effect, echoing the visual repertoire of horror and science fiction films. Ruby has drawn on plexiglas with nail polish, made disturbing analogue and digital photo collages, and repurposed vehicles such as an LAPD squad car and a salvaged American submarine into sculptures.

The range of media the artist uses is mirrored in an aesthetic strategy that he himself describes as “schizophrenic.” Yet for all their multifaceted character, Ruby’s works share a common denominator. His creations clearly spring from an interconnected network and often make direct reference to one another, sometimes at the level of an ingenious recycling of used materials. Common to all of his paintings and objects is a sustained resistance to the ideological limitations of minimalism and conceptual art, their “high culture” social practices and legacy, which continue to dominate the art system today. He advances the evolution of an art-historical game with the abject and the refined, the origins of which are traceable to the work of artists such as Mike Kelley, Rosemarie Trockel, and Bruce Nauman.

Sterling Ruby draws inspiration from a number of intellectual influences, including Judith Butler’s gender theory, mathematical catastrophe theory and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. His oeuvre explores such contemporary phenomena as supermax prisons, American politics and consumption and the social treatment of mental illness. Ruby’s works resemble outgrowths of a social and psychological landscape determined by fear, repression, violence, and stigmatization—a landscape we live in, yet so often turn a blind eye to. They also create the lexicon for a language of chaos, transgression, and radical diversity—a source of simultaneous eruption and awakening.

www.ftn-books.com has the Phaidon publication on Sterling Ruby now available.

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Robert Zandvliet (1970)

Over the past 3 decades, s Robert Zandvliet has developed a versatile as well as consistent oeuvre. That diversity is expressed the choice of motif, but also in the manner of painting, in the degree of figuration and abstraction, in the character of the brushstroke and in the use of or perhaps even the very avoidance of color. The coherence among the works has to do with their subject matter. From the very start Zandvliet has been fascinated with the medium of painting. As a theme found throughout his work, the desire to fathom its potential is given shape in all sorts of ways.

Zandvliet uses the tradition of painting as a guiding thread. Aside from traditional genres such as the still life, landscape and, in recent years, the human figure, specific works by other artists can also serve as points of departure. Whether he opts for a commonplace utilitarian object, a ‘coulisse’ landscape, an etching by Rembrandt or a painting by Picasso, the motifs are no end in themselves but rather a means by which to relate to painting; to its grammar and vocabulary, its pictorial richness, its eloquence and energy.

Zandvliet operates in the realm between abstraction and figuration. This is precisely where painting, in his view, has the opportunity to unfold and reveal its true diversity. The motif provides the painting with a foundation. It prompts the choice of painterly means and possibilities and, in that way, continues to have resonance in the finished painting. During the process of painting, the image becomes autonomous. Abstraction keeps the personal anecdote at a distance. The paint takes over the narrative. The development of Zandvliet’s oeuvre follows no straight course. One can sooner speak of circling movements. In his search for the purest form, Zandvliet frequently shifts his focus. New motifs give rise to other painterly challenges, and applied artistic solutions are further developed or set aside in order, once again, to make new discoveries possible.

For a number of years Zandvliet concentrated on the control of the brushstroke, the basis of painting. In his paintings he developed the movement of the brush into a distinct handwriting of his own. The acquired virtuosity became an obstacle for him, however, and in 2014 the dancing or sometimes fluid movements of the brush gave way to the recurring imprint of a paint roller. Zandvliet now painted his immense canvases in a single session and, with Seven Stones and the 2017-18 series Stage of Being, he pinned his hopes on the ‘momentum’ and the physical and mental energy that this could generate.

After a period in which robustly applied black gesso predominated, color has returned in full glory to his recent works. Zandvliet’s investigation into the essence of individual colors led to a range of ways in which to apply the paint. Striking in his recent paintings are the tactility and subtle nuances of the painted surface.

In his pursuit of the ultimate image, Zandvliet also goes back to motifs and painterly solutions from previous work. With the boulders placed centrally on the image surface in his Seven Stones, he went back to his earliest paintings of commonplace utilitarian objects; in Stage of Being the screen from his early ‘cinema’ works returned. With the landscapes from recent years, his earlier, nearly abstract approach to the genre was given a new twist. Motifs recur; they acquire new uses and new levels of meaning. As Zandvliet’s oeuvre grows, the paintings take on new interrelationships. These make his body of work even more tightly woven and challenge the viewer to discover its wealth of meaning.

www.ftn-books.com has some highly collectible Zandvliet titles now available.

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