FTN-blog

Born in London in 1931, Malcolm Morley lived in and around New York City from 1958 until his death in 2018.  He is acknowledged as one of the earliest innovators of Superrealism, which developed as a counterpoint to Pop Art in the 1960s. Over the course of his distinguished career, Morley defied stylistic characterization, moving by turns through so-called abstract, realist, neo-romantic, and neo-expressionist painterly modes, while being attentive to his own biographical experiences. Morley studied at the Camberwell College of Arts and the Royal College of Art. Since his first New York show in 1964, he had numerous exhibitions in Europe and North America and participated in many international surveys including Documenta 5 (1972) and Documenta 6 (1977). His first retrospective, organized in 1983 by the Whitechapel Art Gallery, travelled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and the Brooklyn Museum. In 1984, he was awarded the inaugural Turner Prize

Subsequent noteworthy presentations of Morley’s work include an exhibition of watercolors at Tate Liverpool, which travelled to the Kunsthalle Basel, Bonnefantenmuseum in Maastricht, and the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton, NY (1991-92); a retrospective at the Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris  (1993); an exhibition organized by Fundación La Caixa, Madrid, which travelled to the Astrup Fearnley Museet, Oslo (1995-96); a retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, London (2001); and the survey “The Art of Painting” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, North Miami (2006). Other notable exhibitions include “Malcolm Morley in a Nutshell: The Fine Art of Painting 1954-2012” at the Yale School of Art (2012), an exhibition exploring the role of paper in Morley’s art-making process at the Parrish Art Museum (2012-13), and an exhibition at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, organized in collaboration with the Hall Art Foundation (2013-14). Most recently, the Hall Art Foundation’s Schloss Derneburg presented a solo exhibition of his work (2017-18). In addition to the Turner Prize, Morley was awarded the Painting Award from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in 1992 and the Francis J. Greenburger Award in 2015. He was inducted into both the American Academy of Arts and Sciences (2009) and the American Academy of Arts and Letters (2011). Morley became a citizen of the United States in 1991. His work can be found in museum collections worldwide.

www.ftn-books.com has ao. the Boymans catalogue on Morley available.

Annette Messager was born in Berk-sur-Mer in 1943. She lives and works in Malakoff, just south of Paris. From the 1970s onward, Annette Messager’s work has been known for a heterogeneity of form and subject matter, ranging from the personal to the fictional, the social to the universal. Through an embrace of everyday materials, and principles of assemblage, collection and theatrical display, her diverse media has included construction, documents, language, objects,  taxidermy,  drawings,  photographs, fabric, embroidery, image collections, albums, sculpture and installation. Messager has explored fairy tales, mythology and doppelgangers throughout her œuvre. Often using reminiscence and memory as a vehicle for inspiration, Messager’s wide range of hybrid forms has had an affinity with traditions as varied as the romantic, the grotesque, the absurd, the phantasmagoric.

Annette Messager was awarded the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture in 2016. She won the Golden Lion for best national pavilion at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005. The Tel Aviv Museum of Art presented a major exhibition of her work in 2022. Recently she has exhibited at the Institut Giacometti in Paris (2018), the Institut Valencià Art Modern (IVAM) in Spain (2018), and the Villa Medici in Rome (2017). In France, an important exhibition was put in at the Musée des Beaux-Arts and at the Cité de la Dentelle et de la Mode in Calais, in 2015–16. In 2014 Messager had major exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art MCA, Sydney, and at K21 in Düsseldorf. Earlier solo shows have been exhibited at the Museo de Arte Contemporáneo in Monterrey (MARCO), Mexico (2011); the Hayward Gallery in London (2009); the Espoo Museum of Modern Art (EMMA), Finland (2008); the National Museum of Contemporary Art, Seoul, South Korea (2008); and the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo (2008). A major retrospective of her work was organised by the Centre Pompidou, Paris, in 2007.

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

A skilled painter and draughtsman working within a wide range of pictorial genres, Stephen McKenna viewed modernity through a rubric of classicism. Using formal elements of shape, structure and light, his works often seek the abstract and indeterminate within the physical world, imposing a geometric clarity onto cityscapes, still life and mythological scenes. Like the early 20th-century metaphysical paintings that inform them, his paintings capture more than the sum of their parts – hinting at an intangible, spiritual realm beneath the surface. The serenity of McKenna’s paintings is often punctured by eccentric birds, animals, or animated figures, while domestic interiors, landscapes and seascapes are invigorated by atmospheric conditions of light, air, space and water. Born in London and living and working in County Carlow at the time of his death in 2017, McKenna traveled extensively within Europe, having lived and worked in Germany, Belgium and Italy. Erudite and cosmopolitan, McKenna responded to the classical European tradition, as well as developments in Modern and Postmodern painting, to develop a highly personal and idiosyncratic approach to the medium, creating contemporary works that continue to intrigue.

www.ftn-books.com has the Isy Brachot title on McKenna now available.

