INSPIRING ARTISTS

Jackson Pollock

Nationality: American
Born: 1912
Death: 1956
Art Movement: Abstract Expressionism
Art Category: Painting
Education: Art Students League of New York
Concept of Art: The famous 'drip paintings' that he began to produce in the late 1940s represent one of the most original bodies of work of the century. At times they could suggest the life-force in nature itself, at others they could evoke man's entrapment - in the body, in the anxious mind, and in the newly frightening modern world. A wholly original, rule-shattering figure in American art, Pollock inspired Frank Stella, Richard Serra, and the Color Field painters. He was widely noticed for his technique of pouring or splashing liquid household paint onto a horizontal surface ("drip technique"), enabling him to view and paint his canvases from all angles. It was also called all-over painting and "action painting", since he covered the entire canvas and used the force of his whole body to paint, often in a frenetic dancing style.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

Willem de Kooning

Nationality: Dutch-American
Born: 1904
Death: 1997
Art Movement: Abstract expressionism
Art Category: Painting, Drawing, Sculpture
Education: Willem de Kooning Academie
Concept of Art: A first-generation Abstract Expressionist, Willem de Kooning is one of the most important artists of the 20th century. In 1950s New York, when painters like Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline were moving away from representational imagery toward pure abstraction, de Kooning maintained a commitment to the figurative tradition, developing a signature style that fused vivid color and aggressive paint handling with deconstructed images of the female form—a then-controversial body of works that has become known as his “Women” paintings. “Flesh was the reason oil paint was invented,” he famously said. Influenced by Arshile Gorky and Pablo Picasso, de Kooning was often thought to have blended Cubism, Expressionism, and Surrealism in his signature style, paving the way for generations of gestural figurative painters like Cecily Brown. Following his “Women” series, de Kooning pursued non-objective lyrical abstraction until his death in 1997.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

Mark Rothko

Nationality: American
Born: 1903
Death: 1970
Art Movement: Abstract Expressionism, Surrealism
Art Category: Painting
Education: Honorary degree at Yale
Concept of Art: A prominent figure among the New York School painters, Mark Rothko moved through many artistic styles until reaching his signature 1950s motif of soft, rectangular forms floating on a stained field of color. Heavily influenced by mythology and philosophy, he was insistent that his art was filled with content, and brimming with ideas. One of the pioneers of Color Field Painting, Rothko’s abstract arrangements of shapes are intended to evoke the metaphysical through viewers’ communion with the canvas in a controlled setting. “I'm not an abstractionist,” he once said. “I'm interested only in expressing basic human emotions: tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on.” A fierce champion of social revolutionary thought, and the right to self-expression, Rothko also expounded his views in numerous essays and critical reviews.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

Alighiero Boetti

Nationality: Italian
Born: 1940
Death: 1994
Art Movement: Art Porvera
Art Category: Painting, Mixed media
Education: University of Turin
Concept of Art: Boetti used a wide variety of materials for his work—including ball point pens and postal stamps—to make a series of maps and graphical charts of the world. “I went to a supplier of building materials. It was thrilling to see the wonderful things that were there!” the artist observed. “Some of the best moments in Arte Povera were hardware shop moments.” Boetti was preoccupied with the tension between order and disorder or chance, as seen in his recurring grid structures. Perhaps best known is Boetti's series of large embroidered maps of the world, called simply Mappa. After the Six-Day War in June 1967 the artist began to collect newspaper covers featuring maps of war zones. Boetti's maps reflect a changing geopolitical world from 1971 to 1994, a period that included the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Embroidered by up to 500 artisans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the maps were the result of a collaborative process leaving the design to the geopolitical realities of the time, and the choice of colours to the artisans responsible for the embroidery.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Michelangelo Pistoletto

Nationality: Italian
Born: 1933
Art Movement: Art Porvera, Conceptual Art
Art Category: Painting, Mixed media
Education: Pistoletto worked in his father's restoration workshop in Turin
Concept of Art: Though well-trained and with a facility for classical painting techniques, early in his career Pistoletto developed a stronger interest in the conceptual aspects of art objects. This included his use of humble materials such as tissue paper and mirrors, which helped lay foundations for the Arte Povera movement. Influenced by the social implications of more experimental tendencies in theatrical performance of his time, Pistoletto promoted a greater role for art in society and politics through his later projects that attempted to re-fashion the human world while involving many creative collaborators and crossing disciplinary lines, including mixing elements of music, theater, and installation, along with other visual art elements. He also designed works so that each would appear to be created by a different artist, defying notions of "branding" a signature style. Both playful (in his unconventional means) and serious (in his high-minded goals of changing the status quo), Pistoletto is a rare figure in arts practice for his commitment to do things differently, both in the art world and the world at large.
Major Collections: MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Museu d'Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA).

Sol LeWitt

Nationality: American
Born: 1928
Death: 2007
Art Movement: Conceptual Art, Postmodernism, Minimalism
Art Category: Painting, Drawing,
Education: Syracuse University, School of Visual Arts
Concept of Art: Sol LeWitt earned a place in the history of art for his leading role in the Conceptual movement. His belief in the artist as a generator of ideas was instrumental in the transition from the modern to the postmodern era. Conceptual art, expounded by LeWitt as an intellectual, pragmatic act, added a new dimension to the artist's role that was distinctly separate from the romantic nature of Abstract Expressionism. LeWitt believed the idea itself could be the work of art, and maintained that, like an architect who creates a blueprint for a building and then turns the project over to a construction crew, an artist should be able to conceive of a work and then either delegate its actual production to others or perhaps even never make it at all. LeWitt's work ranged from sculpture, painting, and drawing to almost exclusively conceptual pieces that existed only as ideas or elements of the artistic process itself.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, BAM.

