Charles Thomas Close

 

 Charles Thomas Close (1940 – 2021) was an American painter, visual artist, and photographer who made massive-scale photorealist and abstract portraits of himself and others. Close also created photo portraits using a very large format camera. Chuck Close is known for his innovative conceptual portraiture, depicting his subjects, which are transposed from photographs, into visual data organized by gridded compositions.Throughout his childhood and adolescence, Close used art as a means of navigating a learning disability. He continued to develop his artistic skills through private art lessons, drawing and painting from live models. As a student at the University of Washington (BA, 1962), and then at Yale (BFA 1963; MFA 1964), he began to emulate the styles of Arshile Gorky and Willem de Kooning, considering himself a third-wave Abstract Expressionist and as he explored this vocabulary he pivoted from biomorphism to figuration.
After studying at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna (1964) on a Fulbright grant, Close returned to the United States in 1965. He taught painting at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where he received his first solo exhibition in 1967. Seeking to break from the gestural style that had characterised his student work, Close shifted toward Pop-inflected figuration before embracing the tools of commercial art and illustration. Basing his paintings on photographic imagery, Close reduced his palette to black and white.

 

Michael "Mike" Kelley

 

 Michael "Mike" Kelley (1954 - 2012) 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
Kelley gained recognition in the 1980s for his work with children's soft toys and other found materials. With these materials, he examined popular culture, memories and fragmented narratives.
Children's toys also function in Kelley's work as a satirical metaphor. Deodorized Central Mass with Satellites (1991–99) consists of suspended balls created from discarded, brightly coloured toys. By transforming children's toys into serious sculpture, Kelley visualised a darker side to the American dream's endorsement of excessive consumption and reckless luxury collecting, and intermingled the 'low' and the 'high' of American culture. He also deodorised his suspended sculptures, mocking America's selective amnesia of unpleasant realities.

 

Renato Guttuso

 

Renato Guttuso (1911-1987) was an Italian artist known for his association with the Socialist Realism movement popular in the Soviet Union. A fervent opponent of Fascism and a devoted communist, Guttuso’s works carried a strong political message, as seen in his troubling Execution by Firing Squad in the Countryside (1938), a painting depicting the violent assassination of the Spanish poet Federico Garcia Lorca by fascist militia. His expressive brushstrokes and rich use of warm reds and browns, can be seen in his painting La Vuicciria (1974), a scene of a bustling market in Palermo. Born on December 26, 1912 in Bagheria, Sicily, he gave up studying law at Palermo University to pursue a career as an artist. Having shown an aptitude for drawing at a young age, his early style reflected the influence of Giorgio de Chirico. The artist went on to exhibit two of his paintings in 1931 at the showcase, Prima Quadriennale d’Arte Nazionale de Roma. Guttuso died January 18, 1987 in Rome at the age of 75. 

Zdzisław Salaburski - Tashism - Polish Abstract Painting

 

 Zdzisław Salaburski (1922-2006)
Actor and painter. Initially, he played in the Pomorska Land Theater in Toruń. In 1947 he performed at the Polish Army Theater in Łódź. He spent the years 1948-55 in Poznań, where he played in the Polish and New Theaters. In 1956 he was an actor at the Stary Theater in Krakow. From 1957, he performed in Warsaw theaters: the People's and the National. Apart from acting, he painted. He created paintings under the sign of informel art - called in Poland Tashism or painting of matter. He exhibited them many times, they were highly appreciated.