Tag: art

Stephen Dixon studied Fine Art at Newcastle University and Ceramics at the Royal College of Art, graduating in 1986. He currently holds the chair of Professor of Contemporary Crafts at Manchester School of Art, investigating contemporary narratives in ceramics. His work features in numerous public and private collections, including the Museum of Arts & Design, New York; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the British Council; the Crafts Council; the Royal Museum of Scotland and the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco. He was a Trustee of the Crafts Council from 2009 to 2013, and is a member of the Art and Design sub-panel for REF 2021.

Early exhibitions in London with Contemporary Applied Arts and the Crafts Council established a reputation for ceramics with a biting political and social satire. Anatol Orient introduced Dixon’s figurative vessels to the U.S.A. in the early nineties, resulting in solo exhibitions at Pro-Art, St. Louis (1993) Garth Clark Gallery, New York (1995) and Nancy Margolis Gallery, New York (1998). Dixon’s politically engaged ceramic practice was comprehensively surveyed in a major solo exhibition ‘The Sleep of Reason’, a twenty-year retrospective showcased at Manchester Art Gallery in 2005, which subsequently toured the U.K.

In 2006 Dixon travelled to Australia as part of The HAT Project, to investigate the effects of dislocation on the creation of cultural artefacts. This experience provoked a shift away from the ceramic vessel as a vehicle for narrative, towards intervention and installation works such as ‘Bush Pantry’ (2007), ‘Monopoly’ (2009) and ‘Letters from Tripoli’ (2011). He was awarded the inaugural V&A ceramics studio residency in 2009, where he embarked on a new body of work exploring political portraiture. (‘Restoration Series’ 2011-2013).

Dixon combines his studio ceramic practice with regular forays into public and community arts;

In 2000 he received an Arts Council Year of the Artist award for ‘Asylum’, a collaborative project with Amnesty International U.K. and Kosovan refugees. Recent public engagement projects ‘Resonance’, ‘Resonate’ and ‘The Lost Boys’ have examined commemoration and the material resonance of archives and objects, in the context of the centenary of World War 1. ‘Passchendaele: mud and memory’ focused specifically on the materiality of the conflict, using terracotta clay sourced from the battlefields of the Western Front. www.ftn-books.com has the Manchester Art gallery publication available.

Aernout Mik’s film installations create situations that chart the formation and transformation of group behavior. The artist draws parallels between structures like religious movements and our belief in the market economy to create spaces for the viewer to contemplate their position between malfunctioning systems.

Aernout Mik’s film installations create situations that chart the formation and transformation of group behavior. The artist draws parallels between structures like religious movements and our belief in the market economy to create spaces for the viewer to contemplate their position between malfunctioning systems.

Aernout Mik (b. 1962, Groningen) lives and works in Amsterdam. He represented the Netherlands in the Dutch Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale, 2007. He has had solo exhibitions at venues such as Art Sonje Center, Seoul; MoMA, New York;  BAK, basis voor actuele kunst,  Utrecht; Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Amsterdam; Jeu de Paume, Paris; Museum Folkwang, Essen; and CA2M Centro de Arte Dos de Mayo, Madrid. Mik has participated in numerous international biennials, including the Venice Biennale, Sao Paulo Biennial, Gwangju Biennale, the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Istanbul Biennial, and the Berlin Biennale.

www.ftn-books. com has several publications on Aernout Mik available

For me the photgraph above is an iconic photo. Without knowing who the artist was I have known the Eline Veere statue all of my life. Eline Veere is themain character in the Louis Couperus novel and van der Nahmer has made the most famous statue of her. He made several versions of Eline Veere statues , but the one above is the most famous one.

