The British artist Dan Coombs ( b.1971 ) creates his compositions from studies in collage and paint , which unite his figures with entirely invented surroundings, landscape dream worlds and interior spaces. These are human encounters charged with a mysterious, symbolic power. They are explorations of guilt, beauty and fear of isolation, that draw on myth, religion and psychoanalysis in order to grasp the real within the imaginary.
The paintings have a formality of composition and balance that underpins the energy of their execution but remain deliberately left open to interpretation from the viewer. They are attempting to capture the essence of an emotional situation, to represent ideas or embody meanings. The figures have an uncanny ambiguity – they can be interpreted as emanations of the artist’s psyche, or as creatures in their own right – trapped within dreamlike, gestural landscapes of heightened colour.
Siôn Parkinson is an artist working with sound and performance.
Though trained as a sculptor at Central Saint Martins and The Slade, after being invited to perform at Cafe Oto by his former tutor Phyllida Barlow in 2010, he has since made music the focus of his art. He is due to receive his PhD in composition and sound studies from the University of Leeds for his research on music and malodours, investigating what our perception of ‘stinks’, both real and hallucinated, can tell us about the act of listening.
Animals and other non-humans often feature in Siôn’s music as a pretext to consider our own empathy, disgust, or disregard with the natural world. Recent work is informed by his passion for mushrooms, particularly the stinkhorn, a phallic, foul-smelling fungus that mimics the odour of dung and rotting meat which it uses to attract flies to help disperse its spores. A short animation, Stinkhorn, made with artist Richard Whitby, was commissioned by LUX and BBC Scotland and broadcast on BBC4 in Spring 2020, and a series of musical works followed shortly after.
Klein, whose striking depictions of the restlessness and violence of city life helped revolutionize photography, died “peacefully” on Saturday, the statement said.
Celebrated as one of the 20th century’s most influential artists, Klein also worked in film and fashion.
His death comes on the final day of a retrospective exhibit at New York’s International Center of Photography, which celebrated the multifaceted artist’s six-decade-plus career, including his time as a famed street and fashion photographer, bookmaker, abstract artist, documentary filmmaker and celebrity portraitist.
Klein was not unknown to many dutch. In 1967 Klein was presented with an exhibition at the Stedelijk and in the same year he made part of the photography for the Niki de Saint Phalle catalog. Both are available at www.ftn-books.com
After completing his primary studies he began attending the Kunstgewerbeschule in Bern and acquired his teaching certificate. For the next two years, he was active as a secondary teacher in Langnau, Kriegstetten and Wichtrach. In 1910, he found a studio in Paris and attracted the attention of Félix Vallotton, who suggested that he study figurative drawing.
After a short stay in Munich, he returned to Paris in the winter of 1912/1913 and worked at La Ruche, an artists’ residence. There, he made friends with Fritz Baumann and spent several weeks painting with him in the Jura Mountains. The outbreak of World War I made it impossible to remain in France, so he divided his time between Solothurn and his mandatory military service. During these years, he switched from Art Nouveau to Cubism and Futurism.
In 1919, he became a teacher at the Zürich University of the Arts and remained there until 1953. He married Hermana Sjövall in 1923. They spent much of the 1920s travelling throughout Europe and spent their summers in southern France.
After his retirement, he painted very little. In 1971 he was awarded the Kunstpreis of Canton Solothurn.
Mario Prassinos (1916–1985) was a French modernist painter, printmaker, illustrator, stage designer, and writer of Greek-Italian descent.
Prassinos was born in Constantinople, Ottoman Empire (now Turkey) in 1916, the son of Victorine and Lysandre Prassinos. In 1922, at the age of six, he immigrated to France with his family, who had escaped the brutal persecution of Greeks and other ethnic minorities by the Ottoman government. Prassinos became a naturalized French citizen in 1949.
He attended the Sorbonne in Paris beginning in 1932 and briefly trained in the studio of the French painter Clement Serveau (1886–1972).
