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John Szarkowski (1925-2007)

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Perhaps Szarkowski was more know for being curator at MOMA then for being one of the greatest photographers from last century.  Here is part of the text the Guardian place shortly after he had passed away.

Szarkowski was a good photographer, a great critic and an extraordinary curator. One could argue that he was the single most important force in American post-war photography.

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Like all good critics and curators, Szarkowski was both visionary and catalyst. When he succeeded the esteemed photographer Edward Steichen as director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1962, he was just 36, and must have been acutely aware of the long shadow cast by his predecessor. Steichen had curated the monumental group exhibition, The Family of Man, at Moma in 1955, which he described as ‘the culmination of his career”. Featuring 503 images by 273 photographers, famous and unknown, it had aimed to show the universality of human experience: death, love, childhood. The show had drawn huge crowds to the gallery and then toured the world, attracting an estimated 9 million viewers.

It was, as Steichen had no doubt intended, a hard act to follow. “We were different people”, Szarkowski later said, “with different talents, characters, limitations, histories, problems and axes to grind. We held the same job at very different times, which means that it was not really the same job.”

More revealingly, Szarkowski also said that Steichen and his predecessor, Beaumont Newhall, “consciously or otherwise, felt more compelled than I to be advocates for photography, whereas I – largely because of their work – could assume a more analytic, less apostolic attitude.” That difference in approach would prove to be a crucial one, and it underpinned a new photographic aesthetic that continues to shape our view of the world to this day.

When Szarkowski took over at Moma, there was not a single commercial gallery exhibiting photography in New York and, despite Steichen and Newhall’s pioneering work, the form had still not been accepted by most curators or critics. Szarkowski changed all that. He was the right person in the right place at the right time: a forward thinker who was given control of a major art institution at a moment when his democratic vision chimed with the rapidly changing cultural tastes of the time.

Szarkowski insisted on the democracy of the image, whether it be a formally composed Ansel Adams landscape, a snatched shot that caught the frenetic cut-and-thrust of a modern city or a vernacular subject like a road sign or a parking lot. “A skillful photographer can photograph anything well,” he once insisted.

In his still-challenging book, The Photographer’s Eye (1964), Szarkowski included snapshots alongside images by great photographers, and argued – brilliantly – that photography differed from any other art form because its history had been “less a journey than a growth”. “Its movement has not been linear and consecutive but centrifugal,” he suggested. “Photography, and our understanding of it, has spread from a centre; it has, by infusion, penetrated our consciousness. Like an organism, photography was born whole. It is in our progressive discovery of it that its history lies.”

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www.ftn-books.com has the Szarkowski /Josef Albers Museum available

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Nicholas Nixon (1947)

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I specially went to Bottrop to see the Nixon series on the Brown sisters in 2004 and i was not disappointed ( poster available at www.ftn-books.com).

Nicholas Nixon takes intimate, black-and-white photographs of children, the elderly and infirm, and his own family (as well as cityscapes). Best known for his series “The Brown Sisters”, Nixon began taking portraits of his wife, Bebe, and her three sisters in 1975, and has continued to photograph them annually since.

 

left  the Brown Sisters in 1980 , right the Sisters in 2019

Influenced by the photography of Walker Evans, Edward Weston, and Alfred Stieglitz, among others, Nixon works with a large-format camera; “For me the print is what matters most. Generally the biggest possible negative has the most clarity, presence, and believability,” he has said. Nixon’s images, which include close-up self-portraits of the artist’s bearded face, manifest the humanistic potential of photography, offering moments of tenderness between individuals, and meticulously capturing the minute details of his subjects.

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Kurt Kocherscheidt (1943-1992)

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Kurt Kocherscheidt was born on the 6th of July 1943 in Klagenfurt, Austria to Friedrich and Elisabeth Mayer. After the divorce of his parents in 1946 and the move of his father back to Germany, the most formative person in his youth became his grandfather August Mayer (1885–1958) whose deep friendship with Hugo Adolf Bernatzik, a famous ethnographer and explorer, awakened Kocherscheidt’s interest in geography, zoology and art in general.

In 1961, after completion of his school years in Klagenfurt and Friesach (his mother’s hometown), Kocherscheidt moved to Vienna to study painting at the Academy of Fine Arts under Professor Sergius Pauser. As a way of supplementing his income, during the summers he would restore gothic frescos, in his words: “the thought of financial stability” led him to move to Zagreb (then Yugoslavia, now Croatia) for two years (1963–1964) to study mural painting under professor Ivo Rezek at the Akademija Likovnih Umjetnosti, before returning to Vienna and completing his academic studies in 1965.  In 1967 he married and divorced his long-time partner Andjelka Feuer.