Eva Hesse

Nationality: American
Born: 1936
Death: 1970
Art Movement: Post-minimalism, Conceptual Art
Art Category: Sculpture
Education: Yale University, studied with Josef Albers at Yale, Cooper Union, Pratt Institute, Art Students League of New York
Concept of Art: Eva Hesse was a German-born American sculptor known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s. One of the first to work with synthetic materials like fiberglass, latex, and plastic, Eva Hesse is best-known for her innovative sculptures, dubbed Postminimimalist for the time and style in which they were made. Reacting to the rigidity and uniformity of Minimalism, Hesse’s sculptural forms appear soft, slack, and uneven, conveying a human sensibility. A pioneering feminist artist, Hesse desired, in her own words, to “challenge the norms of beauty and order.” Hesse’s painful childhood—having fled Nazi Germany followed by her mother's suicide—significantly impacted her artmaking, prompting close friend and art historian Lucy Lippard to describe Hesse’s work as a “materialization of her anxieties.” Hesse’s artistic engagement with her own psychology is apparent in her Spectre paintings, where she uses muted tones and a thick and gestural application of paint to create haunting pictures reminiscent of Munch.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Vito Acconci

Nationality: American
Born: 1940
Death: 2017
Art Movement: Contemporary art
Art Category: Landscape architect, Installation, Performance Art
Education: College of the Holy Cross, University of Iowa
Concept of Art: Vito Acconci was a New York-based poet, performance artist, and architect, whose artworks and architecture explored, often intimately, the interpersonal limits of public space. Best known for his performance works Following Piece and Seedbed, Acconci began his creative practice as a poet and eventually transitioned to an architecture practice later in his life. In 1969, he first performed Following Piece, where Acconci would follow random Manhattanites until they entered the first private space that he was legally not allowed to follow into, determining the limits of publicness and a first example of active voyeurism in art. Throughout his career, Acconci devoted his craft to different conceptions of public space. Whether the performative act of poetry, pushing the edges of behavior and body in the open, or architecture forms that manipulate public in unforeseen ways, Acconci changed the way the people operate in public. Vito Acconci’s dislocations of familiar things into unlikely contexts jolts the viewer from passive looking into a more questioning state of mind. Face of the Earth #3 rejects the pedestal tradition by putting a jack-o-lantern face into the earth. Instead of looking up at it, the viewer steps down into its eyes, nose and mouth and can sit in the skull-like cavities. It proposes that a bland, easy-to-understand, ingratiating face is what the public says it wants in public art.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Michael Armitage

Nationality: Kenyan
Born: 1964-
Art Movement: Contemporary Art
Art Category: Painting
Education: Slade School of Fine Art, Royal Academy Schools
Concept of Art: Born in Nairobi, 1984, Michael Armitage is one of Kenya’s most exciting young artists. His lush, often large-scale paintings merge the traditions of European modernism with the subjects and materials of East Africa. Armitage knits together narratives from folklore, his memory, current affairs, popular culture and the history of East Africa. His paintings are grounded in the social fabric and political dynamics of his homeland. Living and working between Nairobi and London, Armitage paints with oil on Lubugo bark cloth – a culturally-significant material of the Buganda people in Uganda. The bark cloth is traditionally used as a burial shroud or in ceremonies. Replete with ripples, stitches and holes, Armitage stretches it across a frame to form the textured surface of his paintings.
Major Collections: MCA Chicago, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

El Anatsui

Nationality: Ghanaian
Born: 1944 -
Art Movement: Contemporary Art, Nsukka group
Art Category: Sculpture, Installation
Education: Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology, Kumasi, Ghana
Concept of Art: He transforms simple, everyday materials into striking large-scale installations. His work raises questions about ethnic identity by combining traditional African techniques and imagery with abstraction (which arguably is rooted within Western art). His themes are Consumption, transformation and the environment. His use of recycled African materials highlights that there are some places in the world where people have to re-use materials out of necessity, rather than as a choice. He hasn’t just turned something discarded into something beautiful. The use of bottle caps hints at broader topics such as global consumerism and its history, including slavery.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.

Pablo Picasso

Nationality: Spanish
Born: 1881
Death: 1973
Art Movement: Cubism, Surrealism
Art Category: Painting, drawing, sculpture, printmaking, ceramics, stage design, writing
Education: Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando
Concept of Art: A prolific and tireless innovator of art forms, Pablo Picasso impacted the course of 20th-century art with unparalleled magnitude. Inspired by African and Iberian art and developments in the world around him, Picasso contributed significantly to a number of artistic movements, notably Cubism, Surrealism, Neoclassicism, and Expressionism.
Picasso's immersion in Cubism also eventually led him to the invention of collage, in which he abandoned the idea of the picture as a window on objects in the world, and began to conceive of it merely as an arrangement of signs that used different, sometimes metaphorical means, to refer to those objects. This too would prove hugely influential for decades to come.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Renato Guttuso

Nationality: Italian
Born: 1911
Death: 1987
Art Movement: Corrente
Art Category: Painting
Education: University of Palermo
Concept of Art: Renato Guttuso was an Italian artist known for his association with the Socialist Realism movement popular in the Soviet Union. His art was characterized by a strong social commitment, which also led him to political experience as a senator of the Italian Communist Party for two terms, in 1976 and 1979, at the time of Enrico Berlinguer. In 1972 he painted I funerali di Togliatti, which will become a manifesto-work of post-World War II Communist and anti-Fascist painting. The work is now at Mambo, the Museum of Modern Art in Bologna. In it are depicted, in an allegorical manner, various figures of communism, including workers, red flags and the body of Togliatti. In addition to the author himself, you can see Marx, Engels, Trotsky, Sartre, Stalin, Lenin, Pier Paolo Pasolini and many others.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Marcel Duchamp

Nationality: French-American
Born: 1887
Death: 1968
Art Movement: Cubism, Dada, Conceptual Art
Art Category: Painting, Sculpture, Film, Photograph
Education:  Lycee Pierre-Corneille in France, Academie Julian in France
Concept of Art: Marcel Duchamp was a pioneer of Dada, a movement that questioned long-held assumptions about what art should be, and how it should be made. In the years immediately preceding World War I, Duchamp found success as a painter in Paris. But he soon gave up painting almost entirely, explaining, “I was interested in ideas—not merely in visual products.” Seeking an alternative to representing objects in paint, Duchamp began presenting objects themselves as art. He selected mass-produced, commercially available, often utilitarian objects, designating them as art and giving them titles. “Readymades,” as he called them, disrupted centuries of thinking about the artist’s role as a skilled creator of original handmade objects. Instead, Duchamp argued, “An ordinary object [could be] elevated to the dignity of a work of art by the mere choice of an artist.” The readymade also defied the notion that art must be beautiful. Duchamp claimed to have chosen everyday objects “based on a reaction of visual indifference, with at the same time a total absence of good or bad taste….” In doing so, Duchamp paved the way for Conceptual art—work that was “in the service of the mind,” as opposed to a purely “retinal” art, intended only to please the eye.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Max Ernst