Through his father’s literary interests Prassinos became acquainted with Surrealism, meeting Paul Eluard, André Breton, Salvador Dalí, Man Ray. Max Ernst, Marcel Duchamp and others in 1934, and decided to become an artist. From 1932 to 1936 he worked in a Surrealist style, introducing procedures of automatism and formal ambiguities that he retained in his later work.
His first exhibition took place in 1938 at the Galerie Billiet-Pierre Vorms in Paris. That same year he married Yolande Borelly. His daughter Catherine Prassinos was born in 1946.
Prassinos volunteered for military service in 1940, was seriously wounded and later received the Croix de Guerre (Cross of War). He also worked with the French Resistance during World War II, helping Allied soldiers escape Nazi-occupied France.
During the period 1942 to 1950 he met Raymond Queneau and Albert Camus and produced work for Editions Gallimard.
Prassinos’ work is found in major art museums in Europe and North America, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris; Kunsthalle Bremen, Germany; Victoria and Albert Museum, London; Museum of Modern Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago, and others.
Prassinos died at his home in Eygalières, France on 23 October 1985. After his death, a donation of 800 of the artist’s works was made to the French state. The “Donation Mario Prassinos” collection is housed in the Chapel of Notre-Dame de Pitié (also called Notre-Dame des Sept Douleurs) in Saint Remy de Provence, France.
Vivan Sundaram (born 1943 in Shimla) lives in Delhi. He studied painting at the Faculty of Fine Arts, MS University of Baroda (1961-65) and at Slade School of Art, London (1966-69), where he also studied History of Cinema. Active in the students’ movement of May 1968, he helped set up a commune in London and lived in it till 1970. On his return to India in 1971, he worked with artists’ and students’ groups to organize events and protests, especially during the years of the national Emergency. In the 1980s, Sundaram did three large shows of narrative painting and participated in the seminal group exhibition, ‘Place for People’ (1981). Since 1990 he has made installations that include sculpture, photographs and video. The installation Memorial (1993-2014) referred to the communal violence in Bombay. A monumental site-specific installation at the Victoria Memorial, Calcutta, now referred to as History Project (1998), was accompanied by the documentary Structures of Memory. Continuing work on the family of Amrita Sher-Gil (based on photographs taken by Umrao Singh Sher-Gil) include the installation The Sher-Gil Archive (1995) and a set of digital photomontages, Re-take of ‘Amrita’ (1991 -92). A series of exhibitions using found objects include Trash (2008), an installed urbanscape of garbage, digital photomontages, and the videos Tracking (2004), Brief Ascension of Marian Hussain (2005) and Turning (2008). Discarded and found materials were used to makes garments, and the work crossed over into fashion and performance in Gagawaka (2011) and Postmortem (2013). In 2012, Black Gold, an installation of potsherds from the excavation site of Pattanam in Kerala, was made into a three-channel video. These potsherds formed the basis of terraOptics (2016), digital photographs.
A collaborative project on the artist Ramkinkar Baij, 409 Ramkinkars (2015), involved theatre directors including Anuradha Kapur, and developed into a multipart installation and performance. In 2017, a collaboration with cultural theorist Ashish Rajyadhyaksha and sound artist David Chapman resulted in a public art project on the Royal Indian Navy uprising which was joined by Bombay’s working class, titled Meanings of Failed Action: Insurrection 1946.
Sundaram has had solo shows in many cities of India, as well as London, Paris, Toronto, Montreal, Vancouver, Amsterdam, Budapest, Copenhagen, New York, Chicago, Dallas, and at the Fowler Museum, Los Angeles (2015). He has exhibited in the Biennales of Havana, Johannesburg, Kwangju, Taipei, Sharjah, Shanghai, Sydney, Berlin, and in the Asia-Pacific Triennial, Brisbane. He has also exhibited in curated shows at Tate Modern, London (2001); Museum Boijmans van Beuningen, Rotterdam (2001); Haus der Kulturen Welt, Berlin (2003); Queens Museum (2005) and International Centre for Photography (2008), New York; Haus der Kunst, Munich (2006); Museum of Modern Art Ludwig Foundation, Vienna (2006); ZKM, Karlsruhe (2007); Chicago Cultural Centre, Chicago (2007); Mori Museum, Tokyo (2008); HangarBicocca, Milan (2007); Fondazione Fotografia, Modena (2012); Centre Pompidou, Paris (2011); Arken Museum of Modern Art, Copenhagen (2012-13).
