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Born in 1941 in Büren an der Aare (Switzerland), Markus Raetz is a painter, sculptor, photograph and poet

Since the mid 1960s, Raetz has made a body of art which, while seemingly modest, straightforward, unpretentious, and playful, actually reveals layer after layer of complexity. Raetz’s work does not adhere to any ‘school.’ It is neither abstract, representational, nor purely conceptual. He works readily in a variety of media (drawing, sculpture, photography, painting) and dimensions (from miniature to gigantic). With the exception of large outdoor sculpture projects, Raetz works alone. The work is intimate, the means simple. His pieces are made of found materials such as twigs or eucalyptus leaves, or glass, polaroids, unprepossessing black and white photographs, simple shapes cut from tin in various sizes, little pieces of carved wood or stone, clay, small mirrors and panes of glass, corrugated cardboard, or an assortment of odd linear bits of metal. Like a poem in which no word is extraneous or wasted, each element in a piece is critical. In an age of rapid global communication, Raetz’s works, like poetry, require intimacy and attention.

For several decades, his sculptures destabilize our way to apprehend works of art. He enjoys using contrasting effects between full and empty spaces, reflection and reality, curves and countercurves, shadow and light. This search leads him to anamorphoses and mirror effects that invite to grasp how vision and perception may be ambivalent and depend on various points of view. It is the visitor’s responsibility to provide meaning to the shape that was deconstructed by the artist. « What matters to me is people moving around the work and perceiving it differently according their positions in space. », says Markus Raetz.
The importance of movement and perspective endows Markus Raetz’s work with experimental, playful and metaphysical characteristics.
In his own way, Markus Raetz is a bricoleur and philosopher, an amorous and generous moralist, constantly busy finding ways to rework reality, without adding anything useless, but always to see it anew, and ourselves with him, and always with that jubilant surprise that time quells in most mortals. Time has no hold over his works, never exactly the same nor entirely another.

Born in 1941 in Büren an der Aare (Switzerland), Markus Raetz is a painter, sculptor, photograph and poet. Represented since 1981 by Farideh Cadot, who has been showing his work at her galleries in Paris and New York and has curated exhibitions like ‘Markus Raetz and photographie’ at the Maison Européenne de la Photographie (MEP), Museum of Contemporary Art – Carré d’art of Nîmes, New Museum in New York or more recently at Bibliothèque Nationale de France, Paris.
In 1969, Harald Szeemann invites him to participate in his famous exhibition ‘When Attitudes Become Form’ at Kunsthalle in Bern. He has participated in Paris Biennale 1964, 1971, Sao Paulo 1977, 1998, Sidney in 1990; and Dokumenta Kassel in 1968, 1972, 1982. He represented Switzerland at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and has been exhibited in major museums in Bern, Basel, Geneva, Zurich, and Paris. The same year, a large retrospective was also organised by Marcia Tucker at the New Museum and at Farideh Cadot’s gallery in New York – part of the show travelled to San Diego Museum of Contemporary Art. His works are in major public and private collections in Europe and the USA.

www.ftn-books.com has several Raetz titles available

Roman Opałka (193 began to paint numbers from one to infinity in his studio in Warsaw, starting from the top-left corner of the canvas, finishing in the right one below, and after that taking a new canvas to continue the counting. Typically he would paint around 400 figures a day.

Every new canvas that the artist took, denominated Détail, continued the count where the last one left off. All the canvases have the same size of 195 x 35 cm and the height would correspond to the artist’s physical height, whereas the width was derived from the girth of the door to his Warsaw studio where the project began. All the works also have the same title: 1965/1-∞. “1965” stands for the year when Opałka’s counting started and “1-∞” signifies the beginning and the undefinable ending of his oeuvre. As his ultimate goal was infinity it was a project he never completed.

Over the years, Opałka made slight adjustments to his ritual. In his first Détails, he painted white numbers on a black canvas. Two years later he opted for a grey canvas with an explanation that for him grey is not a symbolic color, not an emotional one. From 1972 he gradually lightened his grey canvases by adding one percent of white pigment to the ground with each Détail. He was envisioning the slow disappearance of his notes in white on white, the numerals that would finally dissolve into the surface, embody the surface. There would be no distinction between the numerals and the white surface as a form of blankness, tabula rasa

In each composition, tiny numbers are organized in narrow horizontal rows, without commas or number breaks, and Opałka himself was painting by hand and without the help of rulers.

