Tag: london

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Agnieszka Brzeżańska (1972)

Born in Gdańsk in 1972, she pursued her studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in both Gdańsk and Warsaw under the tutelage of acclaimed painter Stefan Gierowski, as well as at Tokyo National University of Fine Art and Music through the Japanese Government Scholarship. Her oeuvre encompasses painting, drawing, photography, film, ceramics, and other media. Brzeżańska delves into diverse realms of knowledge, ranging from physics and philosophy to marginalized systems of cognition ignored by modern science, such as alchemy, parapsychology, esotericism, indigenous knowledge, and matriarchal traditions. Since 2016, she has co-organized Flow/Przepływ, an artistic residency on the Vistula River, with Ewa Cieplewska. She collaborates with BWA Gallery in Warsaw and NANZUKA in Tokyo.

www.ftn-books.com has the 2013 Marlborough publication available.

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10 great and Iconic buildings, no. 7

This list is invented to make some quick and easy blogs for this month filled with festivities. I chose the buildings because i think they belong to the most important from all buildings realized in the last 100 years.

So here is no.7. the ISOKON building

Isokon Flats, also known as Lawn Road Flats and the Isokon building, on Lawn Road in the Belsize Park district of the London Borough of Camden, is a reinforced concrete block of 36 flats (originally 32), designed by Canadian engineer Wells Coates for Molly and Jack Pritchard

Just look at the picture and try to realize that these apartments were designed over 80 years ago….. a true classic

www.ftn-books.com has many titles availabel on classic and modern architecture

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Will Alsop (1947-2018)

 

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Here is the text that can be found on the pages of the agency of the late  Will Alsop. It is one of the architects from outside the Netherlands who designed several projects over the decades in the Netherlands. This is how i learned to appreciate the projects by Alsop.

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The late Prof. Will Alsop OBE RA was a prominent architect, artist and educator who established aLL Design in 2011. He was awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize for Peckham Library, London and the first RIBA Worldwide Award for The Sharp Centre for Design (OCADU), Toronto, amongst numerous other prestigious accolades for a multitude of projects. His work encompassed all sectors of architecture including urban and landscape design and planning. His studio practice incorporated fine art painting, writing and modelmaking.

Will’s core values were innovation, expression and originality with an emphasis on enjoyment. He worked on a vast array of projects and in all scales; from a bandstand in London to the French Government HQ in Marseille ‘Le Grand Bleu’ via masterplanning, urban design, landscape architecture, interior and product design. He hosted numerous international workshops and lectures.

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His interaction with and involvement of people both within and outside the arts led to design that challenges architectural norms. His practice, aLL Design, was founded principally to ‘make life better’ – the philosophy extends from the design of individual buildings to embrace broader principles of urbanism and city development and uses painting, writing, consultation and workshops to further understanding of design.

Will sat on the architectural advisory boards for Wandsworth and Kensington & Chelsea Councils. He was Professor of TU Vienna and Professor of Architecture at Canterbury School of Architecture, UCA.

His involvement with the Royal Academy of Arts included inclusive education programmes and his model of ‘Heliport Heights’ won the Turkish Ceramics Grand Award for Architecture in the RA Summer Exhibition, 2016 for the ‘most outstanding work of architecture.’ The judges were Ece Ceylan Baba; Kate Goodwin; Vicky Richardson and Ian Ritchie.

Will specialised in large-scale masterplans and regeneration projects for boroughs and districts in Almere, Rotterdam, Groningen, Berlin, Manchester, London, Middlesbrough, and Barnsley, for which he won the 2003 Architects’ Journal Award for Architecture. Latterly he designed part of the regeneration of Kew Gate district for the London Borough of Hounslow; developing schemes for Vauxhall’s regeneration and worked internationally in China, Canada and Europe.

Prior to his death in May 2018, Will was also designing a bandstand for a London Park and working with a Gloucestershire farmer to create an urban farm in South East London. Many of Alsop’s designs, such as the Glenwood Power Plant in Yonkers, New York; OCADU, Toronto, Gao Yang International Cruise Terminal, Shanghai and the HQ of the French government in Marseilles have become icons for their cities, encouraging and increasing tourism and establishing Will as a visionary in the field of architecture.

www.ftn-books.com has some publications on Alsop available at this moment

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Peter Lanyon (1918-1964)

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I have made it myself easy this time. The following text was found on the internet. I searched but this painter is rather obscure and not much information can be found on him. I thought Peter Lanyon interesting enough to look for some more information, because his works in his GIMPEL FILS looks promissing ( available at http://www.ftn-books.com). I found some info, but many pictures ( Tate collection ao)

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(8 February 1918 – 31 August 1964) was a Cornish painter of landscapes leaning heavily towards abstraction. Lanyon was one of the most important artists to emerge in post-war Britain. Despite his early death at the age of forty-six he achieved a body of work that is amongst the most original and important reappraisals of modernism in painting to be found anywhere. Combining abstract values with radical ideas about landscape and the figure, Lanyon navigated a course from Constructivism through Abstract Expressionism to a style close to Pop. He also made constructions, pottery and collage.