Allan McCollum was born in Los Angeles in 1944. In his twenties, McCollum briefly considered a career in theater and then attended trade school to study restaurant management and industrial kitchen work. In the late 1960s, he began to educate himself as an artist. Applying strategies of mass production to handmade objects, McCollum’s labor-intensive practice questions the intrinsic value of the unique work of art. McCollum’s installations—fields of vast numbers of small-scale works, systematically arranged—are the product of many tiny gestures, built up over time.

Viewing his work often produces a sublime effect—as one slowly realizes that the dizzying array of thousands of identical-looking shapes is, in fact, composed of subtly different, distinct things. Engaging assistants, scientists, and local craftspeople in his process, McCollum embraces a collaborative and democratic form of creativity. His drawings and sculptures often serve a symbolic purpose—as surrogates, faithful copies, or stand-ins for people—and are presented theatrically, transforming the exhibition space into a laboratory where artifice and context are scrutinized. Economical in form, yet curious in function, his work and mechanical-looking processes are infused with humor and humility.

Allan McCollum has had more than one-hundred solo exhibitions in Europe and the United States, where his work has appeared in major exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (2009); the Museum of Modern Art, New York (most recently in 2007); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (2004); among others. He has also participated in many international exhibitions, including the Bienal de São Paulo (2008). Recent solo exhibitions include Friedrich Petzel Gallery, New York (2009); Barbara Krakow Gallery, Boston (2008); and Musée d’art moderne et contemporain, Geneva (2006); among others. Allan McCollum lives and works in New York.

www.ftn-books.com has some interesting Allan McCollum titles available;

Ken Lum is known for his conceptual and representational art in a number of media, including painting, sculpture and photography. A longtime professor, he currently is the Chair of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Design in Philadelphia. He was formerly Professor of Art at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver where he was also Head of the Graduate Program in Studio Art; Bard College, Annendale on Hudson, New York, and the l’Ecole des Beaux Arts, Paris.  Besides English, Lum speaks French and Cantonese Chinese.

A co-founder and founding editor of Yishu: Journal of Contemporary Chinese Art, he is a prolific writer with numerous published articles, catalogue essays and juried papers.  In 2000, he worked as co-editor of the Shanghai Biennale catalog. As well, Lum has presented keynote addresses at the International Association of Empirical Aesthetics world conference in 2022 held in Philadelphia, the Becoming Public Art conference held in Markham, Ontario in 2020, the inauguration of the Melly Project Space in 2020 in Rotterdam, The Netherlands,  the 2010 World Museums Conference held at the Shanghai Museum in Shanghai, the third conference accompanying the 15^th Biennale of Sydney in Sydney, Australia in 2006 and the Universities Art Association of Canada conference held in Vancouver in 1997. As an artist, he has a long and active art exhibition record of over 30 years, including major exhibitions such as Documenta 11, the Venice Biennale, Sao Paolo Bienal, Shanghai Biennale, Carnegie Triennial, Sydney Biennale, Busan Biennale, Liverpool Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, Moscow Biennial, Whitney Biennial, among others. In 2019, Lum completed a feature length screenplay dealing with comparative racism in post-civil war America.

Since the mid 1990s, Lum has worked on numerous permanent public art commissions including for the cities of Vienna, the Engadines (Switzerland), Rotterdam, St. Louis, Leiden, Utrecht, Toronto and Vancouver. He has also realized temporary public art commissions in Stockholm, Istanbul, Torun (Poland), Innsbruck and Kansas City.  He is currently working on a memorial to the 1986 Lake Nyos disaster for the Government of Cameroon.  Related to his public art, he has written several essays on subject formation and public space. Lum’s public art often deals with individual and social identity formation in the context of historical trauma and the complications of official and non-official memory.  In 2016, he completed a memorial to the Canadian war effort in Italy during World War 2.  The work is sited in Nathan Phillips Square of Toronto City Hall and depicts the town of Ortona, Italy, in the aftermath of war while four soldiers stand sentinel at each corner of the low-perspective work.

www.ftn-books.com has 4 Ken Lum titles available

Joseph Kosuth, one of the pioneers of Conceptual art and installation art, has initiated language-based works and appropriation strategies since the 1960s. His work has consistently explored the production and role of language and meaning within art.

