James Lee Byars - Conceptual Art

James Lee Byars ( 1932- 1997)was an American conceptual artist and performance artist specializing in installations and sculptures, as well as a self-considered mystic. He was best known for his use of personal esoteric motifs, and his creative persona that has been described as 'half dandified trickster and half minimalist seer'.
Byars' works are often noted as constantly incorporating specific personal themes and motifs, leaning towards the esoteric while simultaneously being ritualistic and materialistic: Robert Clark, writing for The Guardian on the occasion of a Milton Keynes exhibition of his work, described it as 'impenetrably yet intriguingly hermetic'.Most in particular was gold as a material, which served as an elemental identifier. As well as this, works of his demonstrate a fascination with the symbolism of numbers: Clark quotes in the same exhibition, referring to a specific piece of his, writing that he 'imbued the number 100 with symbolic significance, having made a symmetrical arrangement of 100 white marbles and draping 100 nude volunteers in a collective red garment'.A common theme in his works is perfection (especially upon the word 'Perfect'), which he extended into a personal journey that led to his ambiguously celebratory exploration of shapes, numbers and precious materials. A MoMA text explaining his oeuvre, in the context of his piece The Table of Perfect, noted that while it "looks pristine, it—like any other object—can only ever exist as a sign of perfection and can never embody the total concept."Wikipedia

 

Ans Wortel

Ans (Anna Maria) Wortel 1929 - 1996 ) was a Dutch painter, poet and writer. She made gouaches and oil paintings, aquarelles, drawings, collages, lithographs, etchings, sculptures and glass sculptures. She was an autodidact and has won the first prize at the biennale of Paris in 1963. She was one of the leading female artists of postwar Dutch modern art.Wortel’s work is strongly autobiographical. Her experiences as a girl, woman, mother and as an artist were mainly the source of her inspiration. Common themes are human emotions, love, relationships, mother/child relations and social criticism.
Up until the late 1950s there was a search for a personal style. Artwork from that time varies and shows characteristics of different artists, such as Katsushika Hokusai, Willem de Kooning, Marc Chagall, Pablo Picasso, Wifredo Lam and Karel Appel. In the late 1950s her artistic style eventually flows into her very own style which is best described as abstract figurative art. It often consists of naked woman, man or child figures, sometimes recognizable, but always deformed. These human figures are together, search each other, embrace each other or repel each other. The figures are in unspecified spaces. The moon, the sun and the contours of earth often recur in her work. Mostly her work is accompanied by handwritten poetical lines.Wikipedia

Vivian Isabella Lynn

Vivian Isabella Lynn ( 1931 – 2018) was a New Zealand artist

"Vivian Lynn will be known to many as the artist who notoriously used hair in a number of large-scale installations dating from the early 1980s, such as Guarden Gates (1982) and The Gates of Goddess: A Southern Crossing (1986).

These are landmark works in New Zealand’s art history for their trenchant re-coding of materials and subjects that aimed to expose the binary logic of western patriarchal culture and its consequences, as well as provide positive statements about women’s experience.

But perhaps less well known is the fact that Vivian Lynn has been a practising artist since the late 1950s, working across a range of media – painting, drawing, printmaking, book-making, and installation – to develop a formally and iconographically complex body of work that asks fundamental questions about the nature of being, especially if one is a woman..."(adamartgallery.org.nz)

James Lee Byars - Installations and Conceptual Art

James Lee Byars (born April 10, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan – died May 23, 1997 in Cairo, Egypt)was an American conceptual artist and performance artist specializing in installations and sculptures, as well as a self-considered mystic. He was best known for his use of personal esoteric motifs, and his creative persona that has been described as 'half dandified trickster and half minimalist seer'.
Byars' works are often noted as constantly incorporating specific personal themes and motifs, leaning towards the esoteric while simultaneously being ritualistic and materialistic: Robert Clark, writing for The Guardian on the occasion of a Milton Keynes exhibition of his work, described it as 'impenetrably yet intriguingly hermetic'.Most in particular was gold as a material, which served as an elemental identifier. As well as this, works of his demonstrate a fascination with the symbolism of numbers: Clark quotes in the same exhibition, referring to a specific piece of his, writing that he 'imbued the number 100 with symbolic significance, having made a symmetrical arrangement of 100 white marbles and draping 100 nude volunteers in a collective red garment'.A common theme in his works is perfection (especially upon the word 'Perfect'), which he extended into a personal journey that led to his ambiguously celebratory exploration of shapes, numbers and precious materials. A MoMA text explaining his oeuvre, in the context of his piece The Table of Perfect, noted that while it "looks pristine, it—like any other object—can only ever exist as a sign of perfection and can never embody the total concept."Wikipedia