Exposition Art Blog: Avant Garde Art

Avant Garde Art




I would like to invite you to present your art work on my blog Exposition. Please, send me pictures of your work on my e-mail address : milenaolesinska77@gmail.com  Description should include; your name, some details about your work. All art work will be published on the blog free of charge. 










 

Richard Konvička

Richard Konvička was born on April 30, 1957, in Prague – Died, 6 August 2021. 1973 to 1977, he studied at the Secondary School of Fine Arts in Prague and later at the Academy of Fine Arts (AVU) in Prague under the guidance of Professor Jan Smetana (1977-1983).

In 1990, he received a grant from The Pollock-Krasner Foundation, Inc., New York, to study abroad for half a year. Since 1997 he has been a member of Umělecká beseda arts association."Richard Konvička's work was and is up-to-date and is not easy to understand. He has his informed interprets (e.g. Richard Drury, Ivan Neumann), who have written the most important about it. Probably, even I can join them. Every new attempt at his ”portrait“ cannot avoid once already written. The author paints and also destructs. This seemingly ironic expression gives a true picture of the art program his work, points out the essential expressionistic and content components of his paintings, where sensuality softens (disturbs?, corrects?) the mind. Konvička´s art is stormy, stimulates, provokes; but it is also kind and especially human to be always contemporary in all these levels.His art attacks human senses and provides also testimony about his own turbulent spirit, which is too open for the surrounding world. Richard Konvička belongs to a relatively small group of artists, who are not afraid to get down searching for the new ways of art expression. It is historically nothing new that many soon used all the optimism of their Prometheus energy and integrated into the ”middle“ classic stream in art. Others have fallen through the professional routine and became uncreative epigones of their idols. Only a few remained and focused their attention on the search in themselves, with their own eyes, opinions and life. From their family comes also Richard Konvička, direct by nature, lustily tempered, robust (by art, not by his fi gure) painter. "(richardkonvicka.cz)

 





















 

 
  Hayden Minor 

"Hayden Minor -  is a young abstract artist and photographer from the Chicago suburbs. Beginning his art career taking photos as a young teenager, he was taking as many pictures as he could on any camera he could find. Soon, however, Hayden found his second passion: painting.
With the love and support from his mother, he began creating paintings, sometimes amounting to two or three a day. Channelling his inner child, Hayden displays grim topics such as drug addiction, violence, and political turmoil in his paintings through an abstract, jeuvenile art style. The purpose of this is to help break down these complex societal issues and display them in a basic, simple view. This, he hopes, will help in perspective and understanding among people.
Hayden is now in the process of creating an online artist coalition through his newly created HARM Gallery, an online gallery which promotes accepted artists. There, they are able to sell and display their work for free. In addition to this project, he hopes to place his own art in a gallery somewhere in the Midwest and make a living selling his paintings. "
 
 






















 
 
 
 
Roy Oxlade

Roy Oxlade ( 1929 - 2014) was an English painter, writer on art, and an art educator.
Oxlade is quoted in a 2013 exhibition review:
"Painting to me is like a room of the imagination. It’s up to me what I do with it. I choose its size and its materials – usually canvas and oil paint. At the beginning its relationships don’t amount to much – it’s a rectangle in a jumble of art history I relate to. There would not be much fun in leaving the room empty, a passive – one colour field – a blank canvas. And entirely abstract forms place too many restrictions on dialogue. So I have put in some other stuff, some characters, some actors – tables, pots, colours, easels, lamps, scribbles, figures and faces to interact with each other. I adjust the temperature, open the windows, shut the windows, throw things out, change the lighting."
In a written dialogue with the painter Marcus Reichert in 2003, Oxlade said:"Like poetry, painting’s got its own language of metaphor: I think of van Gogh’s The Night Café, a bowl of flowers by Rousseau, many Matisses: the aubergines still life in Grenoble, Music, the Red Dessert. Matisse sometimes managed to achieve wonderfully direct drawing within his painting like he does with the box of pencils in the Red Studio. Aren’t these paintings modernism? A rich vein, you could call it metaphorical modernism; it makes the rest of painting, ancient and modern, so much framed tedium. They’re a hundred years old, but that’s not so long in the scale of things. Do they mark the end of what’s possible? Spengler? Gombrich? We don’t need them to remind us; it’s obvious that ‘we’ve lost faith in our own culture’. The rush to abstraction was a diversion, the dismantling too fast; the dialogue dried up – in abstraction there were no metaphors to make. Philip Guston made a defiant counter-attack but just now the language of painting seems to be foreign. But when cat-walk art has finally imploded perhaps there can be a fresh and essentially evaluative look at metaphorical modernism. That could initiate a continuation of representational painting." Wikipedia

























 David Larwill

 David Larwill (1956–2011) was an Australian artist recognisable by his distinctive and exuberant style based on bold colour, stylised figures and simplified form. Although best known as a figurative expressionist painter, Larwill was also a draughtsman and printmaker of note. He produced many drawings, watercolours, ceramics and sculptures as well as etchings, lithographs and screenprints. In a career that stretched over 30 years, Larwill held over 25 solo exhibitions and participated in scores of group shows.
David Larwill’s early work was direct, spontaneous and often raw. A painting such as Luna Park, 1979, shows how he impulsively explored the dramatic, all-over quality of blacks and reds, combined with expressive handling of paint. The work refers to a well-known fun park in inner-city St Kilda that had attracted figurative artists that Larwill greatly admired.Larwill compared the characteristic primitivism of his figures to letter writing: ‘It’s my symbols, my language. I want to show arrangements people have never seen before.’
For Larwill, painting was essentially a leap of faith. He began by putting paint on canvas and gradually the marks evolved and crystallised through the recall of everyday events. His subjects, although coming from the imagination, were ultimately taken from life; his family, pets, surroundings and things that he liked to do, read, listen to or see. These simple pleasures along with what was happening on the world stage both inspired and challenged him and became the basis of his art. Wikipedia


 





















Philippe Vandenberg

Philippe Vandenberg was born in Ghent in 1952. It is in the Museum of Fine Arts of his native city that his encounter with work by Bosch and Gustave Van de Woestijne sparks off his fascination with painting. In 1972 when he decides to devote himself full-time to the study of painting and in 1976 he graduates with a degree from the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent.
Text and image have grown intimately entwined in Philippe Vandenberg's oeuvre.
"The work of the eminent Belgian painter, draftsman and writer Philippe Vandenberg is characterised by an inner quest in which various literary, philosophical and art-historical references induce a temporary state of wonder. Using images, words and symbols, Vandenberg challenged the ethical context of the artwork. In so doing, his paintings and drawings remain rooted in the here and now, while also establishing a visually recognisable dialogue with the society in which they were created. Over the years, he endeavoured to transcend the tangible and to convert paint into light. In the works of Vandenberg, universal themes such as war, religion, movement, sexuality and death are crucially transformed."(philippevandenberg.be)
"Vandenberg wasn’t concerned with rules or originality. He was famous in the 1980s (he showed in New York at Denise Cadé Gallery) and then stopped in the 1990s, turning his back on the art world for a decade or so. He believed in the phoenix as a way for the progression of art—that is, out of the repetition and destruction of one artwork grew the next. It was a continual rewriting and redrawing process involving self-destruction."(artnews.com)
"He would begin by layering cartoonish figurative elements atop his signature abstract compositions – like a grinning man pushing a wheelbarrow full of cash, or a likeness of Yasser Arafat floating above a dog that appears to be defecating sausage links. Needless to say, some formerly supportive critics and collectors were not pleased.
From there, Vandenberg would gleefully follow his practice wherever it led him: to monochromes, text drawings, violently surreal figurative scenes, deceptively cheerful scenes incorporating swastikas, and soothing geometric compositions. ‘For him, a style was completely irrelevant,’ Hélène says. ‘In his career, he took a motif, he worked on it, and once he had the feeling that he’d become immobile – he destroyed it to start a new one.’"(hauserwirth.com)



























Domoto Hisao -  Avant-Garde Abstract Art - Gutai Group

"Domoto Hisao was also born in 1928, and was primarily trained as a nihonga artist in his youth. When he moved to France in 1955, the artist found it increasingly difficult to continue using Japanese pigments as the dominant medium for his artworks, and switched to oil painting. His move to France also precipitated a meeting with the Informel group, who was gaining increasing moment from the fifties onwards. Almost immediately upon his arrival in France, Domoto’s works took on an Abstractionist flair, and were created organically with swift movements resembling half-circles swinging freely throughout the canvas. This bold movement is reminiscent of clouds or even waves, and aims to mimic nature. As can be seen in Painting 1960-14 (Lot 704), which is an early example of Domoto’s technique of mimesis of the ebbing and flowing inherent to his oeuvre, much attention has been paid to the balance of positive and negative space. Coupled with the light brushwork of each stroke, one is immediately reminded of delicate Eastern calligraphy or even lightly-pigmented scrolls, and it is easy to feel the amalgamation of such two worlds through the swift and bold undulations of his canvas. According to Tapié, who lavished praise on Domoto’s works, the importance of space was at the heart of the artist’s success at marrying Eastern and Western influences. They were all filled with “an ambiguous space that subsumes both the dialectical attainments of Western mathematicians in topological composition and the intuitive properties that Eastern painting has carefully upheld down through centuries. Which is to say that, no matter how complex, Domoto’s paintings are always elegant and intuitive, yet have the precision of clearly delineated proofs.”3 In such a way, Domoto can be understood as among the first of all Japanese artists—if not the first—to be able to marry traditional structured Western composition with the lyrical freedoms of Eastern philosophy."(sothebys.com)





















 Jan Nieuwenhuys - CoBrA - European avant-garde art movement in 20th century

 "The Dutch painter Jan Nieuwenhuijs is probably the most mysterious artist of the European CoBrA movement. He was one of the early active founders of the Dutch ‘Experimentele groep’ that later became part of CoBrA.
He and his brother Constant had lots of arguments about his paintings. During the war Constant himself painted only, catholic scenes like piatas and Maria portraits or still lifeas and thought that Jan chose his subjects too lightly.
In 1948 Appel, Elburg, Kouwenaar, Wolvekamp, Corneille, Constant, Brands, Rooskens and Jan Nieuwenhuijs founded the ‘experimentele groep’ that a few months later became the European group CoBrA. Jan was in his paintings of this period influenced by dreams, childrenas drawings, the artistic expressions of mentally handicapped people and primitive art. Animals such as birds and cats play a leading role in most of his works, along with fantastic creatures and beings that are made up of a combination of human, animal and mechanical elements. A lot of the creatures balance on a rope or wear boats as a hat.an was soon disappointed in the members of the CoBrA group, some of them were more interested in fame than being an activist , he couldnat stand the fighting that was going on between the members and so he left the group in the middle of 1949, some other members also left but they joined again, for the great exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum.
In 1964 he says in an interview;" The group was not founded as an exposition group but as a group of activists. We wanted to put an effort into that, to fight against the softness in art at the time and using our imagination to change that. Regrettably I must ascertain that a lot of the Experimentalists of that day also became esthetics. Everything official stops to be combatant. I think that work of some of them look very dormant these daysa"
Jan went his own way, desillusioned, and concentrated only on his work. His paintings became more and more liberated and he experimented with different materials like fluorescent paint and everything he could get his hands on. Everything could become a painting.In an interview from 1964 he says; a.I start with my material and my color. With that I express myself. From the material I come to my subject and that is maybe contrary to what painters did in earlier days. I paint the way I write, the way I laugh. Thatas why I paint differently all the time, because my moods change. Thatas the way I feel.As a painter I donat want to paint a particular situation. I am not abstract, not really non-figurative. I try to be expressive and therefore I need certain images. Today I am in China, tomorrow in Paris, after tomorrow some other place. We are confronted every day with what happens in the world. Youâ re living on a specific spot, but also in the whole world. Itâs maybe therefore that we become so ignorant and hard, because we experience too much. Hunger, war. That particular situation doesnat mean anything anymore.’
From the same interview; ‘ I wish, if they see my work later on, that they can see the twentieth century. The artist must give his time a suit. And it doesnat matter if he is an architect, poet or painter. In abstract painting I miss the beat of this time, the rudeness. We, the people of today we are living with the fear of an atom bomb. The abstracts are building only a superficial world for you."(jannieuwenhuys.com)


























