For those who want a crash course in Modern Art it is sufficient to study the english/ Japanese catalogue RIPPLE ACROSS THE WATER . A publication with over 350 pages, published on the occasion of the exhibition with the same name in 1995. Some names: Francis Bacon, Jan Fabre, Marlene Dumas, de Cordier, Nauman, Pistoletto etc……..
Not only very worth collecting, but also published as an artist book. This makes the publication an absolute ” must have ” for those that take an interest in Modern Art of the last 50 years.
Undoubtedly Marlene Dumas has proven to be one of the leading artists from last and this century. Always surprising original and highly recognizable. I always have admired her and i am still adding publications on her to my inventory. Last addition is the exhibition catalogue for the Cabinet at the Centre Pompidou in 2002. Beautiful and sparkling publication ands now available at http://www.ftn-books.com.
There is a reason for using the above photograph in which Marlene Dumas stands next to Rene Daniëls. The iconic book for her first major museum exhibition was published by the van Abbemuseum and dedicated to René Daniëls, who had a cerebral haemorrhage in 1987. They boht attended Ateliers ’63 , but did not study in the same period, but after their studies they met at several exhibitions in which they were presented as young promissing artists from the Ateliers ’63.
After they met at the Stedelijk Museum exhibition they became friends and had several (group) exhibitions together.
With the painting “De gele vingers van de kunstenaar”, she had already begun to establish herself as a promising young artist. Born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953, she had moved to the Netherlands to study at the independent art school Ateliers ’63 in Haarlem, near Amsterdam, from 1976 to 1978. Founded in 1963, the institute is now known as De Ateliers and located in Amsterdam. In 1978, at merely 25 years of age, Dumas exhibited her work for the first time as part of the group exhibition Atelier 15 (10 Young Artists) at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and in 1982 participated in Documenta 7.
Painted in 1985, De gele vingers van de kunstenaar belongs to the breakthrough body of work The Eyes of the Night Creatures that Dumas created after a five-year hiatus from painting, during which time she had primarily created works on paper. While her drawings oeuvre had been already been subject to her first museum solo exhibition at the Centraal Museum Utrecht in 1984, the debut of this series at Galerie Paul Andriesse in Amsterdam in 1985 marked the triumphant return to painting and figuration in Dumas’ practice and signaled the emergence of what would become one of the most daring and influential figurative contemporary painters.
Invitation for Galerie Paul Andriesse, Marlene Dumas, The Eyes of the Night Creatures, 1985
Many of the works from the series now reside in public collections, including the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Museum voor Moderne Kunst, Arnhem, the Art Institute of Chicago and the Centraal Museum Utrecht.
Installation view of The Eyes of the Night Creatures series in Marlene Dumas, Image as Burden, Tate Modern, London, 2015
It is important to remember that the art world in Amsterdam at the time was very small, with only two major contemporary art galleries and many of the artists, gallerists, critics and curators knowing each other very well. Recalling the great lineage of French Impressionist bourgeois café scenes, De gele vingers van de kunstenaar captures a late night art world gathering of friends that smoke, drink and talk.
The diptych is indeed based on photographs that Dumas took during nights out with her friends in Amsterdam. On the left, eminent artist and close friend René Daniëls is depicted holding a cigarette with yellow fingers, evocative of fresh paint, but also the staining that occurs from extensive smoking — hence the corresponding title.
De gele vingers van de kunstenaar speaks to a particular moment in time in which Dumas and René Daniëls were on the rise as the most promising young painters in the Netherlands. While Dumas and Daniëls did not overlap in their studies at Ateliers ’63, they had notably been included in the 1978 Stedelijk Museum group exhibition Atelier 15 (10 Young Artists).
The catalogue MISS INTERPRETED which is now available at www.ftn-books.com honours this friendship and the appreciation of Daniels his art by Marlene Dumas.
