Anne Chu - Sculpture and installation art

Anne Chu (1959, New York - July 25, 2016, New York) graduated from Philadelphia College of Art in 1982 and received her MFA from Columbia University in 1985. Anne Chu created painted sculptures from a variety of materials. She was the recipient of the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, The Penny McCall Award, Anonymous Was A Woman Award, Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant, and winner of the Louis Comfort Tiffany Biennial Competition."In keeping with her eclectic sources of inspiration—ranging from photographs of birds and medieval friezes to the biblical love poem “Song of Solomon”—Anne Chu works across media to produce diverse, evocative works that evoke mythology, ritual, and fables. Never literal, her sculptures, prints, paintings, and photographs are suggestive and imaginative musings on her chosen subjects. Chu's expressive sculptures of bears and bears’ heads, for example, reflect her interest in the terracotta warriors of China."(artsy.net)
"Chu received her BFA from the Philadelphia College of Art in 1982 and earned her MFA from Columbia University only three years later. Since 1991, she has had more than thirty solo exhibitions at a number of institutions and galleries throughout the United States and abroad, such as Victoria Miro in London; Monica De Cardenas in Milan and Zuoz; Donald Young Gallery in Chicago; Galerie Karlheinz Meyer in Karlsruhe; 303 Gallery in New York; the Dallas Museum of Art; the Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro; Marc Foxx in Los Angeles; and the Indianapolis Museum of Art.Chu has also been the recipient of many prestigious grants and awards. Among them are a John and Simon Memorial Guggenheim Fellowship in 2010, a Joan Mitchell Foundation Grant in 1999, and the Alpert/Ucross Residency Prize in 2009.
In regard to Chu’s exhibition at the Kunstmuseen Krefeld/Museum Haus Lange, critic Hans Rudolf Reust said in the March 2013 issue of Artforum, “Chu’s installation surprises with an array of cultural fragments whose amalgamation seems at once unconventional and natural. The return of ornamentality, a lascivious luxury in spatial geometry, is here more than the return of what modernism repressed. She creates a bucolic and hybrid world that will certainly leave its mark on our memories of the rooms of the Haus Lange, already shaped by so many important exhibitions.”(artforum.com)

Land art and conceptual art Dennis Oppenheim

Dennis Oppenheim (September 6, 1938 – January 21, 2011) was an American conceptual artist, performance artist, earth artist, sculptor and photographer
Oppenheim's parents were Russian immigrants and his father was Jewish. Oppenheim was born in Electric City, Washington, while his father was working on the Grand Coulee Dam. Soon after, his family returned to their home in the San Francisco Bay area.In 1964, he earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from the California College of Arts and Crafts in Oakland, California, and an MFA from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, in 1965.He moved to New York in 1966 where he first taught art at nursery school and then high school art[citation needed] while working toward his first one-person exhibition in New York, held in 1968[4] when he was 30 years old. He lived and worked in New York City until his death from liver cancer on January 21, 2011, aged 72.

 Coming out of the conceptual art movement, Oppenheim's early work was associated both with performance/body art and the early earthworks/land art movement. From 1966 to 1968, Oppenheim's ephemeral earthworks included shapes cut in ice/snow, such as "Annual Rings" (1968), a series of rings carved in the snow on the U.S.A./Canada border,and "Gallery Transplant" (1969), in which he cut the outline of a gallery in the snow, patterns cut in wheat fields with combine harvesters, and giant overlapping fingerprints representing the artist and his son Eric sprawled across several acres of a spoils field in Lewiston, New York. He was included with Michael Heizer, Robert Smithson and Robert Morris in the important 1968 Earthworks show at the Dwan Gallery in New York.

 Also in 1968, Oppenheim became friends with Vito Acconci and he began producing body art, such as "Reading Position for Second Degree Burn" (1970), for which he lay in the sun for five hours with an open book on his chest. In the early 1970s, he was in the vanguard of artists using film and video in relation to performance.
In the early 1980s, he began his "machine pieces", complex, space-filling devices, and after the mid-1980s, he worked on the "transformation of everyday objects in art". From the mid-1990s, he created a number of large-scale public art pieces in major cities around the world, some of which proved controversial.
He received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. He was included in both the Venice Biennale and the Johannesburg Biennale in 1997. In 2007, he was recognized for Lifetime Achievement at the Vancouver Sculpture Biennale.Wikipedia