Tag: art

Not much info i can find on van Severen. Just a short biography, but that doe not mean that van Severen is not impoprtant. I think he is and if ever i have the opportunity to buy a work for our collection i will not hesitate to do so.

Dan van Severen’s first verified exhibition was documenta 4 at Documenta in Kassel in 1968, and the most recent exhibition was Trance-Action – A meditative stroll through the collection – from Baloji to Van Severen at Mu.ZEE in Oostende in 2020. Dan van Severen is most frequently exhibited in Belgium, but also had exhibitions in Germany, France and elsewhere. Severen has at least 7 solo shows and 39 group shows over the last 52 years (for more information, see biography). Severen has also been in no less than 7 art fairs and in 3 biennials. A notable show was 35. Biennale Internazionale d’Arte 1970 at La Biennale di Venezia Settore Arte in Venice in 1970. Other notable shows were at Documenta in Kassel and Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (MuHKA) in Antwerp. Dan van Severen has been exhibited with Karel Dierickx and Marthe Wéry. Dan van Severen’s art is in at least 7 museum collections, at Museum voor Hedendaagse Kunst Antwerpen (MuHKA) in Antwerp and Stedelijk Museum voor Actuele Kunst (S.M.A.K.) in Ghent among others.

www.ftn-books.com has some nice titles on van Severen available.

I love her works, Spontaneous and intelligent abstraction, reminding me of Pollock and Sam Francis , but in her own style and highly original. The painting is not thought out but emerges from her hands when she paints.

Born in Vienna in 1940, Martha Jungwirth rose to distinction early in her artistic career: she received the Monsignor-Otto-Mauer Prize in 1961, followed by a volley of awards such as the Theodor Körner Prize (1964) and the Joan Miró Prize, Barcelona (1966). Jungwirth’s characteristic painting style is widely regarded as one of the most innovative of the 1980s Neue Wilde painters in Austria, oscillating between the gesturally abstract and formal composition.

After completing her studies at the Academy of Applied Art Vienna in 1963, Jungwirth went on to become the only woman in the artists’ group Wirklichkeiten (Realities), among five male colleagues; it was brought together in 1968 by Otto Breicha, later director of Salzburg’s Rupertinum, as an improvised group for an exhibition at the Vienna Secession. Jungwirth was identified in a review by art historian and museum director Alfred Schmeller with this: “The first crocodile is a female crocodile.” Jungwirth would marry Schmeller a year later, and this union has long been perceived by many as one that made the art world hesitant to embrace Jungwirth.

Despite this hesitation, Jungwirth pursued her practice with a fervor, working with an intuitive and explosive spontaneity. With a deliberative understanding of aesthetic principles, she creates subtle color symphonies with dabs and washes of paint. Receding and advancing, this layering of oil paints and watercolors on packing paper and cardboard, which embodies her dynamic working 

style with a fragility made visible by delicate marks and occasional drips.

www.ftn-books.com now has the Haas catalogue available

British artist Rose Wylie (b. 1934) paints uniquely recognizable, colorful, and exuberant compositions that at first glance are instantly accessible, not seeming to align with any discernible style or movement, but on closer inspection are revealed to be wittily observed and subtly sophisticated meditations on the nature of visual representation itself. As curator Clarrie Wallis notes, “[Wylie’s] large pictures are painted in a kind of visual shorthand that is direct and legible. The ability to elicit a range of responses is made possible precisely because of her reduction of form to an essential vibrancy that incorporates, via the very physicality of her medium, not just what the artist sees but an accompanying multitude of thoughts, feelings, and memories. Wylie’s work is a sophisticated transmutation, or sifting of perceptual experience, carrying as it does a wealth of affective and allusive resonances, into the painted form.”

www.ftn-books.com has the galerie Michael Janssen catalogue now available

Tzuri Gueta, a graduate of Shenkar College in the Tel Aviv area, is a designer and textile engineer who has been based in Paris since 1996. Growing up on the shores of the Mediterranean, he was in direct contact with the elements of nature, and his work reflects his roots.

After settling in Paris, Tzuri worked at Trend Union, an agency run by Li Edelkoort, and went on to concentrate on textile design. He challenged the conventions of the trade by approaching traditional handicraft with unprecedented techniques. This innovative approach gave rise to surprising materials that verged on sculpture – materials that deceive the senses of touch and vision. Good publications on this artist are scarce, but www.ftn-books.com has the Tel Aviv publication from 2010 now available.

As soon as you see a painting by Karin Bos, you notice that there is a story behind the picture. It intrigues and it makes the picture come alive.

Karin Bos (1966, NL) graduated at the Amsterdam School of Fine Arts in 1989. She works as a visual artist in Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Her main media are: painting, drawing and printing.

People are the focus point of her work. Main characters are usually girls or women. Especially mutual relative power and relations have her interest. Frictions and inequality in these relationships is a recurrent theme. For instance between man and woman, or adult and child, or children amongst each other, group behaviour versus the loner. When the pursuit of harmony fails, it becomes interesting for her work . Several examples of ‘girlpower’ series Karin Bos has accomplished are ‘Showgirls’, ‘Gamegirls’, ‘Fairyqueens’ and ‘Feel Good’

www.ftn-books.com has the A TRIP TO THE COUNTRYSIDE from 2009 now available

The works of Mike Strauch (born in 1966) are always intensive painterly confrontations with the landscape and architecture that surround him, sometimes also imagined and composed.

