FTN-blog

Among the great innovators of contemporary painting, Pat Steir first came to prominence in the late 1970s and early 1980s for her iconographic canvases and immersive wall drawings. By the late 1980s, her inventive approach to painting—the rigorous pouring technique seen in her Waterfall works, in which she harnessed the forces of gravity and gesture to achieve works of astonishing lyricism—attracted substantial critical acclaim. Informed by a deep engagement with art history and Eastern philosophy, and a passion for artistic advocacy in the both the visual and literary realms, Steir’s storied five-decade career ­­continues to reach new heights through an intrepid commitment to material exploration and experimentation.

Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1938, Steir attended New York’s Pratt Institute from 1956-58, where she took painting classes from Richard Linder and Philip Guston. Steir transferred to Boston University College of Fine Arts where she studied art and philosophy from 1958-60, before returning to Pratt, where she received her BFA in 1962. It was during her days as a student that she first became acquainted with many of the most influential conceptual and minimalist artists of the day, figures that would become Steir’s lifelong friends such as Sol LeWitt, Brice Marden and Lawrence Weiner. Shortly after graduating, Steir was invited to participate in her first group exhibition at The High Museum in Atlanta and only a year later was featured in group shows at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. These shows helped position her among the first group of women artists to gain recognition in the male dominated art scene of the time, paving the way for numerous long-term relationships with well-respected international galleries. In the mid-1960s, Steir worked as a freelance illustrator before being offered the role of Art Director at Harper and Row Publishing Company in New York. In the early 1970s she taught illustration at Parsons the New School for Design and then painting at the California Institute of the Arts where Ross Bleckner and David Salle were among her students. Steir simultaneously worked as an editor for Semiotext(e) magazine and was a founding board member of both the Printed Matter bookshop and the landmark feminist journal Heresies.

Steir also became friends with artists Mary Heilmann and Joan Jonas in the early 1970s, participating in an early improvisational film by Jonas and joining Heilmann and artist Joan Snyder in a three-person exhibition at the Paley & Lowe gallery. It was also during this time, at the invitation of Douglas Crimp, that Steir first travelled to New Mexico to visit artist Agnes Martin, a trip she would continue to make over many years until Martin’s death in 2004.

In the mid-1970s Steir showed her first iconic and critically acclaimed series of works—paintings of roses that were then completely crossed out, transcending the divide between figuration and abstraction. She also began to make site-specific wall drawings and room-sized installations. These installations transformed her paintings into a three-dimensional experience formed by light and line, allowing the viewer to step out of their reality and into an illusionary world connected to both nature and the progression of time. As Steir has said, ‘Installation allows the artist to paint out of the painting and into space and the viewer to move from space into a painting—the space where the act of painting takes place is in the imagination of the viewer.’

In the late 1970s, after traveling extensively both in the United States and in Europe, Steir and composer John Cage became good friends while working together at Crown Point Press. His embrace of chaos or randomness and non-intention in creative activity became especially influential on her practice, inspiring her to see new potential for accident and chance in artmaking. In the early 1980s, Steir made her first trip to Japan where she became fascinated by Japanese woodcuts and Chinese literati landscape painting, particularly ancient Chinese Shan shui (mountain water), which evoked nature rather than trying to replicate it. By the late 1980s, Steir began experimenting with the technique that has since come to define her oeuvre, no longer strictly using a brush which allowed her to take herself out of the picture. Subject to the influence of time, the finished work is what gravity and the weight of the paint has made. They are not paintings of landscapes but landscapes in and of themselves, an image that both evokes a waterfall and is a waterfall. As much as Steir’s process embraces chance, she retains complete command over the basic parameters. It is a harmonious collaboration between control and chaos, ‘chance within limitations.’ A remarkable synthesis of conceptualism, minimalism, and abstraction that challenges the postwar American canon, Steir’s practice remains limitless.

www.ftn-books.com has several Pat Steir publications now available.

A few eeks ago i received an announcement of the Henie Onstad Kunstsenter in which they announced the closure of the Niki de Saint Phalle exhibition. It is such a charming photograph that I which I never encountered before so I want to share this with you. and please know that I still have some very nice Niki de Saint Phalle books for sale at www.FTN-books.com

Toni Grand was born in 1935, in Gard, France. He began his education in literary studies and then went to l’Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Montpellier. At the age of twenty, he chose to specialize in sculpture, working with lead, polyester, steel, cast iron and various other materials. His first exhibition was held at the Paris Biennale in 1967.

