FTN-blog

Robert Giron was born in Ixelles in 1897. He attended l’Académie de Bruxelles from 1919 until 1920, where his fellow schoolmates included Delvaux, Magritte, Flouquet, Cocq, and Singer. Giron also attended l’Académie Libre Labor. He was a friend of Jean Milo. In 1925 Giro exhibited with his former schoolmate, the Belgian Surrealist Paul Delvaux. In 1932 Giron became the director of exhibitions of painters at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles.

Giron is known for his expressionistic compositions of cafés, cabarets, and theatres.

Typical of the Belgian modernists, he used cubist elements combined with a technique that exaggerates the features of his subjects.

In 1967, Giron died abruptly in Sao Paul, Brasil. He was in Brasil because he was participating in the ninth annual Biennale de Sao Paulo. The following year after his death he was honored by Le Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles with an exhibition of modern artist and contemporaries that he had appreciated and encouraged.

There is an award named after Robert Groin that is presented to outstanding artists that exhibit at the Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles.

Giron died in 1967 in Sao Paulo, Brazil.

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

Salla Tykkä (b. 1973) is a multi-faceted artist who works with film, video, and photography. Through her creations, she delves into poignant social and political issues, exploring themes of power, domination, and the manipulation of images. Despite the depth of her subject matter, Tykkä’s art always maintains a subtle and intimate connection with her own personal experiences.

A 2003 graduate of the Academy of Fine Arts, Tykkä has earned widespread recognition for her work. Her participation in the prestigious Venetian Biennale in 2001 served as a launchpad for her career, paving the way for several solo exhibitions in her home country of Finland and beyond. Notably, her works have been featured at the Wäinö Aaltonen Museum in Turku (2019), the Ludwig Museum in Budapest (2018), M – Museum in Leuven (2016), Galerie Anhava in Helsinki (2015), and Turku Art Museum (2015), just to name a few. She has also been a part of numerous group exhibitions, including showcases at Göteborgs Konsthall in Gothenburg (2015), MAXXI in Rome (2014), The Metropolitan Arts Center in Belfast (2013), and many more.

Tykkä’s films have received critical acclaim and continue to be widely screened at festivals worldwide. With a rich and varied body of work, Tykkä’s art is a testament to her talent and her ability to elicit enigmatic complexity and linguistic dynamism in her creations. Through her unconventional use of language and storytelling techniques, she invites viewers to explore and reframe their perceptions of the world and the prevailing power dynamics within it.

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

Leo Wesel was born in 1955 in Roosendaal, The Netherlands. However, his artistic journey led him to spend two decades living and creating in Ventimiglia, Italy, before eventually settling in Nice, France. His passion for the arts was ignited during his studies at the Arts Academy of the Hague, where he was trained and inspired by two esteemed expressionist professors, Wil Bouthoorn and Wim Schutz. Over the years, Wesel’s works have been influenced and stimulated by various artists including French painter Serge Helenon, French-Italian artist Bernhard Damiano, and more recently, Hungarian constructivists Tamas Konok and Estvan Nadler. He continues to create his distinct style of lithography in Vac, Hungary, drawing from a fusion of these diverse influences. In his sculptural pieces, Wesel sources materials from diverse sources such as slate, ceramics, wood, and iron, often transforming them into bronze or aluminum. His works have been showcased in multiple European and American galleries and museums, and his art can be found in both private and museum collections in France, Holland, and Hungary.

www.ftn-books.com carries one title on Wesel in its inventory

Tomoko Takahashi, a Japanese artist, was born in Tokyo in 1966 and has been based in London since the early 1990s. Her education includes studies at Tama Art University, Goldsmiths College, and the Slade School of Fine Art.

Takahashi’s primary medium is installation art, often utilizing found objects, and is primarily site-specific. While she originally studied painting at Tama Art University, her interest in working with found objects was sparked during her time at Goldsmiths in 1994.

She gained recognition after winning the EAST award at EASTinternational in 1997 and has since exhibited her works globally. Some notable exhibitions include Beaconsfield, London (1998), the Saatchi Gallery’s 1999 New Neurotic Realism exhibition, UCLA’s Hammer Gallery (2002-03), the Serpentine Galleries in London, the De La Warr Pavilion (2010), and her works have been collected by the Tate.

In 2000, she was a finalist for the Turner Prize, alongside Glenn Brown, Michael Raedecker, and eventual winner Wolfgang Tillmans.

Takahashi’s preferred approach for her artistic process, specifically for installation pieces, involves immersing herself in the space where the art will be displayed. She gathers scraps and debris from the surroundings, which she often incorporates into the final product. Though these scenes often evoke a sense of chaos, Takahashi’s meticulous attention to detail is a defining aspect of her work. Her first installation of this style, “Company Deal” (1997), utilized discarded materials from an office space to spill over its walls and furniture. The piece was commissioned by an advertising agency in Battersea for their office space.

www.ftn-books.com has several titles on Takahashi now available.

During the war years, Berend Hendrik (1918 – 1997) was trained as a monumental artist at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam. This department focused on the integration of art in buildings during that period. The commissioned works often had a narrative character and were designed and executed under Hendrik’s supervision. In the post-war period, Hendriks executed dozens of monumental works in the Netherlands, using techniques such as stained glass and mosaics, as well as his signature glass in concrete technique. Twenty years later, Hendriks’s style evolved towards a more abstract form. He no longer designed recognizable religious figures, but instead focused on the pure relations between form and color. Through both his monumental works and series of autonomous pieces, he explored the interplay of color patterns, geometric shapes, rhythms, and movements, referring to a new, universal language of art. This gave birth to series of works, executed in acrylic paint on panels, as well as intricate drawings that were interconnected and sometimes followed one another in a sequential narrative, reminiscent of a graphic novel. From 1966 to 1984, Hendriks taught color and form theory at the Arnhem Academy. He was also a devoted music lover and connoisseur, commenting on art and greatly influencing the art scene in Arnhem. The Rijnstate exhibition showcases a selection of Hendriks’s works from the period of 1975 to 1995.

www.ftn-books.com has several Hendriks titles now available.

Renowned as Captain Beefheart, Don Van Vliet was an American musician, sculptor, and painter. Hailing from Glendale, CA, he was considered a prodigy in sculpture by his instructors, yet his parents discouraged him from pursuing art. In his youth, he met Frank Zappa, a gifted peer who nurtured his musical abilities. As the leader of the band Captain Beefheart, Van Vliet released a string of albums, most notably the groundbreaking Trout Mask Replica (1969). However, his passion for visual art led him to eventually leave music in the late 70s and focus on creating bold paintings that have been likened to Expressionism, Primitivism, and outsider art. His career was launched when Julian Schnabel acquired one of his pieces, and Mary Boone hosted his debut solo exhibition at her renowned New York gallery. Van Vliet’s works have been favorably compared to those of influential artists such as Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, and Jackson Pollock. Notable solo exhibitions at prestigious galleries, including Anton Kern and Michael Werner in New York, have solidified his place in the art world. Sadly, Van Vliet passed away on December 17, 2010 in Arcata, CA, as a result of complications from multiple sclerosis.

www.ftn-books.com has some rare van Vliet items available.

Carla Klein portrays spaces and areas without humans. In her often large oil paintings, she explores and distorts our perception of reality. In Close Distance, KM21 presents new and recent work by Carla Klein in her first solo exhibition in a Dutch museum.

As a starting point for her canvases, Carla Klein uses photos she takes during her travels. While she previously based her work on unique analog photos, her new paintings depart from easily reproducible prints. It is not the image itself, but the actual print that forms the basis of the final work. Stains, fading ink, or unsuitable print paper – all of these technical traces are incorporated by Klein in her manual translation to paint. Thus, the mechanical and the human come together in each painting.

Klein always searches for a certain emptiness, an anonymous and timeless space that cannot be specifically traced. She is drawn to the abstraction of a landscape. From vague in-between spaces like airports and empty highways to desolate desert areas. She is intrigued by the way a place can seem both flat and deep at the same time. When everyday life came to a standstill in recent years, Klein also turned her attention to the quiet environment around her home and studio. This blurs the line between the outside and inside world.

From reality to photo to painting: the layered landscapes are not immediately comprehensible. Yet they manage to completely envelop the viewer. Balancing between the tangibility of paint and the illusion of the image, Carla Klein plays with representing reality.

www.ftn-books.com has several publications on Carla Klein

Paul Sochacki’s paintings defy categorization, leaving one in a state of uncertainty. His insistence on adhering to traditional mediums is juxtaposed with a delicate delivery that feels almost sardonic in its portrayal of the tired battle cry that painting is “not dead.” This sentiment, of course, goes without saying and is a cliché that Sochacki seems to take great pleasure in. Similarly, his blending of mundane visual humor – complete with psychoanalytical cues – with a novice-like eagerness to please, and then subsequently reject, hints at his ultimate goal of rendering himself impenetrable and impervious to criticism.

In his debut exhibition at Galerie Dorothea Schlueter, aptly titled “Le Monde diplomatique,” Sochacki not only displayed his own paintings but also invited fellow artist Elke Marhöfer to screen her films in conjunction with them – further highlighting their playful irreverence. Sochacki’s approach forces the viewer to relinquish control and surrender to his whims.

This is evident in his small painting “Das Gespenst der Freiheit” (The Ghost of Freedom, 2010). A diminutive ghost, glowing and bashfully hovering in a sea of monochrome darkness, grasps a palette of primary colors in its left hand and a red-dipped brush in its right, tracing a clumsy line where its neck should be. The clever paradox of this pictorial suicide by a disembodied canvas-white entity is presented in a style that seems tailor-made for a refined nursery in an upper-class household. While the work may appear to mock painting and its self-imposed demise, any trace of ambitiousness is cleverly thwarted by Sochacki’s elusive humor.