Lanyon took up gliding as a pastime and used the resulting experience extensively in his paintings. He died in Taunton, Somerset, as the result of injuries received in a gliding accident and is buried in St. Uny’s Church, Lelant.

In September 2010 Peter Lanyon’s work was honoured with a large-scale retrospective exhibition: Peter Lanyon 9 October 2010 – 23 January 2011 at Tate St Ives. Curated by Chris Stephens, Head of Displays and Curator of Modern British Art at Tate Britain, it was the first thorough museum retrospective for almost forty years. In 2015 Lanyon’s Gliding Paintings were shown as a set in the Soaring Flight exhibition at the Courtauld Gallery, London.

In 2018 the catalogue raisonné of Peter’s oil paintings and three-dimensional works was published by Modern Art Press, after a decades work by Toby Treves.

lanyon

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Gabriele Münter (1877-1962)

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There are two things that i always have connected with Gabriele Münter , …..first there is that she was a student of Kandinsky and second, she was great with “behind glass painting”. This is an artist who i have not followed until recently. A week ago I discovered at the bookmarket a catalogue on Gabriele Münter published by the MARLBOROUGH GALLERY from 1960 and the first thing I noticed was the influence of van Gogh . Subject , use of colour and size all reflect that she must have admired van Gogh  immensly and where Kandinsky must have taught her to discover abstract painting, she found herself more at ease with realism in her paintings. Later she became part of the ” BLAUE REITER  group and together with Macke she became a respected name in the history of Modern Art. http://www.ftn-books.com has some nice Gabriele Münter titles available.

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Key Hiraga (1936-2000)

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Rooted in Pop Art and Hippie art, this symbiosis of these influences in the art of Key Hiraga created an original approach to subject and painting itself. These paintings are one of a kind and can be immediately recognized for being done by Hiraga.

As with many of the artists from the final years of the Sixties and early Seventies these works are almost forgotten, but now and then they surface again. For instance there is a dutch artist belonging to the same category…. Jakob Zekveld. Color schemes are almost the same but compositions are totally different.  here is one by Zekveld.

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Although i have never seen his works in agllery nor museum, i am a fan , because his works are original and filled with symbolism and never bore. the following publication on Hiraga is available at www.ftn-books.com

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Stephen Buckley (1944)

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I do not know this for certain, but because i could not find many pictures of Stephen Buckley, my guess is he is an introvert perhaps even a shy person and this picture of his character would fit the art that he makes. Large in size and very abstract, but filled with figures that are not very common and certainly not constructivist. There seems to be a mouvement in his paintings, realized by dividing the space , bending the canvas or shifting pannels from each other. This way of setting up the composition and expressing himself makes his paintings very authentic.

For more than forty years Buckley has concerned himself with addressing the major themes of the twentieth century through a personal style oscillating between the matiere of Schwitters, the dandyism of Picabia and the intellectual rigour of Duchamp by deconstruction and reconstruction. Eventually self-reference was inevitable and there is now a large portfolio of themes, references, motifs and symbols which are continually reworked and reinvented. Scale has always been significant from the 20 foot La Manche (1974) to a great number of ‘carry on’ sized works over a period of years.

www.ftn-books.com has a nice Buckley publication available

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Bridget Riley (1931) now a permanent part of the National Gallery building.

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I love the walldrawings by contemporary artists. First in a long line of artists, there is Sol LeWitt. I witnessed the execution of several of his drawings in the rooms and staircases of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag and they fascinated me all.

Then there is Niele Toroni who makes his wall drawings with a single brush and color

and now there is another artist who i admire who have executed a permanent walldrawing, this time at the National Gallery. Yes,…this is permanent and a part of their collection. The last time i had seen  a large walldrawing by Bridget Riley is when she executed one at the Gemeentemuseum in 2012 when she was presented the Sikkens prijs.

