Ans Wortel

Ans (Anna Maria) Wortel 1929 - 1996 ) was a Dutch painter, poet and writer. She made gouaches and oil paintings, aquarelles, drawings, collages, lithographs, etchings, sculptures and glass sculptures. She was an autodidact and has won the first prize at the biennale of Paris in 1963. She was one of the leading female artists of postwar Dutch modern art.Wortel’s work is strongly autobiographical. Her experiences as a girl, woman, mother and as an artist were mainly the source of her inspiration. Common themes are human emotions, love, relationships, mother/child relations and social criticism.
Up until the late 1950s there was a search for a personal style. Artwork from that time varies and shows characteristics of different artists, such as Katsushika Hokusai, Willem de Kooning, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Wifredo Lam and Karel Appel. In the late 1950s her artistic style eventually flows into her very own style which is best described as abstract figurative art. It often consists of naked woman, man or child figures, sometimes recognizable, but always deformed. These human figures are together, search each other, embrace each other or repel each other. The figures are in unspecified spaces. The moon, the sun and the contours of earth often recur in her work. Mostly her work is accompanied by handwritten poetical lines.Wikipedia

Jan Montyn

Jan Montyn (13 November 1924 – 10 August 2015)
"As a 17 year-old in the Second World War, attracted purely by the promise of adventure, he became a member of the Jeugdstorm (Dutch National Socialist Youth Movement), and participated in two Weersportkamps (Endurance Camps) in Austria. In order to escape the Arbeitseinsatz (forced labour) and the restrictiveness of Oudewater, he joined the German navy in mid-1944. In the Baltic Sea, his ship was sunk by a torpedo attack, and he barely survived. He was transferred to the trenches in Courland, where he was wounded. Upon his recovery, he was bussed to the front line at Oder, where he witnessed the bombing of Dresden first-hand. When the Russians crossed the Oder, he fled to West Germany where he was eventually captured by the Americans. He managed to escape to Marseille, where he joined the Foreign Legion. After a short period with the Foreign Legion, he deserted and gave himself up in Straatsburg. In August 1945, he was transferred to the camp in Vught, and then on to the Duindorp camp in Scheveningen. He was sentenced to three years’ internment: firstly in the re-education camp in Katwijk, and later in Nunspeet. At weekends, he would return home to Oudewater or visit the artists’ bars on the Leidseplein in Amsterdam. He returned to Oudewater in May 1948.

 However, once again, Oudewater proved too restrictive and suffocating for him, and he signed up for military service with the UN. After undergoing commando training, he was shipped to Korea, where his love affair with the Far East, particularly South-East Asia, began. He was wounded while serving on the front line. After his recovery, he was once again wounded, and admitted to a hospital in Tokyo with partial paralysis. After his rehabilitation from this latest war wound, he was transferred back to the Netherlands, whereupon he returned to Oudewater.However, after a while, he realised that he had completely outgrown Oudewater and decided to become a professional soldier, accepting a post as instructor for the infantry division of the Dutch Army. Physically, he was in top condition, but his experiences at war had taken a toll on his psychological well-being, and he suffered from fits of rage. During this period, he also began to sketch more and more. After a while, he was given the task of setting up a museum for the Dutch Grenadier Guards. As curator of the museum, Montyn led a double life. By day, he tended to the museum, but by night, he would organise wild parties, orgies and drinking binges. His rage attacks got worse, and he was eventually admitted to a psychiatric institution in Utrecht. He brought his psyche back into balance by writing extensively about his experiences. In April 1957, he was declared unfit for service and discharged from the armed forces.