Opałka introduced a tape recorder, speaking each number into the microphone as he painted it. He also began taking black and white photographs of himself – frontal headshots in front of the canvas in his studio upon the completion of a day’s work, where each self-portrait is created in the same way with him wearing the same white t-shirt. Every portrait was selected by Opałka and accompanied each painting. In this way, his paintings recorded the passing of time and artistic evolution through the gesture of a hand, and his recordings and photographs captured his aging process.

From the day his project began until his death, Opałka combined clear conceptual thinking with painterly materials. His search for infinity through painting became a form of phenomenology, which in retrospect might be seen as a parallel to the philosophy of Hegel. Through his attention to a paradoxically complex, reductive manner of painting, Opałka focused on infinite possibilities latent within his project. He would count aloud each numeral while coordinating the tiny movements of his brush.

Since 2008, he has painted in white on a white background, a color he called blanc merité (a well-earned white) and the numbers for the last three years of his life were white.

Though his artistic quest might have seemed bloodless and abstract, Roman Opałka described it passionately as a grand metaphor for human existence:

It is difficult to envision a life made up of numbers. His Détails do not offer insight into his inner life, thoughts, or identity. Their content is not personal and yet, we are left with something incredibly intimate: the actual minutes of the artist’s lifetime.

While Opałka’s work has been shown internationally for years, including at Documenta in Kassel in 1977, the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1987, and the Venice Biennale in 1995 and 2003, it never received the widespread recognition it deserves. In his uncompromising devotion to systematic art practice, Opałka relates to such artists as Daniel Buren, On Kawara, Hanne Darboven, and Cy Twombly (grey paintings).

Opałka’s synthesis became an idea of painting as a result of a numerical destiny. He calculated that he would reach the stage of white on white at 7,777,777. Consistent with his calculations, he passed away near Rome ten days before his 80th birthday in 2011 and he never met his declared goal to “get up to the white on white and still be alive”. The final number he painted was 5,607,249.

www.FTN-books.com has currently 2 Opalka titles available

Royden Rabinowitch (born 1943) is an internationally renowned Canadian sculptor closely associated with the non-figurative sculptural movement.

Born in Toronto and twin brother to David Rabinowitch, Royden Rabinowitch studied at the University of Western Ontario.  He was Chairman of Fine Art at the Ontario College of Art for a year before he moved to New York in 1970.

His early work was influenced by the Modernists Alberto Giacometti, David Smith and Constantin Brancusi. Through the years his interests evolved through Constructivism to non-figurative sculptural works. His sculpture explores the relationship between the sculptural form and the human body, in contrast to other sculptors whose focus is on architecture or landscape.

Often working in series, Rabinowitch repeats seemingly simple geometrical forms using steel, wood and metals. He is best known for bent steel plates and curved barrel sculptures, often placed low to the ground.

In 2012 Rabinowitch was awarded the Governor General’s Award in Visual and Media Arts honouring his nearly 50-year career as a sculptor. He is an Officer of the Order of Canada and the only artist who is a Life Member of an Oxbridge college (Clare Hall, Cambridge).

His artwork is in some of the most prestigious museum collections worldwide including the Guggenheim in New York, Centre Pompidou in Paris, Tate Modern in London, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam and Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin amongst countless others.

In 2014, a private gallery in Ghent, Belgium opened, which holds the largest private collection of Royden Rabinowitch’s work.

www.ftn-books.com has the most important Rabinowitch title available.

Nicholas Pope (b. 1949) is one of a generation of talented British sculptors who acquired national and international prominence in the 1970s and 1980s. Like others, such as Tony Cragg (b. 1949), Richard Deacon (b 1948), Bill Woodrow (b. 1947), Antony Gormley (b. 1951) and Edward Allington (b. 1951), Pope was interested in making sculpture that departed from the boxy geometrical object orders of American Minimalism and resulted from a direct, physical and emotional engagement with materials.