Time for another blog on Keesde Goede. The reason…..The excellent catalogue that was published by galerie ONRUST in 1991 on de Goede his recent works. Text by Rudi H. Fuchs and what makes this even more special is the print on outside and inside flaps. Silkscreened prints ( ca. 7 cm each ), which makes this a very special publication. galerie Onrust is one of the greatest of all galleries in the Netherlands from last century and this catalogue proves it. The catalogue is available at www.ftn-books.com
Richard Peter Schmid is an artist who repeatedly seeks dialogue with his older works in order to be able to have a fresh look at them from the perspective of his latest paintings and discover in them the seeds of what is to come.
His work is not a slave to innovation, but it is aware of what it owes to older painting, his own as well as works by other artists. ‘To reach a sensibility, which is comparable to that of Monet’s, Renoir’s, or Cézanne’s picture sequences’, is no small-scale intention. It is about nothing less than the possibilities painting affords today.
The concern is for painting which is entirely conscious of the fact that it is denied all possibilities for merely repeating historical painting and which nevertheless does not see its salvation in mere technical or even technological expansions of the painterly process. But, to avoid any misunderstanding: Painting may only be anyway preserved if you carry on with it, against all inner and exterior obstacles. http://www.ftn-books.com has the Linzer publication form 2002 available.
Jan Grosfeld (Valkenswaard, 1956 – Amsterdam, 2019) was a very well respected Dutch artist who’s works have found their way to the Museum Boijmans van Beuningen and many other institutional collections.
This is practically all I could find on this artist. I did not know him personally, but I knew his works since I visited gallery Nouvelles Images and the museum Boymans van Beuningen frequently and both had large collections of this artist. What I remember is that his prices could be described as “affordable” but his art was priceless. Always his compositions were based on contrast, black and deep browns against white and creme backgrounds.
This made his works stand out and made that I still remember his works. Becaue of his lesser popularity there are not many publications to be found , but there is one I can recommend. It is the Nouvelles Images published :Jan Grosfeld, Me-LKCHO_COLA_DEREEP, which is now available at www.ftn-books.com
Hans van der Ham studied classical piano at the Royal Conservatory in The Hague and the Utrecht Conservatory (graduated 1984). He then studied autonomous art at the Academy of Fine Arts in Rotterdam where he graduated with paintings, drawings and graphics (graduated 1989). However, Van der Ham was mainly active for more than 30 years as a sculptor and became known for his black clay sculptures. Vulnerable souls, wrapped in rock hard material. But his indefinable worlds on paper, made of gouache or black ink, also characterize his oeuvre. Until 2020, the need arose to return to his old metier and to make a new start from the spatial work with paintings in various formats.
Van der Ham has been working as an independent visual artist in Rotterdam since 1989 and regularly has exhibitions at home and abroad. His work was represented by Galerie Nouvelles Images in The Hague until its closure in 2018. His work is included in various museum and corporate collections.
In 2012, Van der Ham cofounded Garage Rotterdam, together with a Rotterdam patron, where he was responsible until 2015 as curator and artistic director. Van der Ham makes exhibitions on a regular basis, including for Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen: as a guest curator in 2018 he produced the exhibition ANIMA MUNDI.
Artist/ Author: Oliver Boberg
Title : Memorial
Publisher: Oliver Boberg
Measurements: Frame measures 51 x 42 cm. original C print is 35 x 25 cm.
Condition: mint
signed by Oliver Boberg in pen and numbered 14/20 from an edition of 20