Another blog on Dumas….. an artist i admire very much and who’s name is now settled in the art world as one of the great living contemporay artists. It is important these last few words….. This last sentence shows the appreciation of Dumas worldwide, but still there are institutions like eBay, Pinterest, Facebook and Instagram that are so shortsighted and puritan that they can not recognize a great work of art because it shows some nudity. It is allowed to say and write the most horrible things and even show complete massacres on these sites but a great work of art is removed because it shows a nipple or a womans breast. Unfair for the artist and it shows the puritan nature of those who manage the greatest sites and social network on this earth. So specially for those of you who like myself still admire Marlene Dumas and her great watercolours , here are some examples from her MD publication which was made for her travelling exhibition and showed at MUHKA, Henie Onstad and the Camden Art center. The book is available at http://www.ftn-books.com and lets please keep an open mind on nudity in photographs and paintings.
We have met, but mr.van ‘t Slot does not remember and neither do i have any remembrance of our meeting, because it was at the beginning of my career with the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and i was a rookie in the art world. Exhibitions were held with promising artists and John van ‘t Slot was one them. Gerrit Jan de Rook curated the cycle of exhibitions called KEUS VAN DE KUNSTENAAR. Three of these were held in the early eighties with artists like Maarten Ploeg, Piet Dieleman, Panamarenko, Piet Dirkx and of course John van ‘t Slot. My first impression…. his works looked strange with horses and figures in a landscape , but over the years they grow upon you and eventually you admire these paintings and in the end i was fortunate to finally acquire a large early painting for FTN art which is now up for sale.
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Van ‘t Slot is part of a mouvement called in the Netherlands the NIEUWE WILDEN. The same as their counterparts in Germany DIE NEUE WILDEN. In the eighties he was one of the artists that emerged and rose above others. Together with Rene Daniels and Marlene Dumas he was one of the chosen artists for the exhibition STOP MAKING SENSE, which showed the highlights in painting in the eighties and was presented in the Dordrechts Museum
Rightfully world famous now. An excellent photographer and film maker. I am less enthusiastic about his abilities as a designer, but stil his photographs deserve some extra attention by this blog on art. Because these are not only great photographs, but they also reflect music and their performers through the last 4 decades. Bowie, Jagger, Cobain, Davis and of course U2, name them all and all of them have been before the lens of Anton Corbijn.
( all photographs by Anton Corbijn )
Black and white being his favorite way to portray these great artists. As of late he made some movies during the last decade ( the American and A Most wanted man) However, he made his feature film debut with Control, a film about the life of Joy Division frontman Ian Curtis. It premiered to rave reviews at the Cannes Film Festival on 17 May 2007. Curtis was a personal friend and it shows in the respectful way he portrayed the singer of Joy Divisison. Because his acquired celebrity status as a photographer, Corbijn has had retrospective exhibitions all over the world and 2 years ago there was a large retrospective on Corbijn in the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag. Since a few years Corbijn took up the art of design. Personally i do not think he is a strong designer, but this is my personal opinion on his designs. There is a new logo by the Municipality of DEN HAAG which was designed by Corbijn and judge for your self.
Better focus on his photographs….they are very personal, intriguing portraits and they are great!
for some Corbijn titles visit www.ftn-books.com ( stripping girls is made together with Marlene Dumas)
Exceptional talent, a great dutch artist and one of the greats in Dutch Modern Art. Andriesse died at the age of 35 in 1993 and left us some very impressive works of art. His most important themes were flowers and skulls. The equivalent for him of life and death. Admirer of Salvador Dali, educated at the Ateliers 63, he soon became one of the most talented young artists in the Netherlands. He did not want to paint abstract paintings and chose for realism instead. Flowers and skulls being the centre of his works but also, lobsters, shells and apes. All his subjects were related to nature around us and he made wonderful paintings out of them. A large archive can be found on the internet at http://www.erikandriesse.nl
One of his techniques was to paint animals and use dead models to paint/draw them as accurately as possible. There is a nice video on YouTube in which Marc Mulders and Erik Andriesse discuss this technique and some footage is shown while Erik is at work. A tremendous artist of whom some books are available at www.ftn-books.com
On the Andriesse site there is a nice text by Marlene Dumas in which she describes the works by Andriesse and concludes that not all of his works are naturalistic:
Nightmares of Beauty
Once upon a time there lived a boy called Erik Andriesse, who distinguished himself from the passionless people around him by glowing in the dark. Now the country he lived in was a quite dark. Artists however would talk about the extraordinary light in that country.