Nationality: German-American-French
Born: 1891
Death: 1976
Art Movement: Dada Movement, Surrealism
Art Category: Painting, Sculpture
Education: University of Bonn in Germany
Concept of Art: He had no formal artistic training, but his experimental attitude toward the making of art resulted in his invention of frottage—a technique that uses pencil rubbings of objects as a source of images—and grattage, an analogous technique in which paint is scraped across canvas to reveal the imprints of the objects placed beneath. Max Ernst made paintings, sculptures, and prints depicting fantastic, nightmarish images that often made reference to anxieties originating in childhood. Ernst demonstrated a profound interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, which is apparent in his exploration of Automatism and his Frottage technique.
Major Collections: Musee National d'Art Moderne in Paris, Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Gallery in London, Moderna Museet in Stockholm

Raoul Hausmann

Nationality: Austrian
Born: 1886
Death: 1971
Art Movement: Dada
Art Category: Collage, Photography, Sculpture, Poetry, Performance
Education: n/a
Concept of Art: Raoul Hausmann was an Austrian artist and writer. One of the key figures in Berlin Dada, his experimental photographic collages, sound poetry, and institutional critiques would have a profound influence on the European Avant-Garde in the aftermath of World War I. "What is important is that our optical awareness rids itself of classical notions of beauty and opens itself more and more to the beauty of the instant,” he once wrote. After World War II, he dedicated much of the rest of his career to publishing writings about Dadaism. By 1918 Hausmann had already begun to work primarily in photomontage—composite collaged images made by juxtaposing and superimposing fragments of photos and text found in mass-media sources. Between 1918 and 1920 Hausmann was also busy inventing other anti-art art forms, such as “optophonetic” and “poster” poems, both of which were made up of random letters strung together. As cofounder of Club Dada in Berlin, Hausmann wrote several key Dada texts, including the "Dadaist Manifesto" with Richard Huelsenbeck and the sixteen-page Club Dada brochure with Jung and Huelsenbeck.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Andy Goldsworthy

Nationality: British
Born: 1956-
Art Movement: Contemporary Art, Earth Art, Environmental Art
Art Category: Sculpture, Photography
Education: Bradford College of Art, Preston Polytechnic
Concept of Art: Andy Goldsworthy is a British sculptor, photographer and environmentalist who produces site-specific sculptures and land art situated in natural and urban settings. He lives and works in Scotland. Rather than building monumental constructions on or out of the land, Goldsworthy works almost telepathically with nature, rearranging its natural forms in such a way as to enhance rather than detract from their beauty. Goldsworthy views the inevitable death and decay in his work as part of the life cycle - he takes an environmentalist's approach, lending an utmost respect toward the natural world as most of his pieces gradually fade away into the land from which they've come.
Major Collections: Tate

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

Nationality: Bulgarian and Moroccan
Born: 1935
Death: 2020 and 2009
Art Movement: Nouveau Realisme, Environmental Art
Art Category: Installation
Education: Fine Arts Academy in Sofia, Bulgaria
Concept of Art: Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a collaborative artist duo known for their monumental environmental installations. Part of France’s Nouveau Réalisme movement, the artists’ temporary textile interventions required dedicated planning and execution through detailed drawings. Christo compared the temporary nature of the wrapped Reichstag to the tents used by nomadic tribesmen, quickly erected and equally quickly removed, and to the transience of life itself. ‘It is a kind of naiveté and arrogance’, he commented, ‘to think that this thing stays forever, for eternity. All these projects have this strong dimension of missing, of self-effacement … they will go away, like our childhood, our life. They create a tremendous intensity when they are there for a few days’
Major Collections: Serpentine Galleries, Perez Art Museum Miami (PAMM).

Robert Smithson

Nationality: American
Born: 1938
Death: 1973
Art Movement: Land Art, Conceptual Art, Post- Minimalism, Earth Art,
Art Category: Installation
Education: Art Students League of New York
Concept of Art: A pivotal figure in the evolution of post-war sculpture, Robert Smithson created iconic Land art that radically changed prevailing ideas about the making and viewing of art. Working with unconventional materials including soil, rocks, disused industrial sites, and language, the artist explored the metaphorical qualities inherent in geological formations and the process of entropy. Smithson originated what he called non-sites, referring to the exhibition of materials that have been removed from their natural geological setting and displayed in a gallery space with documentation of their origins and extraction, such as photographs and maps.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Francis Bacon

Nationality: Irish
Born: 1909
Death: 1992
Art Movement: Expressionism, Cubism, Surrealism
Art Category: Painting
Education: Dean Close School
Concept of Art: Francis Bacon produced some of the most iconic images of wounded and traumatized humanity in post-war art. Borrowing inspiration from Surrealism, film, photography, and the Old Masters, he forged a distinctive style that made him one of the most widely recognized exponents of figurative art in the 1940s and 1950s. Among his signature motifs were screaming and disfigured heads, grappling homosexual lovers, and flanks of meat, and his style is characterized by its flat backgrounds and sense of motion, derived from the frequent use of photography and film stills as sources for portraiture. Surrealism, and in particular biomorphism, shaped the style of Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion (1944), the work that launched Bacon's reputation when it was exhibited in London in the final weeks of World War II. The work established many of the themes that would occupy the rest of his career, namely humanity's capacity for self-destruction and its fate in an age of global war.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Käthe Kollwitz

Nationality: German
Born: 1867
Death: 1945
Art Movement: Expressionism
Art Category: Drawing, Painting, Printmaking
Education: Women's Art School in Munich
Concept of Art: Considered one of Germany’s most important early 20th-century artists, Käthe Kollwitz captured the hardships suffered by the working class in drawings, paintings, and prints. Themes of war and poverty dominate Kollwitz’s oeuvre, with images of women grieving dead children a particularly important and recurring theme—an experience that Kollwitz suffered herself when her son died in WWI, influencing her decision to become a Socialist. Kollwitz’s unflinching exploration of human suffering amounted to a searing indictment of social conditions in Germany. In 1936, the Nazis declared Kollwitz’s art “degenerate” and her artworks were removed from museums. Capturing the anguish and plight of the impoverished and injured in a country torn apart by armed conflict, Kollwitz herself suffered numerous losses during the wars—including the death of her youngest son in World War I. “It is my duty to voice the sufferings of humankind, the never-ending sufferings heaped mountain high,” she once stated. “This is my task, but it is not an easy one to fulfill.”
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.