In 1968 Kocherscheidt became a founding member of the artist group “Wirklichkeiten” (Realities). At a moment when the prevailing trend in art leaned towards conceptual art, these artists were bound by their interest in traditional modes of production, such as painting and drawing, and the representational qualities they favored. During this period, Kocherscheidt was predominantly painting highly saturated imagined landscapes that included both homages to real horticulture and surreal futuristic elements rendered in a palette that recalled the Fauves. The group included several painters who were of his generation and active in Vienna at the time, including: Wolfgang Herzig, Franz Ringel, Robert Zeppel-Sperl, Martha Jungwirth (who joined in 1969), and Peter Pongratz. The Kocherscheidt exhibition pposter for the JOsef Albersmuseum is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Tobias Pils (1971)

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I entered the Josef Albers Museum 3 months ago, crossed the treshold and there it was ….on the left at 20 meters, large and totally in black and white…..one of the most impressive paintings i had seen in years. This is how i learned about Tobias Pils. I dit not know of the artist before, but his works have an abstract and graphic quality i had not seen before.

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Working within a palette of blacks and whites and the range of grays that can be made from them, he creates mixed media paintings full of abstract and representational elements. These elements are often arranged so that they flow from one to the next seemingly of their own accord, obeying the dictates of a painterly logic that generates meaning through the accumulation of many small moments. As such, Pils’s works are endlessly captivating as arrangements of textures, flows, and material invention—in a sense, as symphonic, non-objective compositions, even when their mythological content and primal imagery tempt narrative readings. This syncretic approach reflects a mind that revels in contradictions, even as it seeks to suture together contrasting passages with a subtle and virtuosic array of mark-making strategies that are alternately bold, incisive, impressionistic, and completely open to the innate properties of paint medium and support. Pils works at a variety of scales and in different contexts, responding to the urgency of his own intuition and the external constraints of architectural and institutional settings with equal fluency. In each of these forums, he locates the places where the vast and the intimate meet, both in the physical world and the human psyche alike. The Tobias Pils poster for his Josef Albers MUseum exhibition is available at www.ftn-books.com

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Jerry Zeniuk (1945)

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The first thing that i thought when i saw the poster for the Jerry Zeniuk exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum was…..it looks like a large Piet Dirkx. Of course i know the works by Piet Dirkx very well and there are quite some similarities between them . They both prefer large sizes. Zeniuk even larger ones. And the use of color is almost the same.

on the left Jerry Zeniuk on the right Piet Dirkx

Zeniuk follows in the tradition of American art after 1950 with his largeformat works. The wall-filling aspect of his painting does not however seek to redefine real space; it retains its pictorial identity, which allows the painter as well as the viewer to be present in the painting. “To be present, mentally, emotionally, physically” – this was Zeniuk’s motivation as well as his challenge when creating a painting measuring four by eight meters, as he did in 2001 in Mainz, or five by five meters in Munich in 2013. These two works, which act like brackets in relation to the rest of Zeniuk’s oeuvre, are the focus of the current presentation. The oil paintings on canvas were created without the aid of a preliminary sketch. The choice and combination of colors, the movement involved in the application of paint, and the artist’s wealth of experience alone gave rise to these authentic “depictions.” Jerry Zeniuk (b. 1945 in Bardowick near Lüneburg) is one of the foremost representatives of so-called “elementary” or “essential” painting.

www.ftn-books.com has the Josef Albers Museum (signed) poster available.

For more information on the Piet Dirkx paintings please inquire since ftn art has these together with other Piet Dirkx paintings for sale.

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Carol Huebner-Venezia (1947)

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Carol Heubner-Venezia is represented by  Galerie Heike Curtze, one of the leading galeries in the world, they recognized the qualities of this photographer from the early Nineties until now. Her series of BOXER photographs has become iconic and her works can now be found in all important public photography collections.

