Tag: art

Yesterday, Linda and i walked the dogs at the surroundings of Museum Voorlinden and because this was our second visit in a month we immediately noticed the sculptures by Anton y Gormley. Many of the dutch people know his “EXPOSURE (2010)”, but never realize is was made by Gormley.

Now the Museum Voorlinden has organized and outside exhibition. Gormley scattered around 30 of his human sculptures over the entire estate. Around the museum, in the park, in the dunes and even in a small river.

The best is that these sculptures enhance the magic of the museum and one would wish these were acquired for their collection. The best is that the visitors can interact with the sculptures. They are frozen but because of this interaction, they become alive.

here is the text Museum Voorlinden has published on their site on this highly recommended exhibition

Gormley approaches the age-old subject of the human body in his own unique, yet universal and philosophical way, building on art history and conceptual sculpture of the 1960s and 1970s. GROUND will be one of the most ambitious exhibitions in the museum’s history, the first to occupy both the museum and the estate of Voorlinden. ‘As a museum, we want to do everything we can to offer Antony Gormley the stage he deserves’, says director Suzanne Swarts.

Antony Gormley: ‘Sculpture is no longer a medium of memorial and idealisation but a context in which human being can be examined. Sculpture is no longer representational: it is an instrument of investigation and questioning. I have called this exhibition GROUND to make this open invitation of sculpture clear. Without the viewer there is no show, without the gallery there is no context. The joy of this kind of exhibition is to allow the richness of the context itself to become activated by sculpture. For me, the body of the viewer is often the activating principle in a ‘ground’ of contemplation: the works become catalysts for awareness and grounds for physical and imaginative inhabitation.’

Groundbreaking works

The exhibition includes Passage, a 12-metre-long steel work on display for the first time in the Netherlands. Inside the sculpture, one travels through darkness into the unknown. The expansive work Breathing Room, in which you can experience standing in a three-dimensional drawing in the space, will also be shown. Extending outside, Critical Mass puts sculpture in dialogue with the museum’s extensive grounds: 60 solid cast iron bodyforms will be placed in relation with the trees, lawns, canals and reedbeds of the park. Gormley sees these ‘capturings’ of basic body positions as ‘industrially made fossils dropped into the Voorlinden’s verdant context, calling on embedded body-memory and our potential for feeling’.

Director Suzanne Swarts: ‘Antony is one of those rare artists who has built up a timeless oeuvre with a universal visual language, yet very own signature. For four decades, he has been making sculptures that are dear to people from all over the world. For him, sculpture and the human body are the starting point for an endless cosmological investigation that concerns, touches and encourages us all to reflect.’

www.ftn-books.com has some still some great titles on Gormley available.

Michael Peel’s vivid, campaigning text/image works have made a significant contribution to UK visual culture. Through his work Peel sought to expose the forces of power and control, with all their mechanised horrors, injustices and resulting social disintegration. Never straying into dogma, his practice was rooted in a genuine concern for the ordinary and everyday lives of others.

Born in Singapore at the outbreak of the Second World War, Peel and his mother were forced to flee the invading Japanese army, becoming refugees in search of safety and sanctuary. His father, taken prisoner to work on the infamous Burma railway, never returned. The artist and teacher that emerged from this childhood trauma was one of humanity and warmth, whose practice projected a visceral and graphic representation of the social and political excesses endured.

Peel’s practice revolved around photography and printmaking; combining text excerpts and grainy imagery culled from television and print with dynamic, attention grabbing composition. His pivotal poster works series ‘Modern World’, shown simultaneously in galleries and flyposted on billboards, hoardings and lampposts, were part of a strategy to reach a popular audience. Photography was appropriate because it was easily understood, a ‘public, contemporary language’. Its multiple manufacture, through the more commercial processes of silkscreen, moved it away from any ‘objet d’art’ preciousness, placing it within an everyday.

His poster interventions had their antecedents and influences in the visual and conceptual languages of John Heartfield and Hannah Hoch along with the writings of Marshall McLuhan; the idealism of the post war period; the hedonism of 1960’s; the hardened realities of the political and social upheavals of the 1970’s to 90’s; and the dawn of the informational age. Later work explored ideas of chaos, uncertainty and insecurity.

