Tag: painting

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Constant Permeke (1886-1952)

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Like van Gogh and his fellow country man Josef Cantré, Constant Permeke was fascinated with farmers and workers. Inspired by these men and woman he made some beautiful impressive paintings in a style which was highly original and recognizable. Brown, blacks and some sand colors painted on a canvas made some of the most impressive art from Belgium from the early 20th century.

Beside a gifted painter, he was also an impressive sculptor. Inspired by the same subjects his sculptures seem to be even more abstract thatn his paintings. Of course the sahpe one can recognize but there is also an abstract quality with these sculptures. In the Netherlands not many Permeke art can be seen, but there is a tremendous painting in the collections of the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag (Kunstmuseum) and the Kroller  Muller museum.

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The following Permeke titles are available at www.ftn-books.com

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Menno Bauer (1949)

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Here is the text that can be found on the Menno Bauer web site. It explains the works and methods Bauer uses.

Menno Bauer is interested in the movements of dancers. “In my paintings”, says Bauer, ‘I set everything in motion. I want the figures in the painting to dance. I want to show that everything is alive and infused with tension. In fact, I am also dusting off images that already exist. He is not only inspired by Van Maanen’s ballets, but also by famous historic paintings. They too contain scenes into which Bauer breathes new life. His reasoning is simple. In a painting, everything is still, motionless, because it is all painted. Nonetheless, you can in stil the suggestion of motion. The challenge is to make that illusion convincing.
It should be said that Menno Bauer does not work in a realistic style. Against a background of broad planes of colour- an agressive red versus a friendly green -, his figures, loosely contoured in black, dance, walk and fall, imprisoned in a world of their own. Here, just as in a filmclip of Johan Cruyff slowly flying past, its utterly unclear just what these people are doing or where they are.
In Menno Bauer’s eyes, the figures inhabiting the sometimes renowned paintings that he uses as his starting points are the theatrical performers acting out their roles. The undefined space in wich they find themselves is hence their stage, a place that can be altered into all manner of environments by way of changing the decors. The actors that Bauer employs in his paintings are professionals in the art of overstatement. Cheer or drama are applied in thick layers, out to persuade their audience. Moreover, what these characters are acting out is not real. Bauer finds excitement in making use of this exaggeration, these emphatic, acted-out gestures, in order to approach the illusion of real gesture or movement.

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There is one Bauer publication available at www.ftn-books.com

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Kitaj (1932-2007)

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Robert Brooks Kitaj was born in the US but his art is closely related to the British Pop Art. I am writing this blog because i recently acquired a german catalogue on his exhibition at the Kunsthalle Dusseldorf and i was impressed. Later i learned that Kitaj received a lot of criticism on his art as the press slaughtered his exhibition at the Tate gallery in 1994. Her is what i found on Wikipedia

A second retrospective was staged at the Tate Gallery in 1994. Critical reviews in London were almost universally negative. British press savagely attacked the Tate exhibit, calling Kitaj a pretentious poseur who engaged in name dropping. Kitaj took the criticism very personally, declaring that “anti-intellectualism, anti-Americanism, and anti-Semitism” had fueled the vitriol. Despite the bad reviews, the exhibition moved to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and afterwards to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1995. His second wife, Sandra Fisher died from hyperacute haemorrhagic leuco-encephalitis in 1994, shortly after his exhibition at the Tate Gallery had ended. He blamed the British press for her death, stating that “they were aiming for me, but they got her instead.” David Hockney concurred and said that he too believed the London art critics had killed Sandra Fisher.[14] Kitaj returned to the US in 1997 and settled in Los Angeles, near his first son. “When my Wife died”, he wrote to Edward Chaney, “London died for me and I returned home to California to live among sons and grandsons – It was a very good move and now I begin my 3rd and (last?) ACT! hands across The Sea.” Three years later he wrote: “I grow older every day and rather like my hermit life.” The “Tate War” and Sandra’s death became a central themes for his later works: he often depicted himself and his deceased wife as angels. In Los Angeles No. 22 (Painting-Drawing) the beautiful young (and naked) girl records the shadow of her aged lover (on whose lap she sits) in a pose directly taken from the Scots Grand Tourist David Allan’s Origin of Painting. The latter was included by Ernst Gombrich in his 1995 National Gallery exhibition (and catalogue) on Shadows so that Kitaj would have seen it two years before he left England for ever. 

