Hundred Zundert

In her work, Dutch artist Femmy Otten (°1981) explores a very hybrid world of inspiration, ranging from sculptures from Greek antiquity and Italian painters of the quattrocento to American outsider art and contemporary art. She brings all these influences together in a precise yet unfathomable iconography.

The book Rainbow Woman shows mainly recent work, but also revisits a number of older works which Otten has regularly placed in a new context throughout her artistic practice and which have now also been given a new shape in the context of the exhibition in the Warande, Turnhout (01.08-07.11.2021).

Rainbow Woman shows Otten as a versatile painter, sculptor, draughtsman and performer. In ‘Donna Universale’, the art historian Leen Huet places Otten in a tradition of self-confident, female artists that Europe has known since the early Renaissance but who have only sporadically entered the history books as artistically accomplished artists. 

The book has many points of contact with the exhibition Rainbow Woman but can also be seen as a sequel to the artist’s book Slow Down Love (2016, nai).

“In selecting the photographs for this publication, Lisa Spilliaert (b. 1990) was adamant that the image of a sunrise should be among the first in her book. It is, indeed, an emblematic image. For anyone with a camera, such a splendid sunrise is an irresistible trope: a visual motif that simply begs to be captured and fixed on film. In reality, however, the magic of this scene resides in the fleeting, subtle changes in colours and vibrations. This is the dynamic that captivates us.

Photography is usually understood as a technique for ‘stopping’ the flow of time. But as Spilliaert here demonstrates, the impact of photography can also be used to manifest an awareness of time and transience. By accentuating the photographer’s fixed position vis-à-vis the endlessly changing light source, Spilliaert evokes a correlation between stasis and movement, between the cosmic and the mundane. This duality is echoed again in the confrontation of the two equivalent silhouettes: that of the photographer and of his alias or ‘partner’: a life-size technical camera.” — From ‘Time and Tide’ Edwin Carels

With texts by Phillip Van den Bossche, Filarowska and a conversation between Eva Wittocx and the artist (NL/EN)

Nº 48 / October 2022

sawing a plank is like going for a walk by Kato Six (b. 1986) is published on the occasion of Kato’s solo exhibition at M Leuven this autumn. This book encapsulates 10 years of her quest as an artist.

The work of Kato Six (b. 1986) balances between abstract and figurative art. She works on different themes which she develops into series or ensembles. Architecture, design, domesticity and utensils all act as important references. Starting there, she uses recognisable and everyday materials such as MDF, stone, plastic or textiles.
Kato wants to question certain affinities and let the viewer look at familiar objects or images from a different perspective. As a viewer, you feel connected to the object or image but the actual meaning or function no longer applies.

Some of my works refer to the domestic, especially the most recent ones, such as ‘Carpet Beater Carpet’ and ‘Striped Knitwear’. The invisible work done by “housewives”, but also by workers or maintenance staff, is certainly one of the themes addressed in ‘Carpet Beater Carpet’. The above works are textile works, created with so-called “soft skills”. In the arts, these “soft skills” are often attributed to female artists — women often being assigned a certain medium.
Kato Six in conversation with Eva Wittocx in “sawing a plank is like going for a walk”

Nº 49 / October 2022

In her work, Lisa Vlaemminck explores the boundaries of painting, creating an exciting, vibrating and disorienting universe. In her images, she questions very classical phenomena in painting, such as the landscape and the still life, by freezing them behind semi-transparent layers of paint. We catch a glimpse that feels familiar, but soon find that nothing is what it seems. Vlaemminck’s work oscillates between the microscopic and the interstellar, as well as the amorphous spaces in between. Image, material, shape, texture and form mutate into compositional playgrounds floating in a newly created universe where different laws and rules apply.

The book “Screensaver Error” is conceived as a symmetrical, folded stack of sheets with images of Lisa’s paintings and collages.
At the heart of the book is the sixty-metre long, worm-shaped textile sculpture, which runs like a stream through the book for many pages.
Dominique De Groen wrote an electrically charged shimmering poem tailored to the work. The introductory text was written by Simon Delobel.

In KIOSK, Lisa Vlaemminck presents a series of new paintings and a sixty-metre long textile sculpture that will occupy the various exhibition spaces. For the design of the fabric, Lisa worked patterns that form a long colour gradient.

At the end of the exhibition, the sculpture, Meat A Morph Hose, will be cut into 35 separate, new sculptures that will be offered as artworks at € 350 each. Each work is a part of the colour gradient and has a unique print. The proceeds will finance the book. Details: Printed cotton, latex spaghetti filling, the ends are closed with climbing rope
40 cm diameter x 130cmA signed copy of the book will also be delivered together with the work.
The sculptures can be collected from KIOSK at the book-launch: Sat. 26 November

The artist is reprented by gallery rodolphe janssen

“RUSTIQUE” is an artist book created by Nicola Godman. This book is sprung out of a residency in September 2021 at Hôtel Chevillon, a former Scandinavian artist colony in Grez-sur-Loing, France. Barbizon, the village where the painter Jean-François Millet (1814–1875) lived and died, is located 20 km away from there. The book interweaves the life and work of Millet with Godman’s photographs, drawings and personal anecdotes.

“RUSTIQUE” wishes to put forward the artistic gaze towards rural life by artists who themselves are born peasants. Nicola Godman (b. 1989, Rute) is an artist working with photography, video, books and stories, currently based in Stockholm, Sweden. Having grown up on an organic dairy farm, she is researching depictions of rural life in art history and contemporary culture.

Last year, on a summer night in Marseille, someone, within all the hungry people I am meeting during my dinners, specifically set her attention on my projects. Later during the fall I received a call from Austė ZDANČIŪTĖ, the cultural attache at the Lithuanian embassy in France, who introduced me to Kamilè Krasauskaitè. Since that fall, we kept on exchanging and making future plans in France where she would have a residency. The more we chatted, the closest we began. Kamilè is a almost-thirty-years-old Lithuanian artist that has been including sourdough bread in her work and builds a poetic and mesmerising world around that dimension of food, fermentation, senses, environment, rituals...Through our communication I decided to share that encounter that we managed to welcome in Marseille. We kneaded some bread together, shared it in a forest of Marseillais sunflowers, walked the streets, met people, questioned and compared artists' lives in Europe. This issue might be an excerpt of all the long conversations we had, it was hot and sunny in Marseille, it was in June.

About her collaboration with Robert Glück, Kathleen Fraser writes:

"In Commemoration of the Visit of Foreign Commercial Representatives to Japan, 1947 is a small picture book assembled as a memento of Japan’s finest tourist sites, to be given to their new allies (and recent adversaries). I discovered the book when my friend Bob Glück sent me to an Asian antique store, where he thought I might find 'little things' for Christmas gifts. Seeing this book in the $1 box, I bought a copy and began to write a poem sequence based on each of the photos and their captions, not knowing that Bob had also bought this book and was writing his own version from the same collection of pictures."

Featuring color reproductions of the entire postcard book, In Commemoration of the Visit is an accidental collaboration–and we couldn’t be happier for the accident.