 He then set up home in Amsterdam, on the Oudezijds Kolk, where he lived on the fringes of the art world. He made friends with Anton Heyboer, who instilled Montyn with his passion for sketching and showed him numerous techniques. This expressive medium and refined techniques were perfectly suited to Montyn, and together with Heyboer, he embarked upon a long journey through France, Spain and Morocco.
In 1961, Montyn met the young artist Thom Gerrard. They then moved to Morocco, living and working in Rabat for nine months. Upon returning to the Netherlands, they went their separate ways. Tragically, just after Montyn’s first solo exhibition in 1963, Thom took his own life. In mid-1963, Montyn met Elja Julien, with whom he moved to Provence in 1964. With his own two hands, he renovated a tumbledown building for the couple to live in. It had no running water or electricity, but it did have a studio, which he used to create his etchings. His use of colours became more and more pronounced, and his first series of etchings flowed onto the canvas. He was featured in numerous exhibitions. He then embarked with Elja on journeys through Spain, Morocco, the Sahara Desert and the Atlas Mountains. Together with Elja, he accompanied his first child-refugee transit from South Korea. The couple broke up towards the end of the 1960s.

 This marked the beginning of six years of long journeys, often for months at a time. Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Vietnam became homes from home. Montyn travelled through rainforests, across hills, through valleys and along and across the Mekong river. He travelled through war zones, such as the Plain of Jars, Hué, Haiphong, Saigon, Hanoi and the tunnels of Cu Chi. He was caught in air raids, and he stood eye-to-eye with the Vietcong. He combined these extreme circumstances with temple retreats and with rest & recuperation in Bangkok. On his travels, he would create sketches and paintings, and back at his house in France, he would translate his experiences into etchings. The powerful etchings that he created during this period portrayed subjects such as war, air raids and casualties, but also the serenity of the temples, the mystic quality of the landscape and the burning desire for liberation. They were years of intense contrast: the tension and emotion of South-East Asia, hard work in Provence, and the worldliness of Amsterdam and Paris and the countless other cities in which his work was exhibited.

 After the fall of Saigon in 1975, enough was enough for Montyn, and he returned to Europe. In Amsterdam, he met Hi-en Tjia, who he would marry later that same year. The two of them embarked on many journeys together, and the touring party was increased to three with the birth of their daughter Carolynne. They travelled far and wide, to Morocco, Korea, Japan, the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia and Indonesia.
It was at this period that the Khmer Rouge came to power. Once again, Montyn offered his services as a volunteer to humanitarian organisations. He illegally crossed the Mekong, citing his work as an artist as his motivation. He met Roumpha, ‘the Khmer Rouge girl’, via whom he came into proximity with the regime. He witnessed the waves of refugees fleeing Poipet, and visited the refugee camps on the border with Thailand, such as Khao-I-Dang. He witnessed the cruelty that took place in the Tuol Sleng torture camp in Phnom Penh, and the suffering of the victims of the omnipresent landmines, both in the forests and in the fields. He assisted in the transportation of child refugees and the supply of medication for Doctors without Borders, and also worked to clear land mines. His knowledge of the country also enabled him to help track many missing persons for Amnesty International.

 When the military regime took power in Burma, causing a desperate shortage of medicines, he participated in many illegal shipments of medication. In this capacity, he was once again confronted with floods of refugees and the camps in Mae Sot, on the Thai border with Burma. This was once again a period of extreme contrast, with the tension and humanitarian crisis in Cambodia and Burma interchanging with relaxation in Bangkok and family and work life in Amsterdam and Provence. The sketches and etchings that he created during this period have a completely unique style of imagery and their overwhelming power of expression is hugely impressive.
In the second half of the 1990s, the situation in South-East Asia had calmed. However, Montyn continued to travel through Asia, accompanied by his trusty sketch pad, pencil, paintbrush and water colours. He recorded the experiences of his travels at home via his etchings, using his own unique imagery and his characteristic colour scheme."(janmontyncollection.com/jan-montyn )

Byron Galvez

Byron Gálvez (October 28, 1941 – October 27, 2009) was a Mexican artist who was primarily known for his painting but also created sculpture, including monumental works. He was born in rural Hidalgo state, to a father who played jazz music and read literature, a rarity in 1930s rural Mexico. However, it exposed Gálvez to culture, even though this led to an interest in visual art rather than musing or writing. He went to Mexico City to study art at both the undergraduate and graduate level, but never completed his degrees, opting instead to begin career after his coursework. Before his first individual exhibition, his work was criticized by Justino Fernández, but all of the paintings were sold in advance to foreign buyers including American actor Vincent Price, who called Gálvez a “Mexican Picasso.” Gálvez then managed to replace the forty five paintings for the exhibition in a week. Since then he had individual and collective exhibitions in Mexico, the United States and other parts of the world. He concentrated on painting, which he is better known for, in the 1970s and 1980s, but moved on to sculpture, including monumental works later in his career. Recognitions for Gálvez’s work include membership in the Salón de la Plástica Mexicana, a retrospective at the Palacio de Bellas Artes and two books published about his life.

