Tag: art

Robin Rhode (1976) was born in Cape Town during the apartheid era and grew up in Johannesburg, where he attended the Technikon Witwatersrand (now the University of Johannesburg) and the South African School of Film, Television and Dramatic Art. In 2002, he moved to Berlin, where he continues to live and work. His work has been acquired by numerous collections, including those of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York and Johannesburg Art Gallery in Johannesburg.

Over the past two decades, Robin has created an extensive and multi-faceted oeuvre with a strong individual signature. His work is playful and contains a wealth of references to music, poetry, art, and history. His oeuvre is characterised by a visual combination of street art, drawing, painting, sculpture, performance, film, and photography. His preferred materials are charcoal, chalk and paint and you can recognise his work by its simple and clear language of form. Over the years, Robin has transformed himself from a lone performer to the director of an artistic fellowship with whom he can realise more ambitious productions. While his artistic journey began in his homeland, South Africa, Robin and his interventions have since travelled to every corner of the globe.

www.ftn-books.com has the scarce first Rhode publication available. This publication was sponsored and partly funded by Marlene Dumas.

British conceptual artist Helen CHADWICK embraced the sensuous aspects of the natural world, breaking taboos of the ‘normal’ and ‘traditional’ in art historical pedagogy. Considered a ‘mother’ to the YBAs through her teaching posts at the Royal College of Art, Chelsea School of Art and the London Institute, her experiments with material were innovative and unconventional and captured a world in a state of flux. Piss Flowers (1991-92), in which she cast the interior spaces left in the snow by warm urine, are at once as repulsing as they are beautiful, and it this combination that typifies Chadwick’s work: aesthetic beauty created out of an alliance of unconventional, often vile, materials.

Chadwick was one of the first women artists to be nominated for the Turner Prize in 1987. www.ftn-books.com has the scarce Torch/Onrusta announcement for her Koln exhibition available.

Karel Dierickx is a Belgian artist who was born in Ghent in 1940 and died there in 2014. He was a painter, draftsman, sculptor and printmaker. Education at the Academy in Ghent, pupil of O. Landuyt at the Normal School in Ghent. First mention at the prize for Young Belgian Painting in 1962. Godecharle Prize in 1964. Usually starts from a vague landscape as an original motif. Due to an increasingly thorough abstraction of the motif and the simultaneous emphasis of the mood, this matter becomes an almost independent means of expression. The paint skin appears hurt and tense. From the press: “The painter calls himself a chaotic figure who is out to find plastic motifs and solutions, and then to break them down. And that is one of the characteristics of his work, which always starts from a realistic data – for example a still life, a landscape or a figure – but in which the figurative underlay is processed, processed and worked through until an apparently abstract composition remains” (LB ) and “His entire oeuvre is a gifted meditation on light and shadows. His canvases are pictorial ecstasies, paragons of spirituality.” Teacher at the Academy in Ghent. Work in the Museums in Ghent and Ostend.

www.ftn-books.com has some Dierrickx items currently available

Yesterday i received an email by the Marianne Boesky Gallery. Here is the text:

Jennifer Bartlett passed away on July 25, 2022 at the age of 81. Bartlett’s visually bold, intellectually rigorous works drew inspiration from Minimalism, Abstract Expressionism, and Conceptualism, sometimes deploying strategies from all three movements within a single work. Often grounded in precise mathematical abstractions, Bartlett’s paintings and room-sized installations constantly questioned the restrictions of the grids or constraints she herself had imposed, resulting in dynamic compositions with deep poetic and aesthetic resonance.
 
In 1968, Bartlett began working on the square steel plates on which she went on to create her most notable works. Rhapsody (1975-1976), a polyptych first installed at Paula Cooper Gallery filling the entirety of the gallery, included hundreds of these painted steel plates. That work is now part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In 2018, Paula Cooper Gallery and Marianne Boesky Gallery took on shared representation of Jennifer Bartlett. We are grateful to Takaaki Matsumoto, David Lester, and Daniel Lipman of the Jennifer Bartlett Trust; to Jennifer’s studio manager, Joan LiPuma; to her daughter, Alice Carrière, and to her sister, Julie Matsumoto for their thoughtful and supportive collaboration during that time. “I have been honored to represent Jennifer and grateful for the opportunity to continue to shepherd her work forward in concert with the incredible team that has long surrounded her,” said Marianne Boesky.
 