Judy Chicago

Nationality: American
Born: 1939 -
Art Movement: Contemporary Art, Feminism Art
Art Category: Installation, Painting
Education: University of California, Los Angeles
Concept of Art: Synonymous with early feminist art, Judy Chicago has been challenging the male-dominated art world since the 1970s. Her characteristically colorful body of work includes paintings, tapestries, sculpture, and mixed-media installations celebrating women’s achievements. Just as she elevated explicitly female subject matter, Chicago embraced artistic media whose creators were exclusively or mainly women and (perhaps not coincidentally) dismissed by the high art world as merely "craft." Art forms such as needlework, ceramic decoration, and glass art are central to Chicago's work, often included alongside traditional high art media, such as painting. Works such as The Dinner Party helped validate the importance of crafts-based art forms and break down the boundaries separating them from their "high" art counterparts.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Alice Neel

Nationality: American
Born: 1900
Death: 1984
Art Movement: Feminist Art, Realism
Art Category: Painting
Education: Moore College of Art & Design
Concept of Art: Alice Neel was an American visual artist, who was known for her portraits depicting friends, family, lovers, poets, artists, and strangers. Her paintings have an expressionistic use of line and color, psychological acumen, and emotional intensity. Her work depicts women through a female gaze, illustrating them as being consciously aware of the objectification by men and the demoralising effects of the male gaze. Her work contradicts and challenges the traditional and objectified nude depictions of women by her male predecessors.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Faith Ringgold

Nationality: American
Born: 1930-
Art Movement: Postmodernism, Activist Art, Feminist Art, Fiber Art
Art Category: Multimedia
Education: City College of New York
Concept of Art: Faith Ringgold from in Harlem,New York City is an American painter, writer, mixed media sculptor, and performance artist, best known for her narrative quilts. Faith Ringgold took the traditional craft of quilt making (which has its roots in the slave culture of the south - pre-civil war era) and re-interpreted its function to tell stories of her life and those of others in the black community. As a social activist, she has used art to start and grow such organizations as Where We At that support African American women artists. Her foundation Anyone Can Fly, is devoted to expanding the art canon to include artists of the African diaspora and to introduce the African American masters to children and adult audiences. Her art confronted prejudice directly and made political statements, often using the shock value of racial slurs within her works to highlight the ethnic tension, political unrest, and the race riots of the 1960s. Her works provide crucial insight into perceptions of white culture by African Americans and vice versa.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Nam June Paik

Nationality: Korean
Born: 1932
Death: 2006
Art Movement: Fluxus
Art Category: Video Art, Preformance Art, Installation Art
Education: University of Tokyo, Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich
Concept of Art:
Considered the father of video art, Nam June Paik pioneered the use of televisual electronic media in art. An integral member of the Fluxus movement alongside John Cage and George Macunias, Paik sought new modes of artistic expression and cultural exchange in his music, performances, and media works. Paik recognized the TV as more than a content delivery mechanism in works such as Zen for TV, a broken television broadcasting only a horizontal line across the screen.
Coining the term “the electronic superhighway,” he imagined a world in which human beings near and far would be connected through radio waves and television broadcast channels—in many ways predicting the internet.
Major Collections:
Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Coleccion SOLO, Performa.

Magdalena Abakanowicz

Nationality: Polish
Born: 1930
Death: 2017
Art Movement: Postminimalism
Art Category: Sculpture, Fiber art
Education: Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts
Concept of Art: Marta Magdalena Abakanowicz-Kosmowska was a Polish sculptor and fiber artist of Tartar descent. She was known for her use of textiles as a sculptural medium and her outdoor installations. She is widely regarded as one of Poland's most internationally acclaimed artists. “What is sculpture?” she asks. “With impressive continuity it testifies to man's evolving sense of reality, and fulfills the necessity to express what cannot be verbalized.” Through sculpture, Abakanowicz expresses what she sees as the ineffable, dichotomous relationship between the individual and society. The human figure, overt or implied, is central to her work, from her early fiber-based sculptures of ropes and organic forms to her later, expressionistic human and animal figures and trees. Often displayed in groups, with surfaces resembling bark or wrinkled skin, Abakanowicz’s figures seem vulnerable and weathered, as if bearing the marks of life.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Toshiko MacAdam

Nationality: Japanese
Born: 1940-
Art Movement: Fibre Art
Art Category: Sculpture, Installation
Education: Tama Fine Art Institute, Cranbrook Academy of Art,
Concept of Art: Toshiko MacAdam is a Japanese textile artist based in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia, Canada. She is best known for her work with large-scale textile structures, especially "textile playgrounds" for children, brightly colored net-like structures of crocheted and knotted nylon. Toshiko Horiuchi MacAdam explains the crucial turning point in her textile practice came the day two children innocently clambered onto her art. Despite being sited within the unspoken no-touch rules of the gallery, Toshiko saw that “suddenly the piece came to life. My eyes were opened. I realised I wanted just such a connection between my work and people alive at this moment in time – not a hundred years from now. I realised I was in fact making works for children.”
Major Collections: MoMA, National Museum of Modern Art in Kyoto

Chiharu Shiota

Nationality: Japanese
Born: 1972-
Art Movement: Contemporary Art
Art Category: Art performances, Sculpture, Installation
Education: Kyoto Seika University, Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Universität der Künste
Concept of Art: Chiharu Shiota is known for her performative installations in which she weaves human-size webs from black thread, turning entire galleries into labyrinthine environments and often enclosing personal objects or even herself. Mostly renowned for her vast, room-spanning webs of threads or hoses, she links abstract networks with concrete everyday objects such as keys, window frames, dresses, shoes, boats and suitcases. Materials and colors carry particular meanings in her artistic work, in which menstruation blood is used as artistic material and red threads come to signify human relationships. Places matter to her work and she is strongly interested in psychogeography, the relationship between psyche and space. Shiota's thread installation works developed from the artist's experience of moving between places out of which evolved the desire to cover her possessions in yarn thereby marking a personal territory.
Major Collections: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA)

Giacomo Balla

Nationality: Italian
Born: 1871
Death: 1958
Art Movement: Futurism
Art Category: Painting, Sculpture
Education: University of Turin
Concept of Art: Giacomo Balla was an Italian Futurist artist known for his geometric paintings that depicted light and movement. In his paintings he depicted light, movement and speed. He was concerned with expressing movement in his works, but unlike other leading futurists he was not interested in machines or violence with his works tending towards the witty and whimsical. His most famous work, Dinamisimo di Cane al Guinzagio shows a dog moving so fast that the viewer cannot see its legs, inspired by Eadweard Muybridge’s photographic experiments with horse.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Umberto Boccioni

Nationality: Italian
Born: 1882
Death: 1916
Art Movement: Futurism, Cubism, Neo-Impressionism
Art Category: Painter, Sculptor
Education: Accademia di Belle Arti di Roma
Concept of Art: Boccioni was important not only in developing the movement's theories, but also in introducing the visual innovations that led to the dynamic, Cubist-like style now so closely associated with the group. Boccioni believed that scientific advances and the experience of modernity demanded that the artist abandon the tradition of depicting static, legible objects. The challenge, he believed, was to represent movement, the experience of flux, and the inter-penetration of objects. This shaped Boccioni's approach to depicting the modern world, encouraging him to give it symbolic, almost mythical dimensions that evoked the artist's emotions as much as the objective reality of modern life
.Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA).