Teaching was an important extension of Peel’s practice. His unique approach to a subject that had long been seen simply as a technical or craft based activity, helped redefine the role of print within artistic practice.

Peel was one of a generation of artists who thought of art as a mechanism for social change, and that artists were uniquely qualified to reveal the often hidden iniquities of contemporary society. This exhibition demonstrates that the work of Peel remains powerfully fresh and relevant, and will continue to be so while his childhood experiences are relived through new generations of the displaced and disenfranchised.The 1989 Watermans publication on his psoter art is now available at www.ftn-books.com

After Graduating from the California Institute of Arts, Oursler started to work primarily with video and installation.

He truly revolutionized certain aspects of projection by supressing the frame of the screen. Oursler uses different mediums such as video, film, photography, handmade objects, sculpture, computers, the web, and also elaborate soundtracks. Noise, image, and light are important devices composing the artist’s work. The visual sensations of the viewer are heightened as the artist ingenuously occupies the space with these projections (characters hidden under the stairs, projections of faces on clouds of smoke and trees in the middle of New York).

Oursler’s works seem like animate effigies in their own psychological space, often appearing to interact directly with the viewer’s sense of empathy. These installations are consistently disturbing and fascinating.

These confusing, enigmatic, and obsessive virtual characters deliver a message, and present a parable of miscommunication.

The artist manages to create a sensory universe that raises the question of human and non-human, and tries to reproduce the emotions of the human face onto a monstrous or inanimate object. Yet, there is no aggression in Oursler’s installations. They appear as puzzles that appeal to all our senses, and manage to awaken a certain tenderness and compassion for the human race. This aspect diverges from the Neo- Conceptualism or Post-Pop.

Among the artist’s best known works are: The Watching (presented in 1992 at Documenta 9, made of handmade soft-cloth figures combined with expressive faces animated by video projection); Judy (1993), which explored the relationship between multiple personality disorders and mass media; Get Away II, which featured a passive-aggressive projected figure wedged under a mattress confronting the viewer with blunt direct address; Eyes in 1996, and Climax in 2005.

Signature works have been Oursler’s talking lights, such as Streetlight (1997), his series of video sculptures of eyes with television screens reflected in the pupils, and ominous talking heads such as Composite Still Life (1999). An installation called Optics (1999) examines the polarity between dark and light in the history of the camera obscura.

In his website «TimeStream», Oursler proposed that architecture and moving image installation have been forever linked by the camera obscura, noting that cave dwellers observed the world as projections via peep holes. Oursler’s interest in the ephemeral history of the virtual image lead to largescale public projects and permanent installations by 2000.

The Public Art Fund and Artangel commissioned the Influence Machine in 2000. This installation marks the artist’s first major outdoor project and thematically traced the development of successive communication devices from the telegraph to the personal computer as a means of speaking with the dead. Oursler used smoke, trees and buildings as projection screens in Madison Square Park in New York and Soho Square in London. He then completed a number of permanent public projects in Barcelona, New Zealand, Arizona and «Braincast» at the Seattle Public Library. He is scheduled to complete a commission at the Frank Sinatra High School in Astoria, New York.

Oursler was part of the musical and performance group, Poetics, with fellow California Institute of the Arts friends Mike Kelley and John Miller. The artist created the background videos that played at David Bowie’s 50th birthday party concert in 1997, as well as the video to accompany Bowie’s single «Where Are We Now?», released in January 2013.

Oursler ‘s work has exhibited in many prestigious institutions including the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Documenta VIII and IX in Kassel, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh, Sculpture Projects in Munster, Museum Ludwig in Cologne, the Hirshhorn Museum, in Washington D.C., and Tate Liverpool.

www.ftn-books.com has a few Oursler titles available at this moment.

Just last week at Art Rotterdam , my wife told me that she liked the different ways textiles are used in Modern Art nowadays and she had encountered some that fascinated her. There were the works by Sheila Hicks and Mirjam Hagoort and ow I add to these the work by Karin van Dam

She is known for her installations composed with materials such as buffers for boats, ropes and insulating casing. At one time she even used entire pre fab polyester ponds which she hung in the medieval hall of the centre for contemporary arts De Vleeshal in Middelburg, The Netherlands. She sees her installations as spatial drawings, that the viewer is able to walk through, as it were. Currently she is CHURCHMASTER in Veere in which she has made an installation.