The Haags Palet book is now available at www.ftn-books.com

at an early stage of his career the designer-goldsmith cees post became interested in architectural forms.the inspiration he gains in architecture and the choice he made for the material in which he works, determine the shape and style developed by him.each one of his jewelry witness from a clear – tight – form and simplicity.his aim is to develop the jewelry into shaped visual arts.this is the credo for his creative work.the design of his jewelry can be described as “graphic constructively” with a scale-free or monumental character.the materials used are exclusively 1st grade silver and (white-) gold.the jewelry are built in planes and then performed a line pattern with silver.which provides the graphical effect.gold is either used as an accent color either by a folded-edge as a ‘contra shape’.the starting points, which determine the appearance of the jewelry, are: square, rectangle, triangle folded-shape or a combination of these.that leads to theme-like series.despite the theme series each piece retains its individuality and thus remains unique.

,The Haags Palet publication on Post is now available at www.ftn-books.com

About a month ago i encountered this scarce publication on Mary Waters. I recognized the design by Swip Stolk and was surprised to see that I had never encountered this before. Published in 1995 for Flatland gallery / Utrecht. A surprisingly innovative and typical Stolk catalogue which presented me for the very first time with this artist. Mary Waters takes her inspiration from the classic dutch painters from the 17th Century , but gives these great paintings a personal twist. The catalogue is now available at www.ftn-books.com

” All of the source images for my work are taken from European (mainly Italian Dutch, Spanish and English)
painting from the 14thto the 19thcentury. These images are seen by most of the western world as embodying the best in us. They are iconic and unquestioned.
 
Coming from Ireland, a country with a long history of colonization and its aftermath, I see another side of this imagery. In Ireland, these Paintings were not seen as our cultural heritage in the same way they would have been by the English, Dutch or Germans. They carried a message of unattainable superiority and lasting authority, culturally and politically. 

This tension, for me is profoundly interesting and I have been exploring it in my work for many years. I have to stress that I do not look at the images in a sequential, analytical or academic way; I am not an Art historian. I can only describe my study of them as instinctive visually led. Looking at these images I have concluded that they frequently reflect the character of a culture more in their aesthetic than in their content. The values or desires of a society are often allowed only subliminal expression. It seems that for most of us, we can only examine ourselves obliquely. “

Not much info to be found on Oscar Jespers, still , like his father, this artist has grown more important over the last few decades.

As his father, Oscar Jespers practised sculpture. He was formed at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts. His first sculptures, dating from the 1920’s, are Cubists. Later, in 1930, his style changed and evolved towards Expressionism. He exhibited alongside artists of this movement as in 1934 at the Kunst van Heden exhibition held in Antwerp. The sculptor mainly conceived heads, and nudes.

Nowadays, his artworks can be found in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium.

www.ftn-books.com has some nice Jespers publications available.

Paul Joostens was a Belgian artist who was born in Antwerp in 1889 and who died there in 1960. He was a painter, draftsman, designer of collages and assemblages and poet. First apprenticed to the architect M. Winders, then training at the Academy in Antwerp (1909-1913). Initially painted in a post-impressionist style, until ca. 1915, then incorporated both Ensorian, 1900-style and Fauvist influences. Cubism and Futurism made their appearance in 1916. Abstract collages were also created during this period and from 1920 onwards he realized a series of Dadaist objects, composed of the most diverse materials. A number of satirical-erotic drawings and graphic work were created under the pseudonym Duco Of Malibot. In 1972 he turned his back on modernism and was inspired by the work of the Flemish primitives. This was followed by a religious-mystical period in a cubist-expressionist style from about 1930 to 1935. After 1935 his work became more subdued, almost intimate, in lighter colors and he realized a series of photomontages. Just before the Second World War, his work again reflect a certain symbolistic fantasy. After 1946 and until his death, his oeuvre can be divided into two themes. On the one hand, Dadaist assemblages and collages, on the other hand, the paintings and drawings in which his dreamlike figure of the woman, his ‘poezeloezen’, play the leading role. From the press: ‘The main theme, the woman, contains all of Joostens’ dualism: the Madonna and the Platonic glorification of the film diva, the public woman or the girl, on the other hand, barely affected by female perversion’ and about his work as a writer and poet: ‘In 1924 he marries a seventeen-year-old, travels to Paris, travels back and forth: Price, Bruges, but Antwerp remains the stopping place of his heart. In 1928 poverty starts to knock. Divorce followed in 1930. P.J. paints and writes. His writings are piling up. Also in the period 1930-1960. In Antwerp he moves from one studio to another, suffers from poverty, even bitter poverty, is physically ill, lonely and lapses into total isolation. At his death he left behind an extensive oeuvre and a mountain of writings. It was his last wish that a fund should be established to enable the publication of his literary work, because in the end he seemed to attach as much importance to his literary as to his pictorial oeuvre. ‘(Tijdschrift Vlaanderen, 1971) Werkte sporadically also under the pseudonym Jean Yostmans. 

www.ftn-books.com has several titles on Josstens available.

