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Kunst op Kamers/ de Rijp

During the manifestation ‘Kunst op Kamers’ in de Rijp, art is shown in private houses. The booklet contains the portrait of the artist involved; however, the page showing a sketch of what the artist is planning to make is closed. The reader has to tear the page open to be able to see it.

Committee

The finishing of this book is stunning: the side margins of the brochure have been left untrimmed, which makes the pages bulge towards the centre. The fine slipcase design refers to the nature of the event: peeking at other people’s interiors. Another fine detail is the accompanying mini-booklet, which contains the tickets for all open houses.

Over the years www.ftn-books.com has collected many of the publications related to this art manifestation. Also the book by Irma Boom which was chosen as one of the best designs books from 2008.

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Karin Trenkel (1966)

This is what Karin Trenkel says on her own site about her work:

I am fascinated by the immense amount of planning and efforts we carry out to design our environment so that it meets the requirements of all who live and work here. This tendency to believe in the potential of forming our own environment is particularly ubiquitous in the Randstad (Amsterdam, Den Haag, Rotterdam and their suburbs); a built up and densely populated area where one can’t help but notice how people have a hand in almost everything one sees. Even nature has become far more a product, designed to have an appearance that can be perceived as natural. Natural, but according to plan!

Where does this do-it-yourself attitude come from? I believe it has taken root in the Dutch; it has become literally and figuratively their second nature, because here in these ‘low lands’ more than 20 per cent of the land has been created through land reclamation. It is a mentality that has become embedded over time to gain more ground, and is apparent everywhere, in everything.

Because I’m an artist rather than an environmental activist, with a penchant for the unexplainable and poetic aspects of our existence, my eye often falls on absurd and surreal phenomena in the infrastructure. An example is how some reclaimed land is given back to ‘nature’ in the form of ‘re-creation’ areas.

These forms of absurdity are encountered in my own landscape creations in subtle and humorous ways. The absurd stems from the interplay between a strict and playful, or serious and naïve approach, and has to do with a driven but easy-going attitude. The materials chosen, as well as their application and use, usually also have absurd overtones. In the installation ‘Landscape with sheep’ for example, this becomes apparent in the depiction of sheep and fleecy clouds: a light and buoyant theme that acquires a heavy counterweight through the immense amount of work required to knot together plastic strips into a 24-square metre textile piece. The plastic used comes from bin liners, which contradicts the naïve-romantic image.

The formal aspects of my work reflect my interest in the bordering area between painting and sculpture. How can I translate an observation of my surroundings into a two as well as three-dimensional image, which makes possible both an optical illusion (intrinsic to the art of painting) and a physical experience (intrinsic to the art of sculpture)? To find a satisfying answer to this question, in recent years I’ve been making large-scale, three-dimensional collages from hand-painted paper, and sometimes from plastic. The presentation space performs the function of a monumental canvas, upon which classical – or clichéd – concepts about landscape/nature are depicted. In addition, the history of landscape painting is an essential point of departure in determining the subject to be depicted and its translation to the ‘canvas’.

I work with the tension between the actual space, the illusionistic quality of what is being portrayed and the physical presence of the materials used. The viewer observes a massive number of scraps of paper or strips of plastic, while the material as a whole depicts a landscape: a kind of three-dimensional impressionism contained within a collage. One’s perception vacillates between close-up and distant, between flat and spatial, and between reality and its abstraction.

For me, installations are like stage sets for, with and in a specific space. The characteristics of the space become points of departure in determining the nature and content of the installation. On location, I assemble the ‘pieces of scenery’ that I’ve constructed in my studio beforehand; if necessary the space is adapted, so that the scenery works with the space to become a new and unique whole. The play and the actors are absent from my installations – when visitors enter the set, they can be considered the actors and as such form an artificial part of the unnatural landscape.

www.ftn-books.com has the HALF DAY CLOSING book now available.

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André Heller (1947)

André Heller was born in Vienna in 1947. He’s among the world’s most influential and successful multi-media artists.

His achievements encompass garden artwork, chambers of wonder, prose publications and processions including a revival of circus and vaudeville, selling millions of records as a chansonnier of his own songs, amazing flying and swimming sculptures, the avant-garde amusement park Luna Luna, films, fire spectacles, and labyrinths as well as stage plays and shows that have entertained audiences from Broadway to the Vienna Burgtheater, from India to China, and from South America to Africa.

André Heller lives in Vienna, Marrakesh, and on the road.

www.ftn-books.com has the book on his Flying Sculptures from 1986 now available.

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Permeke (Continued)

The reason for another blog on Permeke is that i recently encountered the PERMEKE catalog designed by Benno Wissing. An excellent example of the great quality designs the dutch designers from that period managed to maintain. This is a simple but effective museum catalog design and in quality equals the best by Willem Sandberg.

For this and more Wissing designs visit www.ftn-books.com




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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.