velvet – FTN-blog

One of the most astonishing and surprising books i came across during my search for art books in the last year is certainly this Adriaan Rees book. Published in english and chinese. Containing cut outs, double pages , velvet cover this is a true artist book. Central theme within the book is the sculpture SCREAMING IN A BUCKET . Adriaan Rees is an exceptional sculptor in many ways. Here is the text he wrote on himself and published it on his site.

EXPLORING WANDERER

Adriaan Rees (1957, Amsterdam) lives and works in China and Amsterdam. Rees is famous for his large-scale projects and assignments for public space. He makes sculptures and installations in many materials such as ceramics, bronze, glass, textiles, plaster and stone. He also works with photography and video.

When he works with clay, traces of his hands and the use of extreme power can easily be seen at the surface. He is approaching his sculptures almost as a landscape or a human body, sometimes in a sensual, sometimes in a brutal way. He is an artist who is not predictable, someone who always surprises with new ideas and approaches, a cosmopolitan artist.

Exploring wanderer, 2015

From 2000 Rees increasingly travelled to Asia, specifically to Japan, Korea and China. He is intensely affected by these cultures and settled in Jingdezhen, China where he works in his own studio among the thousands of craftsmen locally.

Tradition and innovation, humor and seriousness, monumentality and intimacy, vulnerable and tough, traditional and contemporary, religion and war, fantasy and reality. All this you can find in his sculptures: it is a dialogue between cultural traditions like Europe and Asia.

His work can be found in collections around the world, in museums, private collections and in public space. Rees teaches in The Netherlands, Germany, Finland, USA, Japan and China and frequently gives lectures about his own work, art and art in public space.

He also works as an art advisor and curator. Since 2008 he is the initiator and project leader for the Exchange project 400 years Delft – Jingdezhen. This project brings artists, designers, archaeologists and museums from both cities together. Famous are the Blue Revolution shows in museums in Delft (NL) and Jingdezhen and Donguan (CHN). The shows attracted more than 40.000 visitors in Delft, more than 80.000 in Jingdezhen and more than 200.000 in Donguan.

Rees was the curator of these shows.

The Adriaan Rees book is now available at www.ftn-books.com

Schermafbeelding 2017-10-19 om 15.58.16

His claim to fame was that Nat Finkelstein was the house photographer of the FACTORY. The complex which housed the studios of Andy Warhol.

(The Factory was Andy Warhol’s New York City studio, which had three different locations between 1962 and 1984. The original Factory was on the fifth floor at 231 East 47th Street, in Midtown Manhattan. The rent was one hundred dollars per year.^[1] Warhol left in 1967 when the building was scheduled to be torn down to make way for an apartment building. He then relocated his studio to the sixth floor of the Decker Building at 33 Union Square West near the corner of East 16th Street, where he was shot in 1968 by Valerie Solanas. The Factory was revamped and remained there until 1973. It moved to 860 Broadway at the north end of Union Square. Although this space was much larger, not much filmmaking took place there. In 1984 Warhol moved his remaining ventures, no longer including filming, to 22 East 33rd Street, a conventional office building)

In September 1962 Finkelstein was commissioned by Pageant magazine to do an article on the emerging Pop Art movement. The article was titled “What happens at a Happening?” it covered a Claes Oldenburg “happening” in Greenwich Village and was a break that would define his future. Two years later, while attending a party at the Factory, Finkelstein met Warhol, who had seen his photographs of Oldenburg’s “happening” in Pageant. Finkelstein offered his services as a photographer to the artist, and for the next three years he was a constant presence at the Factory. His iconic images of the include subjects such as the Velvet Underground performing live, Marcel Duchamp, Bob Dylan, Edie Sedgwick, Salvador Dalí, and Allen Ginsberg.