During the 80’s all the artists were interested in the artificiality of life. A picture of a flower was much more interesting than the flower itself. Very few people still believed that everything that existed was part of nature itself. People lived in cities. Artists lived in their studios. Places filled with books, bottles and talk about art and artists and what was relevant and what was not.
And they forgot to love…
But Erik was aware of the fire that eats at the heart, while the clock ticks at night. The shortage of time, the repetitive movements of desire, the energy of the body watched by death. Flowers larger than life, dreams larger than life.
Nightmares of beauty.
He was ignored by the calculators, whose blood did not rise, when they saw his exotic death-dances on paper, but he continued on his own impatient way. Erik is not a conceptual artist. Erik is not an associative artist. He is not interested in displaying the cultural-historical aspects of his subject-matter. But Erik is also not the naturalist he seems to be. He even shows similarities (at times) to Spiderman, the comic-strip hero. Erik is not a cultural barbarian or a primitive. He reflects on the good, the bad and the ugly of the artworld and the synthetic problems of painting.
Followers of this blog must know by now that i admire Marlene Dumas and whenever there is a chance i can buy her books, i will do so. I know by now, for certain that i have one of the largest inventories of her books available with many special and hard to find publications. Last week i published in my store a title which might be the very best title available on Marlene Dumas. It is the MEASURING YOUR OWN GRAVE book published by the MOCA and distributed by DAP. A large heavy book , excellent printing quality and one of the best overviews of over 30 years of her works. A highly recommended title available at www.ftn-books.com
It has been already almost 3 years that Jan Hoet died, but since his death no one has taken his place. He was truly innovative with his exhibitions and next to Rudi Fuchs , they probably were the best from their generation of curators of Contemporary Art.
His international reputation was first established by “Chambres d’Amis,” an innovative exhibition he organized in Ghent in 1986. In that show, about 50 American and European artists were invited to create works for 50 private homes in Ghent, which were then opened to the public for several weeks. Followed a few years later by Open Mind and his Documenta IX in which he performed as a boxer established his name as one of the very best in his field. His last great project was over the edges. 4 giant exhibitions spread over 2 decades made him one of the absolute best.
The Museum in Gent , his long lasting love SMAK, which he served as a curator and director from 1975 until 2003 was his laboratory for the greater projects he organized outside this Museum rooms. http://www.ftn-books.com is fortunate to have some very nice titles of his exhibitions. including the Chambres d’Amis which is getting scarce these days.
This time a blog on one single item. The Lava-Edge, according to me this is the very first monographic publication by Marlene Dumas ever published. There are only 2 publications that i know of which are 1 year older, but these are publications with group exhibitions in which Marlene Dumas featured. So this is really special and what is more…. it was published in an extremely small edition of only 250 copies by Museum Fodor / Amsterdam in 1983. The publication was part of a cardboard box containing publications by : Ansuya Blom, Marlene Dumas, Erik Andriesse, Frank van den Broeck, Rene Daniels, Jean Paul Franssens, Peer Veneman, Henk Visch and Martin van Vreden. This box was published together with another box with Icelandic artists on the occasion of an exchange exhibition “Reykjavik- Amsterdam, ter weerszijden van de Meridiaan” (1983).
The Lava- Edge is the contribution by Marlene Dumas. A true artist book and as said probably the first ever monographic publication.
Oblong sized and containing 28 pages filled with text, illustrations and photographs. The text is partly in South African and partly in English. This book is extremely rare and as far as i know ,i am the only book seller who is offering this publication at the moment and by some coincedence i have 2 copies available. One as a single copy of the Lava-Edge and one in the complete box with all the other artists. To give a good impression of the item i took some extra photo’s to show the importance of this publication and since i have an extra copy there is a 10% discount for the first who orders it. use: lavaedge10 for the discount.
Artist/ Author: Oliver Boberg
Title : Memorial
Publisher: Oliver Boberg
Measurements: Frame measures 51 x 42 cm. original C print is 35 x 25 cm.
Condition: mint
signed by Oliver Boberg in pen and numbered 14/20 from an edition of 20
