Abstract sculptore Pietro Consagra

Pietro Consagra (October 4, 1920 – July 16, 2005) was one of Italy's leading postwar sculptors.Consagra was born in Mazara del Vallo, a town in western Sicily, on October 4. His father, a traveling salesman, did not register his birth until October 6. Consagra attended the Accademia delle Belle Arti in Palermo. He moved to Rome in 1944, where he studied with the social realist painter Renato Guttuso. Influenced by a trip to Paris, where he saw the studios of Brâncuși, Picasso, and Giacometti, he became a founder of the "Forma I" group in 1947. This group championed abstract art at the expense of the dogmatically heroic canvases and sculpture approved by Marxists such as Guttuso. Consagra wrote an essay called "La Necessità della Scultura" (or "The Need for Sculpture") in 1952. It defended the importance of sculpture as a response to the accusation of the artist Arturo Martini that the medium was now a "dead language".
Steadily Consagra's work began to find an audience. Working primarily in metal, and later in marble and wood, his thin, roughly carved reliefs, began to be collected by Peggy Guggenheim and other important patrons of the arts. He showed at the Venice Biennale eleven times between 1950 and 1993, and in 1960 won the sculpture prize at the exhibition.
During the 1960s he was associated with the Continuità group, an offshoot of Forma I, and in 1967 taught at the School of Arts in Minneapolis. Large commissions allowed him to begin working on a more monumental scale, and works of his were installed in the courtyard of the Foreign Ministry in Rome and in the European Parliament, Strasbourg. His work is found in the collections of The Tate Gallery, London, in Museo Cantonale d'Arte of Lugano and the Museum of Modern Art, Paris, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C..Wikipedia

Ugo Attardi

Ugo Attardi (12 March 1923 in Sori – 20 July 2006 in Rome) was an Italian painter, sculptor and writer.
Attardi moved from Genoa to Rome in the early 1950s, where he formed the group Forma 1 together with other artists such as Carla Accardi, Pietro Consagra, Piero Dorazio, Mino Guerrini, Concetto Maugeri, Achille Perilli, Antonio Sanfilippo and Giulio Turcato.His sculpture of Ulysses is now permanently installed in Battery Park in New Yor

 

Ksawery Makarowicz

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Shaman of Loimaa Alpo Jaakola

Alpo Sakari Jaakola (1 April 1929 – 27 February 1997) was a Finnish painter and sculptor, known as the Shaman of Loimaa. He was one of the most important representatives of surrealism in Finland. Mysticism and absurdist humor were central to his work.Alpo Jaakola matured as an artist in the surrealism-tinged atmosphere of Turku School of Fine Arts. His early work emanates covert and sombre mysticism, examining the link between the self and the subconscious. Jaakola's interest in different eras and genres of art became evident early on and he developed into a genuine "total artist" – simultaneously a "mystical splinter light painter" and an "anarchistic junk metal-concrete dadaist".In 1997, a documentary film about Jaakola was released. The film won a Jussi Award.In 1992, the Alpo Jaakola Statuary Park was opened to the public in Loimaa, Finland. The Statuary Park is the result of many decades of creative work and a monument of Alpo Jaakola's artistic power. Art exhibitions, cultural events, theater plays, concerts and festivals are organized continuously. Alpo Jaakola himself is interred in the Statuary Park.Wikipedia

Color Field painting Howard Mehring

Howard Mehring (1931–1978) was a twentieth-century painter born in Washington, D.C.
Howard Mehring is associated with Color Field painting and the Washington Color School and the artists at Jefferson Place Gallery. Mehring and Robert Gates both received grants from The Woodward Foundation to travel in Europe during 1971 to broaden their art backgrounds. His connection with Vincent Melzac was instrumental in developing his work. Early in his career (1956–1958) he shared studio space with Thomas "Tom" Downing, with whom he had been a student of Kenneth Noland at Catholic University. Some of their paintings from that period are difficult to tell apart.
Mehring's early work is a "Washington version" of abstract expressionism, with the loose handling of paint on a surface but a much more transparent use of magna paint, an acrylic paint developed by Leonard Bocour. The stylistic resemblance to Mountains and Sea by Helen Frankenthaler is obvious.
As Mehring developed as an artist his work became much more structured. He went from a painted surface with an all-over pattern to cutting up canvas with the all-over pattern and gluing it back together. Later he used some of those same forms to make "hard-edge paintings", such as Chroma Double from 1965, in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art.
Mehring and the other Washington Color School painters were in debt to the writings of Clement Greenberg. In 1964 Greenberg included Mehring in his traveling museum exhibition called Post-painterly Abstraction.Wikipedia

 

Neo-conceptual art Steven Parrino

Steven Parrino (1958 – 2005) was an American artist and musician associated with energetic punk nihilism. He is best known for creating big modernist monochrome paintings (his colors were limited to monochrome black (or black-and-white), orange, red, blue, and silver) that he violently slashed, torn or twisted off their stretchers. He died in a motorcycle traffic accident in Greenpoint, Brooklyn at the age of 46
Parrino was born in New York City in 1958 and grew up on Long Island. The family was Albanian-Arbëreshë originally from Sicily. He earned an associate of applied science degree from SUNY Farmingdale, in 1979 and a bachelor of fine arts degree from Parsons The New School for Design in 1982.

 

Parrino began producing art at the end of the 1970s, driven, as he said himself, by his ‘necrophiliac interest’ in painting, which at that time had been pronounced dead. As early as 1981 he detached the canvas from the stretcher in places to create rough, folded, cleft surfaces, thus achieving a literal deconstruction of painting.
Parrino first showed his paintings of deep-seated pessimism at Gallery Nature Morte, an East Village gallery, in 1984, when he emerged as part of a strain of postmodernism called Neo-Geo. Neo-Geo artists, including Peter Halley, Haim Steinbach, John Armleder and Olivier Mosset, mixed modernist abstraction with a more cynical form of Pop Art worldliness by adding references to commerce, design, music or the movies. Parrino called his mauled canvases “misshaped paintings,” in response to the shaped paintings of the sixties.

In addition to painting, Parrino exhibited painted environments that involved monochrome walls pounded with sledgehammers such as the 13 plaster panels painted black and smashed to pieces as a memorial to the Punk legend Joey Ramone called 13 Shattered Panels for Joey Ramone (2001). He also made films of the making of these environments along with sleek metal sculptures whose bent and folded elements related to his misshaped canvases. He also exhibited photographs of his desktop strewn with the newspaper stories, magazine spreads and music albums that often inspired him. Parrino used intentionally provocative subjects like abstract swastikas, rebel flags, and silhouettes of Russ Meyer starlets, Elvis Presley as rendered by Andy Warhol, the Hells Angels, Johnny Cash, and other works by Andy Warhol. His work has been called "mannered, Romantic, formulaic, conceptualist-formalist heavy-metal boy-art abstraction" by the art critic Jerry Saltz.Wikipedia