Tag: art

 Harald Vlugt is a well known Dutch sculptor, and collagist who works and lives in Amsterdam where he has an impressive studio in a former distillery downtown. Immediately upon graduation from De Witte Lelie Amsterdam he got involved in alternative gallery Aorta in Amsterdam. He collaborated for several years with Aldert Mantje. As a duo they joined the prestigious gallery The Livingroom. From the eighties onward he also worked in New York where he exhibited at gallery Germans van Eck on West Broadway. Later he joined gallery Nikki Diana Marquardt in Paris. After his participation in the Biennale of Venice in 1989, Vlugt quickly gained an international reputation.

He won many prizes and exhibited in well known museums and galleries all over the world. From 1996 to 2002 he worked with Rob Scholte on the Huis ten Bosch City project in Japan.Vlugt’s work is part of the collections of Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Rijksmuseum Amsterdam, Museum Boymans van Beuningen, Stedelijk Museum Schiedam and the Kröller-Müller Museum. Many large institutional collections have acquired works by Vlugt.

Besidese some interesting publications on the artist. www.ftn-books.com recently acquired the beautiful “WHERE ANGELS DARE”

Why a blog oon a swimwear and lingerie designer. One simple reason. Beside the designs she made herself, she had a lucky hand in choosing the right people for her catalogues. Gert Dumbar designed her catalogues and she commissioned Erwin Olaf and Inez van Lamsweerde for her fashion photographs. The result a highly appealing catalog which is now available at www.ftn-books.com

I would not have heard of Emilio Kruithof if it was not Piet Dirkx who wrote the first few pages in Kruithof his first catalog/ Audition.

Emilio Kruithof graduated from the Sint Joost Academy of Fine Arts in Breda in 1995, and went on almost immediately to mount a number of exhibitions. Emilio’s fascinating portraits of women are highly regarded both in his native country and abroad, and were even featured in the US soap Gossip Girl.

He explained in an interview: “I go for what touches my heart. I find women beautiful: women are my subject. I used to collect illustrations of women from LP covers, internet and magazines. My female friends read Vogue and Cosmopolitan, and whenever I can I browse through their magazines. The colours of creams, make-up, lingerie… these are the colours of my palette.

The skin of models looks so magical. The skin must be unblemished, smooth to the touch. Silence of the Lambs? Ah, my favourite B-film. But I’m a painter, you understand. For me, the skin is everything. I can’t go for long walks along the beach, I have to paint. And when I do, I can’t have women around me. They are loved ones, my objects. They don’t mean any more to me than the form on which I project my love. Yes, they’re objects, like a vase for Morandi or celebrities for Warhol.

I paint for the same reason as women apply makeup. They do it every day with infinite care. I paint every day with the same care: erotic minimalism. The form, the appearance, the attitude, the tone, impasto, transparencies and the brush stroke. The final touch is what it’s all about. Once I’ve put my model on canvas, I’ve done everything I can. She has the right posture, the appropriate framing, a depth and structure. Finally comes my last, intimate ‘touch’, the brush stroke that justifies her slip or renders her lips monumental.”

When Dutch actress Halina Reijn was awarded the prestigious Theo d’Or in 2013, she commissioned Kruithof to paint the portrait of her that now hangs permanently in Amsterdam’s Stadsschouwburg theatre.

Chanel is arguably the most iconic fashion label of all time and the classic fashion of Coco Chanel and the great designers that worked for this fashion house resulted not only in some of the ultimate fashion of all time, but also in some of the greatest in house publications by a fashion label . The period of the late Eighties and early Nineties resulted in catalogues photographed by the very best of Fashion photographers and worn by the greatest of all famous models. Specially the photographs by Karl Lager field of his muse Claudia Schiffer belong to the very best of fashion photographs ever. www.ftn-books.com has bought a small collection of Chanel publications and can offer there’s now on its site.