He worked on both large and small scale, carving wood, chalk and stone, whilst also working in lead and terracotta. He soon became known for his compelling lumpen forms, as well as for his columns and arches. In these works, he explored the precariousness of stacking, using rope to coordinate his sculptures’ gravity-defying logic and heighten the inbuilt tension of their compositions.

Pope was student of Bath Academy at Corsham (1970-73) and soon travelled on a number of scholarships abroad, including to Romania in 1974 and 1975, where his passion for Brancusi’s heritage further developed. Pope’s Oak Wood Column was included in The Condition of Sculpture (1975) at the Hayward Gallery in London, selected by the sculptor William Tucker, and Pope’s sculptures were shown in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1980. That year Pope’s work was also shown across the USA in the British Art Now: An American Perspective touring exhibition.

In the early 1980s Pope’s life changed when, after visiting the Mbawala sculptors in the Ruvuma Valley in Tanzania, he contracted an encephalitic virus. Pope gradually came through this debilitating disease, looking determinedly ahead and learning again how to draw and write, think and make. Working on paper took on new meaning and, as well as making drawings and woodcuts, he carved some models for unknown landscapes in wood and alabaster.

In the 1990s and 2000s, Pope produced some of the most extraordinary artwork that he had made in his career up to that point. Eschewing the natural palette of his early work, he made works that were bright and bold, amorphous and effusive, crude and unabashed, as he took matters of life, sex and death head on – with a passion and a vengeance. Narrative acquired new importance as he explored the power of belief, reshaping its forms and translating its religious iconographies into ceramic, epoxy resin and oil pastel. He revisited its established allegories with newer story-lines that take us at once into the heart of the family home and out onto the open road. Amongst his works from these recent years, we find his ‘Motorway Service Station of the Seven Deadly Sins and Seven Virtues’. We also watch as he embarks on new sculptures within his ongoing ‘Mr & Mrs Pope’ series of works, in which he depicts both himself and his late wife Janet together – and in different guises and diverse materials – across their married life, from the 1970s into the present.

Nicholas Pope is presently working on a series of new exhibitions staged in the summer of 2021 at The Holburne Museum in Bath, the New Art Centre at Roche Court and The Sunday Painter in Stockwell. Pope has also just completed a commission for Hellens Manor in his home village of Much Marcle, The commission “Weird” was made during the pandemic and inaugurates a biennial sculpture commission at Hellens for young artists. This mirrors Hellens Music Festival’s established tradition of fostering young musicians.

www.ftn-books.com has several scarce Pop publications availabel

Anne Poirier met her alter ego, Patrick Poirier (born 1942), while they were both students at the École nationale supérieure des arts décoratifs. They began to travel together regularly to the Far and Middle East and to the United States, before becoming residents of the Villa Medici in Rome from 1967 to 1970. From then on, they decided to work together as a unit. Their artistic activity reaches beyond the traditional categories of painting and sculpture in that it flirts with archaeology and architecture. Since the start of their collaboration, their work has focused mainly on the subjects of memory, fragments, and ruins. They make equal use of a variety of mediums, including scale models, photography, herbariums, sculpture, installations, and artist’s books. They first became known for their “reconstructions” of legendary sites of antiquity, Ostia antica (1970-1972) and Domus aurea (1975-1978), which associate archaeological precision with fiction.

Their work is steeped in mythology, dreams, and utopia, in the spirit of both Jorge Luis Borges and Nicolas Ledoux. It has been the subject of a number of solo exhibitions, particularly at the Centre Georges-Pompidou (1978) and New York Museum of Modern Art (1979).

www.ftn-books.com has 1 important title available in which pPoirier is combined with Boltanski and Brodwolf.

For Fabrizio Plessi (born 1940), one of the most internationally renowned pioneers of video art, art always means movement. Since the end of the 1960s, the element of water has been a main theme of his art. »Water, especially the sea, opens our minds.« For him, the flowing element of nature is a symbol of temporality, the flow of life, and a metaphor for memory. In his unmistakable signature and constant exploration of state-of-the-art, time-based technology, Fabrizio Plessi uses the medium of video to make the power of nature directly experienceable.