Since Grand decided to immolate his oeuvre, the pieces that escaped the conflagration are conserved in private collections or renown museums that have yet to produce the retrospective his work deserves. He used mainly elements of wood, stone, bone and fish of the congridae family to produce image-forms whose recognizable features are not the attributes of a signature style, but of authentic imagination.
Grand’s production has been considered a response to American Minimalism and Process Art. If his ingenuousness rivals Carl Andre’s artlessness, his steel sculptures weigh in with Richard Serra, and his experiments with anti-form compare with Robert Morris, Grand manages sin machismo. The Ceysson gallery is proud to present the manly art of Toni Grand.

www.ftn-books.com has the Venise 1982 catalogue now available.

Hantaï began creating pliage paintings in 1960, conceiving of the process as a marriage between Surrealist automatism and the allover gestures of Abstract Expressionism. The technique dominated the work he made during the rest of his career, re-emerging in diverse forms—sometimes as a network of crisp creases of unpainted canvas spanning the composition, and at other times as a monochrome mass manifesting in the center of an unprimed canvas. His technique of “pliage” (folding): the canvas is first folded in various forms, then painted with a brush, and unfolded, leaving apparent blank sections of the canvas interrupted by vibrant splashes of color. The technique was inspired by the marks left folding on his mother’ apron.

From 1967 to 1968 he worked on the Meuns series where he studies the theme of the figure. Meun is the name of a small village in the Forest of Fontainebleau where the artist lived starting 1966. Hantaï stated: “It was while working on the Studies that I realized what my true subject was – the resurgence of the ground underneath my painting.”^[3] In contrast with the Meun (1967–68), the figure, in the Studies (1969), is absorbed and the white detaches from being the background and becomes dynamic.

www.ftn-books.com. Has three publications on Hantaï available

The poet, painter and graphic artist Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) is regarded a protagonist of French Tachism.
Camille Bryen was born Camille Briand at Nantes in 1907. He is an all-rounder and was not only active as visual artist, but also as writer. In 1932 he published a collection of drawings, collages and poems with the title “Expériences” under the pseudonym Camille Bryen.
As painter Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) followed a path of subjective, expressive abstraction. Together with Georges Mathieu he started the movement “Non-Figuration-psychique” in 1947. A year later Camille Bryen, Georges Mathieu and Michel Tapié organized the first exhibition for this “psychic-abstract” painting called “L’Imaginaire”, “HWPSMTB” as well as “White and Black”.
Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) executed his expressive-abstract works, which are close to Tachism, in various techniques. In 1947 he made abstract watercolors called “Structures Imaginaires”, as of the late 1940s Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) became increasingly occupied with oil painting and graphic techniques.
Camille Bryen (Camille Briand) was quite successful with his strong abstraction as of the 1950s: He had his first grand retrospective at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes as early as in 1959, in 1973 another large exhibition at the Paris Musée National d’Art Moderne followed. International museums are in possession of works by Camille Bryen (Camille Briand), among them the Musée d’Art Moderne et Contemporain (MAMCS) in Strasbourg, the Macedonian Museum of Contemporary Art in Thessaloniki, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.

www.ftn-books.com has now the Christian Fayt Art gallery catalogue from 1985 available

Leonardo Cremonini was born on 26 November 1925 in Bologna, Italy.

He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna and at the end of the war, in 1945, he moved to Milan where he attended Brera Academy and met important figures in the Italian cultural scene. In 1951 he moves to Paris thanks to a bursary, where he installs his main residency. He lived for long periods abroad, in New York, where he exhibited extensively from 1952 to 1960, Florence, Andalusia, Normandy, and the isle of Panarea in Sicily.

His most significant retrospectives have been held worldwide in the museums of Basel, Brussels, Metz, Paris, Prague, Siena, Strasbourg, Spoleto, Tokyo, Aosta, Monte Carlo, Grenoble, Toulon and Milan.

In 1964 he exhibited at the Venice Biennale. In 1967 he got the Marzotto International Prize and in 1979, the Prize from the Italian President of the Republic. From 1983 to 1992 he directed the painting course at the “Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts” in Paris. He was nominated “Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres” in France, member of the Royal Academy of Belgium, member of the San Luca National Academy in Rome and of the “Accademia delle Arti e del Disegno” in Florence.

www.ftn-books.com has two scarce Cremonini titles available.

Under a title that is a nod to German artist Joseph Beuys (“Every human being is an artist”), this exhibition dedicated to Pierre Bismuth (b. 1963, lives and works in Brussels) at Centre Pompidou highlights the singularity of the artist’s practice.

Covering a little more than 20 years of activity, it features a set of works revealing of his method and reflection. What does it mean to be an artist in an age where culture has become part of the leisure industry and where industrial production instantly assimilates every aesthetic issue? How to create artworks in the absence of any specific know-how?