Last Friday the exhibition MAARTEN PLOEG opened at the Kunstmuseum in Den Haag with impressive personal speeches by Ryu Tajiri and Rogier van der Ploeg. After the speeches it was time to visit the exhibition. Far too busy to have a good look at all these timeless works, but the day after I returned to make some photographs for my personal archives. Part of these I share now with you with just one reason……to encourage you to visit this exhibition. HET PAROOL reviewed the exhibition and concluded that beside the art of Marlene Dumas, Rob Scholte and Rene Daniels other great art was made by Maarten Ploeg….. a well-deserved retrospective.

www.ftn-books.com has some nice Ploeg books available.

There is a reason to write another blog on Michel Seuphor. Not only because his growing importance for Modern Art as we know it nowadays, but also because I just added a signed limited edition to my inventory. The book was published. by Galerie Het Mondriaanhuis in 19889 in an edition of 150 copies only . Numbered and signed by Seuphor. The book is published on the occasion of his 88th birthday and is dedicated to the 64 Hexagramms of the Yi-King. A highly collectible item and a rare occasion to add this to your collection.

Jiro Sugawara was largely inspired by the 1960s. Artistically, the decade began with the twin movements of Pop and Minimalism emerging alongside each other. On one hand, Pop espoused the visual culture of the mainstream and mass media, and of products and consumerism. The work of art by artists like Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Tom Wesselmann and Claes Oldenberg was inspired by the popular culture of the fast developing Capitalism of the United States, taking things like advertising, comic books and ideas surrounding celebrity culture as their main visual inspiration. A parallel movement was established on the West Coast in California – a strain that also related to language in art, and is viewed as the very first blossoming of conceptual art. The 1960s were a sensational decade internationally, witnessing a great increase of modernist philosophies and trends. It was the era of Kennedy and Kruschev, and the start of the Cold War, which would endure for most of the second half of the twentieth century, and was epitomised most symbolically by the construction of the Berlin Wall in 1961. The Iron Curtain divided Eastern and Western Europe, both ideologically and literally, and student political uprisings took place across the globe. Psychedelia, an massive increase in consumerism, and the associated trends of marketing and advertising further defined the era. Minimalism developed a formal language with no external references, predicated solely on line, colour and geometric form as key elements of both painting and sculpture.

The main figures of Minimalism included Frank Stella, Donald Judd and Agnes Martin. Colour Field painting, as practiced by Morris Louis, Kenneth Noland and Helen Frankenthaler, further developed some of the expressive philosophies of Abstract Expressionism, but reduced much of the rhetoric, instead approaching a more rule-based approach to surface and colour that associated this practice with Minimalism. Pop Art was a prominent offshoot of minimalism, a discipline made famous by through the work of artists like Victor Vasarely and Bridget Riley. Globally, a number of artistic movements echoed the artistic concerns of the previously mentioned movements, often with regional fortes and nuance. In Italy, Lucio Fontana and Piero Manzoni established Spatialism, and in Germany the Zero group under the leadership of Gunter Uecker adopted similar ideas. The influential school of Existentialist Philosophy was an important source of creativity for creatives, with artists like Francis Bacon and Alberto Giacometti achieving international prominence for their idiosyncratic approaches to the human form and the angst related to the human condition.

The Yamaki 1991 catalog is now available at www.ftn-books.com

IGOR GANIKOWSKIJ HAS TAKEN PART IN MORE THAN 50 ONE- MAN SHOWS, 13 OF THESE IN MUSEUMS, AND 100 GROUP EXHIBITIONS.  HE HAS EXHIBITED AT ART-BASEL, ART COLOGNE, ARCO MADRID , ART LA AND ART LONDON.  HE HAS BEEN WIDELY PUBLISHED, WITH 11 SOLO-CATALOGUES AND MORE THAN 300 ARTICLES ON HIS ART IN BOOKS, MAGAZINES, NEWSPAPERS.  HIS WORK IS REPRESENTED IN THE COLLECTIONS OF MORE THAN 35 MUSEUMS.

www.ftn-books.com has the gaslerie Julia Tocaier catalogue from 1989 available