Tag: painting

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Brian Clarke (1953)

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Brian Clarke was born in Oldham, Lancashire, to Edward Ord Clarke, a coal miner, and Lilian Clarke (née Whitehead). In 1965, aged 12, he applied for a place as the last intake of an education scheme existing in the North of England to enable artistically promising children to leave their secondary school and become full-time art students, and was accepted into Oldham School of Arts and Crafts on a scholarship.[4][5] In 1968 he and his family moved to Burnley, where he attended Burnley Art School, and in 1970 he enrolled in an architectural stained glass course at the North Devon College of Art and Design, where he went on to receive a first class distinction in their Diploma in Design.

Paintings, stained glass, screenprints, mosaic and tapestry by Clarke can be found in architectural settings and private and public collections internationally, including the Tate, Victoria and Albert Museum, Seibu Museum of Art in Tokyo, and the Corning Museum of Glass, New York.[13]

Major works include the Foster and Partners-designed Pyramid of Peace and Accord in Kazakhstan, Al Faisaliyah Center in Riyadh, and Stanstead Airport; the Pfizer World Headquarters in New York; the Stamford Cone in Connecticut; windows for Linköping Cathedral in Sweden; the Papal Chapel of the Apostolic Nunciature to Great Britain; the world’s largest stage sets (for Paul McCartney’s 1993 World Tour) and both the largest stained glass work in Great Britain and the largest in the world.

Other projects include ecclesiastical commissions in churches, mosques and synagogues (including the DarmstadtHolocaust Memorial) across Europe, the USA and the Middle East; the glass exterior of ‘Le Grand Bleu’, the Hotel du Department des Bouches-du Rhone, Marseille (with Will Alsop); the Lake Sagami Country Club, Japan (with Arata Isozaki); stage sets for the Dutch National Ballet, and sets for an opera of The Crucible directed by Hugh Hudson; King Khalid International Airport in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia; Norte Shopping, Rio de Janeiro; the Spindles Shopping Mall, Oldham; the barrel-vaulted roof of Cavendish Arcade, Buxton;[22] the stained glass ceiling of Victoria Quarter, Leeds; windows for the 13th century Cistercian Abbaye de la Fille-Dieu, Romont, Switzerland; collaborations in stained glass with photographer Linda McCartney; and EP and album covers for The Human League, Paul McCartney, and EMI Classical

( the above text was copied from Wikipedia )

www.ftn-books.com has Brian Clarke titles available

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Lawrence Weiner (1942) + discount

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Lawrence Weiner and the Netherlands is a combination which now exists for almost 50 years. His connections with dutch directors and curators is legendary and he has made several special projects with them in dutch. Weiner is considered as a post minimal artist and one of the founders of Conceptual art and that is the reason why his works blend so well within the collections of the more important dutch museum. The van Abbemuseum, Stedelijk and Gemeentemuseum have all works by Weiner in their collections.

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But Weiner is much more than a conceptual artist. He is a book designer and poet at the same time  and these little sketches with words can be blown up into facades and objects with words. One of the most memorable to me was the facade at the Ljubljana Modern Art museum with a Weiner object on one of the outside museum walls. Impredssive, recognizable. So to celebrate the longtime history that Lawrence Weiner has with the Netherlands there is a discount this week of 10%  on all items at www.ftn-books.com . use the discountcode : LawrenceWeiner10 and receive a 10% discount on all items including some marvelous Lawrence Weiner publications.

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John Zinsser (1961)

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A master in Blue . A bit like Yves Klein had his favorit color too  and executed many of his paintings in Blue. Zinsser uses the available commercial paints with their standard bright colors.

John Zinsser’s abstract paintings investigate formal properties of gestures, supports, color, and paint through simple actions and two-toned compositions that explore the relationship between figure and ground. After studying art history at Yale, Zinsser relocated to New York, where he has remained since the 1980s. Color is a preeminent concern for Zinsser; he typically works with naturally occurring commercially available colors such as cobalt blue or cadmium red. The properties and values of the ground determine what colors and forms he chooses to include in the foreground. “I always put a faith in materials first—that paint has a kind of authority of its own,” he says. “Paint has a unique power to assert tactile reality, pushing toward a larger visual and bodily response.”

For me personally il compare his paintings with the one Tomas Rajlich has done in the last 2 decades / also monochrome paintings with working the paint over that it the paint is moulded into a shape. Both arftists i like very much, but for me personally i prefer the Rajlich paintings , because i have met Tomas on several occasions and beside an excellent painter he is a an aimable person.

www.ftn-books.com has a nice Zinsser catalogue available.