Born in Baghdati, Russian Empire (now Mayakovsky, Georgia) on July 19, 1893, Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was the youngest child of Ukrainian parents. When his father, a forester, died in 1906, the family moved to Moscow, where Mayakovsky joined the Social Democratic Labour Party as a teenager in 1908. Due to his family’s financial situation, Mayakovsky was dismissed from grammar school. He spent much of the next two years in prison due to his political activities.

In 1910, Mayakovsky began studying painting, soon realizing he had a talent for poetry. In 1912, he signed the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which included two of his poems. In 1913, he published his first solo project, Ya, a small book of four poems.

Mayakovsky’s early poems established him as one of the more original poets to come out of the Russian Futurism, a movement characterized by a rejection of traditional elements in favor of formal experimentation, and which welcomed social change promised by technologies such as automobiles. Specifically, Mayakovsky’s early poems lacked traditional metrical structure, relying instead on forceful rhythms, exaggerated imagery, and—perhaps most importantly—street language, considered unpoetic in literary circles at the time.

In 1915, Mayakovsky published A Cloud in Trousers, his first major work. The long poem took the poet’s stylistic choices to a new extreme, linking irregular lines of declamatory language with surprising rhymes.

Living in Smolny, Petrograd, in 1917, Mayakovsky witnessed the early Bolshevik insurrections of the Russian Revolution. This was a fruitful period for the poet, who greeted the revolution with a number of poetic and dramatic works, including Ode to the Revolution (1918), Left March (1918), the long poem 150,000,000 (1920), and Mystery-Bouffe (1918), a political satire and one of the first major plays of the Soviet era.

Mayakovsky returned to Moscow to create propoganda graphics and verses for the Russian State Telegraph Agency, and became involved in Left Front of the Arts, editing its journal, LEF. The journal’s objective was to “re-examine the ideology and practices of so-called leftist art, and to abandon individualism to increase art’s value for developing communism.”

In 1919, he published Collected Works 1909-1919, which further established his reputation. Mayakovsky’s popularity granted him unusual freedoms, relative to other Soviets. Specifically, he travelled freely, throughout the Soviet Union, as well as to Latvia, Britain, Germany, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba. In 1925, he published My Discovery of America.

Among the poet’s best-known longer poems are Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1924), a eulogy to the Soviet leader; and All Right! (1927). Around this time, Mayakovsky also wrote two satirical plays: The Bedbug (1928) and The Bathhouse (1929).

Mayakovsky had been working on the long poem With Full Voice since 1929, when on April 14, 1930, he allegedly shot himself directly in the heart. Ten days later, the officer investigating the poet’s suicide was himself killed, fueling speculation about the nature of Mayakovsky’s death. www.ftn-books.com has some nice publications on Maiakovski currently available.

After a few years of silence and not contributing any new news nor items on Piet Dirkx I finally found a reason to write again on Piet. Last week I found the BEELDEN IN DE KOEPEL II catalogue on Piet Dirkx. An important catalogue since it also shows some “‘t Venster” rooms in which Piet had one of his first exhibitions. The catalogue is now together with many art works available at www.ftn-books.com. Inquire for more information at www.ftnbooksandart@gmail.com

Just the focus on the early Frank van Hemert pastel that I acquired yesterday. I bought a series of 6 pastels of which two will become available in the coming months. Opened the frame to make the perfect photographs and examined the pastel in detail. Without the glass you can see the delicate pastel drawing as it should be. Signed and dated on the back and this week becoming available at FTN art at www.ftn-blog.com