From the very beginning of his artistic career, Plessi began to develop water as the central theme of his art. His fascination with this primal element – based on the ubiquity of water in his adopted country of Venice – was already a source of inspiration for his numerous forays into action art and conceptual art during the 1960s and 1970s. Photographs document his actions. For example, when in Paris Plessi tried to punch a hole in the Seine with a large nail (Un Buco N’ell Acqua, Azione 1973) or sawed the Stichter See near Neunkirchen into two equal parts (Segare il Lago Stichter in due parti uguali, Azione 1975). Absurd actions in which water is treated less as a natural element than as a full-fledged medium to be shaped for the implementation of his ideas.
His first videotapes developed in 1974, and soon after the medium of video became the core of his art. In the 1980s, he began developing expansive video installations where he combined natural materials such as wood, earth, iron, or marble, as in the monumental video installation »Roma«, with state-of-the-art technology to create the exciting wholistic experience characteristic of his works. With the presentation of this video installation at Documenta 8 in 1987, Plessi, who first exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1970, finally achieved international renown. Plessi has realized more than 120 video sculptures and expansive video installations on the subject of water worldwide. Later, the element of fire would also become a recurring theme.
Given the rapid pace technical innovations in recent years, Plessi’s formal language has also changed accordingly. Instead of combining sculptural elements with electronic media as he did in his earlier works, Plessi now reduces his more recent video installations to the simple form of the image carrier, the screen. Since 2015, his video installations have impressed audiences with their minimalist staging.

www.ftn-books.com has 1 Plessi title available

Hermann Pitz was born in 1956 in Oldenburg, Germany. He lives and works in Munich, He holds a Meisterschüler degree in painting from the Hochschule der Bildenden Künste in West-Berlin (1980) and has had many solo exhibitions in different museums.
On an international level, He participated in shows like Documenta (1987 and 1992), Skulpturprojekte Münster (1987 and 1997), XLIII Biennale de Venezia, 1. and 2. International Biennale Istanbul. Next to his studio practice, he has a continuous curatorial practice since 1978 in international institutions. A possible entry point into Armin’s works is to trace the themes that recur in his work and overlap or mutually expand: mirror objects, photographs, light sources that can be assigned to the field of optics or objects that, due to their form or function, can be associated with the process of seeing: convexly or concavely curved objects, a mirrored sphere or drops of water. The motifs are familiar to the viewer from everyday life and at the same time stimulate him to reflect on the perception of reality: What is reality, what is fiction? The curtain, easel, and lighting are reminiscent of theatre and stage or evoke a studio atmosphere. Here, too, the themes revolve around appearance and reality, image and likeness, staging and presentation. Everyday reality mutates into artificial-artistic reality. For his complex concept, Armin also uses other metaphors from the cultural and scientific tradition as formal “containers” that connect his works like a network: the archive, the world map, the family tree, or the journey. […] The artist quotes himself, again and again, establishes a spatial and temporal continuity between works, develops his iconography. His art lives from the paradox of always progressing through references back.

www.ftn-books.com has several Pitz titles available.

Initially, van de Pavert became known for his sculptures, his early works referred to architecture and resembled parts from buildings, such as windows and doors. An example is the 1987 work Inversion: the work is a door and doorpost folded inside out, for which an original door and doorpost were used as a mold.

Later, the artist decided to use these architectural elements in films as well and eventually started using computer animations. As this developed, he focussed more and more on murals. In an interview he justified this as follows: “I could put an entire exhibition in one film. While I was working on that, I decided to add murals to the spaces. I asked myself the question: if these spaces were covered with murals, what kind of iconography would they show? What would muralism, like Diego Rivera’s, look like in this day and age?”

A central topic in van de Pavert’s drawings is the development of figuration. He took historical paintings originating in earlier centuries as his starting point, asking himself: what do these works mean to our world right now? The themes he developed in response to this question play an important role in the publication.