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Valérie Favre (1959)

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Born in Switzerland , but working for most part of her artistic life in Berlin, Favre has gathered a loyal following of collectors. Her work is a typical feminal mix of abstraction and story telling.

Within the composition there are always recognizable elements, but background and even some of the props in the painting can be purely abstract.

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Valérie Favre makes up stories and tells us these stories, gradually mixing in their sociopolitical influences: war, death, suffering, as well as a few well-known suicides mingling with hybrid creatures in quest of sex, both masculine and feminine. In this way, her works can be seen as a kind of index of the world’s fears and anxieties. Yet, as the artist treats these anxieties with the derisory irony of a piece of paper, she also imposes a distancing from them, a distance from which rises humor.

Outside Germany her art is hardly known and certainly deserves to be known much better.

www.ftn-books.comwww.ftn-books.com has a nice Valerie Favre title available

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Siegfried Anzinger (1953)

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At the time Anzinger had an exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag ( curated by Franz Kaiser  i was not very interested in this kind of art, but sone 25 year ahead in time thingds change and now i find his work at least….INTERESTING and INTRIGUING.

Perhaps that is because i have learned to appreciate this kind of art. His paintings remind me of some of the ones Bacon has made and in the Netherlands John van ‘t Slot approached his subjects in the way Anzinger does. (Van ‘t Slot and Anzinger are from the same generation) and still they are rooted in the Austrian way of painting.

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If you try to find some information on Anzinger you will have a hard time finding it. There is some put on line by his gallery  MAX WEBER, but even this information is not very elaborate. An interesting artist, but hard to keep track of his works, because outside Germany and Austria his work is rarely seen.

www.ftn-books has one important publication on Anzinger available

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Andras Gal (1968)

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This is the kind of painting that appeals to me. Monochrome, well not completely MONOCHROME, since there is a fine kind of structure in the upper layer. It is a bit like the miniimal paintings of Tomas Rajlich , who uses the surface of the paint to form a pattern on the canvas, making the painting not flat but finely structured. Combining his Monochrome canvasses in a way that makes them a composition on their own and there you have it , beautiful paintings by this young Hungarian artist.

Max Imdahl said about Gal.

„The painting finds its way behind every order, whether innate or trained, defined conceptually, mathematically, geometrically or by a (formal) aesthetic: it finds the ground of (absolute emotion )as a kind of elementary capacity.” (Max Imdahl)

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The above publication is available at www.ftn-books.com

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Hanns Schimanski (1949)

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It takes some time to discover the qualities within the works of Hanns Schimanski but his touch and art language are truly original. His works remind me the most of Jurgen Partenheimer his drawings, but his approach is totally different. he composes a drawing/painting and if necessary then folds and/ or “cuts” it visually in pieces and makes changes and reorganizes the parts and folds into a new work.

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Trained as an agronomist engineer, Hanns Schimansky decides in 1979 to devote his career to art and solely to drawing. In his scriptural drawings, he invites us to feel the rhythm of the world by capturing and prolonging the un seizable intensity of the instant, convoking and provoking chance, opposing a voluntary slowing down of the breathtakingly speed of our media-centered world. Geometric forms or interlacing lines, enhanced by the folded paper, create a dynamic writing specific to Schimansky. His works are filled with movements that inhabit us such as waves and winds. The œuvre of Hanns Schimansky is composed as much of sonorities as it is of silences. The rustles of the paper folded and unfolded, the ink-pen scratching the paper, the dot repeated forever with precision, the line sliding in variable rhythms are all sounds which contribute to the harmony of the artist’s drawings.

His works have been shown in Europe at the Gemeentemuseum of The Hague, at the Staatliche Kunsthalle in Karlsruhe, at the Museum of Art and History of Neuchâtel in Switzerland, as well as the Martin-Gropius-Bau in Berlin in Germany. Schimansky’s drawings have integrated public collections such as the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Oslo, the Berlinische Galerie, the National Museum of Contemporary Art in Berlin of the Museum of Art and History of Neuchâtel.

www.ftn-books.com has some Schimanski titles available.

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Alice Neel (1900-1984)

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Until a few years ago the works by Alice Neel were not known outside a small circle of admirers. Among them director Rudi Fuchs and some curators from duthc Modern Art museums. the result a breathtaking exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag in 2017. Her works remind me of Georg Grosz his very best works.