Born in 1945 in Toledo, Ohio, Kosuth attended the Toledo Museum School of Design from 1955 to 1962 and studied privately under the Belgian painter Line Bloom Draper. From 1963 to 1964, he was enrolled at the Cleveland Institute of Art. In 1964 and 1965 Kosuth studied with Roger Barr at the American Center in Paris.

In 1965, Kosuth moved to New York to attend the School of Visual Arts, where he would later join the faculty. Soon after, he abandoned painting and began making conceptual works, which were first shown in 1967 at the exhibition space he co-founded, known as the Museum of Normal Art. In 1969 Kosuth held his first solo exhibition at Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, and in the same year became the American editor of the journal Art and Language.

From 1971-1972 Kosuth studied philosophical anthropology (with Stanley Diamond) and philosophy at the Graduate Faculty of The New School for Social Research, New York. The philosophy of Ludwig Wittgenstein, amongst others, influenced the development of his art from the late sixties to mid-seventies. His more than fifty-year inquiry into the relation of language to art has taken the form of installations, museum exhibitions, public commissions and publications throughout Europe, the Americas and Asia, including Documenta and the Venice Biennale on multiple occasions.

Joseph Kosuth lives and works in New York and London. He has been awarded the Brandeis Award, 1990; Frederick Wiseman Award, 1991; the Menzione d’Onore at the Venice Biennale, 1993; and the Chevalier de l’ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government,1993 amongst others. He received a Cassandra Foundation Grant in 1968. In June 1999, a 3.00-franc postage stamp was issued by the French Government in honor of his work in Figeac. In February 2001 he received the Laurea Honoris Causa, a doctorate in Philosophy and Letters from the University of Bologna, Italy. In October 2003 he received the Austrian Republic’s highest honor for accomplishments in science and culture, the Decoration of Honour in Gold for services to the Republic of Austria. Kosuth’s work titled, ni apparence ni illusion opened at the Musée du Louvre, Paris in 2009 and became a permanent installation in 2014. In May 2012 he was inducted into the Royal Belgian Academy. Kosuth’s internationally recognized work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at institutions including the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Russia; the Kunstmuseums Thurgau, Warth, Switzerland; Haus Konstruktiv, Zurich, Switzerland; and the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art, Melbourne, Australia, amongst others. Most recently, in 2019 Kosuth installed permanent public installations at the Miami Beach Convention Center, in Miami, Florida and Bill Graham Civic Auditorium, San Francisco, California. His work is featured in major private and public collections including the Museum of Modern Art, NYC; the Tate Gallery, London; the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NYC; the Whitney Museum of American Art, NYC; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; the Louvre Museum, Paris, France; the National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney; the Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome amongst many others worldwide.

www.ftn-books.com has a few Kosuth titles now available.

Seymour Likely was a fictional American artist as well as the trademark of an artists ‘ group: Alders Mantje (1954), Ronald Hooft (1962) and Ido Vinderink (1953). The Likely-brand was sponsor of a non-existent basketball team and propagated nepfilms with the members of the collective in the lead roles. They denounced corruption of art and money by making art banknotes, art copies and fictional events.

www.ftn-books.com has some publications by this famous fictional group of artists now available.

Since the late 1970s, Jonathan Lasker has developed a distinctive formal vocabulary based on different mark-making processes, including structural grids, graphic scribbled lines and thick impasto strokes of paint. Although he creates these forms intuitively, the compositions themselves are highly structured and controlled. At the forefront of artists who re-established the possibilities of painting after Minimalism and Conceptualism emptied the picture-plane, he has mounted a challenge to the medium’s status quo, creating a unique system of painting based on a figure-ground relationship, in which the figure and ground stand in a dialectical relationship to one another.

The artist uses doubled, transposed and translated forms to create paintings composed of distinct, clearly defined elements. ‘In Lasker’s work, forms […] are part of a larger schema, but independent in terms of form, colour, texture, and manner of paint application,’ describes art critic Richard Kalina. ‘Each image [in the picture] becomes a thing itself, an element to be examined, experienced and categorised; a component of the larger grammatical structure that Lasker has built.’ The pictures which form are arrived at by the viewer interpretively rather than literally, through an active engagement with the different abstract figures on the canvas and the relationships between them. Viewers are encouraged to experience themselves through the act of viewing and, in the end, they become the subject of Lasker’s paintings.