Pierre Bismuth responds by applying the logic of productivism to the artistic field, broadening the skillset as much as possible, whether through his multiple relationships with cinema, or by the creation of strange hybrid industrial materials, the random proliferation of names, the automatic production of geometric abstraction based on national emblems, or quite simply by the creation of a real product from everyday consumption.

The exhibition thus presents about 30 works including a large series of drawings/photograms in which the artist follows the gestures of Marlene Dietrich, Louise Brooks, Catherine Deneuve but also Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan or the famous video installation The Jungle Book Project (2002) in which each Disney character is speaking a different language.

Two new works from 2021 mark this exhibition: Portrait du collectionneur, the Saab automobile that once belonged to the great Belgian collector of conceptual art Herman Daled, in which the upholstery has been entirely redone and now features the names of the artists included in Daled’s collection. The second work, Pierre Bismuth’s Chocolate is a presentation and distribution of chocolate bars whose recipe has been developed by the artist. As the artist says: “if the art public cannot escape its role as cultural consumer, then they might as well eat good chocolate.”

The Bismuth chocolate bar is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Thomas Lange (Berlin, 1957) is a German painter and sculptor. With spirited brush strokes and movements, his paintings are visionary portraits or scenic views on the borderline between abstraction and figuration. This is achieved by constant and complex repainting and layering, meant as the overlapping of different temporal dimensions, from which the human figure emerges and takes on the leading role. His artwork and projects have been exhibited worldwide in prestigious art galleries, museums and foundations, such as the Berlinische Galerie and the Martin Gropius-Bau in Berlin, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum of New York, the Palais de Beaux-Arts in Brussels, the Musée d’Art Contemporain de Nice, the Mocak in Krakow, the Kunsthalle in Budapest, the Haus der Architekten of Düsseldorf, the Resim ve Heykel Müzesi in Istanbul, and the Mori Art Center in Tokyo.

www.ftn-books.com has a few Lange titles available among them the Brauschweig catalog

Born to a family of Polish immigrants in Paris, Maurice Frydman creates his work in a field that he scours tenaciously: the skin. The skin – the first and last bastion of our being – is a reflection of intimacy and experience and connects us to the outside world via touch. Skin is a living testament, down to the smallest wrinkles, creases and folds. The artist has made this the subject of his work, in order to tell us about the individual, love and hate and sensuality, but also fractures, stigmata and scars. He strives to evoke the skin in different forms and through different techniques: sometimes personal memories, sometimes recollections of the dark spirals of the past.

Maurice Frydman’s roots were initially figurative. He depicted maternity and paternity, but also the opposite of this humanity through drawings and washes of intense emotion, illustrating the horrors of the Holocaust. In these, we imagine the human form rather than recognising it in the attitudes of these naked, slaughtered bodies.

A few years later, the discovery of transparent plastic film marked a turning point in Maurice Frydman’s style. While he is inspired by this unconventional, supple, elastic and seemingly banal material, it is because it is malleable, mobile and alive, closely mirroring the plasticity of the skin. In the hands of the artist, when associated with painting, it quickly takes on a meaning and allows for a range of hybrid works that play with texture, with a language that is common to both sculpture and painting. Abstraction and 3D then take centre stage. The relationship with the material is decisive and essential and both visual and tactile; it is almost carnal because Maurice Frydman shapes it with his own hands by stretching and twisting it. He brings the plastic to the point of breaking, with the material in a permanent state of action/reaction, leading to an explosion of folds and tears. Gesture and thought go hand in hand. This is because, behind the handiwork, behind the texture, which graduates the effects of chance and light, beyond the successive layers of paint that coil and create a sense of relief in this material, there is a mirrored surface that is full of meaning. Certain three-dimensional works, which are formed from luminous matrices that are folded and creased, depict imaginary landscapes in bas-relief, shifting between abstraction and figurative work.

The ebb and flow of the docile plastic calls to mind the skin (be it pleasure or pain), onto which vital energy and concealed emotions are grafted. This skin retains the remnants and marks of our experiences and reveals both the dark and light side of our existence. While Maurice Frydman follows in the footsteps of Michelangelo, he suggests exceptional variations on David’s torso. This part of the human anatomy is the most complex and varied when it comes to its movements. In addition to its formal beauty and the research that continues ad infinitum, this work serves as a cry from the abysses of history. Tragedy is present and muffled in the large formats or the huge sheets, which are produced with masterly dimensions.

www,ftn-books.com has the 1978 Veranneman catalogue available