Starting in the 1990s, he began working on watercolors that served for computer-animated films. The representations in those watercolors were about the avant-garde movements and the political left. Later, he focussed more on youth, the 1960s and 1970s and the idea of freedom. In 2013, these murals were executed on a large scale for the first time for an exhibition at Art Centre De Appel in Amsterdam. 20th-century avant-garde clearly lives on through the artist’s oeuvre.

Jan van de Pavert (1960) lives and works in Rotterdam. He studied at Academy of Fine Arts Sint-Joost in Breda from 1979 to 1982, where he was taught by Hans van Zummeren and Theo Mols. From 1982 to 1984, he continued his studies at Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem with Stanley Brouwn and Carel Visser, among others. Van de Pavert established himself as an independent artist in Amsterdam in 1984. He moved to Utrecht in 1992, before he finally settled in Rotterdam in 1998.

www.ftn-books.com has an important artist book in an edition of 450 copies available.

Mimmo Paladino was born in Paduli in southern Italy in 1948. A prolific sculptor, painter and printmaker, he studied at the Liceo Artistico in Benevento between 1964 and 1968. His first solo exhibition was held at the Studio Oggetto, Caserta in 1969. Paladino gained international recognition in 1980 when he participated in the Aperto ’80 at the Venice Biennale with Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi and Nicola De Maria, central figures of the Transavantgarde movement.

A major retrospective of his work was held in Munich at the Stadtische Galerie im Lenbachhaus in 1985. Other solo exhibitions include Museum of the Nineteenth Century, Milan (2011); Galerie Kluser 2, Munich (2009); Centro Cultural Recoleta, Buenos Aires (2008); Centro per l’Arte Contemporanea Luigi Pecci, Prato (2002); South London Gallery (1999); Scuderie di Palazzo Reale, Piazza del Plebiscito and Villa Pignatelli, Naples (1995); Forte Belvedere, Florence (1993); and Galleria Civica d’Arte Contemporanea; Trento (1992).  Paladino has created several installations with Brian Eno, the earliest of which was presented at the Roundhouse, London, in 1999. 

Paladino’s work is held in major public collections worldwide, including Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh; Tate, London; Kunstmuseum, Basel; Kunstmuseum, Dusseldorf; Berlin Neue Galerie; Fonds Regional d’ Art Contemporain, France; Los Angeles County Art Museum; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York; Australian National Gallery, Canberra; Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and Setegaya Museum, Tokyo.

www.ftn-books.com has several Paladino titles available.

Olivier Mosset first became known in France for having been part of the famous BMPT group alongside Daniel Buren, Niele Toroni and Michel Parmentier. Since then he has been associated with a multitude of art historical movements, involving himself in both the European and American artistic and critical contexts.

In anticipation of many artists, who in the 1980s would use appropriation to critique Modernist authority, Mosset called into question the painter’s gesture and signature by sharing styles and dissolving authorship to reach a “degree zero” of painting. Mosset has remained committed to questioning painting as a historical object by, paradoxically, continuing to paint, turning to monochrome works on canvas and walls.

Mosset lives and works in Tucson, AZ. Since his emergence in the 1960s with BMPT, Mosset has exhibited extensively in galleries and museums worldwide. Recently he has been the subject of a solo exhibitions at Jean Paul Najar Foundation, Dubai, United Arab Emirates (2017); Hunter College Art Galleries, New York, NY (2016); The Power Station, Dallas, TX (2015); Musée regional d’art contemporain Languedoc-Roussilon à Sérignan, France (2013), and Kunsthalle Zürich, Switzerland (2012), among others. A retrospective of his work, Olivier Mosset: Travaux/Works 1966-2003, was presented at Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland and Kunstverein St. Gallen Kunstmuseum, Switzerland (2003). His work has been included in several group exhibitions including Manifesta 10, Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia (2014); Whitney Biennial, Whitney Museum of American Art, NY (2008); and he represented Switzerland in the 44th Venice Biennale (1990). His work is in the collections of such institutions as Museum of Modern Art, New York, NY; Centre Pompidou, Paris, France; National Gallery of Canada, Ontario; Albright Knox Gallery, Buffalo, NY, and Musée Cantonal des Beaux-Arts, Lausanne, Switzerland, among others.

www.ftn-books.com has one Mosset title now available.