Tag: art books

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Renie Spoelstra (1974)

The intention of the huge charcoal drawings of Renie Spoelstra is to let the viewer experience an atmosphere of deliberate apathy; hours and days go by in a split second, every moment frozen in time and every moment equal to the other. Consequently, characteristics of actual observations are diminished, making the unique more common and indefinite, so that they can function as a substitute for many similar places.

Renie Spoelstra’s arduous process of drawing always begins with a journey. For close to a decade, she has travelled to coasts, lakes and forests throughout North America and Europe, looking for landscapes that evoke overwhelming existential feelings.

Spoelstra uses film footage as a starting point for her charcoal drawings. The suede like and velvety texture is achieved by the many layers of charcoal, which are skillfully positioned on top of each other to re-create an almost cinematographic scene. The balance between darkness and soft beams of light is rendered through the many shades of black and grey, creating a notion that something may be lurking below the surface.

Themes of intensity, secrecy and mystery are reoccurring in Spoelstra’s works. There is an alluring and mythical feel of a place. The series ‘Stretching Universe’ refers to the scientific fact that our universe is expanding, while here on earth it feels as though it is shrinking with the rise of xenophobia, narrow-mindedness and the continuous threats of climate change. Fleeing, or escaping to nature is not as easy as it may seem.

Renie Spoelstra studied at St. Joost, Breda and at the Academie Minerva, Groningen. She has exhibited in the Netherlands and abroad, notably at institutions like the Louvre-Lens, Albertina, Vienna, Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam, the Kunsthal Rotterdam, Museum Belvedere Heerenveen, Rijksmuseum Twenthe and Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. Her work is included in renowned collections such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris, MACBA Barcelona, Collection Frac Picardie Amiens, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam, Centraal Museum Utrecht, Cobra Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Amstelveen, Museum Voorlinden, Wassenaar, the Guerlain Foundation, Paris, De Nederlandsche Bank, Bouwfonds Collection, The National Collection of the Netherlands, Teylers Museum Haarlem, The Louis Dreyfus Family Collection NY, De Ru Collectie and many other (private) collections worldwide.

www.ftn-books.com has now the DARKNESS IS A PLACE publication available.

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Albert in ‘t Veld (1942)

Albert in t veld dutch artistAlbert in ‘t Veld is a Dutch artist known for his striking and complex abstract works. Born in 1942, in the Netherlands, in ‘t Veld studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam before transitioning into painting and drawing.

In the 1960s, in ‘t Veld was influenced by the American abstract expressionists, including Jackson Pollock and Morris Louis. He was particularly drawn to the process of pouring paint and working with colors in an unpredictable, fluid way. This interest in abstraction and the spontaneity of the creative process would become a hallmark of his work.

Throughout his career, in ‘t Veld experimented with different materials and techniques, including acrylic paint, ink, and crayon. He also explored different styles, from minimalism to more colorful, expressive works. His compositions are often characterized by bold colors, dynamic lines, and layered textures. His works are fascinating and intricate, and seem to invite the viewer to look closer to uncover the many layers of meaning and symbolism.

One of his most notable works is a large-scale mural commissioned for the Erasmus University in Rotterdam. The massive painting measures over 225 square meters and is composed of 260 individual panels, each one painted by hand. It depicts an abstract landscape that incorporates elements of nature, such as mountains and waterfalls, alongside more geometric shapes and patterns. The mural took in ‘t Veld over a year to complete and is considered one of his greatest achievements.

Throughout his career, in ‘t Veld has received numerous awards and accolades for his work. His paintings and drawings have been featured in exhibitions in galleries and museums around the world, including the Netherlands, France, Italy, and the United States.

In conclusion, Albert in ‘t Veld is a talented, pioneering abstract artist whose work continues to inspire and captivate viewers today. His commitment to exploring the creative process and pushing the boundaries of traditional art forms has helped to cement his place as one of the most iconic Dutch artists of the 20th century.

http://www.ftn-books.com has an impressive leporello publication with steel coverts now available.

