Nek Chand Saini - The Rock Garden

Nek Chand Saini (1924 – 2015) was a self-taught Indian artist, known for building the Rock Garden of Chandigarh, an eighteen-acre sculpture garden in the city of Chandigarh.
The Rock Garden is one of the most famous sites in India. Chand, its creator, died in 2015, but it is still visited by millions of people every year.
In his spare time, Chand began collecting materials from demolition sites around the city. He recycled these materials into his own vision of the divine kingdom of Sukrani, choosing a gorge in a forest near Sukhna Lake for his work. The gorge had been designated as a land conservancy, a forest buffer established in 1902 that nothing could be built on. Chand's work was illegal, but he was able to hide it for eighteen years before it was discovered by the authorities in 1975. By this time, it had grown into a 13-acre (5.3 ha) complex of interlinked courtyards, each filled with hundreds of pottery-covered concrete sculptures of dancers, musicians, and animals. Made from recycled materials, Chand built up the mass with a cement and sand mix before adding a final coating of smoothly burnished pure cement combined with waste materials such as broken glass, bangles, crockery, mosaic and iron-foundry slag.His work was in serious danger of being demolished, but he was able to get public opinion on his side, and in 1986 the park was inaugurated as a public space. Wikipedia

Edoardo Daniele Villa

Edoardo Daniele Villa (1915–2011) was a notable South African sculptor of Italian descent who worked primarily in steel, and bronze
Villa's sculpture developed further during the 1950s, when the use of cut steel and bronze. At this time he also taught at the Polly Art Centre in Johannesburg. The Polly Art Centre was founded as an adult education institution; in 1952 it was converted into an art and exhibition centre. Until its closure in 1960, it was the only place – apart from a few private galleries – where black artists in Johannesburg could pursue their art and show their works.
Villa's work includes larger than life steel installations, such as Reclining Figure in Pieter Roos Park, Johannesburg. This work was intended as a play statue for children, paid for by Anglo American, selected by the Parktown and Westcliffe Heritage Trust and donated to the City of Johannesburg and unveiled by the Deputy Mayor of Johannesburg Councillor C.E. Fabel on 8 September 1984.Edoardo Villa represented South Africa at the Venice Biennale on five occasions and he has received awards at the São Paulo Biennales of 1957 and 1959.From his conventional heads and figures of the 1940s, Villa moved progressively through stylized figuration to structural abstraction. The universality of humankind is a theme that dominates his work.

Phil Solomon - Experimental Filmm & Digital Painting

Philip Stewart Solomon (1954 – 2019) was an American experimental filmmaker noted for his work with both film and video. Recently, Solomon has earned acclaim for a series of films that incorporate machinima made using games from the Grand Theft Auto series.His films are often described as haunting and lyrica
"Phil Solomon, who used repurposed footage, manipulated images and striking soundtracks to make evocative experimental films that were widely admired by hard-core cinephiles, died on April 20 near Boulder, Colo. He was 65.
Solomon, an emeritus professor of cinema studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder, took up the experimental-film mantle in an era when the lure of feature filmmaking was irresistible to most of the creative young minds in cinema. His films, usually relatively short, did not have stars or plots in any conventional sense; he was after something more cerebral.
“Phil’s many films were examples of a truly unique style of what is sometimes called ‘visionary cinema,’ a term coined by P. Adams Sitney to describe films which were primarily concerned with the visual experience rather than with a story or narrative situation,” Jeanne M. Liotta, an experimental filmmaker and colleague of Mr. Solomon’s at the university, said by email. “Phil considered the film frame as a painting — a rectangle full of tensions, textures and pulls — rather than as a window through which to daydream.”(nytimes.com)

As one of the key filmmakers of the American avant-garde, Phil Solomon is known for his ability to extraordinarily beautiful, deeply affecting film works that are often composed out of abandoned or lost pieces of celluloid. In many cases, these works employ an optical printing process to further degrade, burn and amplify certain figurative elements, almost to the point of pure abstraction. And indeed, one could easily view many of his films as great painterly efforts with pronounced sensual and dimensional qualities.

The “Digital Painting” series (2012-2013)
dimensions variable, silent, 47” LCD display
Notes from the artist: “Being an artist who has spent a great deal of his adult life exploring the haptic sense of the (treated and untreated) patinas of film texture and film grain, I have approached the squared off geometries of the digital domain with some degree of reluctance and aesthetic caution. In the past few months, however, I have been employing, various orchestrated chance operations, a sort of digi-roulette wheel - and almost accidentally bumped into what I can begin to think of as a possible “pixel aesthetic” - something that perhaps Cézanne, Francis Bacon or Klimt might have appreciated.

Martin Disler - Neo-Expressionism Art

Martin Disler (1949 -1996 ) was a Swiss painter, draughtsman and writer.Martin Disler was a Swiss painter best known for his naïve, expressive paintings and sculptures. With affinities to various avant-garde movements such as CoBrA, Neue Wilde, and Art Brut, Disler drew on psychological and mythical archetypes to further convey the angst evident in the formal construction of his works.