Born in Jersey City, New Jersey in 1948, Lasker lives and works in New York. He initially pursued a career as a rock musician before studying at the School of Visual Arts in New York and the California Institute of the Arts in Valencia. Early solo exhibitions include the ICA Philadelphia in 1992 and a retrospective that travelled to the Kunsthalle Bielefeld, Germany; Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; and Kunstverein St. Gallen, Switzerland in 1997–98, followed by exhibitions at the Rose Art Museum, Brandeis University, Waltham, USA; Forum for Contemporary Art, St. Louis, USA; and The Power Plant, Toronto. A major retrospective of his work was held in 2003 at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. In 2015, the exhibition Jonathan Lasker: Paintings 2001–2014 was shown at the Musée d’art moderne et contemporain in Saint-Étienne, France.

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

Born in 1961 in Buenos Aires, where he continues to live and work, Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca’s distinctive cubistoid style masterfully reconciles abstraction with an illusionist form of figuration. Informed by the worlds of architecture, music, theater and cartography, Kuitca’s paintings seek to incite the potential for a theatrical experience. Shifting from gestural mark making to linear precision, and incorporating diverse motifs—spanning fragmented geographical maps and architectural plans—Kuitca’s work mines varied aesthetic styles and histories.

The artist’s distinctive visual language was initially developed in his Desenlace series of paintings, exhibited in the Argentinean Pavilion at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Recalling a cubist aesthetic and eschewing figurative references, Kuitca’s segmented forms and angular patterns act as the organizing principle of his compositions in this series. To create these paintings, Kuitca relied upon elementary human movements to map the surface of each canvas. Pacing to and fro, he marked the cloth with short diagonal strokes as he walked: a process inspired by the avant-garde choreographer Pina Bausch’s notion of ‘Tanztheater,’ which he first encountered as a young man of 19 in Buenos Aires. Struck by Bausch’s dictum ‘walking is enough,’ in light of this experience, Kuitca sought to transform the narrative effect of his paintings to evoke theatrical fields of expression and reception.

Portals, doorways and transitional thresholds are recurring themes in Kuitca’s work. This stems, in part,  from a response to a series of wall paintings he completed—including a mural in his studio in Buenos Aires, a commission inside Durslade Farmhouse at Hauser & Wirth Somerset, as well as installations in New York and the Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain in Paris—which encouraged Kuitca to work on a larger scale: affording a literal incorporation of real space into his canvases, while enabling Kuitca to bridge two-and three-dimensional modes of working. Kuitca’s longstanding involvement with the theatre further informs his integration of architectural features and speaks to his works’ conceptual proximity to scenic design.

Kuitca first entered Argentina’s art scene at the young age of 13 with a solo exhibition at the Galeria Lirolay in Buenos Aires. Today, his work is represented in some of the most distinguished collections across three continents. Kuitca’s work has come to international renown through exhibitions including ‘Projects’ at The Museum of Modern Art in New York (1991); his participation in Documenta IX in Kassel (1992); and his representation of Argentina at the 2007 Venice Biennale. His status as one of Argentina’s leading artist has been further confirmed by shows at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London (1995); the Center for Fine Arts in Miami (1993) and The Arts Club of Chicago (1999). Kuitca’s most recent solo exhibition venues include the Kunsthaus Centre d’art Pasquart (2017) and Hauser & Wirth in London (2016). In 2017, Kuitca conceived and curated the show, ‘Les Visitants,’ for the Fondation Cartier in Paris.

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

The artistic expression of Bernd Koberling is born out of the ongoing conversation he has with nature’s own world of ideas. The paintings are as extension of the Arctic vast expanses, but instead of depicting their landscapes, Koberling is capturing their essence in a flora of his own painterly associations. He says:  – ”I draw from nature but translate that which is seen and experienced into my own form language.” To this, an additional dimension is added by the recurring use of onomatopoetic titles, and by his main verse: color.

Koberling’s compositions capture the gazing eye, pulling it into a world of color and movement. Here, it will find basic elements in conflict with each other; a pastel landscape penetrated by a red awl, or a bright void penetrated by a strobe-like line extended over the image plane, color fields that in one moment rests in stillness, while in the other is twisting and turning, like a dazzling microcosm. Spending time in the wilderness is said to raise an understanding of how nature’s fundamental structure is both reflected and merged with the structure of the human essence; if this is true, then Koberling is depicting this relationship like no other.

Bernd Koberling has since the 60’s been exhibited at museums and art galleries worldwide. In 2006, he was awarded with the Fred Thieler Award for his oeuvre and his contribution to the development of German contemporary painting.

www.ftn-books.com has some interesting Koberling items available.