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Han Klinkhamer (1950)

The paintings by Han Klinkhamer show landscape in two respects. First, the view of the land opens up, with the painting serving as a window that opens up the view of a horizon, a sky and contours of trees, shrubs or flowers.
At the same time, each painting has a very independent rough structure, the artist has put a lot of work into the texture – it often looks like the magnification of a surface or a cutout from nature. These two perspectives – far away and close – are combined without the focus being affected. Or, in other words, Klinkhamer’s works combine a spiritual image with a material, physical view of real landscapes.
The artist lives in a village directly behind a dike on the Meuse. He only has to climb this dike if he wants to see water, meadows or the moving sky. Nevertheless, one does not feel as if his paintings depict this outer world. Although his works deal with nature, his daily encounter with the elements undoubtedly serves as a framework for him. But the true landscape is created in the studio – “true” here means the landscape created with color, conjured up. Sometimes one gets the impression that plant stems or grains of sand are added to the colour. But the illusion arises from the thickness of the paint layer and scratching with a sharp tool, everything is painted.
Klinkhamer’s works are about the transformation of nature into paintings – and about making this transformation look authentic and credible. As far as the colour spectrum is concerned, Klinkhamer is limited. One almost gets the impression that he is hiding the colors in the motifs. Is this perhaps due to the limited colour diversity of the Dutch river landscape, where Klinkhamer is at home? Hardly. The colours are determined in the studio, in the painter’s head, in the image he wants to create, by the inner truth of the respective image. There is always a primer, often in black or white, and the potential for color, which, however, is reluctant to appear – as if the viewer witnessed the moment of the first rays of sunshine when things take on color. Then we can indeed see a hint of green in the black, and a hint of pink in white.
Do these images radiate a love of nature? Maybe, yes. On the other hand, however, there is also effort and struggle, a pulling and pulling. “With every picture,” says the artist, “you have to start from scratch as if it were the very first image.” Klinkhamer’s paintings thus address not only the outside world, but also the inner landscapes, moods and convictions – without words, and yet as an essential part of the paintings.

www.ftn-books.com has several books on Klinkhamer now available.


 

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Sylvie Fanchon (1953)

Sylvie Fanchon

Sylvie Fanchon is a landmark in French painting. She was born in Nairobi in 1953. She has been living and working in Paris since the early 1980’s, after she graduated from the Ecole Nationale des Beaux-Arts de Paris, where she was then head of a workshop from 2001 to 2019.

For 30 years, her painting has remained faithful to radical means and intentions, in accordance with a series of previously fixed rules: two-tone color scheme, flatness of the surface, absence of depth and extremely schematic forms. The touch, the gesture, the transparency, after having been eliminated in favor of quasi-abstract forms drawn from the world around us, become today close to the parody, the grotesque. Decontextualized, these familiar forms are difficult to identify: Sylvie Fanchon thus plays between the unknown and the recognized, between oblivion and the work of recollection, leaving room for a multiplicity of interpretations.

With around 50 artworks in public collections, Sylvie Fanchon’s work is present in more than 15 major French institutions including CNAP, MAC VAL, Pompidou Center, MAM Paris … and eight regional contemporary art funds. Sylvie Fanchon has also benefited from important monographic exhibitions at the CRAC in Sète (2015), the FRAC Franche-Comté (2018), the Espace de l’Art Concret (2019).

www.ftn-books.com has two important Fancon publications available.
 

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Ettore Spalletti

Ettore Spalletti

Ettore Spalletti (1940-2019) was born in Cappelle sul Tavo (Pescara) where he spent his whole life. He began his career when Arte Povera was revolutionizing visual culture in Italy and beyond. Spalletti developed a singular, solitary voice and a resultant body of work that exceeds any movement that circumscribes an artist to regional or ideological boundaries. Spalletti’s formal vocabulary has always melded and balanced painting and sculpture, form and color, interior and exterior space. Each work is the result of a meditative but rigorous process of applying a layer of color at the same time of each day, to capture a specific tone that recalls an hour, a season, and the weather. 