Charles Demuth

Nationality: American
Born: 1883
Death: 1935
Art Movement: Precisionism
Art Category: Painting, Watercolor
Education: Drexel University in Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Pennsylvania, Académie Colarossi in Paris, Académie Julian in Paris
Concept of Art: A titan of American Modernism, Charles Demuth produced works ranging from delicate watercolors of flowers and fruits to hard-edged, bold Precisionist paintings of urban and industrial landscapes influenced by Cubism and Futurism. He produced watercolors which vibrated like a "living nerve," and began to demonstrate architechtonic structure, laying a foundation for Cubist-Realism, or Precisionism, an adaptation of Cubism. Demuth began to introduce industrial imagery onto his canvases. Demuth painted posters for his fellow artists and friends that portrayed their respective painters and writers and performers through referential objects and language, as opposed to literal depictions. These works proved to be a challenge for critics. One reviewer described the works as having been made in “a code for which we have not the key.
Major Collections: The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Dallas Museum of Art, Brooklyn Museum

Marina Abramović

Nationality: Serbian
Born: 1946 -
Art Movement: Conceptual Art,
Art Category: Preformance Art, Filmmaker, Body Art, Photography
Education: Academy of Fine Arts, Belgrade ,Academy of Fine Arts, Zagreb
Concept of Art: Working in a wide range of media, Marina Abramović is best known for her provocative performance works, employing her own body as both subject and medium. In an early performance entitled Rhythm 10, Abramović repeatedly stabbed the spaces between her fingers with a series of knives, effectively testing the relationship between the mental and physical, and reinterpreting the concept of rhythm. Between 1976 and 1988, Abramović collaborated with German photographer and performance artist Ulay to create performance works that explore such binaries as male and female, active and passive, through the execution of repetitive, exhausting, and often painful actions. Abramović has continued to work independently since then, staging performative works that increasingly demand viewer involvement, such as her MoMA retrospective, “The Artist Is Present,” in which museum visitors could sit down across from Abramović at a table and engage in a silent exchange with the artist.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Yoko Ono

Nationality: Japanese-American
Born: 1933-
Art Movement: Happenings, Fluxus, Performance Art, Conceptual Art
Art Category: Performance Art
Education: Gakushūin
Concept of Art: Yoko Ono Lennon is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art, which she performs in both English and Japanese, and filmmaking. Well before her famous partnership with John Lennon, Yoko Ono was the "High Priestess of the Happening" and a pioneer in performance art. Drawing from an array of sources from Zen Buddhism to Dada, her pieces were some of the movement's earliest and most daring. With unprecedented radicalism, she rejected the idea that an artwork must be a material object. Many of her works consist merely of instructions. In Cloud Piece (1963) for example, she instructs us to imagine digging a hole in the garden, and putting clouds into it. Ono faced the considerable challenge of remaining visible as an artist, not just a rock star's wife.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Claes Oldenburg

Nationality: Sweedish-American
Born: 1929-
Art Movement: Pop Art, Avant-garde
Art Category: Sculpture, Public Art
Education: Latin School of Chicago, Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University
Concept of Art: Claes Oldenburg is a Swedish-born American sculptor known for his innovative and humorous reconstructions of everyday objects in both large-scale public installations and soft materials. From his Happenings beginning in the 1960s, to his enormous public sculptures of ice cream and rubber stamps, to his collaboration with his wife Coosje van Bruggen, Oldenburg has remained at the forefront of the Conceptual and Pop art movements. “I am for an art that grows up not knowing it is art at all,” he wrote. “I am for an artist who vanishes.” Whereas Pop artists had imitated the flat language of billboards, magazines, television, etc., working in two-dimensional mediums, Oldenburg's three-dimensional papier maches, plaster models, and soft fabric forms brought Pop art into the realm of sculpture, a key innovation at the time.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.

Marisol Escobar

Nationality: Venezuelan-American
Born: 1930
Death: 2016
Art Movement: Pop Art, New Realism
Art Category: Sculpture, Assemblage
Education: Jepson Art Institute, École des Beaux-Arts, Art Students League of New York, Hans Hofmann School
Concept of Art: Marisol Escobar, later known as simply “Marisol,” was an American artist best known for her carved wooden sculptures, which often incorporated photographs and painted elements. Escobar’s work was largely influenced by pre-Columbian artwork, incorporating materials such as terracotta and wood elements while using geometric abstraction. The artist is most commonly associated with her installation The Last Supper (1982–1984), in which she recreates da Vinci’s famous painting through sculptural assemblage. Marisol mimicked the role of femininity in her sculptural grouping Women and Dog. This work, among others, represented a satiric critical response on the guises of fabricated femininity by deliberately assuming the role of 'femininity' in order to change its oppressive nature.
Major Collections: Albright-Knox Art Gallery, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Currier Museum of Art, Museum of Modern Art

Sigmar Polke

Nationality: German
Born: 1941
Death: 2010
Art Movement: Pop Art, Contemporary Art
Art Category: Painting, Photography
Education: Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Concept of Art: Sigmar Polke was a German painter and photographer.
Polke experimented with a wide range of styles, subject matters and materials. In the 1970s, he concentrated on photography, returning to paint in the 1980s, when he produced abstract works created by chance through chemical reactions between paint and other products. In the last 20 years of his life, he produced paintings focused on historical events and perceptions of them. Inspired by his fascination with science and alchemy, Polke innovated techniques in painting and photography by manipulating chemical processes. Life in post-war Germany led the artist to establish Capitalist Realism, an ironic exploration of consumerism using the imagery of popular culture and advertising, evident in his 1976 collage on paper Supermarkets aus dem Zyklus, Wir Kleinbürger (translated as “Supermarkets from the Cycle, We Petty Bourgeoisie”), featuring iconic Superman figures shopping in a brand-laden supermarket.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

William Kentridge

Nationality: South African
Born: 1955-
Art Movement: Postmodernism
Art Category: Printmaking, drawings, and animated films
Education: University of the Witwatersrand and Johannesburg Art Foundation
Concept of Art: William Kentridge stands assured as an exciting visual artist, a profound philosopher, and a subtle symbol for peace. To say that he is primarily a political artist however is in many ways a misleading starting point from which to consider Kentridge's practice. As a human who cares deeply and one who is connected to his surroundings, current and contemporary happenings do appear in the artist's work and these can include incidents of violence, racial prejudice, and traces of the apartheid system. As a characteristically philosophical artist, Kentridge constantly reflects on the unanswerable question of what it means to be human. Starting with rigorous personal interrogation - often in the form of self-portraits - he successfully gives insight to a shared human story and recognises the importance of returning to one's origins in order to do so. As such the artist uses basic charcoal as his primary medium and always holds onto the childhood impulse to draw.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Lincoln Center Vera List Art Project.