On closer inspection and prolonged examination, the pictorial world emerges as a contemporary version of a lyrical, Arcadian, not always cheerful landscape painting. The visible traces of painting, such as drops, splashes, noses and colour gradients and undifferentiated parts of the picture, visualise the artist’s processual and open way of working. He does not hide, smooth or paint over but rather openly presents his work to the viewer. In this way, Mike Strauch takes us as recipients into his studio. He lets us have a look as he works and lets us participate in the process of finding a motif, even though we are studying a seemingly completed work.

Landscapes are the overriding theme in Strauch’s works. Since time immemorial, the landscape and the forest have been seen as symbols of the possibility of self-renewal and of the dimension of the unknown that needs to be explored. Strauch explores seemingly unknown dimensions with his painterly, expressive odes to nature. Architectural theory understands the concept of landscape and architecture as one. Architecture is landscape, and landscape is architecture. In this light, Strauch’s pictorial cosmos with its solitary, seemingly abandoned “residential cubes” in rampant, sometimes blurred flora acquires a kind of explanation. www.ftn-books.com has the Schwerin publication available ( edition of only 400 copies)

Whether popcorn, batteries, water or bronze — no material is too uninteresting for Vanessa Billy (*1978, Geneva, lives in Zurich) not to use for research into sculpture and themes such as transformation and recycling. Her artistic work is poetic but at the same time remains anchored in the concrete physical qualities of the materials. Billy examines the cultural use of natural resources by contra-intuitively working on objects or placing them next to each other. For example, when a silicone lemon is confronted with a car engine. In the process the artist always investigates cycles in which humanity and technology are caught up. She asks what reactions follow actions, now or in the time continuum, and to what extent these influence our thought and behaviour.

www.ftn-books.com has the Pro Helvetia Vanessa Billy publication available.

At first i thought i recognized some influences of Toon Verhoef, Piet Dirkx and Jerry Zeniuk in the works of Jelis van Donderen, but when you see multiple works at one page you see that van Dolderen has a style of his own….and yes…. i like his paintings. He developed a pictural language that is typically van Dolderen and that is his strength. Bright colors, shapes typical for van Dolderen and best for the most of us, still available at reasonable prices. So check out van Dolderen and for those interested in his publications …i have the Centraal Museum Utrecht small artist book available.

Born in 1970 in Osnabrück, Silke Otto-Knapp majored in cultural studies at the University of Hildesheim and received her MFA from Chelsea College of Art and Design in London. Otto-Knapp works in the medium of watercolor on canvas and produces landscape paintings as well as paintings based on historical documentations of stage design and performance. Unlike traditional watercolorists, Otto-Knapp applies layers of watercolor that are washed down and then applied anew. These countless coats produce the coexistence of conflicting concepts of space – surface and depth, contour and corporeality, distance and closeness, reality and figurativeness – which give rise to a tension between the motif and the picture surface.

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

The independent started his article on Metzger that he is probably the artist you have never heard of. Still he is one of the most influential artists for the decades to come.

‘Gustav Metzger remains a moral compass, a constant reminder that integrity comes at a price, and that fighting for your convictions can indeed change the world. Metzger has done more than raise awareness. His art and philosophy are a stark testimony to the alternative world for which he strove.’–Mathieu Copeland

Gustav Metzger was an artist and political activist who developed the concept of Auto-Destructive Art and the Art Strike. At the heart of Metzger’s practice was a passionate engagement with the notion of creation as a continual counterpoint to themes of destruction. This exhibition will look at works that explore nature, man-made environments and human intervention.

Gustav Metzger was born in 1926 in Nuremburg, Germany to a Polish-Jewish family. In 1939, at the age of 12, Metzger and his brother were evacuated from Germany to England on the ‘Kindertransport’. He lost his parents and most of his immediate family to the Holocaust. In his youth he decided to become ‘a kind of revolutionary’, but after living for six months in a Trotskyist-anarchist Commune in Bristol, Metzger decided this wasn’t what he wanted. He was later convinced to attend life-drawing classes by Henry Moore, after asking to be his assistant and went on to study in Cambridge, Oxford, Antwerp and London.

Metzger was the chief proponent of the Auto-Destructive Art (or ADA) movement and organised the DIAS (Destruction in Art Symposium) in 1966 with contemporaries such as John Sharkey. Other notable attendees and contributors were members of the Fluxus movement and Yoko Ono, who performed her seminal participatory ‘Cut Piece’, where members of the audience were invited to gradually snip away her clothing using a pair of fabric scissors.

Metzger dedicated much of his life and career to campaigning for environmental issues, nuclear disarmament and expressing his distaste for consumerism and the wider capitalist agenda.

www.ftn-books.com has 2 important Metzger publications now available.