Ursula Schultze-Bluhm

 "Ursula Schultze-Bluhm: A leading German painter and etcher of the latter twentieth century Ursula Schultze-Bluhm moved to Berlin in 1938 and began her art studies there. With the commencement of the Second World War (1939-1945) she was ordered to work in the government bureaucracy and then returned to her studies and began exhibiting her art after the war in the Amerika-Haus-Programme (1945-1953).
 Ursula Schultze-Bluhm first visited Paris in 1951. Shortly thereafter her work came to the attention of Jean Dubuffet who in 1954 featured her prints and paintings in his famous 'Musee de l'Art Brut'. In the following year (1955) she married another leading German etcher, Bernard Schultze. Together the artists lived and worked not only in Germany and France but in New York and Washington (1964-1967), Leningrad (1970), Ceylon and Thailand (1973), Mexico and Guatemala (1975), and Hong Kong and Bali (1977).Ursula Schultze-Bluhm's first solo exhibition took place in Frankfurt in 1954. After that date her art was the subject of many exhibitions in cities such as Paris, Hanover, Heidelberg, Dusseldorf, Munich, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Basel and Vienna.Like the art of her husband, Ursula Schultze-Bluhm dedicated her work to the creation of a private universe or individual mythology. Memories, unconscious associations and fantasies play key roles in her great, Surrealist art. Selbst Portrait is one of her finest works of graphic art."(artoftheprint.com)


 


















Jane Winkelman - Alternative Art

 Jane Winkelman (1949 - May 30, 2012) was an American painter. Her paintings are often signed "Jane 'in vain' Winkelman." She is considered an outsider artist.Jane Winkelman was born in 1949 in Long Island, New York. She lived for a time in Miami as well as San Francisco. While in San Francisco, she lived on the edge of homelessness in the Tenderloin distric.Winkelman was introduced to painting at San Francisco's Hospitality House, a free community arts center. Her work is characterized by vivid colors, fantastic figures, and strong political commentary.They often include text as well as images. Her style has been compared to that of Hieronymous Bosch, Marc Chagall, and Edvard Munch.Wikipedia

















Joan Hernández Pijuan

"Joan Hernández Pijuan was a Spanish painter known for his simple compositions, neutral colors, and expressive lines. Born on February 15, 1931 in Barcelona, Spain, he graduated from the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Sant Jordi. The Museo Municipal de Mataró hosted his first solo exhibition in 1955, and soon afterward he co-foundered Grupo Silex. The group, which included artists Eduardo Alcoy and Josep Maria Rovira Brull, explored the connection between contemporary art and primitive art forms. Moving to Paris in the late 1950s, Pijuan attended engraving and lithography classes at the École des Beaux-Arts. He began teaching at his alma mater the Escuela de Bellas Artes de Sant Jordi and in 1989, he was appointed a professor of painting in the Department of Fine Arts at the University of Barcelona. Pijuan died on December 28, 2005 in Barcelona, Spain. In 2011, the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow showcased his work in a retrospective exhibition. Today, the artist’s works are held in the collections of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Museum of Modern Art in Buenos Aires, among others." (artnet)

















Moshe Gershuni 

 Moshe Gershuni (11 September 1936 – 22 January 2017) was an Israeli painter and sculptor. In his works, particularly in his paintings from the 1980s, he expressed a position different from the norm, commemorating The Holocaust in Israeli art. In addition, he created in his works a connection between bereavement and homoerotic sexuality, in the way he criticized society and Israeli Zionism-nationalism. He was awarded the Israel Prize for Painting for his work in 2003, but in the end it was revoked and he was deprived of receiving the prize.
"At the heart of his paintings are amorphous stains; hand-written phrases are their iconographic counterparts, functioning as directive anchors for the viewers. They link the corporeal and abject with the conceptual in Gershuni’s work. Paintings from the series Hai Cyclamen (1983 – 85) feature bent, undulating flowers that form elliptical loops, flames and infinity symbols, as well as incomplete verses taken from death rituals or passages conveying God’s mercy. The Binding of Isaac, perhaps the most powerful motif in Jewish-Israeli representational language, transmutes onto the canvas into the Yiddish, Eastern European pronunciation of ‘Isaac’. Works from his The Soldiers series (1981) similarly references filicide, though here the sons are no longer defenceless. The paintings’ blood reds also seem to question Israeli occupation almost 15 years after the Six Day War. At the same time, the soldiers, conjured in the paintings by language alone, also become objects of homoerotic desire: inscribing the red stained works with a discursive ‘Shalom Soldier, How Are You?’ or ‘Good Soldier’, Gershuni, who came out in 1980, shows himself as a flirtatious provocateur. Three works from 1998 feature the titular ‘No Father No Mother’, an allusion to Georg Büchner’s famous play about the soldier Woyzeck (1879). Gershuni’s search for identity as a Jewish and an Israeli artist has resulted in an orphan state: he broke away from the post-minimalism of his peers, yet as a painter belonging to a non-iconographic tradition, his tools became stain and written word. ‘I’m an Israeli because I am Jewish,’ Gershuni wrote in 1982, in the context of secular Israeli cultural debates over themes of Jewishness, offering one answer to the show’s opening challenge. Yet his Zionism is far more nuanced than the definition the term assumes in light of recent political developments. In 2003, Gershuni rejected the ‘Israel Prize’, the state’s highest honour, because he refused to shake hands with then Prime Minister Ariel Sharon, as he would have had to at the ceremony. No Father No Mother, planned months in advance, opened after a summer of bloodshed in the region. Through Gershuni’s depictions of multiple complexities, this show in Berlin, in the autumn of 2014, is a reminder that the conflict can’t be reflected in simplistic binaries." ( Hili Perlson  frieze.com )





















Ken Kiff 

 Ken Kiff  (29 May 1935 – 15 February 2001) an internationally known figurative artist, was born in Dagenham and trained at Hornsey School of Art 1955-61. He came to prominence in the 1980s thanks to the championship of art critic Norbert Lynton, and a cultural climate intent on re-assessing figurative art following the Royal Academy’s ‘New Spirit in Painting’ exhibition in 1981. He started exhibiting at Nicola Jacob’s gallery, moved to Fischer Fine Art in 1987 and finally to the Marlborough Gallery in 1990, by which time he had begun exhibiting internationally and had work in major public collections. He was elected to the Royal Academy in 1991 and became Associate Artist at the National Gallery 1991-93. His 30-year teaching career at Chelsea School of Art and the Royal College influenced a generation of students.
Despite his success, Kiff’s position was never a comfortable one. His commitment to the pictorial values of modernism, his deep respect for artists such as Klee, Miro or Chagall, and his ideas about painting were often at odds with prevailing assumptions. In contemporary debates around abstraction versus figuration he tended to push past the battle-lines: ‘colour thinking’ as opposed to ‘image thinking’, pictorial form versus representational meaning, in order to get at something beneath their seeming differences. Images themselves arose out of the stuff of painting and an intimate relationship with a technique. His deep personal knowledge of poetry and music informed his sense of a painting’s structure. He saw colour in terms of images and images in terms of colour, which constituted, as he saw it, “the natural complexity of painting”.Colour and colour relationships interacted in his paintings with a range of images evoking the blissfully radiant and lyrical to the comic and disturbingly grotesque. ‘Fantasy’ as he saw it ‘was a way of thinking about reality’. The matter-of-fact imagery of streets, houses, trees, animals and people was configured with dreamlike encounters and happenings in a way that invited the viewer into an internal world constantly using the external world as its subject-matter.By the late 1980s his range of media had expanded to include woodcuts, monotypes, lithography and etching. He enjoyed how new ways of working with materials, the grain of the wood, for example, or the wax in the encaustics, could extend his visual thinking and force him to make decisions more quickly. He took great pleasure in collaborating with master printmaking technicians such as Dorothea Wight and Mark Balakjian in Britain, Erik Hollgersson in Sweden, and Garner Tullis in the US. Wikipedia





















Jeannie Scott 

SPHERICAL AWAKINING :created 6/17 ON A 26X34 UPSOURCED CANVAS , Traditional Brush Mixed Media:(Lady GaGa's, Born this way,kept playing in my head (not on the stereo system.  lol) (I prefer quiet when I work ,except for organic white noise, most times,which calms me.) As I painted ,the Canvas began to express ,that our differences, our so called *flaws,* MAKE us Uniquely Beautiful &flaws aren't flaws at all ,but they are merly beauty marks.Organicly Stamped on each one of us , bringing each individual into  THEIR OWN  .Making of us THE BEAUTIFUL PEOPLE 
 TWO SPIRITS: This piece was inspired by  a few different things ,and as I worked on it ,Two Spirits took quick direction ,and quickly came into its own ,Seemily to know, exactly what the journey was to be , what the Expression of Two Spirit was to convey. Inspired by Pablo Pacasso The Dream , a bit of Fauvism,a pinch of Expressionism, in technique.The Title & Soule,from the   Native American Navaho People,s traditon &customs. Of the impotance of celebrating& embracing a person's differences ,and how those differences benefit the entire tribe .Making their contaburions an invaluable resource to the indigenous resadents of the Navaho reservation &beyond .Find attached the indepth artical that explains the Navajo tradition of celebrating & embracing the birth of a two spirit child. Thankful for the blessing of the  Two Spirited gift that has been bestowed upon the tribe 







 George McNeil 

"George McNeil was born on February 22,1908 in New York City. He studied at the Pratt Institute, the Art Students League, the Hans Hoffmann School of Fine Arts and Columbia University. In 1935 he joined the Federal Art Project of the WPA and in 1936 he helped form the American Abstract Artists. He was known for his vibrant colors and energetic compositions.McNeil grew up in the East New York section of Brooklyn in a working-class family of Irish descent that neither encouraged nor discouraged his interest in art. He took art classes Saturday mornings at the Brooklyn Museum and by the time he was sixteen, he was sold on modern art. Later he won a New York Art League scholarship to Pratt; he went there from 1927 to 1929. He met Dora who was only sixteen at the time and they were married in 1936.McNeil and his wife, Dora, who had been a graphic designer, lived in an apartment over his studio near the Pratt Institute. He worked in the ground-floor studio about six hours a day. The McNeils had two children.
In 1936, McNeil and a group of others formed the American Abstract Artists. They painted in a geometric cubist style; at the same time McNeil was beginning to create a different expressionist kind of art. He painted full time, but World War II broke out and McNeil spent time in the Navy. When he got out, in 1946, his first regular job was teaching at the University of Wyoming in Laramie.In the 1960s he turned away from pure abstraction, inserting roughly rendered figures in his paintings. The high color and the painterliness of the abstractscapes are sustained in McNeil's figurative work of the late 1970s and early 1980s. As soon as the figure appeared in McNeil's work, so did his work's strong sexual content. Most of his 1960s figures are female, exuberantly so.
He remained prolific until his death while simultaneously pursuing a teaching career that lasted until 1981 and included the directorship of the Pratt Institute's evening program. McNeil died in 1995. "(rogallery.com)





















 Gutai avant-garde paintings - Kazuo Shiraga

 Kazuo Shiraga  (Japanese, 1924–2008)  was a Japanese artist best known for his performative painting practice. Shiraga’s gestural style was influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and indicative of his participation in the Gutai avant-garde movement. The object of Gutai was to allow action and everyday life into the creation of dynamic artworks. The artist would suspend himself over his canvases, swinging back and forth, creating marks with his feet, creating a unique texture and thickness to his abstract swirls and splatters. “I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion,” the artist once proclaimed. Born on August 12, 1924 in Amagasaki, Japan, he graduated from the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting in 1948, and joined the Gutai group in 1954. In a seminal early work, Challenge to the Mud (1955), the artist explored the gesture of sculpting clay by throwing himself and contorting his semi-naked body in a pit of mud. Through the following decades, Shiraga continued to work on activating art through moving a body in space. He died on April 8, 2008 in Amagasaki, Japan. Today, the artist’s works are included in the collections of the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Art, among others.(artnet.com)






















Charlotte 'Lotti' van der Gaag 

 Charlotte 'Lotti' van der Gaag  18 December 1923 – 20 February 1999) was a Dutch sculptor and painter and strongly associated with members of the COBRA arts movement.Charlotte van der Gaag was born on 18 December 1923 in The Hague in the Netherlands.Aged 20, she had a relationship with the artist Bram Bogart, who introduced her to sculpture.Around 1950, she visited the Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog in Paris; here she was introduced to members of COBRA, amongst them Karel Appel and Corneille. During this period she concentrated almost exclusively on her sculpture.Van der Gaag died, at the age of 75, in Nieuwegein on 20 February 1999




















Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze - Wols 

 Wols was the pseudonym of Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (27 May 1913, Berlin – 1 September 1951, Paris), a German painter and photographer predominantly active in France. Though broadly unrecognized in his lifetime, he is considered a pioneer of lyrical abstraction, one of the most influential artists of the Tachisme movement.He is the author of a book on art theory entitled Aphorismes de Wols.
Wols' painting style, as early as 1946–47 (Untitled, 1946–47, Yellow Composition, 1946–7; Berlin, Neue N.G., It's All Over The City, 1947), was informal, gestural, with the paint applied in layers by means of dripping and with scratching into the surface. This new development in art proved influential, earning him the praise of artists such as Georges Mathieu and critics such as Michel Tapié, who coined the term Art autre (the Other Art) to describe the new style.Wols was noted for his etchings and for his use of stains (taches) of color dabbed onto the canvas (as exemplified by his painting Composition, c. 1950). His painted work contains figurative elements as well as free improvisations and abstract elements. Spontaneity and immediateness determine the creative work of Wols, who never underwent any formal artistic training. Randomness (initially inspired by the Surrealist psychic Automatism) plays an important role in his unstructured compositions. In later years Wols was particularly interested in the combination of powerful brushstrokes with a relief-like painted surface structure.Wikipedia



















Akira Kanayama

"Akira Kanayama (1924 -2006 ) was the secretary of the Gutai group. He jokingly said that the position involved so much work that he had no time to paint and instead let a remote-controlled toy car paint for him. The resulting Work (1957) can be seen as a critique against Jackson Pollock’s drip paintings, with which they have some resemblance. In Kanayama, the male genius who expresses his feelings with paint is supplanted by a toy car that randomly zooms around the paper, leaving a trail of paint. Kanayama thus challenged the artist's personal relevance to the quality and ingenuity of the work."(cyberneticzoo.com)













 Michel Macréau  - Neo-expressionism


Born on July 21st in Paris1953. Studied in the Arts section of the Lycée de Sèvres.
Participated in the making of tapestries by Le Corbusier.1954–1956
Attended the Grande-Chaumière Academy.1959
Collective studio and moved in with friends in an uninhabited castle in the valley of Chevreuse. He abandons the paint brush in favor of a tube that he pressed directly on the canvas or paper.1960 Macréau begins to use any surface he can get his hands on to paint (bed sheets, bags, planks of wood...)
1972 Isolated and tired, Macréau has doubts about his painterly approach. He painted very little for several years.
1994 Galerie Alain Margaron begins to represent and show Macréau's work regularly.
1995 Death of the artist.


















 Neo-expressionism A. R. Penck

Ralf Winkler, alias A. R. Penck, Mike Hammer, T. M., Mickey Spilane, Theodor Marx, "a. Y." or just "Y" (5 October 1939 – 2 May 2017) was a German painter, printmaker, sculptor, and jazz drumme
Penck was born in Dresden, Germany. In his early teens he took painting and drawing lessons with Jürgen Böttcher, known by the pseudonym Strawalde, and joined with him to form the renegade artists’ group Erste Phalanx Nedserd (de) (“Dresden” spelled backward). He later worked for a year as a trainee draftsman at the state advertising agency in Dresden. After failing to gain admission to the fine-arts academies in Dresden and East Berlin, Penck worked for several years as a stoker, a newspaper deliverer, a margarine packer and a night watchman.
Penck later studied together with a group of other neo-expressionist painters in Dresden. He became one of the foremost exponents of the new figuration alongside Jörg Immendorff, Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz. Under the East German communist regime, they were watched by the secret police and were considered dissidents. In the late 1970s they were included in shows in West Berlin and were seen as exponents of free speech in the East. Their work was shown by major museums and galleries in the West throughout the 1980s. They were included in a number of important shows including the famous Zeitgeist exhibition in the well-known Martin Gropius Bau museum and the important New Art show at the Tate in 1983.








 Penck first attracted attention with a series of paintings and sculptures, made in the 1960s and early 1970s, that he called Standarts, a conflation of "standard" and "art", with an echo of the German word for banner or flag, Standarte.In the 1980s he became known worldwide for paintings with pictographic, neo-primitivist imagery of human figures and other totemic forms. He was included in many important shows both in London and New York City.
Penck's sculptures, though less familiar, evoke the same primitive themes as his paintings and drawings. They use common everyday materials such as wood, bottles, cardboard boxes, tin cans, masking tape, tinfoil, and wire, and are crudely painted and assembled. Despite their anti-art aesthetic and the rough-and-ready quality of their construction, they have the same symbolic, archetypal anthropomorphic forms as his flat symbolic paintings. The paintings are influenced by Paul Klee's work and mix the flatness of Egyptian or Mayan writing with the crudity of the late black paintings by Jackson Pollock. The sculptures are often reminiscent of the stone heads of Easter Island and other Oceanic art.









A keen drummer, he was a member and with Frank Wollny co-founder of the free jazz group Triple Trip Touch (aka T.T.T. or TTT) and took every opportunity to play with some of the best Jazz musicians of the late 1980s including Butch Morris, Frank Wright, Billy Bang, Louis Moholo and Frank Lowe, organising events at his country mansion in Heimbach in 1990 involving installations by Lennie Lee, performances by Anna Homler and paintings by Christine Kuhn.
After leaving East Germany, Penck settled in Kerpen, southwest of Cologne, but in 1983 he moved to London. He later relocated to Dublin.[3] At the time of his death, Penck lived and worked in Berlin, Düsseldorf, Dublin and New York City.
Penck died on 2 May 2017 in Zürich at the age of 77.Wikipedia











 Neue Wilde painting Martin Disler

 Martin Disler (1 March 1949, Seewen – 27 August 1996, Geneva) was a Swiss painter, droughtman and writer. He is associated with the Neue Wilde painting style.
Born to a family of gardeners, he was expelled from school in 1968 for disciplinary reasons. He was married to fellow artists Agnes Barmettler and later Irene Grundel. In the 1970s and 1980s, Disler worked extensively in Europe and in the USA, gaining international attention alongside artists such as Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Georg Baselitz. In 1982, he exhibited works at the Documenta 7. His awards include the Bremer Kunstpreis (1985), the Preis für junge Schweizer Kunst der Zürcher Kunstgesellschaft (1987) and the Kunstpreis des Kantons Solothurn (1988).Wikipedia









 The term Neue Wilde (roughly, “new savages”) first employed by the art historian and museum director Wolfgang Becker, can be traced back to the exhibition of the same name at the Neue Galerie – Sammlung Ludwig in Aachen in 1980, which drew attention to similarities between early twentieth-century French Fauvism and neo-expressive contemporary painting: Les nouveaux Fauves – Die neuen Wilden. Unlike the term Heftige Malerei (heavy painting),which was also initially applied to the new movement—the term Neue Wilde did not refer so much to the savagery of their art as it did to the savagery of the artists themselves. It was received critically, especially by the artists themselves, who pointed out their entirely subjective visual vocabulary and lack of an overarching agenda, while at the same time rejecting the comparison between their art and an art movement from the past. Yet, despite all of the skepticism, the term stuck.(April 30, 2015 Stefanie Gommel  hatjecantz.de )














 Jon Serl

Jon Serl (1898–1993) was an American artist.He is best remembered as a painter like the American artists Grandma Moses and Edward Hicks.He also worked in other roles and under several different names. These included as a vaudeville artist named Slats; as a voiceover performer for Hollywood named Ned Palmer, and as a migrant fruit collector, better known under the name Jerry Palmer.on Serl was born as Josef Searls in 1894 in Olean, New York. He was the fifth child of seven. He grew up in a vaudevillian theatrical family. This contributed to his early artistic talents, including performance, acting, dancing, singing and as a female impersonator. Jon Serl was one of his several pseudonyms. In his young adult days he worked as a peripatetic female impersonator performer known as “Slats”. He was called Jerry Palmer when the silent film era ended in the late 1920s with the first Sound film. He was a voiceover artist for actors whose voices did not fit well in 'talkies'. He was Ned Palmer during the Great Depression, a migrant fruit picker.Jon Serl lived in destitute conditions. His house was dilapidated and next to his porch there was a written sign "CLEAN ENOUGH TO BE HEALTHY, DIRTY ENOUGH TO BE HAPPY". Paintings were piled up everywhere and mice and chicken were found around. There was no TV nor radio. Serl ranked his home as a dump, in his own words: "It's a dump, but it's a nice dump"








Jon Serl painted in oil paint on a found surface. He mainly painted characters that were known to be expressionistic and complex, but also brash and bold. It was part of his trademark, which also included the long elegant arms, clownish expressions and large eyes. Because of his vaudeville childhood, his canvases were often compared to theatrical stages. His works explored the inner and the outer worlds with a strange narrative, which usually expressed dualities such as: female against male, good against evil, or nature against technology.  Jon Serl was categorized as prolific. This might be due to the fact that he began painting at a late age.Wikipedia











 Anita Steckel

 Anita Slavin Arkin Steckel (February 24, 1930, Brooklyn, New York – March 16, 2012, Manhattan, New York) was an American feminist artist known for paintings and photomontages with sexual imagery. She was also the founder of the arts organization "The Fight Censorship Group", whose other members included Hannah Wilke, Louise Bourgeois, Judith Bernstein, Martha Edelheit, Eunice Golden, Juanita McNeely, Barbara Nessim, Anne Sharpe and Joan Semmel.Steckel was born in New York to Russian Jewish immigrants Dora and Hyman Arkin. She studied art at the High School of Music & Art in Manhattan (now Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art), the Cooper Union, and Alfred University, as well as completing advanced study at the Art Students League of New York with Edwin Dickinson She also taught for several years at the Art Students League







 Steckel began showing her work in both solo and group exhibitions beginning in the late 1960s. In her "Giant Woman" series of works, Steckel painted oversized nude women onto photographs of city scene, an idea associated with a Women's movement theme that women had "outgrown their roles" in society as previously defined.In 1972, her work was exhibited at the Women's Interart Center in New York alongside pieces by the influential feminist artists Judy Chicago, Miriam Schapiro and Faith Ringgold.
Steckel came to public attention after her solo exhibition, The Sexual Politics of Feminist Art, held at Rockland Community College in 1973 The exhibition was controversial because Steckel's work was sexually explicit and some local authorities called for the closure of the show.
She created a series of artworks concerning erections, in defense of which she said, “If the erect penis is not wholesome enough to go into museums, it should not be considered wholesome enough to go into women.”She also created a series in 1963 which she called "mom art", in reaction to pop art.
In 2001, Steckel's work was exhibited at the Mitchell Algus Gallery.Wikipedia









  Gideon Gechtman

 Gideon Gechtman (1942 – November 27, 2008) was an Israeli artist and sculptor. His art is most noted for holding a dialogue with death, often in relation with his own biography.Gideon Gechtman was born in Alexandria, Egypt. He moved to the British mandate of Palestine with his family in 1945. He studied at the Avni Institute of Art and Design (1961–1962), Hammersmith College of Art (1968–1971), the Ealing School of Art, and Tel Aviv University (1975–1976).
After returning from London with his future wife singer/actress Bat-Sheva Zeisler, he created minimalistic art that was typical for that period. These works were described to "didactically demonstrate structural and figurative change in material and appearance."Gechtman taught at the Bezalel Academy of Art and Design in Jerusalem (1972–1975) and the Art Teachers Training College of Beit Berl (1971–2008).








In 1973 Gechtman had his first solo exhibition in the Yodfat Gallery in Tel Aviv. The exhibition, named "Exposure", signified Gechtman's increasing interest in the connection between art and the biographic dimension. On the walls of the gallery were enlarged photographs of the body shaving process before the open heart surgery that Gechtman underwent in 1973. Also in this exhibition were real and fabricated documents regarding Gechtman's medical condition. At the closure of the exhibition Gechtman put up obituaries for himself in Israeli dailies Haaretz and the Jerusalem Post, as well as around his home in Rishon LeZion. Gechtman told later about the reactions: "Teachers from Bezalel said to me: 'Have you gone mad? You frightened everyone.'"The obituaries were a returning element in Gechtman's art for years to come.
In 1999, he exhibited a remodelled hospital environment under the name Yotam, named after his son who had died.
Gideon Gechtman died of heart failure on November 27, 2008.Wikipedia











Adolf Frohner

"The artist Adolf Frohner was born in Gross-Inzersdorf, Lower Austria, on 12 March 1934. In 1952, at the age of eighteen, he went to Vienna, where he worked in various professions until 1961. That year he attended lectures as a guest student at the Academy of Fine Arts. He was awarded a grant to live in Paris in 1961, became involved with the Nouveaux Réalistes and decided to become a freelance artist. After his return to Vienna in 1962 he was one of the originators of Viennese Actionism, together with Hermann Nitsch and Otto Mühl, with the "Blutorgel? action and manifesto. It was not long before he distanced himself from the Actionists, however, because he did not want to work in public. During a further visit to Paris he worked in the studio of Daniel Spoerri, the most important of the Nouveaux Réalistes. Apart from his art, he also worked as a commercial artist and art reviewer. Frohner?s works were shown in major galleries and museums throughout the world from the early 1960s, including the Biennale in Venice (1970) and the Künstlerhaus in Vienna (1993). He was appointed professor at the University of Applied Arts in 1972 and was elected dean in 1987 and prorector in 1989?91.







Frohner received numerous awards including the Austrian State Prize in 1972. After his first Actionist phase and the collages, he concentrated increasingly on painting and drawing. As a tribute to his work, the construction of the Forum Frohner in the former Stein Minorite Church in Krems of a new exhibition and event venue in the Krems museum district, planned and designed in close collaboration with the artist, was commenced while Frohner was still alive. It features Frohner?s own complete oeuvre as well as contemporary works by other Austrian and foreign artists. Frohner did not want a museum devoted to him but rather a platform for vibrant discussion ? not just for exhibitions but also for cultural, communal and social events. Tragically, the artist did not live to see the opening of Forum Frohner in September 2007, having died suddenly and completely unexpectedly on 24 January of that year. Frohner is regarded today as one of the most important and remarkable post-war Austrian painters." (frohner-stiftung.at)












 Isidore Isou

 Isidore Isou (29 January 1925 – 28 July 2007), born Isidor Goldstein, was a Romanian-born French poet, film critic and visual artist. He was the founder of Lettrism, an art and literary movement which owed inspiration to Dada and Surrealism.
Born into a Jewish family in Botoşani, Isou started his career as an avant-garde art journalist during World War II, shortly after the 23 August coup saw Romania joining the Allies (see Romania during World War II). With the future social psychologist Serge Moscovici, he founded the magazine Da, which was soon after closed down by the authorities.He moved to Paris, having developed many concepts that intended a total artistic renewal starting from the most basic elements of writing and visual communication. He adopted then the French first name "Jean" (John in English) and the pseudonym Isidore Isou. He called himself a Lettriste, a movement of which he was initially the only member (at the age of 16 he had published the Manifesto in 1942) and published a system of Lettrist hypergraphics. Others soon joined him, and the movement continues to grow, albeit at times under a confusing number of different names.







 In 1951 the young Isou released his experimental and revolutionary film Traité de bave et d'éternité (Treatise on Venom And Eternity), work deemed revolting by many critics present at the premiere. Including a reflexive discourse on the making of a new cinema, it became a virtual Lettriste film manifesto. Attacking many film conventions by chiseling away at them in his film, Isou introduced the concept of "discrepancy cinema" where the sound track has little or nothing to do with the accompanying images. The sound track of Treatise on Venom and Eternity begins with jarring and unpleasant human noises, which continue in low volume throughout the spoken dialogue. In addition, the celluloid on which the film was recorded was attacked with destructive techniques such as scratches and bleaching. The film caused a scandal at the 1951 Cannes Film Festival, and was later introduced into the United States, where it influenced avant-garde film makers such as Stan Brakhage. In the early fifties one segment of Orson Welles' film journal, which was entitled Le Letrrisme est la Poesie en Vogue, included an interview with Isou and Maurice Lemaitre.






 In the 1960s Lettrist, Lettrist-influenced works and Isidore Isou gained a great deal of respect in France. The influential writer Guy Debord the artist Gil J. Wolman and the writer and artist Gabriel Pomerand worked with Isou. Debord and Wolman later broke away to form the Lettrist International, which later merged with the International Movement for an Imaginist Bauhaus, and the London Psychogeographical Association to form the Situationist International, a dissident revolutionary group. In this new form using means acquired over the course of a decade prior, Lettrist art exerted a profound influence upon the posters, barricades, even designs for clothing in the attempted revolution of 1968. Although it had seemed a highly self-contained art in the post-war period, in 1968 it became more deeply involved in active social change than such movements as Existentialism and Surrealism, and came closer to producing actual transformation than these movements.









 Aurel Cojan 

Aurel Cojan (b. March 3, 1914, Beceni, Buzau, d. December 2005, Paris, France) was a painter and decorator Romanian artist. During 1932-1934, he attended the Bucharest Academy of Fine Arts, Painting Department, having as teachers and Camil Ressu Şirato Francis. In 1969 he obtained political asylum in Paris.















 Dolls Greer Lankton

 Greer Lankton (1958 – November 18, 1996) was an American artist known for creating lifelike, sewn dolls that were often modeled on friends and celebrities and posed in elaborate theatrical settings. She was a key figure in the East Village art scene of the 1980s in New York.
Greer Lankton was born in Flint, Michigan, to a Presbyterian minister and his wife. It was during her rough childhood as a feminine boy that she began creating dolls. "It was when I was about ten years old ... I used to make dolls out of hollyhocks and all types of flowers. Pipecleaner dolls and things like that. I started taking it seriously by the time I went to college when I was 17."Greer was often teased by peers, and on more than one occasion experienced physical harassment.
Lankton studied at the Art Institute of Chicago and later Pratt Institute in New York. She changed her name and had sexual reassignment surgery at the age of 21, while she was a student at Pratt. She had previously been the subject of a local newspaper article about people transitioning to a new gender.







 Gender and sexuality are recurring themes in Lankton's art. Her dolls are created in the likeness of those society calls "freaks", and have often been compared to the surrealist works of Hans Bellmer, who made surreal dolls with interchangeable limbs. She created figures that were simultaneously distressing and glamorous, as if they were both victim and perpetrator of their existence.
In 1981 Lankton was featured in the seminal "New York/New Wave" exhibition at P.S.1 in Long Island City, and began to show her work in the East Village at Civilian Warfare. She gained an almost cult following among East Village residents from her highly theatrical window displays she designed for Einstein's, the boutique that was run by her husband, Paul Monroe, at 96 East Seventh Street.









Besides her more emotionally charged dolls, Lankton also created commissioned portrait dolls. These include a 1989 doll of Diana Vreeland that was commissioned for a window display at Barney's  as well as shrines to her icons, such as Candy Darling.
Critic Roberta Smith described her works in the New York Times as: "Beautifully sewn, with extravagant clothes, make-up and hairstyles, they were at once glamorous and grotesque and exuded intense, Expressionistic personalities that reminded some observers of Egon Schiele. They presaged many of the concerns of 90's art, including the emphasis on the body, sexuality, fashion and, in their resemblance to puppets, performance."Wikipedia









 Tsang Tsou Choi

 Tsang Tsou Choi  (12 November 1921 – 15 July 2007) was a Hong Kong citizen known for his calligraphy graffiti.Tsang was born in Liantang Village, Gaoyao, Zhaoqing,Guangdong, China. He travelled to Hong Kong at the age of 16, he was a poor worker and was barely literate. He began to mark the streets of Hong Kong with his distinctive graffiti at the age of 35. He claimed that he had studied his ancestral tree and discovered that most of the land of Kowloon belonged to his ancestors. He said that Kowloon belonged to his grandfather. There are no records to back up Tsang's claim









He was arrested for his graffiti several times, but the police usually just gave him a warning or a small fine. His family disowned him, saying he was mentally unbalanced and a public nuisance and his wife had grown tired of his obsession and left him.
Although his graffiti was repeatedly painted over, he often returned to re-apply his messages as soon as the paint dried. At the height of his graffiti career, his obsessive marking of territory made his graffiti an ever-present aspect of the streets of Hong Kong. The graffiti has been spotted at many places on the streets of Hong Kong, ranging from lampposts, utility boxes, pillars, pavements, street furniture, and building walls, to an occasional car. The contents of his calligraphic graffiti usually include his name, his title (Emperor or King of Kowloon, Hong Kong, or China), his family tree (a variable list of about 20 individuals), the names of illustrious emperors, and the exclamation, "Down with the Queen of England!"His complaints about the supposed misappropriation of his land were not always so formulaic, however. He occasionally demanded that the government pay him land taxes.









A Hong Kong magazine named him one of the city's ten least influential people. However, this supposed lack of influence does not extend to the art world. His typography has inspired many fashion designers, art directors, interior decorators, and CD cover artists.His style has also informed the work of traditional artists, such as Oscar Ho. He appeared in a commercial for Swipe cleaner, in which he cleans away his permanent ink graffiti, proclaiming the product's effectiveness to Hong Kong consumers.
One of Tsang's public art works at Tsim Sha Tsui Star Ferry Pier
During his last years, he lived in a retirement home, and no longer wrote on walls. However, his poor health did not entirely halt his calligraphic efforts. He continued his work on paper, household linens, and other mundane items. He also told visitors that he should have been elected chief executive of Hong Kong, instead of Donald Tsang, that "impostor".








 He received international recognition for his work. Photographs of his work have toured in shows, such as "Power of the Word", which began its US tour at Grinnell College's Faulconer Gallery on 6 October 2000. In 2003, he was included in the Venice Biennale. His first major commercial recognition came when Sotheby's auctioned a board, painted by Tsang, for HK$55,000 (USD $7,050) on 31 October 2004.
He died on 15 July 2007 following a heart attack in Hong Kong. He was 85. Art critic Lau Kin-wai said Tsang spent his final days at an elderly home surrounded by family members. He also said that Tsang's last wish was for another exhibition of his work.Wikipedia









 Street Art Pablo Delgado

Pablo Delgado is a Mexico-born London-based street artist that emerged in 2011 to quickly became a well-known London street artists. Since 2012 he has been decorating East London's street corners with his inventive and humorous miniatures
His early work consisted of miniature doorways pasted up on the edges of walls. Soon, Pablo began expanding into detailed narratives, meticulously depicting hosts of people, animals and objects in minutia around London.
His style involves taking imagery from mass media or popular culture, stripping it of colour then arranging the tiny figures into surreal scenes and compositions. His style is peculiarly known for the distinctive black shadows cast on the pavement that give a lifelike quality to his work and make them pop off the surface. The scenes themselves appear fantastical, chaotic and seemingly unrelated, but each contain their own narratives and stories that, with the locations, are carefully chosen in order to contribute to the story.In December 2012, Pablo Delgado painted the Village Underground wall in Shoreditch, London.Wikipedia


















Jason Rhoades

 Jason Rhoades (July 9, 1965 – August 1, 2006) was an installation artist who enjoyed critical acclaim, if not widespread public recognition, at the time of his death, and who was eulogized by some critics as one of the most significant artists of his generation. Better known in Europe, where he exhibited regularly for the last twelve years of his life, Rhoades was recently celebrated for his combination dinner party/exhibitions that feature violet neon signs with African, Caribbean, Creole and hip-hop slang for the female genitalia. His work remains part of the permanent collection in the Rubell Family Collection in Miami, where he was a part of exhibit "Beg Borrow and Steal" at the time of his death.Wikipedia












Pierre Wemaere

  The French Abstract painter Pierre Wemaëre was born on October 1, 1913 in Comines, Flanders, and he died in Versailles January 8, 2010. Because of World War One, his family moved from Comines to Versailles. Wemaëre is a patriot and a Catholic, he dislikes publicity, he is a very modest person, he is apolitical, he lives a quiet unobtrusive life in Versailles, the former Residential City of the kingdom of France. Wemaëre has always differed from the established art world's idea about "the artist" by never being engaged in any revolutionary movement as well as never having a liking for political organizations and by never having promoted himself. However, once in a while, Wemaëre has commented on political events e.g. Hitler's occupation of Czechoslovakia in 1939, the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact invasion of Prague and the May Revolt of 1968..(arslonga.dk)













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Modern Photography in Japan 

Kansuke Yamamoto (30 March 1914 – 2 April 1987) was a photographer and poet. He was a prominent Japanese surrealist born in Nagoya, Japan.















Helmut Sturm

 Helmut Sturm (21 February 1932 – 20 February 2008) was a German painter.











Jiří Načeradský

 Jiří Načeradský (9 September 1939 – 16 April 2014) was a Czech painter, graphic artist and educator. He was best known for his human figures, sometimes with erotic and sexual subtext and context. He was born in Sedlec-Prčice, Příbram District, Czechoslovakia.Načeradský died on 16 April 2014 in Prague, Czech Republic, aged 74.Wikipedia,













 Raffi Lavie

 Raffi Lavie ( 1937 – May 7, 2007) was an Israeli artist, art educator and music/art critic. Lavie's work is a cross between graffiti and abstract expressionism.
Rafael (Raffi) Lavi was born in Tel Aviv, Mandate Palestine. He began teaching at the Midrasha Art Academy in 1966. In the same year he was also a founder of the group Ten Plus. Due to severe back problems, Lavie painted in his last years while sitting. On May 7, 2007, he died of pancreatic cancer at his home in Tel Aviv, aged 70. He donated his body to the University of Tel Aviv for research.
He studied at the Art Teachers' Training College in Tel Aviv and later taught at the Art Teachers' Training College in Ramat HaSharon.In 2005, he had a solo exhibition at Givon Gallery in Tel Aviv.
Lavie represented Israel in the 53rd Venice Biennale in 2009.Wikipedia









 



Jean Dubuffet

 Jean Dubuffet disliked authority from a very early age. He left home at 17, failed to complete his art education, and wavered for many years between painting and working in his father's wine business. He would later be a successful propagandist, gaining notoriety for his attacks on conformism and mainstream culture, which he described as "asphyxiating." He was attracted to the art of children and the mentally ill, and did much to promote their work, collecting it and promulgating the notion of Art Brut. His early work was influenced by that of outsiders, but it was also shaped by the interests in materiality that preoccupied many post-war French artists associated with the Art Informel movement. In the early 1960s, he developed a radically new, graphic style, which he called "Hourloupe," and would deploy it on many important public commissions, but he remains best known for the thick textured and gritty surfaces of his pictures from the 1940s and '50s.





 

Dubuffet was launched to success with a series of exhibitions that opposed the prevailing mood of post-war Paris and consequently sparked enormous scandal. While the public looked for a redemptive art and a restoration of old values, Dubuffet confronted them with childlike images that satirized the conventional genres of high art. And while the public looked for beauty, he gave them pictures with coarse textures and drab colors, which critics likened to dirt and excrement.
The emphasis on texture and materiality in Dubuffet's paintings might be read as an insistence on the real. In the aftermath of the war, it represented an appeal to acknowledge humanity's failings and begin again from the ground - literally the soil - up.
Dubuffet's Hourloupe style developed from a chance doodle while he was on the telephone. The basis of it was a tangle of clean black lines that forms cells, which are sometimes filled with unmixed color. He believed the style evoked the manner in which objects appear in the mind. This contrast between physical and mental representation later encouraged him to use the approach to create sculpture.(.theartstory.org)














Matthew de La Tour 








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Wols

 Immediately after WWII, when Wols' art started to attract attention, critics regarded Wols' paintings as the product of their times: highly strung, uncompromising, wild and aggressive. While people tend to think their times are unique, in fact human history is a rapid succession of crises, interrupted by short periods of relative calm. These violent mood swings make the human race the archetypal bipolar patient.
Art historians have to take the blame for far too often explaining the style of an artist in personal psychlogical terms, or attribute it to the culture-psychological climate of the day.
In fact, Amedeo Modigliani's work (he lived and painted until 1920) already shows the spirit and some of the methods of art informel and art informel would have occurred with or without WWII or other social or geo-political phenomena. Much of the history of 20th century art can be seen as a damped oscillation, with geometric abstraction (e.g. Mondrian) at one extreme and purely painterly styles (e.g. art informel) at the other extreme. Hence, Wols was one of the first painters to realize the momentum was going in the direction of the painterly approach, and so, as more often than not, his art can be explained in artistic-technical terms, rather than in social terms.







 Alfred Otto Wolfgang Schulze (a.k.a. Wols) was one of the last renaissance-men. Rather than caring about social status or practical needs, his short life is characterized by a myriad of activities, each of which he executed successfully, but none of which earned him a stable life. The romantic myth of the "starving artist" is one that has it's origins in the 19th century and was further cultivated by artists themselves throughout the 20th century, but today has a negative, pathetic ring to it. However, men like Wols belonged to those people that "live fast and die young", a life-style which is of all times and by no means unique to artists. (paintings.name)









John Christoforou 

 John Christoforou (March 10, 1921-February 2014[1]) was a British painter of Greek heritage. He spent his childhood in Greece, but returned to England in 1938. With the outbreak of the war he joined the Royal Air Force, where he flew missions in the Far East.Christoforou had his first exhibition in 1949. In 1957, he moved to Paris and participated in a show with Enrico Baj, Jorn and Mihailovitch at Galerie Rive Gauche. Galerie Birch (Copenhagen), with whom Christoforou worked with for many years, will be paying tribute to his legacy with a solo exhibition, "Hommage à Christoforou" on May 3, 2014. Wikipedia











Dash Snow

 Dash Snow (American, 1981–2009) was a multi-media artist, known for work that embodied a rebellious, drug-fueled lifestyle. Snow illegally graffitied as a teenager, and began taking Polaroids as a way to document places he had been during nights out he would never be able to remember. These photographs, capturing sex, drugs, and violence with candor, became a signature element in his work. He later worked with collage—a practice in which he ejaculated on newspaper pages.(.artnet)






2008 Dash Snow was interviewed by the French magazine Purple Fashion. He described his art as a kind of storytelling and said it was about "trying to preserve a moment". By way of illustration, he talked about a piece he had recently made entitled A Means to an End. With hindsight, his description seems chillingly prescient.
"Sometimes the story is more important than the visuals, like A Means to an End, the table with all the stuff on it, the empty bags of coke and dope, and needles and diamond rings and all kinds of stuff. I was living on Avenue C in this really screwed-up house. When I moved it took seven days to clean it up, and this is all the stuff we found."(.theguardian.com)







Snow began taking photographs as a teenager, he said, as a record of places he might not remember the next day.
In 2006, he was included in the Wall Street Journal article titled "The 23-Year Old Masters", which profiled 10 emerging US artists including Rosson Crow, Ryan Trecartin, Zane Lewis, Barney Kulok, Jordan Wolfson, Rashawn Griffin and Keegan McHargue.
Like photographers Nan Goldin, Larry Clark and Ryan McGinley his photos depict scenes of a sex, drug-taking, violence and art-world pretense with candor, documenting the decadent lifestyle of a group of young New York City artists and their social circle.
Some of Snow's later collage-based work was characterized by his practice of using his own semen as a material applied to or splashed across newspaper photographs of police officers and other authority figures.Wikipedia







Tamuna Sirbiladze

 Tamuna Sirbiladze, whose brushy paintings hovered between figuration and abstraction, and who had her first New York solo show in August, died in Vienna on Wednesday of cancer-related causes. She was 45.
Though Sirbiladze had been showing for a while in Europe, with exhibitions at places like Jonathan Viner Gallery in London and Secession in Vienna, she wasn’t known to New York audiences until last year, when she had two shows of her abstract paintings, at Half Gallery and James Fuentes. For the former, Sirbiladze turned Half Gallery’s Upper East Side space into an installation—two walls were covered in a series of purple, dark-blue, and green smears, and paintings were hung on top. In the past, Sirbiladze had also experimented with other forms of display, at times propping paintings against each other.Sirbiladze’s paintings played with the division between figuration and abstraction, often melding the two in ambiguous images. Genitalia and bodies can be glanced in some, while in others, objects like jugs and fruits seem to materialize. Sirbiladze’s paintings recall the work of Henri Matisse and the Impressionists in their light, expressive brushwork.









Born in Tbilisi, Georgia, in 1971, Sirbiladze was exposed to art mostly through books—her home country had few museums. She knew early on that she wanted to be an artist, however, and cited the colors of the art she came across as the reason she ended up painting. “Searching for light and color is my main engagement,” she told Forbes in an interview last year on the occasion of her Half Gallery show.
When Sirbiladze moved to Vienna, she met the artist Franz West, whom she married and had two children with, and whom she later ended up surviving, when he died in 2012. Despite West’s fame, she never felt overshadowed. “Franz hated all this authoritarian stuff,” she said in a 2013 interview.






James Fuentes, whose eponymous Lower East Side gallery began representing Sirbiladze last year, remembered the artist for her devotion to her family and her short period of exposure in New York. “She was filtering the history of painting to a point where she visually reflected a near-collapse or disintegration of these iconic images and forms,” Fuentes said in a phone conversation. “It really resonated with me as very timely work… Her career was really just starting to kick off in the United States, and we were only at the beginning of our journey together.”.(artnews.com)








Abdoulaye Diarrassouba

Abdoulaye Diarrassouba, also known as Aboudia is an African contemporary artist based in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. Born on October 21, 1983 in Côte d’Ivoire, he graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Bingerville in 2003. In 2005, he graduated from Institut des Arts in Abidjan. He first reached an international audience during the siege of Abidjan in 2011, when the conflict came close to his studio.







Aboudia depicts fevered landscapes and street scenes populated by child-like figures. “Assassin” powerfully demonstrates Aboudia’s trademark “nouchi” style. Rendered in oil sticks, acrylics and collage, his works are noted for brutal lines of color applied to heavily-layered background collages, details of newspaper and magazine cutouts ingeniously encircled by drawings fall in and out of focus. The resulting composition suggests current events cohering through the imagination into a provocative vision.
Aboudia's multi-layered paintings offer a simultaneaity of images and meanings that conduct a continuous discourse with each other and with the viewer. The surfaces deploy fragments, cuttings, from bits of comic strips, magazine ads, newspaper images, set into the paintings' overall compositions so as to suggest current events cohering through the imagination into a troubled and troubling vision.Wikipedia











Alden Mason

 Alden Mason is a prolific, contemporary Northwest Master. Born in Everett, Washington in 1919, Mason earned his MFA from the University of Washington in 1947. He taught painting at the University of Washington from 1949 to 1981. Throughout his career, Mason has used a variety of mediums from oil to acrylic. After becoming sensitive to the toxicity of his materials, he then moved to watercolor and oil stick. 
Although the imagery and media used by Mason have gone through many changes over the years, his paintings always exhibit exuberance and inventiveness in form, color, and style. Mason draws inspiration from Arshile Gorky, Willem de Kooning, Joan Miro, Pablo Picasso, and the many different cultures he has encountered while traveling. He has exhibited with Foster/White Gallery since 2003.








Mason’s work can be found in the collections of the Henry Art Gallery, Seattle Art Museum, Tacoma Art Museum, Museum of Northwest Art, San Francisco Museum of Art, Portland Art Museum, Milwaukee Art Museum, and many private and corporate collections in the US.Alden Mason was selected by the Seattle Art Dealers Association (SADA) to be a part of the Century 21 exhibit at the Wright Exhibition Space in Seattle.
Alden Mason passed away at the age of 93 in February of 2013. (fosterwhite.com)













Doll  Hans Bellmer

 Hans Bellmer (13 March 1902 – 23 February 1975) was a German artist, best known for the life-sized pubescent female dolls he produced in the mid-1930s. Historians of art and photography also consider him a Surrealist photographer.






Bellmer produced the first doll in Berlin in 1933. Long since lost, the assemblage can nevertheless be correctly described thanks to approximately two dozen photographs Bellmer took at the time of its construction. Standing about fifty-six inches tall, the doll consisted of a modeled torso made of flax fiber, glue, and plaster; a mask-like head of the same material with glass eyes and a long, unkempt wig; and a pair of legs made from broomsticks or dowel rods. One of these legs terminated in a wooden, club-like foot; the other was encased in a more naturalistic plaster shell, jointed at the knee and ankle. As the project progressed, Bellmer made a second set of hollow plaster legs, with wooden ball joints for the doll's hips and knees. There were no arms to the first sculpture, but Bellmer did fashion or find a single wooden hand, which appears among the assortment of doll parts the artist documented in an untitled photograph of 1934, as well as in several photographs of later work.Wikipedia









Philippe Vandenberg 

 Philippe Vandenberg (Ghent, 1952 - Brussels, June 29, 2009) was a Belgian painter.
Philippe Vandenberg was born in 1952 in Ghent, where the contact with the works of Hieronymus Bosch and Gustave Van de Woestijne at the Museum of Fine Arts will arouse fascination for painting. In 1970 he began his studies of Arts and Philosophy and Art History at the University of Ghent he stops in 1972 to fully focus on his studies of painting. In 1976 he graduated in the direction of painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Ghent and two years later he leaves for the first time to New York where he met the space in the work of Pollock, Rothko and Kline and was struck by 'The battle of the rebel Angels' Ensor.












 CoBrA Art Group Jørgen Nash









 Russian avant-garde art Pavel Filonov

Russian modernist Pavel Filonov is known for founding “Analytical Realism,” a detail-oriented style of painting developed largely in response to Cubism. While Filonov’s imagery contains the sort of deconstructed forms and compressed pictorial spaces associated with Cubism, his main objective was to represent the inner being of the subject, a concern he found sorely lacking in Cubism’s rigid focus on physical characteristics. Filonov’s dynamic style reflects that of his Russian Futurist contemporaries, and his oftentimes systematic application of paint echoes the Divisionism of Georges Seurat. The artist was also an educator, insisting that his students build their pictures as he did: bit by bit, detail by detail, using small brushes to make fine marks. While a keen observer of the modern art movements of his time, Filonov’s subject matter owes to Russian folklore and his own imagined iconography.(artsy.net)











Alfonso Ossorio
Ossorio's early work was surrealist. He was an admirer and early collector of the paintings of Jackson Pollock who counted him as a good friend, and whose works influenced and were influenced by Ossorio. In the early 1950s, Ossorio was pouring oil and enamel paints onto canvas in the style of the first abstract expressionist movement in the US.











George McNeil 

 George McNeil (February 22, 1908 – January 11, 1995) was an American abstract expressionist painter.
From the Cubist-influenced compositions of his earlier Hofmann student years, McNeil moved to full abstraction by 1936. His early 1950s paintings were "both abstract and expressionist"with an active surface “ very moving, full of feeling, emotional" displaying the “painterly touch” that was identified with the artists exhibiting at the Charles Egan Gallery. His paintings remained fully abstract until the early 1960s when figures and faces began to appear in the abstract field, particularly in the "Dancer" and "Bather" series. McNeil commented to art historian Irving Sandler in 1968:
my work has always had not a human figure image, but it always had a figural image. There always seems to be some kind of center image...that is figural, or imagistic.... [The figure] is not only found: it’s completely abstract. You see this is the whole thing: I’m not a figure painter at all. I’m an abstract painter where I hope that bringing in the figure brings in certain human or psychological connotations or associations.
From 1980, dynamic situations such as discos, New York City, football, street life or graffiti activate his paintings. His work is characterized by profound attention to color and complex abstract volumes. In the 1980s his work enjoyed a renaissance of attention and influence.From 1970 to 1991 McNeil made lithographs that he printed on his own press or at the Tamarind Institute, Albuquerque, NM, where he was invited four times in the 1980s.Wikipedia













Edward Kienholz

 Edward Kienholz (October 23, 1927 – June 10, 1994) was an American installation artist and assemblage sculptor whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. From 1972 onwards, he assembled much of his artwork in close collaboration with his artistic partner and fifth wife,[1][2] Nancy Reddin Kienholz. Throughout much of their career, the work of the Kienholzes was more appreciated in Europe than in their native United States, though American museums have featured their art more prominently since the 1990s.
Art critic Brian Sewell called Edward Kienholz "the least known, most neglected and forgotten American artist of Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation of the 1950s, a contemporary of the writers Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, his visual imagery at least as grim, gritty, sordid and depressing as their literary vocabulary"Wikipedia











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Herbert Gentry

Herbert Alexander Gentry, popularly known as Herb Gentry (July 17, 1919–September 8, 2003), was an African-American Expressionist painter who lived and worked in Paris, France (1946–70; 1976–80), Copenhagen, Denmark (1958–63), in the Swedish cities of Gothenburg (1963–65), Stockholm (1965–76; 2001–03), and Malmö (1980–2001), and in New York City (1970–2000) as a permanent resident of the Hotel Chelsea.Wikipedia












Adam Cullen

Adam Cullen was born in Sydney in 1965. He graduated from the City Art Institute with a Diploma of Professional Art in 1987 and received a Master of Fine Arts from the University of New South Wales in 1999. He exhibited broadly in individual and group exhibitions both in Australia and overseas. In 2002 he represented Australia at the 25th São Paulo Art Biennial.He gained early fame at art school by dragging around a rotting pig's head chained to his ankle.Cullen was well established as a Sydney 'grunge' artist when he won the prestigious Archibald Prize for his portrait of actor David Wenham in 2000.
As well his painting his grunge style entered the world of printmaking at Whaling Road Studios producing his first suite of etchings printed by Diana Davidson and Mark Rowden.Wikipedia













Dieter Roth

 Born in Hanover of a Swiss father and German mother. Moved to Switzerland 1943. Began to make drawings, oil paintings and prints in various media, and to write poems. Graphic design apprentice at Bern 1947-51. Started in 1954 to make experimental works, including his first baked sculpture, experiments with Op art, first book with holes and first film. Lived from 1955-7 in Copenhagen, then moved to Reykjavik, Iceland. Made kinetic pictures and sculptures, pictures made with half-tone screens, photograms, and had his first one-man exhibition at the Mokka Kaffi, Reykjavik, 1958. Received a William and Noma Copley Foundation Award in 1960. Lived in the USA 1964-7, where he taught at Yale and elsewhere, and began making pictures and objects incorporating chocolate and other edible materials subject to decomposition. Large output of experimental books and prints. Made series of paintings and drawings in collaboration with Richard Hamilton from 1976; has also made prints in collaboration with Hamilton or Arnulf Rainer. Lives in Reykjavik, with visits to Düsseldorf, Berlin, London.( tate.org.uk )












Cuban Art -  Paintings Gina Pellón

 Gina Pellón (December 26, 1926 – March 27, 2014) was a Cuban painter who lived in France.She was known for her abstract expressive paintings in strong colours, usually depicting women. She also wrote collections of poems.
Born in Cumanayagua, Las Villas she graduated from the Academy of San Alejandro in 1954, and taught at the Velado Polytechnic Institute, until 1957. In 1959, she studied in France, and overstayed her visa, fleeing from the Cuban dictatorship of Fidel Castro, and in 1960 she made her first solo exhibition in Luzern, Switzerland. Since then she has made exhibitions in various countries.Wikipedia












Neo-Dada: Robert Rauschenberg 








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Raquel Forner 

(April 22, 1902 – June 10, 1988) Argentina












Gordon Bennett

Gordon Bennett (10 August 1955 – 3 June 2014) was an Australian artist of Aboriginal and Anglo-Gaelic descent. Born in Monto, Queensland, Bennett was a significant figure in contemporary Indigenous Australian art. Gordon Bennett died on 3 June 2014, of natural causes.Wikipedia













Martin Kippenberger

 Kippenberger’s refusal to adopt a specific style and medium in which to disseminate his images resulted in an extremely prolific and varied oeuvre which includes an amalgam of sculpture, paintings, works on paper, photographs, installations, prints and ephemera.Wikipedia
His paintings very not always but very often technically masterpieces and his ridiculing aphorisms connect historically to a long rooted German philosophical tradition: the artist as the anarchist voice of the people, who traditionally very often didn’t or couldn’t dare to be anarchists.(inenart.eu)














Davyd Whaley

 Davyd Whaley (1967-2014), was an American abstract painter, known for expressing in his paintings Jungian themes related to the world of the subconscious.
Whaley studied painting at the Art Students League of New York from 2008 to 2011, working with mentors Ronnie Landfield and Larry Poons.His painting style is known for using brilliant colors and for its Jungian themes, reflecting his interest in dream analysis and in the world of the subconscious.Wikipedia














Norris Embry

 During his adolescent years in the Chicago area, Embry developed a keen interest in avant-garde literature, music and art. In 1947 Embry decided to devote his life to painting and, for the next 15 years until the early 1960s, embarked on a nomadic artistic career which would take him from San Francisco to New York, to post-war Europe, as well as Turkey and North Africa.
Throughout much of his life, Embry suffered from severe bouts of mental illness. In the mid-1960s, after having sought medical treatment at the Shepphard Pratt Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, he made that city his permanent residence. He continued to live and paint in Baltimore until the last weeks of his life.
After a series of strokes, he died February 17, 1981 and was buried at Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville.Wikipedia













 Jules Olitski

 One of the original Color Field painters to emerge in the 1950s, Jules Olitski was deeply concerned with the physical properties of paint. In his early career, Olitski depicted abstract shapes with thick, heavily impastoed surfaces, but later took to layering thin films of spraypaint onto his canvases, creating a trademark atmospheric effect. Olitski was always drawn to bright color, experimenting with unusual color harmonies and chromatic shifts. He would eventually return to impasto, experimenting with acrylic paints, binders, and gels that were not previously available.(.artsy.net)














Franz West 








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Burhan Uygur











Nancy Graves

A prolific artist who worked in painting, sculpture, printmaking and film, Graves first made her presence felt on the New York art scene in the late 1960s and 70's, with life-size sculptures of camels that seemed as accurate as a natural history display. Like-minded artists included Eva Hesse, Close, Bruce Nauman, Keith Sonnier, and Serra, to whom Graves was married from 1965 to 1970. Her work has strong ties to the Alexander Calder's stabiles and to the sculptures of David Smith, with their welded parts and found objects; she collected works by both artists.
Her most famous sculpture, Camels, was first displayed in the Whitney Museum of American Art. The sculpture features three separate camels, each made of many materials, among them burlap, wax, figerglass, and animal skin. Each camel is also painted with acrylics and oil colors to appear realistic.Wikipedia














Jean Fautrier

 He first exhibited his paintings at the Salon d'Automne in 1922 and at the Fabre Gallery in 1923. It was at the Galerie Fabre that he met art dealer Jeanne Castel, his first collector and friend. In 1923 he began producing etchings and engravings. His first solo exhibition was at the Galerie Visconti in Paris, in 1924.
In 1927, he painted a series of pictures (still lifes, nudes, landscapes) in which black dominates. In 1928 he met André Malraux through Castel. Malraux asked Fautrier to illustrate a text of his choice, but copyright issues kept him from using his first choice, Arthur Rimbaud’s ‘’Les Illuminations’’, and he settled instead with Dante’s Inferno. He produced 34 lithographs, but the publication, proposed by Gallimard, was deemed impossible and the project was abandoned in 1930. Until 1933 he divided his efforts between sculpture and painting. Short on funds, he spent the years 1934–1936 living in the resort of Tignes, where he made his living as a ski instructor and started a jazz club.Wikipedia

 












Action painting - Albert Kotin

 The style was widespread from the 1940s until the early 1960s, and is closely associated with abstract expressionism (some critics have used the terms "action painting" and "abstract expressionism" interchangeably). A comparison is often drawn between the American action painting and the French tachisme.
The term was coined by the American critic Harold Rosenberg in 1952, in his essay "The American Action Painters", and signaled a major shift in the aesthetic perspective of New York School painters and critics. According to Rosenberg the canvas was "an arena in which to act". While abstract expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Willem de Kooning had long been outspoken in their view of a painting as an arena within which to come to terms with the act of creation, earlier critics sympathetic to their cause, like Clement Greenberg, focused on their works' "objectness." To Greenberg, it was the physicality of the paintings' clotted and oil-caked surfaces that was the key to understanding them. "Some of the labels that became attached to Abstract Expressionism, like "informel" and "Action Painting," definitely implied this; one was given to understand that what was involved was an utterly new kind of art that was no longer art in any accepted sense. This was, of course, absurd." – Clement Greenberg, "Post Painterly Abstraction".Wikipedia

 














Eva Aeppli 

 Eva Aeppli (2 May 1925 – May 4, 2015) was a Swiss artist.









New realism - Gérard Deschamps

 The members of the nouveaux réalistes group tended to see the world as an image from which they could take parts and incorporate them into their works—as they sought to bring life and art closer together. They declared that they had come together on the basis of a new and real awareness of their "collective singularity", meaning that they were together in spite of, or perhaps because of, their differences. But for all the diversity of their plastic language, they perceived a common basis for their work; this being a method of direct appropriation of reality, equivalent, in the terms used by Pierre Restany, to a "poetic recycling of urban, industrial and advertising reality"
Thus the nouveaux réalistes advocated a return to "reality" in opposition to the lyricism of abstract painting. They also wanted to avoid what they saw as the traps of figurative art, which was seen as either petty-bourgeois or as Stalinist socialist realism. Hence the Nouveau Réalistes used exterior objects to give an account of the reality of their time. They were the inventor of the décollage technique (the opposite of collages), in particular through the use of lacerated posters—a technique mastered by François Dufrene, Jacques Villeglé, Mimmo Rotella and Raymond Hains. Often these artists worked collaboratively and it was their intention to present their artworks in the city of Paris anonymously.
Nouveau réalistes made extensive use of collage and assemblage, using real objects incorporated directly into the work and acknowledging a debt to the readymades of Marcel Duchamp. But the New Realism movement has often been compared to the Pop Art movement in New York for their use and critique of mass-produced commercial objects (Villeglé's ripped cinema posters, Arman's collections of detritus and trash), although Nouveau Réalisme maintained closer ties with Dada than with Pop Art.Wikipedia












 Lotti van der Gaag

 Charlotte van der Gaag was born on 18 December 1923 in The Hague in the Netherlands.
Aged 20, she had a relationship with the artist Bram Bogart, who introduced her to sculpture.
Around 1950, she visited the Dutch poet Simon Vinkenoog in Paris; here she was introduced to members of COBRA, amongst them Karel Appel and Corneille. During this period she concentrated almost exclusively on her sculpture.
Van der Gaag died, at the age of 75, in Nieuwegein on 20 February 1999.
Wikipedia











Tsuruko Yamazaki - Gutai group










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Svavar Guðnason

 Svavar Guðnason (November 18, 1909 in Höfn í Hornafirði – June 25, 1988 in Reykjavík) was an Icelandic painter.








Anton Rooskens 

CoBrA - avant-garde movement

Anton Rooskens he was one of the founders of the Experimental Group in Holland, which later became the Cobra movement. Rooskens was only briefly involved with Cobra.
Cobra painters, he was the only one with a steady job, so his brothers as Karel Appel and Corneille paints and canvases could provide.
Rooskens initially painted in an expressionist style, with a clear influence of Vincent van Gogh. From 1945 (after his move to Amsterdam) his works were experimental. Influenced by the simple, clean forms of folk art (especially for older images from New Guinea, Africa and India), he developed his own form of expression, which consisted of a colorful play of lines and shape. In the tradition of Cobra fantasy creatures can be seen in his work.














Leif Sylvester Petersen

 Petersen debuted in the late 1960 when he was the artists' exhibition was deeply disappointed with the launch of the established art. The same was Erik Clausen and together they began to exhibit in the streets and eventually to perform community satirical entertainment. Sylvester was about to make art, but at the same time he became involved in theater and music.
Clausen & Petersen made a series of plates and Sylvester formed the band Sylvester and Swallows, which also released several albums. He lives today of his art, but help on rare occasions in the film. Most recently, he exhibited at Sofie Holm. Among his decorations in public spaces is the bronze sculpture "That's it". 


 









Kevin Tigert



"Between Two Worlds"
Art Plaster with embedded painted canvas pieces detailing a mans in a stsill life between this world and the next.


"In The Beginning"
Art Plaster with embedded glass rods, plaster circles, glass objects, etc....

"Space Elevator"
Art Plaster with embedded glass rods, plaster circles and tiles, glass objects, etc

"Woman in Mirror"
Art Plaster with embedded dominoes, glass objects, etc... in a frame made of old window frame



Henry Heerup

 Henry Heerup (4 November 1907 - 30 May 1993) was a painter and sculptor born in Frederiksberg, Denmark.













Ernst Wilhelm Nay











Markus Prachensky

Markus Prachensky (1932 - 2011) was an Austrian painter and graphic artist of the Informel.












Laurent Jiménez-Balaguer

 Jiménez-Balaguer’s purpose is to establish a framework of knowledge of the human psyche based on Ferdinand de Saussure’s language model, in order to show how painting is a universal medium for the understanding of the Self. He regards the construct of the Self as indispensable, and its visualization as vital; the human inner is neither an impalpable, untouchable soul nor an invisible, immaterial ego.
His conception of creation and society inscribe him in a process of a permanent revolution, from which the subject must struggle for the construction of the Self. His work asserts that the Self is a performative act. Jose María Moreno Galván in 1960 considered him one of the twenty most talented painters of Contemporary Catalan Art.
Two fundamental archetypes structure his field: the Body-Memory and the Exterior-Interior..Wikipedia














Allen Eberle










Saburo Murakami

 Murakami, who held a doctorate in philosophy with a specialization in aesthetics, made performance works and conceptual paintings. Some of his best-known works were performances in which he used his body’s momentum to break through many consecutive panels of paper stretched between wood; these were presented as “paintings”. In other works, he used different parts of his body to puncture stretched paper, and threw a ball onto a surface to create marks. Later in his career, his works merged further with conceptual, performance, and minimal techniques, and away from actual objects. Murakami didn’t want to call his creations works or exhibitions in the traditional sense, but considered them “negotiation sites.”











Eugène Brands

 In 1946, Eugène Brands participated in the group exhibition "Young Painters" in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where a whole room was filled with his work. In 1948 he joined the Experimental Group Holland, and in November 1949 he showcased his artwork in the "International exhibition of experimental art". Meanwhile, the Cobra movement was founded, a group he produced his best works with. However, differences of opinion and disagreements resulted in his departure and he decided to go solo. In the 1950s he was inspired by children's drawings.
Today his work is often showcased at the Museum Jan van der Togt.Wikipedia














Tony Oursler 

 Tony Oursler is known for his fractured-narrative handmade video tapes including The Loner (1980) and EVOL (1984). These works involve elaborate sound tracks, painted sets, stop-action animation and optical special effects created by the artist. The early videotapes have been exhibited extensively in alternative spaces and museums, they are distributed by Electronic Arts Intermix. His early installation works are immersive dark-room environments with video, sound, and language mixed with colorful constructed sculptural elements. In these projects, Oursler experimented with methods of removing the moving image from the video monitor using reflections in water, mirrors, glass and other devices. For example, L-7, L-5, exhibited at The Kitchen in 1983, used the translucent quality of video reflected on broken glass.Wikipedia















Brood ; musician and painter

 Known for his hedonistic lifestyle of "sex, drugs and rock 'n roll," Brood was an enfant terrible and a cultural figure whose suicide, apparently caused by a failure to kick his drug and alcohol habit, only strengthened his controversial status. His suicide, according to a poll organized to celebrate fifty years of Dutch popular music, was the most significant event in its history.
After his career in music, Brood turned to painting and became a well-known character in Amsterdam art circles. His art is best described as pop-art, often very colorful and graffiti-inspired screen prints, and he achieved some commercial success and notoriety by, for instance, creating murals in various public spaces in and around Amsterdam.














Sadamasa Motonaga














Keiichi Tanaami

 Tanaami took to drawing from a young age, and as a junior high school student he often spent time at the studio of leading postwar cartoonist Kazushi Hara with the intention of becoming a cartoonist himself. After Hara’s sudden death, however, he turned to the pioneering field within manga of graphic novels, and went on to study to become a professional artist at Musashino Art University. Word of his talent spread quickly during his time there and in 1958, as a second year student, he was awarded the Special Selection at an exhibition held by the authoritative illustration and design group of the time. After graduating he took a job with an advertising agency, but quit before one year was up due to the numerous private commissions he was receiving. During the ‘60s he busied himself as a successful illustrator and graphic designer while also actively participating in the Neo-Dada organization, one of the defining art movements of postwar Japan. In the latter half of the ‘60s he immersed himself in making video art, the newest medium in the art scene at the time.Wikipedia












Tarō Okamoto 

 Among the artists Okamoto associated with during his stay in Paris were André Breton (1896–1966), the leader of Surrealism, and Kurt Seligmann (1900–62), a Swiss Surrealist artist, who was the Surrealists' authority on magic and who met Okamoto's parents, Ippei and Kanoko Okamoto, during a trip to Japan in 1936. Okamoto also associated with Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, Robert Capa and Capa's partner, Gerda Taro, who adopted Okamoto's first name as her last name.
While in Paris, Okamoto had worked in both abstract and Surrealist styles, but he came to believe the two movements were incompatible. In 1947, in response to this conflict, he introduced as the core of his artistic principle Taikyoku-ism (polarism), an idea that proposed the communion of opposites. Based on these tenets, he created works such as Dawn (1948), Heavy Industry (1949), and Law of the Jungle (1950). The following year, he established the Yoru-no-kai (Night Society) with critic Kiyoteru Hanada as a means to integrate avant-garde art and literature. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Okamoto focused on executing public projects, including installations in subway stations and government buildings in Japan. He painted a monumental mural for a hotel in Mexico entitled Tomorrow’s Mythology (1968), a work that depicts a human figure being hit by an atomic bomb. In 1961, Okamoto withdrew from Nika-kai and other art circles with which he had associated.

















Egill Jacobsen

  Egill Jacobsen (16 December 1910 – 21 April 1998) was a Danish painter who became a professor at the Royal Danish Academy.
Born in Copenhagen, Jacobsen studied painting at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts under Kræsten Iversen and Peder Hald (1932-33). His earliest paintings were inspired by traditional Danish landscape painting under the influence of Albert Gottschalk but after visiting Paris in 1934 when he experienced the work of Matisse and Picasso, he began to create Abstract images of brightly coloured beak-shaped masked figures inspired by ethnographic art. He went on to paint a series of works devoid of any motifs in which colour was the only criterion for expression. From 1940, he produced more masked images with geometrical shapes depicting teeth, eggs and other such features in pure spectral colours. His Græshoppedans (Grasshopper Dance, 1941) depicts simplied figures in a work suggesting the culmination of high summer.Wikipedia









Street Art Brazil














Serge Vandercam

  Serge Vandercam (Copenhagen, 1924 – Wavre, 10 March 2005) was a Danish-born Belgian painter, photographer, sculptor and ceramist associated with the CoBrA group.











Atsuko Tanaka 

 Atsuko Tanaka ( February 10, 1932 – December 3, 2005) was a pioneering Japanese avant-garde artist.









