Carl Beam - Photo Collage

"Carl Beam is an artist who works in a variety of media to explore the tensions between Western and Aboriginal relations. In his autobiographical work, he references himself as an Ojibwa, and places his Native culture within broader surroundings. He brings to attention problems that affect contemporary Native cultures and shows, through his juxtaposition of images, how these concerns relate to larger world issues. Through his work Beam integrates personal memory with issues related to the environment, brutality, and a rethinking of the ways histories are told.
Beam was born in West Bay on Manitoulin Island in 1943. His formal studies of art began at the Kootenay School of Art in British Columbia in 1971, and he transferred to the University of Victoria in 1973. Beam received his MFA at the University of Alberta in Edmonton in 1976. In his training he was influenced by artists Jasper Johns and Robert Rauschenberg for their collaging of images from popular culture and expressive handling of paint and printing, and Andy Warhol for his use of photo-silkscreen processes..Beam employs a range of media, including painting, printmaking, and sculpture. The collage and photo-transfer techniques he often uses allow him to visually bring together subjects and events from different historical moments that he infuses with political commentary. His contemporary art-making strategies serve and empower his engagement with the struggle of Aboriginal people in the late 20th century."(gallery.ca)

Hugo Longa - Magical Painting and Surreal Iconography

 Hugo Longa (1934 - 1990) began showing in 1966. His work reflects a peculiar imaginative and chromatic freedom and straightforwardness. Particularly noteworthy among his series are the Auschwitz collages created between 1967 and 1976, the rendering of objects, assemblages and collages where he explores imaginary, fabulous, magical worlds with doses of surrealism and Pop art. He represented the fantastic and the grotesque in painting, collages and assemblages. He showed certain human perspectives with a powerful sense of humor and explored unconscious realities. The neo-expressionist canvases he created as of the 198os are inciting because of the density of the material, the violent, multi-directional brushstrokes, the altered relationships of scale, the overwhelming color, the vehement dripping and splotching, and the aggressive iconography.
Hugo Longa's teaching endeavors were considerable and his numerous students make up the group of today's young Uruguayan artists.

Tetsumi Kudo - Neo-Dada Tradition

Tetsumi Kudo (23 February 1935 – 12 November 1990), was a Japanese artist associated with the Neo-Dada tradition
Tetsumi Kudo was born in 1935 in Osaka, Japan and graduated from the Tokyo National University of Fine Arts in 1958. In 1957, he began exhibiting his work at the Salon of Independents, Yomiuri and had his first solo exhibition at the Galerie Blanche, Tokyo. He was awarded the Grand Prize and a travel grant to Paris through his participation in the 1962 Second International Young Artists Exhibition in Tokyo. His work made international appearances at the Venice Bienniale (1976), and the Biennial São Paulo (1977, awarded a special mention) while also appearing frequently in museums and galleries throughout Japan and France, with a growing recognition in the Netherlands. Notable museum solo exhibitions include the National Museum of Art, Osaka (1994), a joint-exhibition and catalogue organized by the Van Reekum Museum and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1991), as well as the Hirosaki City Museum, Aomori (1986). In the year before his death, Galerie du Génie and FIAC dedicated a retrospective and catalogue to Kudo’s work. Wikipedia

Horace Clifford Westermann - Assamblage

Horace Clifford Westermann (December 11, 1922 – November 3, 1981) was a highly influential and important American sculptor and printmaker whose art constituted a scathing commentary on militarism and materialism. His sculptures frequently incorporated traditional carpentry and marquetry techniques. From the late 1950s until his death in 1981, Westermann worked with a number of materials and formal devices to address a range of personal, literary, artistic, and pop-cultural references. The artist’s sculptural oeuvre is distinguished by its intricate craftsmanship, in which wood, metal, glass, and other materials are laboriously hand-tooled, and by its ability to convey an offbeat, often humorous, individualistic sensibility.
Westermann’s sculptures reveal not only the influence of craft traditions, but also of varied art historical precedents. The artist’s ability to convey subtle and uncanny effects through the presentation of seemingly simple objects has often led critics to compare his work to that of Surrealist-inspired artists such as Joseph Cornell. However, Westermann’s work encompasses elements from a broad and diverse range of artistic practices, including Assemblage, Dada, and Folk Art. His sculptures, moreover, point to minimal and post-minimal art of the late 1960s and beyond, in terms of their rigorous craftsmanship, formal sophistication, unconventional use of materials, and sense of humor. Wikipedia