Personally i think the critics are wrong. Kitaj deserves his place among the great European Pop Art artists and the future exhibitions that will include his works will probably prove me right. Some Kitaj catalogues are availableat www.ftn-books.com

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Joachim Grommek (1957)

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Joachim Grommek, Master of Arts of Free Art/ Film at HBK Braunschweig (Professor: Malte Sartorius), Germany, in 1982 has mainly shown in German and European institutions and galleries since 1987, among them important solo shows like “Malerei 300” at the Städtische Galerie Wolfsburg, Wolfsburg, Germany in 2011. His geometric-abstract, illusionary work in perfection lays varies the topic of authentic image and copy like the ancient Trompe-l’œils, always asking for a second look. Grommek’s work though is reflecting art history and prominent artists like Kasimir Malewitsch, Piet Mondrian, Blinky Palermo or Robert Ryman.

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This is how the Taubert gallery describes the works by Joachim Grommek. They have a nice selection in stock. This blog on Grommek is written on the occasion of the purchase for FTN-art of a beautiful impressive diamond shaped work : STAR IV, 2006 (Black Diamond). You really have to study his works from very close up. It appears these are not tapes nor raw chipped wood material, but literally everything….lines , wood, tapes …is painted. Materials used, acrylic paint, lack, wood , special paints…the result a fascinating work of art that impresses with its composition, but in the meantime is a technical painters masterpiece.

The works by Grommek can be found in numerous German museums and ao. the Centraal Museum / Utrecht

here is the text from the book TILT:

Grommek’s pictures have an extraordinarily immediate visual presence, despite their comparatively small size. Whereas they seem rigorously minimalistic in terms of both areal composition and chromatic clarity, there is still something provisional and unfinished about them. More like tantalising intermediates, they seem to imply that the artist has not yet decided which area should be superimposed on which. Patches of bald fibreboard are visible in places, as are strips of adhesive tape.

But nothing is what it seems in these works. Although Grommek does indeed use standard industrially laminated fibreboard as a ground, the grey-brown speckled areas that the viewer takes for unpainted fibreboard turn out to be no less painted albeit with deceptive verisimi|itude -than all the other areas. Even the brightly coloured transparent »adhesive tape« turns out to be lacquer which, perfectly applied layer upon layer, creates the illusion of overlapping strips of plastic tape. An abstract, »unrepresentational« picture by Grommek, therefore, is actually the result of a highly representational style of painting, with what it represents being its own materiality.

Once the temptation to tear off the strips of non-exlstent adhesive tape has been resisted, the viewer can step back a few paces and in doing so go back to the beginning and to the play of shapes and colours. The tension remains, just as the contradictions between the reality seen, painted and represented remain unresolved.
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Armando …signed publications

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It was a few months ago that i was fortunate to buy a small collection of ARMANDO books. Only 25 cm’s of books, but among the 16 books , 6 were signed by the master himself. Since his death , Armando paintings, drawings and etchings have become highly collectable items and the books are no exception. Publications that are in most cases of a very high quality and the ARMANDO signature makes them even more wanted and collectable. ww.ftn-books.com has them now for sale, so please take a look at them at my site and search for the many Armando items i have for sale.

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Sergei Lobanov (1887-1943)

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This is one of those artists that stayed out of sight for me because i never had seen his work in a museum before, but after i found a book ( available at www.ftn-books.com) it became clear to me that his implressionist art is not less than the the works by his french  and european counterparts.

Sergey Ivanovich Lobanov was one of the significant but little known artists of the first half of the 20th century. His fauvist landscapes participated in exhibitions of the Jack of Diamonds in 1910 and 1912. Unfortunately, Sergey Lobanov’s works were hardly displayed hereafter but for few exhibitions in the 1920s.
<divSergey Lobanov studied in art studios of F.I. Rerberg (1906) and I.I. Mashkov (1907), at the Moscow School for Painting, Sculpture and Architecture (1907-1913). As a school student yet, he got interested in the history of fine arts. Sergey Lobanov attended courses on the history of arts at the Moscow Archaeological Institute in 1914.