An excellent Leperello catalogue was published on that occasion

This beautiful leperello catalogue is available at www.ftn-books.com

Location: Annenberg Court

Spanning a vast 10 x 20 metres, the work comprises coloured discs painted directly onto the surface of the Gallery’s Annenberg Court.

The title, ‘Messengers’, is inspired by a phrase Constable used when referring to clouds, and might also be an allusion to the numerous angels, bearers of news, that we see in the skies of so many National Gallery pictures. 

Painted directly onto the wall of the Annenberg Court, this abstract work carries influences from our historic collection over into the 21st century. Throughout art history, harmonies of colour have played a large part in pictorial composition.Taking as a point of departure the paintings of George Seurat, in particular Bathers at Asnières, Bridget Riley’s ‘Messengers’ transforms the Annenberg Court into a great white space in which coloured discs float as clouds drift in the lanes of the sky. By leaving after-images on the viewer’s retina that suggest volume and movement the longer it is perceived, the work becomes a tribute to its artistic predecessors and to the process of looking at art itself.

Bridget Riley (born 1931) has a long-standing relationship with the Gallery; she made copies of paintings in the collection including Jan van Eyck’s Portrait of a Man (Self Portrait?), 1433, as a teenager as part of her portfolio when applying to Goldsmiths College, London, just after the end of the Second World War, and Georges Seurat’s Bathers at Asnières while training as an artist. 

riley sikkens e

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Richard Long (1945)

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Hamish Fulton and Richard Long…. Two artist who i learned to appreciate in the time that Rudi Fuchs was director at the Gemeentemuseum. Long was nominated 4 times for the prestigious Turner price , but only won it once in 1989 for White Water Line.

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Since i first saw works and publications i have seen Richard Long his works on many occasions and one of the most recent ones was at the Guggenheim Bilbao museum. Each time the lines, circles and labyrinths look random, but this is not true. The placement of the stones and paint is strict and makes it free whitin the object , but it has very strict boundaries making it perfectly shaped. The way each work is created is described and laid down in drawings i a way that each work can be re-cretaed at any other place than it was first was created. It is somewhat the saem as with the walldrawings by Sol LeWitt who uses the same method . The art work is the sketch/drawing and materials and can be re-created anywhere as long as you have the original drawing belonging to the work.

What makes Richard Long stand out from other contemporary artists is that many of his publications are also artist books which hold beside the works, photography and word “sculptures” by Long and http://www.ftn-books.com has some of these titles available.

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Peter Blake (1932) … a British Pop-Art artist

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Peter Blake is known by the dutch art lovers as one of the first Pop Art artist who had the opportunity to exhibit at the Stedelijk Museum, Together with this exhibition an excellent catalogue designed by Wim Crouwel was published , bu apart from that his work is becoming more and more important every year. The same with Paolozzi works , this Pop Art is original and authentic and where it was almost forgotten 30 years ago it is now considered among the best art from the 60’s.

Without knowing, many people have admired Peter Blake’s works and are familiar with it . This, because he was the painter and designer of the Beatles Sgt Pepper  album. He even made a second version for Liverpool being cultural capital of Europe in 2008.

In the original 1967 work, the Beatles form the centrepiece wearing colourful military-style outfits while their wax models also feature. However, in the 2012 piece, the faces of Ringo Starr and the late John Lennon and George Harrison have all been omitted.

And even Sir Paul McCartney has been relegated to the third row – one behind his daughters Stella, the fashion designer, and Mary, the photographer. Blake, known as the Godfather of Pop Art, has put his own face and images of his family where the Fab Four once stood.

Blake painted several album sleeves. He designed the sleeve for Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band with his wife Jann Haworth, the American-born artist whom he married in 1963 and divorced in 1979. The Sgt. Pepper’s sleeve has become an iconic work of pop art, much imitated and Blake’s best-known work. Producing the collage necessitated the construction of a set with cut-out photographs and objects, such as flowers, centred on a drum (sold in auction in 2008) with the title of the album. Blake has subsequently complained about the one-off fee he received for the design (£200[5][6]), with no subsequent royalties. Blake made sleeves for the Band Aid single, “Do They Know It’s Christmas?” (1984), Paul Weller’s Stanley Road (1995) and the Ian Dury tribute album Brand New Boots and Panties (2001; Blake was Dury’s tutor at the Royal College of Art in the mid-60s). He designed the sleeves for Pentangle’s Sweet Child and The Who’s Face Dances (1981), which features portraits of the band by a number of artists.

There are some excellent publications on Blake available at www.ftn-books.com

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