The three dimensional works are prepared in pencil drawings on a small format in which she often also integrates objects like rubber plugs, rope or wooden sticks. Urban structures, both above and below ground level, are a recurring theme in her work. To her the city is a living organism that continually develops and expands. Karin van Dam works highly intuitively, using a combination of materials that, together, develop into a new, coherent system.

www.ftn-books.com has now an early artist book by Karin van Dam available in which she shows a 3 dimensional sculpture in paper.

195 MILLION DOLLAR was paid for the Andy Warhol/ Marilyn. It is one of the iconic modern art works from the 20th century, but still…a ridiculous amount . This led me to a search on the internet and i found a nice report on the art market. Not a report on new trends , but far more inside information on the development of the value of art. The report sponsored by UBS bank and Art Basel gives insight in the mechanism of the ART MARKET. Click on the link to download the report.

One of the artists originally represented in the Netherlands by one of my favorit dutch galeries of all time….the now closed galerie Onrust. Droese fitted in this galerie with his abstract works. A pupil of Joseph Beuys he commented on society with his works. From 1970 to 1976 he studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy in the class of Peter Brüning, but worked mainly in the Beuys class. In his art, Droese deals in particular with questions of money, economics and economisation and because of this higly personal view on art he truly deserves a place among the greatest German artists of his time.

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

The best way to introduce Claudia Kölgen is to use a text I found on the internet page by Michael Gibbs.

Light, space, image, screen and language are the elements that form Claudia Kölgen’s artistic practice. Yet rather than dealing with these elements in a formalistic sense, she employs them in a poetic, almost abstract, metaphysical way, drawing attention to the specificity not of the medium but of the picture, the object, as well as the specific way these are perceived.

Her book objects are beautifully crafted, and extend our sense of what a book means – a sequence of identical pages in a closed form that invites an opening, a filigree of strands conducting the charge of meaning to a reader/viewer, a breath of air whispered between the leaves. Stéphane Mallarmé, who once compared the printed page to an elusive white butterfly would certainly have approved of Claudia Kölgen’s books. Mallarmé described the book as a ‘spiritual instrument’, but whereas he envisaged a Total Book containing ‘everything that exists’, Claudia Kölgen reduces the book to its essence. Her infra-red photograph of a still-life arrangement of open and closed books allows us to conceive of the book as a warm comforting object, as a body.The page of a book is analogous to a screen, so it should come as no surprise to learn that Claudia Kölgen has worked extensively with film and film installation. The first time I ever saw her work was at a group exhibition of film installations in a decrepit building on the Warmoesstraat in Amsterdam. Claudia’s work stood out for the simple economy of its means and its utter effectiveness. The piece was entitled ‘Choreographie der Bilder’ and consisted of two loop films of candle flames photographed in slow motion projected through a board (with a grid of circular holes cut out of it) onto a double screen cantilevered like the open cover of a book. The random, organic tongues of flame thus became transformed into a computer-like grid of dancing circular spots of light. In one cinematic jump we are carried from the primeval to the electronic age.



A similar breadth and economy is achieved in her previous film installation ‘Lighthouse’ in which a vertical beam of light is rotated from a central, beacon-like axis around the walls of the space, which includes a sheet of copper and a glass frame. At the same time a film is being projected, which we occasionally get glimpses of. A lighthouse usually projects beam of light into the distance – it is meant to be seen from afar, but Claudia Kölgen’s lighthouse is just that: a light house, an enclosed space whose internal contours and surfaces are made visible reflectively, as a sign of introversion. The continuously moving beam of light intersecting with the film being projected challenges the spectator’s sense of space as something static. The viewer’s gaze becomes mobilized, disoriented.