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Roughly speaking, Carol Hübner-Venezia shows in her works the fast passing moments of everyday life. For example, since the early 90s Carol Huebner-Venezia has been photographing in Gleason’s Gym (New York). In the oldest and most famous boxing stable in the world, heavyweights such as Muhammed Ali, Joe Frazier, George Foreman, Jake la Motta and Mike Tyson once trained. But Carol Huebner-Venezia shows neither prominent boxing stars nor spectacular wrestling matches. 
Instead, her large-format works reflect the atmosphere of the milieu, they provide insight into training situations and tell of the athletes’ self-image.

In her beach series, for example, her photos show various beaches. In this series, the works depict everyday life on the beach in New Jersey. In front of us, infinite sand expanses open up, interwoven with traces and giving us a sense of loneliness.

http://www.ftn-books.com has the Carol Heubner-Venezia poster for her Josef Albers Museum exhibition available.

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Boris Kleint (1903-1996)

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He was born in 1903 in Masmünster , Alsace . After graduating from high school in Baden-Baden (1921), he studied psychology , philosophy , medicine , languages ​​and art studies at the universities in Heidelberg , Leipzig , Berlin and Würzburg from 1921 to 1925 . In 1925 he received his doctorate in Frankfurt in the subject of psychology [1] and was there at the Psychological Institute assistant to Max Wertheimer , the founder of Gestalt theory . From 1933 he studied in Berlin Painting by the Swiss painter and art teacher Johannes Itten , whose assistant he became in 1933. In 1936 Kleint emigrated to Luxembourg .

Between 1936 and 1942 he traveled from there to Walter Gropius in London and to Kandinsky and Picasso in Paris , later a second trip to Kandinsky followed. After the liberation of the Grand Duchy by Allied troops (1944) he was interned in the Luxembourg state prison “Im Grund” for four weeks.

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In 1946 Kleint received an appointment at the State School for Art and Crafts in Saarbrücken, where he took over the master class for painting and at the same time set up a “basic teaching” based on the Itten preliminary course ( Bauhaus ), which he passed on to his assistant Oskar Holweck after a few years passed on. In 1953 he took over the chairmanship of the Saarland Artists Association. In 1954 he was appointed professor and four years later a visiting professorship at the Technical University of Aachen . In 1957, Kleint and like-minded people founded the artists’ association “ neue gruppe saar ”. In 1969 his main work “Bildlehre” appeared, which became decisive for later generations of students and in several languages, including insJapanese , has been translated.

Kleint’s oeuvre covers a broad spectrum and is stylistically diverse. Both constructive – concrete elements and informal tendencies can be found in the work . According to his own statement, his artistic goal was a “visual universality” to which he subordinated the finding of a personal style.

In 1994 Klein received a Retrospective exhibition at the Josef Albers Museum. He signed a few of the exhibition posters of which one is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Jonas Weichsel (1982)

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Weichsel is without doubt one of the youngest artists that had a one man show at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop and….deservedly. His works have a minimalist quality and are bright filled with color. Just see his show and it makes you comfortable and happy at the same time. Thre is nothing to distract….just the composition.

He creates minimalist paintings of uncanny precision and impalpability, which upon closer inspection translate into sensuous, lived experiences. Early on, Weichsel developed his unique analytical and systematic painting technique, which he continues to pursue often combining digital and plotting techniques with hand-painted elements to explore the possibilities and limits of painting and the boundaries between immateriality and a tangible, material presence. His paintings inherit a deceptive simplicity and unfold their full power only in the contemplation of the original.

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Jonas Weichsel, born 1982 in Darmstadt, Germany, first studied in Mainz and Düsseldorf before completing his Meisterschüler with Judith Hopf at Städelschule Frankfurt. In 2016, he was awarded a residency at the Villa Romana in Florence, Italy. In 2012, he won the Karl Schmidt-Rottluff Stipendium after having been awarded the Dies Academicus—the Prize of the Johannes Gutenberg-Universität Mainz—alongside a scholarship from the Studienstiftung des Deutschen Volkes in 2009. Recent solo exhibitions include the Joseph Albers Museum, Bottrop (2018), Museum Wiesbaden (2016), and Deutsche Bundesbank, Frankfurt a.M. (2013). Important group exhibitions include the Museum of Modern Art, Frankfurt (2018; 2017; 2011), Kölnischer Kunstverein, Cologne (2017), Kunstverein Braunschweig (2016), Kunsthalle Düsseldorf (2016), Villa Romana, Florence, Italy (2016), Frankfurter Kunstverein (2015), Kunsthalle Wiesbaden (2015), Kunsthalle Mainz (2015; 2010), Kunstraum Bethanien, Berlin (2015), Salondergegenwart, Hamburg (2013), Kunstmuseum Wiesbaden (2012), Heidelberger Kunstverein (2011), Wilhelm Hack Museum (2010), and Nassauischer Kunstverein, Wiesbaden (2010). Jonas Weichsel lives and works in Frankfurt a.M.