 Gálvez’s work included painting, sculpture, etching, lithography, and drawing. For Galvez, art was spiritual and disconnected with physical logic, when only aesthetics mattered. Female figures are common, and often are sensual. He work has been influenced by the Cubism of Picasso and Georges Braque, by African and Oceanic folk art and by pre-Columbian sculpture. He preferred large scale works often bigger than seven by seven feet.He painted while listening to classical, jazz and occasionally, rock music.Galvez’s work experienced periods in which different artistic currents dominated including expressionism, abstract art and mixtures of the two.In his work, he tried to achieve a balance between figurative and abstract expression.The first stage of his painting was figurative expressionism, then abstract expressionism, under strong influence of Carlos Mérida, Rufino Tamaho, Santos Balmori, Kandinsky, Wifredo Lam and Picasso, along with some from classical painters such as Rembrandt and Caravaggio . Then for some time, he practiced abstract art, but then felt the need to draw human bodies again, especially female ones because he felt it allowed him better expression.Around 1980, he moved on to geometric figurativism, marked by the “Woman” exhibit at the Museum of Modern Art.This has also been describes as “pure chromatic constructivism."He considered himself primarily a sculptor and painted in that fashion.

 Despite their abstract quality, his paintings have an intense romanticism which arises from a mixture of nostalgia and affection, showing the influence of Rodríguez Luna and Santos Balmori His use of color and texture shows influence from the work of Rufino Tamayo with many works showing the forms of Picasso and the color schemes of Tamayo. He considered Picasso to be the greatest artist of all time. (vision) He works in “cold colors” and used chiaroscuro (a technique from Rembrandt) to indicate movement.
As student he specialized in painting but he also created sculpture and monumental pieces. During the 1970s and 1980s, he concentrated on painting but never left sculpture completely.He began doing sculpture though his work with murals, with his initial sculptural work showing the influence of Manuel Felguérez (seen in later pieces as well) with sculptures evolving from two dimensional to three. His European travels influenced his sculptural work with exposure to the works of Henry Moore, Brâncuși and Chillida. A visit to Stonehenge influenced his sense of space and Mesoamerican influence comes by way of his cultural heritage.His sculptural work is mostly in metals, with both geometric and figurative designs, which include reliefs and bronze sculptures.There are also mixed-media pieces such as metal fountain work on a mosaic base.Latter sculptures often feature feminine figures that float in space, gazing upon the onlooker and often sensuous. His sculpting work influenced his painting and vice versa.Wikipedia

Ans Wortel

Ans (Anna Maria) Wortel (18 October 1929, in Alkmaar, Netherlands – 4 December 1996, in Hilvarenbeek, Netherlands) was a Dutch painter, poet and writer. She made gouaches and oil paintings, aquarelles, drawings, collages, lithographs, etchings, sculptures and glass sculptures. She was an autodidact and has won the first prize at the biennale of Paris in 1963. She was one of the leading female artists of postwar Dutch modern art

Wortel’s work is strongly autobiographical. Her experiences as a girl, woman, mother and as an artist were mainly the source of her inspiration. Common themes are human emotions, love, relationships, mother/child relations and social criticism.
Up until the late 1950s there was a search for a personal style. Artwork from that time varies and shows characteristics of different artists, such as Katsushika Hokusai, Willem de Kooning, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Wifredo Lam and Karel Appel. In the late 1950s her artistic style eventually flows into her very own style which is best described as abstract figurative art. It often consists of naked woman, man or child figures, sometimes recognizable, but always deformed. These human figures are together, search each other, embrace each other or repel each other. The figures are in unspecified spaces. The moon, the sun and the contours of earth often recur in her work. Mostly her work is accompanied by handwritten poetical lines.Wikipedia