The interference of one space with another is also the theme of her film ‘Ricercar’. The title is a musical term meaning to start again anew, and this is interpreted by the cello music on the sound track. The film is a journey through an abandoned industrial building, but it is really two films in one, since the centre of the frame is occupied by another moving image taken from a second camera placed at a right angle to the first, so that what we see are two views literally interfering with one another in a continual, vertiginous process of change. What we are left with is a vision of the pure relativity of space. This is not the modernist, fractured space of cubism, but a completely conditioned, reductive sense of space – one that offers not progress but recurrence. And this is where the element of time comes in – the endless, repetitive time of the film loop, or the steady revolving of a tower, or the pace of walking. Time is not a simultaneity (as in the modernist vision) but an ordered, self-effacing sequence.
Kölgen’s film ‘Wende’ (Turn) epitomises the dualities and dialectics that inform her work. The undulations of a sandy beach are filmed in positive and negative and overlaid with enlarged typewritten letters. On the sound track we hear layers of random spoken words which gradually disintegrate into phonemes and consonants. Language becomes reduced to what Barthes refers to as the ‘grain’ of the voice/text, a polysemy without origin or end.

The grid of circular holes used in her film installation recurs in her recent photoworks. In one piece, circular pieces of colour film negatives are sandwiched between two sheets of perspex and lit from behind – we cannot make out what is depicted; the images remain imaginary, waiting as it were to be realized through the action of light and chemicals. Kölgen’s screens are at once opaque and transparent – their grid structure makes them indices of infinity, like so many zeros, but we are reminded too of the mental screen that each of us possesses which filters everything that we perceive. Whether we call this screen rationality or the unconscious, it is always resisted by the immediacy of lived experience and by the knowledge (or at least the suspicion) that our perceptions are more than just fleeting shadows on the walls of a cave.



Photographs are traces of experience, not the experience itself; their logic is that of an absent presence, of what Barthes calls a ‘having-been-there’. Yet the photograph is also a type of icon, a model of that which is represented. As André Bazin has written, ‘The photographic image is the object itself, the object freed from the conditions of time and space that govern it. No matter how fuzzy, distorted, or discoloured, no matter how lacking in documentary value the image may be, it shares, by virtue of the very process of its becoming, the being of the model of which it is the reproduction; it is the model.’
The images that appear in Kölgen’s photoworks – clouds, a room, a figure on a beach – are not documents; they need no captions to explain them. They are models within a larger model having to do with seeing and not seeing. Natural light is combined with artificial light, reality with construction. We are no longer certain of what we see, since we are made conscious of the very determinants of seeing – the screen separating blindness and insight, the spectacle and the spectator.

Michael Gibbs
February 1989

Now that she is introduced properly I like you to know that I have added 2 important publications by Kölgen. The one that stands out is the HEFTIG ALS EEN STORMWIND. Published in an edition of 10 copies. Each numbered and signed. Package contains 20 cigarettes all printed with different texts by Claudi Kölgen , each package is signed and numbered

available at www.ftn-books.com

Readers of this blog know of my admiration for the Galerie Denise Rene. In all past decades they were the first to present Avant Garde artists and in the sixties they were one of the first to show ZERO artists and their works. One of these shows was the legendary UECKER exhibition in 1968. The catalogue is like a “ghost” catalogue since it is rarely seen or offered, but now I have a copy for sale. This is certainly not cheap , but extremely scarce and a solid investment. available at www.ftn-books.com

There are a few iconic travel posters that always surface when people are decorating their homes. Many by Cassandre. But the one I am selling now at www.ftn-books.com is one of my personal favorites.

This one is from a painting by Kees van Dongen who depicted the Le Bar du Soleit at the Deauville beach. It has everything. Great art, atmosphere and really wants you to go there and have a drink on the beach.

artist : Kees van Dongen

Title : France, Deauville /Bar du Soleil

published: 1960, Commissariat general au tourisme

Text / Language: french

Measurements: 99 x 62,2 cm. cm .

Condition: B++

scarce 

Frank Van den Broeck’s (1950) drawings and paintings have a characteristic and unmistakable handwriting. In mobile lines he draws performances that are concrete but ambiguous. The hovering often returns in Van den Broeck’s work, objects seem to be in a state of transition, on the way to another place or dimension. The artist’s universe is often the subject of his work.

Motives such as the painter’s palette and the open book, of which the butterfly is a derivative, play an important role in the drawings. Other representations are more threatening with ghostly creatures and mask-like faces that suddenly appear. There is always a sense of transition present, the objects and figures seem to refer to an underlying reality.

Both the above publications are available at www.ftn-books.com