He became an official of the Museum and Monument Protection Department of the People’s Commissariat for Education in 1918. Sergey Lobanov was seated the custodian of the nationalized collection of S. I. Schukin in 1922. For one and a half decades the artist was the deputy director of the State Museum of New Western Art (later a considerable part of the museum collection was shifted to the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts and made the basis of the collection of French painting of the second half of the 19th and 20th centuries).

After his short membership in the Artists Association of Revolutionary Russia he was excluded from it as being “alien to ideology of the Association” in 1924 and walked off from any art groups.

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Otmar Alt ( 1940 )

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Otmar Alt has become over the years a famous German artist. The reason is that his art is accessibel and in his piantings and prints he depicts a fantasy world which is abstract and populated with figurative creatures. His roots can be found in the colorful world oof Pop Art painting, but over the years he developed a recognizable style of his own. You can not help but admire the commercial quality of his art. A bit the dsame as Corneille in the Netherlands developed his art into a highly commercial form of art. Helped by big companies his art was distributed among many admirers in high editions ( ABN bank ao). In the case of Otmar Alt you can see that his art was distributed among many , because on several occasion he included some nice “signed in print” prints within the books that were published. Onme of these books including the print is now available at www.ftn-books.com.

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John Davies (1946)

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“I call myself a haunted house… we all have ghosts and histories.” – John Davies

Davies’ interest in the human presence set him apart from many of his contemporaries in British sculpture at the beginning of his career. Of his early figures, often cast from life and clothed, Davies has said, ‘I wanted to make a figure, not like a piece of sculpture, more like a person…. I wanted my sculpture to be more like life in the street’.

His more recent works are modelled in clay, before being cast in polychrome polyester and fibreglass, or bronze. Davies arranges these figures in carefully choreographed relationships. Animals and inanimate objects such as houses also appear in works whose thematic concerns are always with human experience.

Of The Deerson Series, shown for the first time in this exhibition, John has said: ‘This series of scarecrow-like figures, with their moons, are a kind of self-portrait. I never intended to make these images, having other ideas to the fore, when I had a car crash in 2010. My life always leaks into my work, so inevitably and reluctantly these images emerged. They are works processing my long recovery. Now to me they seem to have a life of their own, independent of my story. Mad dancing ‘scarecrows’ coming to life, a protest against fate and physical frailty, like the figures in the Watersons’ song, ‘The Scarecrow’.’

Drawing, often in series, has always been an important aspect of John Davies’ practice, and the sculpture and drawings are equally important to him. The drawings in this installation demonstrate how the two practices influence each other.

The above text was found in Fuse magazine

www.ftn-books.com has some John Davies catalogues available

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Franz Eggenschwiller (1930-2000)

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Discovering “new” artists is one of the nicer thing of writing a daily blog. And writing a blog on this artist is a pleasurable experience since i like his art .  Mix total astraction wit constructivist art and use very delicate colors and you get an impression of the art Eggenschwiller stands for. Born in 1930 het must have known the abstract painters from his generation, but this does not show. His art is original and although not very well known, deserves to be presented in exhibitions and galeries. This is one of the goals the Eggenschwiller-Wiggli foundation has set for themselves.

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Eggenschwillers works must be known with a much larger public than these are known now. Works by Franz Eggenschwiller are present in the Solothurn Museum and www.ftn-books.com has the most important publication on this artist available.

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Wim Oepts (1904-1988)

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Wim Oepts , always reminds of the more abstract brother of Vincent van Gogh. The choice of colors even reminds of van Gogh and in many cases his landscapes are the same kind of Landscapes van Gogh preferred to paint. The days that Oepsts started to paint were the same days that van Gogh was finally recognized as being one of the great painters of all time. This meant that Oepts must have known his paintings very well and admired them. This also meant that he never followed the road into abstraction . His paintings were always colorful and the subjects recognizable. Friendly paintings for those who want an ” easy” work of art on the wall. Affordable certainly , artistically important? ….i doubt it.

left Oepts / Right van Gogh