Spalletti has been the subject of major international exhibitions over the last 40 years, most recently at the Galleria Nazionale d’arte moderna e contemporanea, Rome, Italy (2021);

www.ftn-books.com has currently 1 title on Spalletti available

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Guy Rombouts (1949)

Guy Rombouts

Since the early 1980s, Rombouts has blurred the existing boundaries between words and objects. The idea of having objects speak for themselves, acts as a drive and utopic horizon behind his artistic practice. The result is a body of work that is idiosyncratic, poetic as well as conceptual. The artist’s very own bounded set of ideas has become a kind of art-producing machine: his ‘concepts’ make his works come about more or less automatically. The result is never egotistic, but invariably particular and tactile.Rombouts’ work — he is the son of a
printer and trained to be a typographer — is rooted in a fascination with the shapes and the stuff language is made of. In the early ‘80s, when he made what could be viewed as his ‘primal’ work, he collected objects whose names consisted of three letters, and exhibited them in alphabetical order. Rombouts is probably best known for his Azart alphabet, which he developed in 1984 with his partner Monica Droste (1958-1998). The line-based alphabet allows words to take on an endless array of two/three-dimensional shapes.

Ever since it was first designed, it has served as a deliberately coincidental procedure for creating objects, sculptures, paintings etc.

Inspired by Azart, Rombouts has recently created new, graphic ways of translating words into images. Using the website www.azart.be, everyone can generate images in Azart.Guy Rombouts, (1949-, Geel, Belgium) seems to make a comment on how the flatness of letters and words can create a reality and make that reality non- existing without the words, in line with what the “linguistic relativity principle” suggests. Rombouts does this by inventing a new alphabet; the Azart, a name that refers to A-Z art, but also to the French word “hasard” meaning coincidence. In Azart each letter is translated by a corresponding line, on the basis of the first letter of the word which describes the line. A is angular, B is barred, C is curve, D is deviation and Z is a zigzag line. When the lines are linked together closed forms or word-images appear. What is going on quite literally on the paper when forming Azart words, goes on in our mind when forming realities of alphabetic words. The arbitrary letters of the alphabet also obtain meaning in our mind. Words written in Azart visually define them selves, forming isles of meanings, while words of the alphabet is defined by means of other words. These words, however, are formed by the same letters as the word they define. A circle of definitions are formed, referring again literally to the Azart circled words.

www.ftn-books.com has a few Rombouts titles available.

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Peer Veneman (1952)

a classic photo of Peer Veneman

It must have been written in the stars since many dutch artist swho became household names in the 80’s and 90’s were born and raised in the city of Eindhoven. There are of course Henk Visch and Piet Dirkx to whome i have devoted multiple blogs and now you can add Peer Veneman to that list. Also born and raised in Eindhoven, but this time with a different career. Where Dirkx and Visch stayed initially in Eindhoven, Veneman moved to Amsterdam and soon became part of the LIVING ROOM art scene. Here he had his first successful exhibitions and later his name would become more familiar and his works more successful resulting in exhibitions at galerie Onrust and at galerie Hafemann.

He became known in the 1980’s with colorful sculptures that somehow filled the space between abstraction and figuration. Ever since he took the liberty to make abstract and figurative works at the same time, denying the traditional gap between the two. One constant factor evident throughout all his work is his apparent refusal, even within a single piece of sculpture, to do the same thing twice. He aims to give new meaning to sculpture (form), painting (the surface) and architecture (spatial construction). Not only are the formal aspects of visual art questioned by Veneman in his work, but his connotative intentions also undergo that process as well.

www.ftn-books.com has some nice Living Room and Veneman publications available.

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Giulio Paolini and Rudi Fuchs

The catalogue i write about is the Giulio Paolini  catalogue made for the Musee des Beaux Arts Nantes from 1987. This is not such a well know catalogue but because of its provenance i chose this one. Paolini is a well known “Arte Povera”artist and  this fame has brought him all over the world with his art. One of his admirers is Rudi Fuchs who organized exhibitions with Paolini in the van Abbemuseum and the Stedelijk Museum and because of this, he always received complimentary copies whenever there was another exhibition with Paolini. One of these catalogues i have for sale is signed by Rudi Fuchs, meaning that this must have belonged to his personal library. It is a rather obscure publication, but very nicely published with an impressive cover with the name of Giulio Paolini underneath an arch. Exhibition was organized by Henry-Claude Cousseau, but the importance of this catalogue and proof of its quality is that is was within the library of Rudi Fuchs. Signature in blue ink on the first inner page.

catalogue available at www.ftn-books.com

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wilfried