Christopher Wool

Nationality: American
Born: 1955-
Art Movement: Postmodernism
Art Category: Painting, Photography, Sculpture
Education: New York Studio School
Concept of Art: Christopher Wool is an enigmatic abstract painter whose formal experimentation and satirical subversion has left him both commercially successful and acclaimed by some critics, whilst condemned as banal or superficial by others. Wool's work is grounded in an investigation of abstract painting through a postmodern repurposing of signs and symbols. Familiar images, including stark black and white patterns, shapes, and particularly words are repeated, manipulated and erased. His most famous works, the 'word paintings', are large canvases silkscreened with phrases that suggest graffiti slogans, lines from movies or tv shows, or other recognizable material. The framing of such works as abstract paintings is designed to question what painting is, how it should be produced, and how an image can incorporate multiple layers of meaning that are revealed by the viewer's attention.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.

Gerhard Richter

Nationality: German
Born: 1932-
Art Movement: Contemporary Art, Capitalistic Realism, Pop Art, Post-Modernism
Art Category: Painting
Education: Dresden Art Academy, Kunstakademie Düsseldorf
Concept of Art: Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction. Richter would often blur his subjects and embrace chance effects in his own painting process in order to show the impossibility of any artist conveying the full truth of a subject in its original condition. Such means for suggesting that something essential to the model has been "lost in translation" often leads a viewer's attention to the oil pigment's dense, material nature, thereby demonstrating both its expressive strengths and shortcomings.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.

Vincent van Gogh

Nationality: Dutch
Born: 1853
Death: 1890
Art Movement: Post-Impressionism
Art Category: Painting
Education: Anton Mauve
Concept of Art: Van Gogh's dedication to articulating the inner spirituality of man and nature led to a fusion of style and content that resulted in dramatic, imaginative, rhythmic, and emotional canvases that convey far more than the mere appearance of the subject. Although the source of much upset during his life, Van Gogh's mental instability provided the frenzied source for the emotional renderings of his surroundings and imbued each image with a deeper psychological reflection and resonance. Van Gogh used an impulsive, gestural application of paint and symbolic colors to express subjective emotions. These methods and practice came to define many subsequent modern movements from Fauvism to Abstract Expressionism.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, J. Paul Getty Museum, Cleveland Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Museo Soumaya.

Alexander Calder

Nationality: American
Born: 1898
Death: 1976
Art Movement: Kinetic Art, Surrealism, Abstract
Art Category: Sculpture
Education: Stevens Institute of Technology, Art Students League of New York
Concept of Art: American artist Alexander Calder changed the course of modern art by developing an innovative method of sculpting, bending, and twisting wire to create three-dimensional “drawings in space.” Resonating with the Futurists and Constructivists, as well as the language of early nonobjective painting, Calder’s mobiles (a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931 to describe his work) consist of abstract shapes made of industrial materials––often poetic and gracefully formed and at times boldly colored––that hang in an uncanny, perfect balance. His complex assemblage Cirque Calder (1926–31), which allowed for the artist’s manipulation of its various characters presented before an audience, predated Performance Art by some 40 years.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields.

Diego Rivera

Nationality: Mexican
Born: 1886
Death: 1957
Art Movement: Mexican Muralism
Art Category: Painting, Mural
Education: San Carlos Academy
Concept of Art: Diego Rivera was a prominent Mexican painter. At the height of his career, Diego Rivera was an international art celebrity. Trained at the Escuela Nacional de Bellas Artes in Mexico City, he spent more than a decade in Europe, becoming a leading figure in Paris’s vibrant international community of avant-garde artists. There, he developed his own brand of cubism infused with symbols of his Mexican national identity. After his return to Mexico in 1922, he joined fellow creative thinkers and state officials in concerted efforts to revitalize and redefine Mexican culture in the wake of the Mexican Revolution (1910–20), a decade-long conflict that killed more than a million citizens. Using a centuries-old fresco technique, Rivera created sweeping mural cycles that drew upon modernist painting styles to render heroic visions of Mexico’s past and present that captured the attention of critics and onlookers internationally.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), MALBA.

Donald Judd

Nationality: American
Born: 1928
Death: 1994
Art Movement: Minimalism, Earth Art
Art Category: Sculpture
Education: College of William and Mary, Columbia University School of General Studies, Art Students League of New York
Concept of Art: Donald Judd was an American artist, whose rejection of both traditional painting and sculpture led him to a conception of art built upon the idea of the object as it exists in the environment. Judd's works belong to the Minimalist movement, whose goal was to rid art of the Abstract Expressionists' reliance on the self-referential trace of the painter in order to form pieces that were free from emotion. Judd will survey the evolution of Judd’s work, beginning with his paintings, reliefs, and handmade objects from the early 1960s; to the years in which he built an iconic vocabulary of works in three dimensions including hollow boxes, stacks, and progressions in readily available commercial materials; and continuing through his extensive engagement with color during the last decade of his life. “Half a century after Judd established himself as a leading figure of his time, there remains a great deal to discover,” said Temkin. “MoMA’s presentation will emphasize the radicality of his approach to art-making and the visual complexity of his work.”
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Annette Lemieux

Nationality: American
Born: 1957-
Art Movement: Minimalism
Art Category: Photography, Painting, Mix-Media
Education: Hartford Art School University of Hartford
Concept of Art: Annette Lemieux is an American artist who emerged in the early 1980s along with the “picture theory” artists. Lemieux brought to the studio a discipline equally based on introspection, and the manifestations of an ideological minimalism. Process is a key component in the execution of her works over the past three decades, creating the lure to the confrontation of issues of social and historical urgency. Following the legacies of Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage, she works to narrow the gap between “art” and “life”. Lemieux's works resist the traps of a “signature style,” and she has referred to her shows looking more like group shows rather than a single artist's. Her work surprises us, challenges her audience to keep up, and resists the conformity of the brand. As stated by Peggy Phelan, “For Lemieux, the art object offers her thoughts and feelings a way to travel . . . Art is her way of responding, both publicly and intimately, to the ongoing predicament of our lives”.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Richard Serra