The Josef Albers Museum poster is now available at www.ftn-books.com

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Joachim Brohm (1955)

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I never had seen his photographs. The first time was when i encountered work by Brohm at the Josef Albers Museum in Bottrop ( poster available at www,ftn-books.com). I was impressed mand saw similarities with dutch 17th century painter Hendrik Avercamp.

Joachim Brohm was one of the first photographers in Germany to take pictures exclusively in color starting in the late 1970s. “Color lent my pictures credibility in the documentary sense,” he explains, defining at the same time his artistic credo. His approach went against the trend at the time in that it did not exhaust all of the possibilities of color photography: Joachim Brohm challenged omnipresent advertising aesthetics with his photographic naturalism, staged productions with documentation, picture effects with austerity, vibrant, high-contrast colors with his muted tones. As a student, he met with incomprehension from his professors, but photographic role models such as Stephen Shore and Lewis Baltz, who would go on to enjoy world fame, encouraged him to continue on his chosen path. “The Americans presented seemingly trivial scenes, content and context appeared to be missing – many people were unable to make any sense of it.”

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Joachim Brohm brought this approach to a higher level: He combined mostly deserted landscape scenes with his interest in social interaction, turning his photographs into small-scale studies of society. They show how people change the landscape – and how the landscape changes people. He took his photographs of the Ruhr region at a time when theme parks and artificial lakes were being built to help cast off the image of a desolate mining region. Joachim Brohm shows this transition from work to leisure which accompanies the transformation from rural to urban from the perspective of a neutral observer. He sends the viewer on a mystery tour: “I wanted to show people in an environment undergoing change: What do they look like, what are they doing, what activities stand out?”

Joachim Brohm reveals structures in the landscape that would otherwise remain hidden. The camera’s elevated position, which is characteristic of many of his photographs, reinforces the impression of photographic surveillance which he himself describes as “all over”. The absence of a clear focus, and a depth of field that covers the entire image, mean that the individual scenes merge to form a situational snapshot. “The whole picture is the motif – the viewer can choose his or her focal point.” In this way, Joachim Brohm draws our attention to the big picture – with an excellent eye for detail.

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Fred Sandback (1943-2003)

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A very special Minimal artist definitely is Fred Sandback.

Fred Sandback would stretch lengths of colored yarn taut in a space to make people experience it differently, uniquely, unexpectedly. His ingeniously simple sculptures had no weight or mass, no inside or out.

He described is work eloquently in his booklet A Children’s Guide to Seeing made to accompany his 1989 exhibition of yarn sculptures at the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum. His words for kids provide illumination for adults:
We all need a place for play, whether it’s jump rope, baseball, or making a sculpture. I’m lucky enough to have the whole Contemporary Arts Museum in which to build my sculptures that are made out of knitting yarn.

I need a big space like this because I mean my sculptures to take space and make it into a place—a place that people will move around in and be in.

Knitting yarn is great for making the proportions, intervals, and shapes that build the places I want to see and to be in. It’s like a box of colored pencils, only I can use it to make a three-dimensional sculpture instead of making a drawing on paper.

My knitting-yarn sculpture is a somewhat distant cousin to some other string games. Maybe the one that uses the most space is kite flying. But the one that is the oldest, and the most universal, is cat’s cradle. Indians, Eskimos, Bushmen, and many other cultures around the world have had games like cat’s cradle since before anyone can remember.

Often cat’s cradle is about making a little place—just for yourself, or to share with someone. If you don’t know any of the moves, you can probably learn some from a friend, a relative, or from your mom or dad, if they remember them.

If you ask the attendant here in the Museum now, he or she will give you some yarn to use while you are here and to take home. Your fingers might do some thinking while you wander around and look at my sculptures.

And here are a few cat’s cradle ideas.

Cat’s cradle is nice because you can put it in your pocket when you’re busy with something else, and take it out again when you’re not. Although, as you can see, it’s not so hard to build big things like my sculpture. All it takes is a ball of string. If you were feeling a little adventurous, you could even wrap up your whole house.

http://www.ftn-books is fortunate to have some nice Sandback items available

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