Her importance startded to grow among a small circle of admirers in the Sixties, because in the early 60s Neel moved to the more prosperous Upper West Side of New York, where her subjects began to include influential curators, art critics and dealers. At the same time, she became interested in the subcultures that were beginning to lay claim to their position in society around this time. Thanks to her friendship with Andy Warhol, she met various gays and transsexuals, including Jackie Curtis (inspiration for Lou Reed’s song Walk on the Wild Side). Neel’s portraits of Curtis and of ‘liberated’ women contributed to the public acceptance of such subcultures. In this respect, her oeuvre includes a genre familiar to us from the world of photography – for example, that of Diane Arbus – but unique in painting. By the end of her life, Alice Neel had created a body of portraits that, taken together, represented a cross-section of 20th-century American society.

 

Alice Neel was a figurative painter at a time when the art world was dominated first by Abstract Expressionism and later by Minimal Art and Pop Art. Figurative painting was regarded as a thing of the past. Indeed, in the 1960s and ’70s painting itself was declared dead. Although she was well aware of contemporary trends, Neel chose to pursue a path diametrically opposed to them. Consequently, her life was a constant struggle for artistic recognition. She did not achieve broader recognition until the 1970s, and then partly due to the women’s liberation movement. In the United States she is now ranked as one of the most important figurative painters of the 20th century, alongside Lucian Freud and Francis Bacon. In Europe, interest in her work has increased sharply in recent years and this exhibition can be seen as the culmination of her posthumous artistic breakthrough on this side of the Atlantic.

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Aaron van Erp (1978)

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No better text on the works by Aaron van Erp than the one which was published on the occasion of his Gemeentemusem/ GEM exhibition from 2008. It looks a really long time ago, but nowadays his works are more or less the same. Their subjects hardly any different and the way they are painted has not changed at all. van Erp is an important “young” painter and i will be following his career from a short distance because his paintings fascinate me.

“Horrible things frequently also have a funny side.” This is how Aaron van Erp (b. 1978) explains how his paintings, despite their often brutal subjects, can raise a laugh thanks to their bizarre titles. Since graduating from the St Joost school of art and design in ’s-Hertogenbosch in 2001, Aaron van Erp has become a rising star of the art world. His weird paintings have been acquired for numerous collections in the Netherlands and abroad, including the trendsetting Saatchi collection. Aaron van Erp opens his first ever one-man museum exhibition at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag: an overview of paintings and drawings produced since leaving art school, with the emphasis on his most recent work.

Jars of peanut butter

Van Erp’s paintings often include familiar objects from the world around us: shopping trolleys, meatballs, jars of peanut butter, supermarket bags and washing machines. These are located in bare, desert-like landscapes or huge empty interiors. His colourful pictures sometimes refer to well-known paintings of the past (The Meatball Eaters, 2000) or appear to allude to social issues like terrorism, problems in the health care system or child abuse. His painting The Child Tamer (2006), for example, featuring a shadowy figure keeping order with a whip, immediately suggests child abuse. But, despite its sadistic undertone, the work is painted in a humorous way. The green boots of the ‘tamer’, the title, the use of colour and the absurd setting all undermine the sense of violence.

Theme

Another important theme in Van Erp’s paintings is that of victims versus attackers. Medical Personnel at the Meatball Plantation (2005/06) is a good illustration: at first glance, the painting appears to show Red Cross staff attending to a victim. Look closer and you find that they are actually tearing the victim apart and turning his flesh into meatballs to hang in the leafless trees. Dividing lines between good and evil are blurred; saviours can also be attackers and vice versa.

Influence

As well as inspiration from everyday life, the paintings betray the influence of artists such as James Ensor and Francis Bacon. This is apparent in the amorphous figures, the artist’s palette, a certain surreal atmosphere, and the fragmentary way in which Van Erp paints his figures. His social and political commitment is akin to that of Francisco Goya, who also produced works denouncing violence, constraints on freedom of thought, and human suffering.

www.ftn-books.com has some important van erp titless available

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Jan Commandeur (1954)

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Another painter from my generation is Jan Commandeur. Abstract lyrical work which is rooted in nature. Shadows and spots of light play with each other on his canvasses. Bright and dark places are depicted, but combined in an abstract way making the paintings related to nature, but purely abstract in its composition. A fascinating way of painting and because of their size very impressive.

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FTN books has a very nice designed catalogue on Commandeur available at www.ftn-books.com

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