Nationality: American
Born: 1938-
Art Movement: Process Art, Minimalism, Video Art, Post-minimalism, Installation Art
Art Category: Sculptor, Video Artist
Education: University of California, Berkeley (attended),University of California, Santa Barbara (B.A. 1961), Yale University (B.F.A. 1962, M.F.A. 1964)
Concept of Art: Richard Serra is one of the preeminent American artists and sculptors of the post-Abstract Expressionist period. Beginning in the late 1960s to the present, his work has played a major role in advancing the tradition of modern abstract sculpture in the aftermath of Minimalism. His work draws new, widespread attention to sculpture's potential for experience by viewers in both physical and visual terms, no less often within a site-specific, if not highly public setting.
Serra took up that contemporary heritage, one suggesting that the human body itself no longer had a place in painting or sculpture, and returned to it something of the human body's stature. He explored how an art work might relate intimately to a specific setting; how it might take up a physical as well as a visual relationship to a viewer; and how it might create spaces (or environments) in which a viewer can experience universal qualities of weight, gravity, agility, and even a kind of meditative repose.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Lincoln Center Vera List Art Project.

Elizabeth Murray

Nationality: American
Born: 1940
Death: 2007
Art Movement: Neo-Expressionism
Art Category: Painting
Education: School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Mills College
Concept of Art: Inspired by Abstract Expressionist Jackson Pollock’s work, as well as Pablo Picasso’s Cubist works, American painter Elizabeth Murray’s oeuvre span styles from a Minimalist use form and color to bold, cartoonish Surrealism. Her works push the boundaries of a two-dimensional medium; the irregular triangles in the “Giant Maiden” series (1972) strain against the edges of canvases painted in high relief, while the explosive colors on an intricate collage-like canvas in Do the Dance (2005) lend the painting a kinetic, almost optical quality. 'Pastiche' is a term used to refer to a celebratory imitation of an artwork or style. Parody is a similar term, but means an imitation produced to mock. Murray's paintings often both pastiche and parody painting's history: using recognizable Cubist and Modernist abstraction techniques and reinterpreting famous works of art in a way that playfully pokes fun at the hallowed history and contemporary seriousness of painting as a medium.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, Anderson Collection at Stanford University.

Edward Hopper

Nationality: Dutch-American
Born: 1882
Death: 1967
Art Movement: Social Realism
Art Category: Painting, Drawing, Printmaking
Education: Parsons The New School for Design
Concept of Art: Edward Hopper was an American realist painter and printmaker. While he is widely known for his oil paintings, he was equally proficient as a watercolorist and printmaker in etching. Hopper's enduring popularity stems from his ability to stage scenes from everyday life in a way which also addresses universal concerns. His contemplative studies of modern life, captured within the stark interiors of automats, motel rooms, diners and movie theatres have a timeless quality, transcending the hour and the place to become profound statements about the human condition. Hopper believed that the artist's goal was to reveal the truth about the everyday and the interior life of ordinary people. His paintings are flooded with penetrating beams of sun or moonlight which expose isolated figures in sparsely furnished rooms, portraits of aloneness, absorbed in themselves and detached from their world. Another major theme of Hopper's work is the use of American venacular architecture, often cropped in a way to increase psychological tension and heighten the feeling of isolation.
Major Collections: Collected by a major institution

Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA), Yale University Art Gallery.

Banksy

Nationality: British
Born: estimate 1965 - 1974
Art Movement: Contemporary Art, Urban Art, Anti-Consumerism
Art Category: Graffiti, Film, Political Art, Street Art, Auto-destructive art
Education: unkown
Concept of Art: With tongue firmly planted in cheek, English graffiti artist and international prankster Banksy has managed to become one of the world's most recognized artists while remaining relatively anonymous. Staying true to the credos of Street Art, he's built a celebrated body of work, both permanent and impermanent, that utilizes satire, subversion, dark humor, and irony to create resonant social, political, and humanist messages for the masses on a populous and public level.
His style is universally familiar, founded on a signature stencil aesthetic that has elevated him from mere man with a spray can to a highly creative artist in his own right. He is responsible for catapulting guerilla work into the mainstream as a viable form of art. anksy's work has also shown a desire to mock centralised power, hoping that their work will show the public that although power does exist and works against you, that power is not terribly efficient and it can and should be deceived.
Major Collections: n/a

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Nationality: American
Born: 1960
Death: 1988
Art Movement: Neo-expressionism
Art Category: Painting, Graffiti, Street-Art
Education: n/a
Concept of Art: Jean-Michel Basquiat was a Haitian-American artist who rose to success during the 1980s. Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he was part of the Neo-expressionism movement. His work explored his mixed African, Latinx, and American heritage through a visual vocabulary of personally resonant signs, symbols, and figures, and his art developed rapidly in scale, scope, and ambition as he moved from the street to the gallery. Much of his work referenced the distinction between wealth and poverty, and reflected his unique position as a working-class person of color within the celebrity art world. In the years following his death, the attention to (and value of) his work has steadily increased, with one painting even setting a new record in 2017 for the highest price paid for an American artist's work at auction.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Guggenheim Museum

Keith Haring

Nationality: American
Born: 1958
Death: 1990
Art Movement: Contemporary Art, Pop Art, Urban Art, Neo Pop, East Village Art
Art Category: Graffiti Art, Sculpture, Murals
Education: The Ivy School of Professional Art, School of Visual Arts New York City
Concept of Art: Keith Allen Haring was an American artist whose pop art emerged from the New York City graffiti subculture of the 1980s. His animated imagery has "become a widely recognized visual language". Much of his work includes sexual allusions that turned into social activism by using the images to advocate for safe sex and AIDS awareness. Haring's popularity grew from his spontaneous drawings in New York City subways—chalk outlines of figures, dogs, and other stylized images on blank black advertising spaces. After gaining public recognition, he created colorful larger scale murals, many commissioned.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Yoshitomo Nara

Nationality: Japanese
Born: 1959-
Art Movement: Superflat, Pop Art, Ukiyo-e Japanese Woodblock Prints, Japonism
Art Category: Painting, Sculpture, Illustration
Education: Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Germany, Aichi Prefectural University of Fine Arts and Music, Nagakute Aichi, Japan
Concept of Art: Nara is a central figure within contemporary Japanese art. He is associated specifically with the rise of Superflat art; a term coined by Nara's compatriot Takashi Murakami to describe a movement that blends a two-dimensional (flat) graphic design with the more contemplative interests of fine art. Nara's deceptively simple art uses cartoon-like imagery to express conflicting childhood emotions and anxieties within a single figure. His children are typically shown in a mood of resistance and rebellion or, sometimes, in a more tranquil or contemplative state. Given his nationality, and the illustrative quality of his art, Nara has often been associated with the traditions of Japanese manga and anime but Nara's work draws on a much wider range of influences ranging through Western Punk Rock and fairy tales to Eastern religion and philosophy.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)