Bartlett’s first survey exhibition was held in 1985 and traveled to the Walker Art Center, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Museum of Art, Carnegie Institute. In 2006, her early enameled steel plate paintings were surveyed at the Addison Gallery of American Art. Klaus Ottman curated her second traveling survey exhibition in 2013-14, Jennifer Bartlett: History of the Universe—Works 1970–2011, which traveled to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the Parrish Art Museum. In 2014, the Cleveland Museum of Art exhibited all three of her monumental plate pieces, Rhapsody, Song, and Recitative in the exhibition Epic Systems. Bartlett’s works are in the collections of the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, the Museum of Modern Art, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Modern, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, among many others.

www.ftn-books.com has some of the famous Bartlett publications available

The exploration of the visible and making visible is the driving force in
the work of Stefan Gritsch. In this context, painting is the conceptual
point of departure for expanding the work to other genres – drawing,
sculpture, photography, printmaking – and to find three-dimensional,
installation-based as well as performative formulations for them.

Gritsch takes the principle of inversion

further, as the work takes on an additional dimension and, due to the
enlargement, becomes physically experienceable. At the same time, he
creates an intimate proximity to his primary material, acrylic paint.
In Gritsch’s oeuvre of the early 1990s, the exploration of paint as
material already took the form which is still relevant today. Ever since, a
mass of acrylic paint modelled into new shapes and states serves as the
basis for most of his three-dimensional works. In a process characterised.

www.ftn-books.com has one Gritsch title currently available

The departure point for Raúl Illarramendi’s work is the observation of “traces” left by human activity in the everyday urban milieu. Found on walls, sidewalks, gateways and doorways, these traces are photographed and chosen for their compositional and power to evoke. The artist thus accumulates a repertory of images that serve as inspiration for his compositions. Illarramendi applies coloured pencil on a canvas that has previously been prepared with gouache, a mixed technique that combines drawing with painting and vice versa. The artist conceives these works as non-drawings: The work is composed of lines that suddenly appear in the un-penciled spaces, thus revealing the foundation of the canvas. His series are all the product of a continuous reflection; the representation of a false hue, of a false fluidity, of a false rhythm and a false event.

Born in 1982 in Caracas, Venezuela, Raúl Illarramendi began his artistic training in 1998 as assistant to the painter Felix Perdomo. He then became a member of the Circulo de Dibujo of the Contemporary Art Museum of Caracas Sofia Imber. He followed studies in Visual Arts and Art History at the University of Southern Indiana in Evansville in the United States. He has won several art awards in the United States and France, the most recent of which being the Jean Chevalier Award for Painting in Lyon, which he received in 2012. Illarramendi lives and works in Méru, France.

www,ftn-books.com has now the Spirit Line publication by Karsten Greve available

Michael Blum, born in Jerusalem in 1966, is a Montreal-based artist. Following studies in history at Université Paris I and photography at the École nationale de la photographie in Arles, France, he developed an art practice—comprising videos, books and installations—that aims at critically re-reading the production of culture and history. His work encompasses several exhibitions presented in such venues as the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon (2012); the New Museum, New York (2009); the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven (2008); Mobile Art Production, Stockholm (2007); and as part of the 9th Istanbul Biennale (2005). He has completed several residencies including at the Banff Centre for the Arts, Banff; the Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam; ISCP in New York; IASPIS in Stockholm; and Very Real Time, in Cape Town. His book works include Monument to the Birth of the 20th Century and La dernière brève, published by Revolver-Archiv für aktuelle Kunst in 2005. Michael Blum has been a professor at the UQAM School of Visual and Media Arts since 2010.

www.ftn-books.com has now the Stanley Picker gallery publication from 2000 available

Nilbar Güreş is an artist from Turkey who lives and works between Istanbul and Vienna. Using photography, collage, textile, drawing, and video, she places images of everyday life in theatrical settings to explore cultural identity, especially female and queer identity. Her work is based on long-term research and cultural observation, and it is strongly political—it deals with, among other things, sexism, violence, and gender and social inequality. Güreş received her MA in painting and graphics from the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna. She has exhibited at museums around the world, including MAXXI museum in Rome, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, the Schwules Museum in Berlin, the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Mak–Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna, the Museum of Modern Art in Salzburg, and the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art in Strasbourg. Her selected exhibitions include the 20th Yokohama Triennale, the 20th Biennale of Sydney, the 31st Sao Paulo Biennial, the 6th Berlin Biennale, and the 11th International İstanbul Biennial. Her awards include the 2013 Professor Hilde Goldschmidt Award (Austria), the 2014 Msgr. Otto Mauer Award (Austria), the 2015 BC21 Art Award (Austria), and the 2018 De’Longhi Art Projects Artist Award

www.ftn-books.com has currently one Gures title available.

Sam Havadtoy was born in London in 1952 and raised in Hungary. From there he moved to New York, worked as an interior designer and began painting. Among others, he designed homes for John Lennon and Yoko Ono, and became their friend. The first stage of Havadtoy’s work consists of writing an autobiographical text, which he reduces and condenses and then copies onto canvas. He covers it all with a coat of paint, and at times glues onto it a layer of lace, also painted. The exhibition presents portraits the artist made inspired by paintings by Alexej von Jawlensky in the collection of the museum. In some of the paintings, the figure’s outlines are very clear, whereas in others, Jawlensky’s paintings take on a new interpretation by Havadtoy, almost devoid of figurative aspect. The process of work, combining painting and erasing and concealing the image, leads Havadtoy’s work towards minimalist, almost abstract painting that seeks to reach a sublime spiritual experience through its intensity.

www.ftn-books.com has now the Tel Aviv Museum of Art catalogue available

Maria Eichhorn was born in 1961 in Bamberg, Germany. ¹ She moved to Paris where she wanted to study languages but, instead, she became an artist. In 1983, she moved to Berlin, where she studied until 1990 at the Hochschule der Kunste in the class of the artist Karl Horst Hodicke. She then took a studio at the Kunstlerhaus Bethanien, a studio-residency programme in Berlin and showed in improvised, artist-run spaces such as Shin Shin or Galerie Vincenz Sala. In 1989 the Berlin Wall came down and she continued to work with the changing situation in the city as well as beyond it.

Her work has developed since the late 1980s as an exploration of the relationship between the symbolic and the real, between the practice of art and direct – albeit limited and exemplary – actions geared towards the bettering of personal life, social relations and the human and natural environments. It demonstrates a strong sense of ethics and the belief that radical oppositional thought and action are still and will always be possible. Her work is rarely spectacular and most often discreet.

Eichhorn recognises and develops both Fluxus libertarian gestures and strategies of conceptual art. As with conceptual art, she is not interested in the production of artefacts for exchange and does not privilege the visual in art over other modes of sensual and intellectual perception. However, contrary to most idea-based art of the first period, she is not interested in hierarchically placing verbal language over the visual, nor in creating tautologies or eliminating self-expression from the work of art. As with Fluxus ‘histories’ and chronicles, the vitality and ephemeral nature of the events, relationships and processes that Eichhorn enacts within – and as a consequence of – her works imply a need for rigorous documentation and a chronological vision that positions her work as a sequence of emblematic and exemplary ‘oppositional’ projects. Her work is almost always context-specific and in some way useful. She redirects artistic resources, such as production budgets or the ‘free zone’ attributed to art by the authorities, and engages them to counter losses of freedom and individual well-being in contemporary Western society. Though these projects appear as political in the broadest sense, no explicit party or ideological affiliation of her own is ever declared. In fact, almost all her works relate to some need, experience or desire of the people living and working in the place where she is invited to exhibit. More often than not, her proposals reveal a strong critical undercurrent and an almost anarchic questioning of power itself.

The work of Maria Eichhorn is layered and complex, rich and textured, both literal and metaphoric and often highly poetic and allusive. Yet, emerging at the end of the 1980s from a generation of self-expressive ‘wild painting’, it remains as little as possible a reflection of her own personal, expressive behaviour. Instead, she bases her productions on the belief that there are already many highly expressive behaviours in the world and her task is to provide some form of manifestation or outlet for them.

www.ftn-books.com has the below Eichhorn publication available: