Esteban Vicente - Abstract Expressionist painter

"Esteban Vicente was a Spanish Abstract Expressionist painter. Known for his gestural and contemplative compositions, Vicente’s work focused on exploring color and tonal harmonies rather than the expressive improvisation of his AbEx peers. He was an integral member of the New York School of painters, working alongside Franz Kline, Jackson Pollock, Barnett Newman, and Willem de Kooning. Born on January 20, 1903 in Turégano, Spain, Vicente spent his youth visiting the Museo del Prado, and went on to study at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes in Madrid. He left Spain for New York in 1936 to escape the Spanish Civil War, and rarely returned to his home country thereafter; however, a museum dedicated to his life and work was established in Segovia, Spain. Today, Vicente’s works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Bilbao Fine Arts Museum in Spain, and the San Diego Museum of Art, among others. Vicente died on January 10, 2001 in Bridgehampton, NY."(artnet)

British abstract art - Gillian Ayres

Gillian Ayres (3 February 1930 – 11 April 2018) was an English painter. She is best known for abstract painting and printmaking using vibrant colours, which earned her a Turner Prize nomination.Gillian Ayres was born to Florence and Stephen Ayres on 3 February 1930 in Barnes, London, the youngest of three sisters. She started school when she was six. Her parents, a prosperous couple who owned a hatmaking factory, sent her to Ibstock, a progressive school in Roehampton run on Fröbel principles.In 1941, Ayres was sent to Colet Court, the junior school for St Paul's, Hammersmith.She passed the entrance exam for St Paul's Girls' School the following year, and developed an interest in art while there. Among her schoolfriends was Shirley Williams, with whom she taught art to children in bomb-damaged parts of London.Ayres then decided to go to art school. In 1946, she applied to the Slade School of Fine Art and was accepted. However, at sixteen, she was too young to enroll. She was advised to apply to the Camberwell School of Art and studied there from 1946 to 1950.Gillian Ayres worked part-time at the AIA Gallery in Soho from 1951-59 before starting a teaching career.She held a number of teaching posts through the 1960s and 1970s, becoming friends with painters such as Howard Hodgkin, Robyn Denny and Roger Hilton. In 1959, she was asked to teach at Bath Academy of Art, Corsham, for six weeks. She remained on the teaching staff until 1965.For much of her time at Corsham she shared a teaching studio with Malcolm Hughes. She was a senior lecturer at Saint Martin's School of Art, London, from 1965 to 1978 and became head of painting at Winchester School of Art in 1978, the first female teacher in the UK to hold such a position. She left teaching in 1981, and moved to an old rectory on the Llyn Peninsula in north-west Wales to become a full-time painter.Gillian Ayres' early works are typically made with thin vinyl paint in a limited number of colours arranged in relatively simple forms, but later works in oil paint are more exuberant and very colourful, with a thick impasto being used.
One of Ayres' early projects was a 1957 commission by architect Michael Greenwood to decorate the South Hampstead high school dining hall in north London. The murals, described as "the only true British contribution to American abstract expressionism", were quickly covered over with wallpaper before being rediscovered in 1983 in nearly perfect condition.Wikipedia

Between Surrealism and Abstractionism Hedda Sterne

Hedda Sterne (born Hedwig Lindenberg) was an artist best remembered as the only woman in a group of Abstract Expressionists known as "The Irascibles" which consisted of Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Mark Rothko, and others. Sterne was, in fact, the only woman photographed with the group by Nina Leen for Life magazine in 1950. In her artistic endavors she created a body of work known for exhibiting a stubborn independence from styles and trends, including Surrealism and Abstract Expressionism, with which she is often associated.Sterne has been almost completely overlooked in art historical narratives of the post-war American art scene. At the time of her death, possibly the last surviving artist of the first-generation of the New York School, Hedda Sterne viewed her widely varied works more as in flux than as definitive statements. In 1944 she married Saul Steinberg the Romanian-born American cartoonist and illustrator, best known for his work for The New Yorker.During the late 1940s she became a member of The Irascible Eighteen, a group of abstract painters who protested the Metropolitan Museum of Art's policy towards American painting of the 1940s and who posed for a famous picture in 1950; members of the group besides Sterne included: Willem de Kooning, Adolph Gottlieb, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Pousette-Dart, William Baziotes, Jimmy Ernst, Jackson Pollock, James Brooks, Clyfford Still, Robert Motherwell, Bradley Walker Tomlin, Theodoros Stamos, Barnett Newman, and Mark Rothko.(www.wikiart.org)

 

Action painting Frank Avray Wilson

Frank Avray Wilson (1914–2009) was a British artist.
Born in Vacoas, Mauritius, on 3 May 1914, Wilson was one of the first British artists to use Tachist or Action painting techniques
Wilson graduated from St John's College, Cambridge University with a degree in biology, before studying art in Paris and Norway.[citation needed] In 1953, he met Denis Bowen, and they formed the New Vision Group and, in 1956, the New Vision Centre Gallery near Marble Arch in central London.Avray Wilson had his first solo show at the Obelisk Gallery in 1954, before being included in the British Council's influential La Peinture Anglaise Contemporain, which toured in France and Switzerland. He also took park in the New York Foundation's New Trends in British Painting in Rome in 1957 and was shortlisted for the John Moore's prize exhibition in Liverpool in 1959. His auction record of £15,000 was set at Christie's, London, on 22 March 2012, for his 1957 oil on canvas Wish.Wikipedia

Emil Schumache

"Emil Schumacher (German, August 29, 1912–October 4, 1999) was born in Hagen, Germany. The Abstract Expressionist artist studied at School of Arts in Dortmund from 1932 to 1935. His earlier works show mainly Cubist-influenced landscapes. After World War II, he founded Junger Westen with artist colleagues. The group aimed to restore the connection to Modern Art, which was lost in the time of the Third Reich.
In the 1950s, Schumacher developed non-objective color-focused works. In 1955, he became famous through his first exhibitions. He achieved internal recognition as a result of his participation in Biennale di Venezia in 1961, and through his several documenta exhibitions. From 1958 to 1960, he held a professorship at Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg. Today, the artist’s works are held in various famous museums worldwide. In 1998, the German government commissioned him for a mural in the renovated Reichstag building in Berlin. Schumacher died one year later in Spain."(.artnet.com)