Takashi Murakami

Nationality: Japanese
Born: 1962-
Art Movement: Contemporary Art
Art Category: Painter, Sculptor, Installation Art
Education: Tokyo University of the Arts
Concept of Art: Known for his brightly colored and maniacally cheerful works, Takashi Murakami's astronomical rise to fame in the contemporary art world has been met with equal parts celebration and criticism. Murakami merges Japanese pop culture referents with the country's rich artistic legacy, effectively obliterating any distinction between commodity and high art. Out of defiance for the Western-dominated art world, Murakami created his own movement called Superflat. The name refers both to the flattened compositions that lacked one point perspective of historical Japanese artistic movements such as Nihonga, as well as to the flattening (or merging) of art and commerce.
Major Collections: Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Coleccion SOLO.

Giorgio de Chirico

Nationality: Italian
Born: 1888
Death: 1978
Art Movement: Metaphysical art, surrealism
Art Category: Painting, sculpture, drawing, costume and stage design
Education: Athens School of Fine Arts, Academy of Fine Arts in Munich
Concept of Art: Giorgio de Chirico was an Italian artist and writer born in Greece. In the years before World War I, he founded the scuola metafisica art movement, which profoundly influenced the surrealists. His most well-known works often feature Roman arcades, long shadows, mannequins, trains, and illogical perspective. His imagery reflects his affinity for the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and of Friedrich Nietzsche, and for the mythology of his birthplace. After 1919, he became a critic of modern art, studied traditional painting techniques, and worked in a neoclassical or neo-Baroque style, while frequently revisiting the metaphysical themes of his earlier work. De Chirico later rejected his earlier metaphysical style and became interested in traditional painting techniques, working in Neoclassical or neo-Baroque styles influenced by Raphael, Luca Signorelli, and Peter Paul Rubens. The Surrealists were publicly critical of this anti-modern development in de Chirico’s work and the artist eventually ended his association with the group. He cited the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche as a deep influence.
Major Collections:Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Salvador Dalí

Nationality: Spanish
Born: 1904
Death: 1989
Art Movement: Cubism, Dada, Surrealism
Art Category: Painting, drawing, photography, sculpture, writing, film, and jewelry
Education: San Fernando School of Fine Arts, Madrid
Concept of Art: Salvador Dalí was a leading proponent of Surrealism, the 20-century avant-garde movement that sought to release the creative potential of the unconscious through strange, dream-like imagery. “Surrealism is destructive, but it destroys only what it considers to be shackles limiting our vision,” he said. Dalí is specially credited with the innovation of “paranoia-criticism,” a philosophy of art making he defined as “irrational understanding based on the interpretive-critical association of delirious phenomena.” Major themes in his work include dreams, the subconscious, sexuality, religion, science and his closest personal relationships. To the dismay of those who held his work in high regard, and to the irritation of his critics, his eccentric and ostentatious public behavior often drew more attention than his artwork.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Indianapolis Museum of Art at Newfields, de la Cruz Collection.

René Magritte

Nationality: Belgian
Born: 1898
Death: 1967
Art Movement: Surrealism
Art Category: Painting
Education: Académie Royale des Beaux-Arts
Concept of Art: René Magritte was a Belgian artist and one of the most enduringly influential members of the Surrealist movement. Best known for his illusionistic images that challenged the viewer’s preconceptions of reality, Magritte’s Surrealist paintings are clever, witty, and ironic—his most popular being The Treachery of Images (This is Not a Pipe) (1929). Often depicting ordinary objects in an unusual context, his work is known for challenging observers' preconditioned perceptions of reality. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA).

Jake and Dinos Chapman

Nationality: British
Born: 1966 and 1962 -
Art Movement: Young British Artist
Art Category: Sculptures, Prints, Installations
Education: Ravensbourne College of Art, North East London Polytechnic, Royal College of Art
Concept of Art: Jake and Dinos Chapman create iconoclastic sculptures, prints, and installations that examine contemporary politics, religion, and morality with searing wit. The brothers explore the poles of beauty and pain, humor and horror, the sublime and perverse, the diabolical and the infantile, in ways that shock and confront viewers with their own voyeurism. The Chapman brothers have been working together since the early 1990s. Their art is deliberately confrontational, engaging with such inflammatory subjects and Nazism, the holocaust and religion, while it exploits an aesthetic of obscenity and horror. They appropriate elements from the history of art and philosophical and sociological theory to produce a body of work that derives much of its power from being politically and morally ambiguous, wilfully resisting straightforward interpretation.
Major Collections: ICA London, Hamburger Bahnhof, Palazzo Grassi - Punta della Dogana.

Tracy Emin

Nationality: British
Born: 1963 -
Art Movement: Young British Artists, Fiber Art
Art Category: Painting, Drawing, Installation Sculpture,
Education: Medway College of Design, Maidstone College of Art, Royal College of Art, Birkbeck University of London
Concept of Art: A prominent member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Emin works in a wide range of mediums, including film, painting, neon, embroidery, drawing, installation, and sculpture. Her work is intensely personal, revealing intimate details of her life with brutal honesty and poetic humor. Her installation, 'My Bed' features the artist’s unmade bed surrounded by personal items (from slippers to empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and condoms), exploring the allegorical qualities of a bed as a place of birth, sex, and death. Emin’s unflinching takes on sexuality, relationships, and trauma—coupled with her striking looks—drew a retrograde tabloid response to her work in the 1990s.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA). Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, Haus der Kunst, MALBA.

Gary Hume

Nationality: British
Born: 1962-
Art Movement: Young British Artists, Post-Minimalism
Art Category: Painting
Education: Goldsmiths
Concept of Art: Gary Hume is a British artist whose membership of the notorious Young British Artists (YBA) movement in the 1990s first brought his paintings to public attention. But unlike several of his YBA contemporaries, Hume avoided much of the extreme partying and tabloid notoriety that characterized the movement throughout the decade by preferring to focus on the development of his abstract, minimal, and often wryly narrative visual artworks. Using broad planes of color and household gloss paint to suggest familiar objects (such as hospital doors), his artwork came to be championed by international art dealers like Charles Saatchi as an innovative contemporary minimalism.
Major Collections: Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA)