Tag: art

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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.

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Piet Tuytel (continued)

Another reason to emphasize the importance of Piet Tuytel. I more and more appreciate his works and since a few months I am looking to OCTAGOON nr. 8 . A sister work from the same series has been a gift by NOG and is now on permanent display in the entrance hall of the Stedelijk Museum Schiedam. Here is Oktagoon nr. 8

Some sculptures appropriate space, while others structure and define it. The works of Piet Tuytel (Alblasserdam, 1956) are among the latter sort. Tuytel likes the flat landscape of the polders, whose emptiness is made palpable by the occasional appearance of a farm or a power pylon. At times even those sparse elements are missing and you need—as he says—to start slamming poles in the ground in order to focus on something.
Tuytels sculptures involve that type of intervention. In order to give ‘shape’ to space, he makes use of existing objects. At first those ranged from pipes and tubes to bathtubs and chairs; later he opted for more neutral objects that were less charged with meaning. Over the past ten years, he has worked with construction materials such as T-bars and H-beams, heightening their spatial effect with the aid of color and a well-considered placement on a metal base plate. In De Pont’s project space this use of elementary forms expands to include a new element. The wall sculptures, to be on view as of March 21, consist of radiators, sometimes in combination with treaded aluminum plates.

The wall sculptures have the standard sizes of two types of radiators: long and narrow ones (50 x 250 cm) and square ones (90 x 90 cm). He shows a number of them from the front and others from the back side. With the connections for pipes and the attachment points for brackets being clearly visible, the radiators remain recognizable as such. As an artist Tuytel has always sought turning points at which the ordinary allows itself to be experienced in terms of art, but rarely has the existing object taken on its new role so matter-of-factly and serenely as it does here. The heavy and unwieldy radiators have been transformed into abstract fields in which light and shadow play a leading role. In a series of four, the strict vertical rhythm of the convectors is counteracted in a much less predictable horizontal pattern. What seems, from a distance, to be thin lines proves, on closer inspection, to be the frayed cuts of a power tool. The position, the number and the distribution of the incisions bring motion into the square field in various ways and cause the visual space to recede or contract.

In his intuitive search for rhythm, Tuytels takes an approach which hardly differs from that of an artist like Mondrian, but his concern for materiality is that of a sculptor. In the series of vertical wall sculptures, narrow radiators have been turned sideways and combined with aluminum plates. The choice of this material, used for such things as loading ramps, has been deliberate. Due to its raised surface, some amount of space remains between the radiator and the plate. And the slight curve caused by the rolling process gives the material a certain spatial quality. Tuytel exploits this by spray-painting the aluminum black or by polishing it to a mirror-like shine. The black or silvery color of the aluminum plate and the white of the radiator each have their own three-dimensional effect. Tuytel makes use of that in constructing the wall sculptures, in which he ‘stacks’ various spatial qualities. In others the dynamics between figure and ground are evoked through the use of plates cut in angular shapes. The visually expansive effect of these forms is further heightened by the bright red in which the plate has been spray-painted.
Tuytel’s wall sculptures attest to the intense observation of an artist who takes inspiration from the spatial dimension of landscape and translates this into a play of formal relationships. The precision with which Tuytels zooms in on his subject parallels his location of a point by latitude north and longitude west, manifest in the exhibition’s title 51° 34′ 4″ N 5° 4′ 29″ E: these are the coordinates of the project space at De Pont.

www.ftn-books.com has now the Piet Tuytel book” Ruimte” available

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Sterling Ruby (1972)

Sterling Ruby (*1972) has created a complex, ever-evolving artistic universe that oscillates between raw abjection and aestheticizing abstraction. His ceramics, sculptures, installations, textile works, videos and paintings are associated with a post-humanist view on culture. The Los Angeles-based artist is working on a map of our collective unconscious, with a particular focus on social topologies, as well as traumas and ruptures in post-war art history.

Ruby’s oeuvre is diverse, formally and thematically, and difficult to characterize. While his SP (spray painting), BC (bleach collage) or more recent WIDW (window) series include color abstractions with a composition and materiality that explores traditional and contemporary senses of beauty, they also bristle with a clear subtext of psychological unrest. The artist’s geometric solids series consists of monumental minimalist sculptures made of Formica composite that Ruby has covered with graffiti, scratchiti, smears, fingerprints and other vandalizing methods. His SCALES series comprises mobile sculptures that merge modernist forms with such unusual readymades as paint buckets and industrial steel drums. Ruby’s SOFTWORKS recall labyrinthine bundles of amorphous, stuffed fabric figures with an unsettling corporeality. Apart from their aesthetic dimension, some of Ruby’s STOVE sculptures also serve as functional wood-burning stoves. The artist’s ceramics, which he produces in a variety of series and sizes, have organic shapes and sumptuous glazes and are often reminiscent of charred animal and human remains. His large-scale, totem-like sculptures made of polyurethane resin have a similarly visceral effect, echoing the visual repertoire of horror and science fiction films. Ruby has drawn on plexiglas with nail polish, made disturbing analogue and digital photo collages, and repurposed vehicles such as an LAPD squad car and a salvaged American submarine into sculptures.

The range of media the artist uses is mirrored in an aesthetic strategy that he himself describes as “schizophrenic.” Yet for all their multifaceted character, Ruby’s works share a common denominator. His creations clearly spring from an interconnected network and often make direct reference to one another, sometimes at the level of an ingenious recycling of used materials. Common to all of his paintings and objects is a sustained resistance to the ideological limitations of minimalism and conceptual art, their “high culture” social practices and legacy, which continue to dominate the art system today. He advances the evolution of an art-historical game with the abject and the refined, the origins of which are traceable to the work of artists such as Mike Kelley, Rosemarie Trockel, and Bruce Nauman.

Sterling Ruby draws inspiration from a number of intellectual influences, including Judith Butler’s gender theory, mathematical catastrophe theory and the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. His oeuvre explores such contemporary phenomena as supermax prisons, American politics and consumption and the social treatment of mental illness. Ruby’s works resemble outgrowths of a social and psychological landscape determined by fear, repression, violence, and stigmatization—a landscape we live in, yet so often turn a blind eye to. They also create the lexicon for a language of chaos, transgression, and radical diversity—a source of simultaneous eruption and awakening.

www.ftn-books.com has the Phaidon publication on Sterling Ruby now available.

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Komar & Melamid ( 1943 & 1945)

Vitaly Komar and Alexander Melamid are Moscow-born artists who emigrated to Israel in 1977 and then to New York in 1978. The two artists first collaborated on a joint exhibition entitled Retrospectivism in Moscow in 1967, and from 1972 started signing all their works with both names, regardless of whether they were made collaboratively. They continued to collaborate until the early 2000s, referring to their work as ‘not just an artist, but a movement’. Komar and Melamid are the founders of Sots-art (socialist art), a critical, nonconformist, conceptual form of pop art, based on the appropriation and subversion of socialist realist iconography and street propaganda, creating humorous, often grotesque, posters, paintings and banners. Both artists took part in the notorious ‘Bulldozer Exhibition’ held in a vacant plot in Moscow’s Belyayevo in 1974, which showcased nonconformist art by Moscow avant-garde artists that was swiftly destroyed by the authorities with bulldozers and water cannons.

www.ftn-books.com has some interesting Komar & Melamid publications available.

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Walter Gropius (1883-1969)

Walter Gropius was the founder of the Bauhaus and remained committed to the institution that he invested in throughout his life. He was a Bauhaus impresario in the best possible sense, a combination of speaker and entrepreneur, a visionary manager who aimed to make art a social concern during the post-war upheaval. After his departure as the Bauhaus’s director, Gropius recommended his two successors: Hannes Meyer and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe. The conservation of the Bauhaus’s legacy after its forced closure is another of Gropius’s accomplishments. He was also able to continue his career in exile in America as an avant-garde architect.

A native of Berlin, Gropius came from an upper middle-class background. His great-uncle was the architect Martin Gropius, a student of Karl Friedrich Schinkel, whose best-known work was the Königliche Kunstgewerbemuseum (royal museum of applied art) in Berlin, which now bears his name. In 1908, after studying architecture in Munich and Berlin for four semesters, Gropius joined the office of the renowned architect and industrial designer Peter Behrens, who worked as a creative consultant for AEG. Other members of Behrens’s practice included Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Le Corbusier. Gropius became a member of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) as early as 1910.

The same year, Gropius opened his own company. He designed furniture, wallpapers, objects for mass production, automobile bodies and even a diesel locomotive. In 1911, Gropius worked with Adolf Meyer on the design of the Fagus-Werk, a factory in the Lower Saxony town of Alfeld an der Leine. With its clear cubic form and transparent façade of steel and glass, this factory building is perceived to be a pioneering work of what later became known as modern architecture. For the 1914 exhibition of the Deutscher Werkbund (German Work Federation) in Cologne, Gropius and Adolf Meyer designed a prototype factory which was to become yet another classic example of modern architecture.

www.ftn-books.com has several titles on the Bauhaus available. Among them the 1971 BAUTEN UND PROJEKTE.

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Jens Pfeifer (1963)

Jens Pfeifer studied fine arts at the Royal College of Art London and at the Rietveld Academie Amsterdam. Pheifer has a practice as visual artist, making sculptures, drawings and site-specific work. His work is represented in numerous collections. As an adviser and teacher he has been connected to various art academies, amongst which: Hochschule für Kunst und Design Halle, AKI Enschede, Sandberg Instituut and the Rietveld Academie, where he has been the head of the glass department since 2012.

www.ftn-books.com has the COLORING BOOK by Jesn Pfeifer now available.

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Max Slevogt (1868-1932)

Max Slevogt is one of the three important exponents of German Impressionism – the other two being Lovis Corinth and Max Liebermann (Fig. 1). Slevogt was a prolific and highly versatile artist who worked in a wide range of artistic media. He produced oil paintings, watercolors, drawings and prints. He also completed fresco schemes and stage designs for theater and opera. [1] Additionally, still life was one of his preferred genres.

In his early Berlin years Slevogt’s output of still lifes was small – he produced only very few after his move to the city in 1901 and then no more than a handful around the year 1914. His real interest in the still-life genre did not emerge until the 1920s when he was to produce some of his most vibrant and arresting compositions.[2] Floral still lifes were to be less frequent in his work than still lifes of vegetables or fruit.

Slevogt depicts two bunches of summer flowers in a pair of vases. These are seen from a slightly raised viewpoint and are placed in a sharp diagonal to the picture plane. They are set on the corner of a table jutting into the pictorial space. The jutting corner of the table is a spatial device also found in late nineteenth-century French painting.
Despite the rapidity of Slevogt’s brushwork the flowers are botanically identifiable. Their striking color is reflected in the cut glass facets of the vases. The composition is dominated by the red roses in the larger of the two vases. Some of the roses have passed their peak and are already hanging their heads – suggesting the melancholy of an Indian summer. The smaller, chromatically more refined bunch in the foreground is still in full bloom.

Slevogt’s preoccupation with the still lifes of Manet was particularly marked during his Berlin years. Many of his still lifes reference elements of the compositional structure of Manet’s still lifes. This is still evident in his later works – an example is his predilection for diagonals.

www.ftn-books.com has the book on his complete graphic works now available.