Geometric abstraction Nadir Afonso

Nadir Afonso (December 4, 1920 – December 11, 2013) was a Portuguese geometric abstractionist painter. Formally trained in architecture, which he practiced early in his career with Le Corbusier and Oscar Niemeyer, Nadir Afonso later studied painting in Paris and became one of the pioneers of Kinetic art, working alongside Victor Vasarely, Fernand Léger, Auguste Herbin, and André Bloc.
As a theorist of his own geometry-based aesthetics, published in several books, Nadir Afonso defended the idea that art is purely objective and ruled by laws that treat art not as an act of imagination but of observation, perception, and form manipulation.
Nadir Afonso achieved international recognition early in his career and many of his works are in museums. His most famous works are the Cities series, which depict places all around the world. He was known to have painted into his later years and died on December 11, 2013, at a hospital in Cascais.
During his life he achieved great honors, representing his country at the finest level.Wikipedia

Eva Hesse

Eva Hesse (January 11, 1936 – May 29, 1970), was a Jewish German-born American sculptor, known for her pioneering work in materials such as latex, fiberglass, and plastics. She is one of the artists who ushered in the postminimal art movement in the 1960s.Hesse was born into a family of observant Jews in Hamburg, Germany, on January 11, 1936.When Hesse was two years old in December 1938, her parents, hoping to flee from Nazi Germany, sent Hesse and her older sister, Helen Hesse Charash, to the Netherlands via Kindertransport.After almost six months of separation, the reunited family moved to England and then, in 1939, emigrated to New York City,where they settled into Manhattan's Washington Heights. In 1944, Hesse's parents separated; her father remarried in 1945 and her mother committed suicide in 1946. In 1962, she met and married sculptor Tom Doyle; they divorced in 1966. In October 1969, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor, and she died on Friday, May 29, 1970. Her death, after three operations within a year,at age 34 ended a career spanning only 10 years.

Hesse's early work (1960–65) consisted of abstract drawings and paintings. She is most well known for her sculptures and because of this, her drawings are often regarded as preliminary steps to her later work.However, Hesse created her drawings as a separate body of work. She states, "They were related because they were mine but they weren’t related in one completing the other."
Hesse’s interest in latex as a medium for sculptural forms had to do with immediacy. Keats states, "immediacy may be one of the prime reasons Hesse was attracted to latex". Hesse’s first two works using latex, Schema and Sequel (1967–68) use latex in a way never imagined by the manufacturer. "Industrial latex was meant for casting. Hesse handled it like house paint, brushing layer upon layer to build up a surface that was smooth yet irregular, ragged at the edges like deckled paper." 

 Hesse's work often employs multiple forms of similar shape organized together in grid structures or clusters. Retaining some of the defining forms of minimalism, modularity, and unconventional materials, she created eccentric work that was repetitive and labor-intensive. In a statement of her work, Eva describes her piece titled Hang-Up, "It was the first time my idea of absurdity or extreme feeling came through...The whole thing is absolutely rigid, neat cord around the entire thing . . . It is extreme and that is why I like it and don't like it . . . It is the most ridiculous structure that I ever made and that is why it is really good"Wikipedia

Karl Prantl

Karl Prantl (November 5, 1923 – October 8, 2010) was an Austrian sculptor.Prantl was born in Pöttsching in the Austrian state Burgenland. He studied from 1946 tot 1952 with the painter Albert Paris Gütersloh at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna in Vienna. As the stone sculptor he became he was an autodidact.
He was the founder of the International Sculpture Symposium. He held his first international symposium (Symposion Europaischer Bildhauer) with 8 participants in the old quarry Römersteinbruch in Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland. Prantl was invited to exhibit work in the Austrian Pavilion of the Venice Biennale in 1986.
Prantl died of a stroke at his home on October 8, 2010 at the age of 86.Wikipedia

 "Landscape and boundary lines are central themes in the development of Karl Prantl’s work. At Pöttsching where he lives and works, his sculptures are laid out along the edges of a long thin field, emphasising the region’s history of strip farming, and leading the eye towards the distant hills of the border between Austria and Hungary.
All his life he has striven to break down barriers between different cultures and countries. This was particularly true during the fifties and early sixties when Prantl made contact with artists working in Eastern bloc countries, and established a series of stone carving symposia. This culminated in the development of the St Margarethen stone quarry Workshop in eastern Austria which acted as a catalyst for the organisation of many more symposia, often in troubled areas such as Berlin and the Israeli desert. [...]"(karlprantl.at)

Abstract expressionism Fuller Potter

Fuller Potter (April 24, 1910 – 1990) was an American Abstract expressionist artist. He was born in New York City in 1910, attended St. Bernard's School in New York and Groton School in Groton, Massachusetts, and lived most of his life in his Ledyard, Connecticut estate, near Old Mystic. Potter started painting in the traditional modes of representation, specializing in still life and landscape. His work was shown in New York in the 1930s at the Marie Harriman Gallery.
Potter spent several of his formative years painting landscapes and portraits in the Southern Appalachia region, later studying painting in Paris with André Lhote from 1929 to 1931, and in New York with Walt Kuhn and with Thomas Hart Benton. In 1950, Potter met Jackson Pollock and changed his mode of painting permanently to abstraction, and had a number of shows of that body of work at the Mystic Gallery in Mystic, Connecticut. When starting his transition towards abstract painting, he combined his graphic skills with his mastery of color, and followed a path that would lead to his artistic peak, during his full abstract expressionist period.

 

During the 1940s, Potter's work was still mostly figurative, but showed deliberate avoidance of ordinary representation. From the early 1950s on, Potter's style kept with the early works of Ad Reinhardt and with Jackson Pollock's 1940s pre-drip works. He painted in the "New York School" style, along with several of his contemporaries, including Franz Kline (1910–1962), Joan Mitchell (1925–1992), Jean-Paul Riopelle, William Baziotes (1910–1963), and Jackson Pollock (1912–1956). He had a few shows in that style at several New England art venues. The Museum of the City of New York exhibited Potter's work along with Joan Miró and Georgia O'Keeffe in the main lobby in 1959.

Jeffrey Potter's To a Violent Grave, a biography of Jackson Pollock's last years, reports that Potter shared drinking sessions with Pollock in the mid-1950s. After these encounters, which occupied only a short period of his life, Fuller Potter's work evolved towards a mature and personal form of abstraction. Potter never pursued the drip/throw action mode of abstract expressionism to any notable degree. His paint is delivered with loaded brush in hand, opulently, generously and aggressively.
Fuller Potter is considered one of the major abstract painters of the 20th century. He died of emphysema in May 1990 at Westerly Hospital in Westerly, Rhode Island. He was 80 years old.Wikipedia