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Shozo Shimamoto

 Shozo Shimamoto (January 22, 1928 – January 25, 2013) was a Japanese artist.He was a co-founder (along with Jirō Yoshihara) of the avant garde Gutai group formed in the 1950s, and his works are in museum collections such as those of the Tate Gallery and the Tate Modern (in both London and Liverpool) and the Hyogo Prefectural Museum of Art in Kobe, Japan. New York Times art critic Roberta Smith [ has noted him as one of the most daring and independent experimentalists of the postwar international art scene in the 1950s. Internationally today he is especially noted for his work in the "mail art" genre, of which he was a pioneer.Wikipedia
















Bengt Lindström

 Bengt Karl Erik Lindström (September 3, 1925, Berg Municipality — January 29, 2008) was a Swedish artist. Lindström was one of Sweden's best known contemporary artists with a characteristic style of distinct colors, often including contorted faces.
Lindström was born in 1925 at Storsjö kapell, Härjedalen, Sweden. In 1944, he moved to Stockholm to study under the Swedish painter Isaac Grünewald. In 1948, he moved to Paris, where studied under the French painters André Lhote and Fernand Léger. He remained in France at Savigny sur Orge for the rest of his artistic career.Wikipedia












Jan Nieuwenhuys

 Jan Nieuwenhuys (January 8, 1922 – December 28, 1986) was a Dutch painter and one of the early active founders of the Dutch Experimentalists group (Reflex) that later became part of CoBrA.










Asger Jorn
 
Asger Oluf Jorn (3 March 1914 – 1 May 1973) was a Danish painter, sculptor, ceramic artist, and author. He was a founding member of the avant-garde movement COBRA and the Situationist International. He was born in Vejrum, in the northwest corner of Jutland, Denmark.









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Kurt Schwitters

Kurt Schwitters (20 June 1887 – 8 January 1948) was a German artist who was born in Hanover, Germany.
Schwitters worked in several genres and media, including Dada, Constructivism, Surrealism, poetry, sound, painting, sculpture, graphic design, typography, and what came to be known as installation art. He is most famous for his collages, called Merz Pictures.Wikipedia















Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk

 Lucebert (15 September 1924 – 10 May 1994) was a Dutch artist who first became known as the poet of the COBRA movement.
He was born in Amsterdam in 1924. He entered the Institute for Arts and Crafts in 1938 and took part in the first exhibition of the COBRA group at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam in 1949.












Corneille Guillaume Beverloo

 Corneille Guillaume Beverloo (3 July 1922 – 5 September 2010), better known under his pseudonym Corneille, was a Dutch artist.
Corneille was born in Liege, Belgium, although his parents were Dutch and moved back to the Netherlands when he was 12. He studied art at the Academy of Art in Amsterdam, in the Netherlands. He was one of the founders of the REFLEX movement in 1948 and in 1949 he was also one of the founders of the COBRA movement, which has had great influence on Scandinavian art. He was active within the group from the beginning, not only painting but also publishing poetry in the Cobra magazine. He was a cofounder of the Experimentele Groep in Holland.












Günter Brus

 Günter Brus (born September 27, 1938, Ardning, Styria, Austria) is a controversial Austrian painter, performance artist, graphic artist, experimental filmmaker and writer.









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 Karel Appel 

 Christiaan Karel Appel ( 25 April 1921 – 3 May 2006) was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement Cobra in 1948.










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Hannah Höch

 Hannah Höch (German: November 1, 1889 – May 31, 1978) was a German Dada artist. She is best known for her work of the Weimar period, when she was one of the originators of photomontage.













John Chamberlain 

 John Angus Chamberlain (April 16, 1927 – December 21, 2011[1]) was an American sculptor. At the time of his death he resided and worked on Shelter Island, New York
Chamberlain is best known for creating sculptures from old automobiles (or parts of) that bring the Abstract Expressionist style of painting into three dimensions. He began by carving and modelling, but turned to working in metal in 1952 and welding 1953. By 1957, while staying with the painter Larry Rivers in Southampton, New York, he began to include scrap metal from cars with his sculpture Shortstop, and from 1959 onward he concentrated on sculpture built entirely of crushed automobile parts welded together. Far more than just another wrinkle on assemblage Shortstop and subsequent works completely reinvented modeling casting, and volume altering Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the readymade and using the car as both medium and tool.
By the end of the 1960s, Chamberlain had replaced his signature materials initially with galvanized steel, then with mineral-coated Plexiglas, and finally with aluminum foil. In 1966, he began a series of sculptures made of rolled, folded, and tied urethane foam. Since returning in the mid-1970s to metal as his primary material, Chamberlain has limited himself to specific parts of the automobile (fenders, bumpers, or the chassis, for example). In 1973, two 300-pound metal pieces by Chamberlain were mistaken for junk and carted away as they sat outside a gallery warehouse in Chicago.
In the early 1980s, Chamberlain moved to Sarasota, Florida, where an 18,000-square-foot warehouse studio on Cocoanut Avenue enabled him to work on a much grander scale than he previously had. Many of the subsequent works Chamberlain made in Florida revert to more volumetric, compact configurations, often aligned on a vertical axis.Wikipedia
















Matthew de La Tour








João Costa Rosa

 Portuguese - 24 years old.
Painting is my way of talking... my language, my alphabet and how to express my emotions.
We live in heartless world - I use my paints as a statement, trying to wake up humans conscientiousness. I grow and hope you all too...





 

Jean-Michel Basquiat 

 Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 – August 12, 1988)  was an American artist of the Neo-Expressionism and Primitivism art movements. Basquiat produced graffiti, paintings, poetry, and music. He was world-famous by the age of twenty-three, and has been credited for bringing the African-American and Latino cultural experience into the elite art world. Although his life ended tragically and early, he is considered an exceptionally creative talent, and he became a cultural hero, to many young artists. His artwork collections are on display in Europe, Canada, Asia, and the United States.












Ushio Shinohara 

 Ushio Shinohara (born 1932, Tokyo), nicknamed “Gyu-chan”, is a Japanese Neo-Dadaist artist. His bright, large work has been exhibited internationally at institutions including the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Centre Georges Pompidou, the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Leo Castelli Gallery, New York, Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Seoul










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Kazuo Shiraga

   Kazuo Shiraga (born 1924 in Amagasaki, Japan; - 8. April, 2008) was a Japanese modern artist who belonged to the Gutai group of avant-garde artists. He was acknowledged internationally only after his death.In the 1940s he studied Nihonga at the Kyoto City University of Arts. In 1953 he founded the group "Zero Kai" with Akira Kanayama, Kaiko Tanaka und Saburo Murakami which merged with Gutai in 1955. Until 1966 his Performance Paintings were largely painted with his feet. Later he was influenced by Frenchman Jean-Jacques Lebel. 1971-72 he lived as a Buddhist monk.













Wall Street Fine Art Gallery





Barnett Newman

 Barnett Newman (January 29, 1905 – July 4, 1970) was an American artist. He is seen as one of the major figures in abstract expressionism and one of the foremost of the color field painters. His paintings are existential in tone and content, explicitly composed with the intention of communicating a sense of locality, presence, and contingency
Newman is generally classified as an abstract expressionist on account of his working in New York City in the 1950s, associating with other artists of the group and developing an abstract style which owed little or nothing to European art. However, his rejection of the expressive brushwork employed by other abstract expressionists such as Clyfford Still and Mark Rothko, and his use of hard-edged areas of flat color, can be seen as a precursor to post painterly abstraction and the minimalist works of artists such as Frank Stella.
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Tetsumi Kudo







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Tadeusz Kantor

 Tadeusz Kantor (6 April 1915 – 8 December 1990) was a Polish painter, assemblage artist, set designer and theatre director. Kantor is renowned for his revolutionary theatrical performances in Poland and abroad.









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Kenny Scharf

Kenny Scharf (born 1958) is an American painter who lives in Brooklyn, New York. He received his B.F.A. in 1980 with a major in painting at the School of Visual Arts located in Manhattan, New York City. Scharf's works consist of painting pop culture icons in a science fiction setting, such as the Flintstones and the Jetsons. Wikipedia
 











Katharina Grosse











Mimmo Rotella










Arman

 (November 17, 1928 – October 22, 2005) was a French-born American artist.Born Armand Fernandez in Nice, France, Arman was a painter who moved from using objects for the ink or paint traces they leave to using them as the painting itself. He is best known for his "accumulations" and destruction/recomposition of objects.
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Pamela Masik's live performance painting










World bodypainting festival 2014















Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama  is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art, and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg. Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.Wikipedia















Mike Kelley


(October 27, 1954 in Wayne, Michigan  – c. January 31, 2012 in South Pasadena) was an American artist. His work involved found objects, textile banners, drawings, assemblage, collage, performance and video. He often worked collaboratively and had produced projects with artists Paul McCarthy, Tony Oursler and John Miller. Writing in The New York Times, in 2012, Holland Cotter described the artist as "one of the most influential American artists of the past quarter century and a pungent commentator on American class, popular culture and youthful rebellion." Wikipedia










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Ulla von Brandenburg











 Niki de Saint Phalle

 Niki de Saint Phalle (born Catherine-Marie-Agnès Fal de Saint Phalle, 29 October 1930 – 21 May 2002) was a French sculptor, painter, and filmmaker.


 










Władysław Hasior

May 14, 1928 – July 14, 1999) was one of the leading Polish contemporary sculptors connected with the Podhale region. He was also a painter and theatre set designer.
Władysław Hasior was born in Nowy Sącz on May 14, 1928. From 1947-1952, he studied under Professor Antoni Kenar at the State Secondary School of Visual Art Techniques. In 1952 he started his studies in sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw. He graduated from the Academy in 1958. From 1959-60, he stayed in Paris as a holder of a scholarship of the French Ministry Culture and studied under Ossip Zadkine. His first individual exhibition was in 1961 at the Jewish Theater in Warsaw. Since then his works have been displayed at over seventy individual exhibitions in Poland and Europe. In 1968 Hasior had returned to his first school and became a teacher there until 1968.
Hasior’s art meant to provoke and shock the beholder. He continuously experimented with forms, techniques and materials by creating spatial compositions, assemblages and collages. He also authored many unconventional monuments and plein air sculptures, both in Poland and abroad. Since 1984 artist focused on the continuous arrangement of the authors Gallery.
Władysław Hasior died on July 14, 1999 in Kraków. He is buried at the Zakopane Cemetery of the Meritorious at Pęksowy Brzyzek.
(Wikipedia )



















Sonia Falcone











Natalia Pereira's  "Dismorfobina"







"Dismorfobina"
"Dismorfobina"
Natalia Pereira: Dismorfobina
Natalia Pereira: Dismorfobina


César Baldaccini

 (1 January 1921 in Marseille - 6 December 1998 in Paris), usually called César was a noted French sculptor.
César was at the forefront of the Nouveau Réalisme movement with his radical compressions (compacted automobiles, discarded metal, or rubbish), expansions (polyurethane foam sculptures), and fantastic representations of animals and insects. 
Wikipedia














Joseph Beuys

Joseph Beuys; 12 May 1921 – 23 January 1986  was a German Fluxus, happening and performance artist as well as a sculptor, installation artist, graphic artist, art theorist and pedagogue of art.

His extensive work is grounded in concepts of humanism, social philosophy and anthroposophy; it culminates in his "extended definition of art" and the idea of social sculpture as a gesamtkunstwerk, for which he claimed a creative, participatory role in shaping society and politics. His career was characterized by passionate, even acrimonious public debate. He is now regarded as one of the most influential artists of the second half of the 20th century. Wikipedia














Francisco de Pájaro

 Art is Trash: the sculptor who uses rubbish in the street 













Street art











Mariel Clayton - Barbie










Christo Jawczew 







New York





Banksy













Paris, France







San Francisco

 


This vehicle used to be a Honda Civic



Havana  Cuba 










Berlin Germany 











 Andres Serrano 







Erik Ravelo


 



Controversial 

Gunther von Hagens (born Gunther Liebchen, 10 January 1945) is a German anatomist who invented the technique for preserving biological tissue specimens called plastination.



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