Ai Weiwei
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese conceptual artist and a social activist. His work encompasses diverse fields including fine arts, curating, architecture and social criticism. Born in Beijing in 1957 as son of the famous poet and activist Ai Quing. The family had to move to Xinjiang between 1960 and 1976. As one of the first students able to study abroad Ai Weiwei relocated to the United States in 1981 and
Alex Katz
A seminal figure in postwar American art, 1927 Brooklyn-born artist Alex Katz’s distinctive style and decades-long career has made him a recognizable and widely lauded artist. Though he emerged in the New York art world in the 1950s during the heyday of Abstract Expressionism. In the 1950s, Katz began experimenting with printmaking, which became a key aspect of his artistic practice. In addition to his large-scale paintings, Katz has produced
Julian Schnabel
Julian Schnabel, born 1951 in Brooklyn, New York is a painter and filmmaker (i.a.Basquiat). Julian Schnabel’s first solo exhibition was held at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston in 1976. However, his rise to prominence occurred a few years later following two exhibitions at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, in which he established a new narrative style for painting. His style is characterised by very large scale paintings. He
Sarkis
Sarkis Zabunyan, known as Sarkis, is a French artist of Armenian origin, born in Istanbul in 1938. He studied painting and interior architecture before moving to France in 1964. In 1967, he won the prize for painting awarded at the Paris Biennal. In 1969, he was invited by Harald Szeemann to take part in the exhibition When Attitudes Become Form, which has been famous ever since: “My work is always
Jeff Koons
Born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania, Jeff Koons became one of the most important, but contraversial living artists. Since his emergence in the 1980s Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop and Conceptual art with popular culture to create his own unique iconography. Often working with everyday objects, his work revolves around themes of self-acceptance and transcendence. He started working in a quite similar mode as Andy Warhol‘s Factory (a
Campana Brothers
The work of Brazilian designers Humberto Campana (b. 1953) and his brother Fernando Campana (b. 1961) rests principally on the idea of transformation and reinvention. Building on their established reputation, their work is presented by the world’s grand museums such as Museum of Modern Art (New York, NY), Vitra Design Museum (Weil am Rhein, Germany), Museum of Art (Tel Aviv, Israel), Museum of Fine Art (Montreal, Canada), Pinakothek Art Museum
Cindy Sherman
Cindy Sherman was born in Glen Ridge, New Jersey in 1954. In the late 1970s, Sherman began a series of black and white photographs, which she named Untitled Film Stills, (1977 to 1980), and were first exhibited at the Contemporary Art Museum in Houston, Texas in 1980. The series cemented her position in post-modern photography. In almost all of her works, Sherman acts as model, photographer, and director, and alters
Mel Ramos
Melvin John Ramos born 1935 to Portuguese-Azorean immigrants in Sacramento, California. He studied art at Sacramento Junior College and Sacramento State College. He lived and worked in Oakland,California, died in 2018. As a student of Wayne Thiebaud, Mel Ramos was close to the so-called Bay Area Figurative School, which, from the 1950s onwards, was based on Abstract Expressionism. In 1961, Mel Ramos started to use for his paintings comic characters
Leon Fontana
Leon Fontana, born 1998, is a young multi talented artist and fashion designer. He created his alias as tribute to the Argentine-Italian avant-garde artist Lucio Fontana, creator of spatalism in his work group tagli, In his paintings and grapfics he is dealing with art history as well as with everyday aesthetics. His concept is demonstrating in his own artistic process the power of observation as a personal involvement. He is
Donald Baechler
Baechler was born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1956 and came of age as a painter in the early 1980s when he began exhibiting internationally. Baechler is called one of the important painters of his generation. He has amassed a great inventory of worldly images. Recorded on slides and collected in the archives of his enormous Lower Manhattan studio, they are the sources for many of the compelling images in his
Georgios Derpapas
Georgios Derpapas, born in Katerini in 1937, was a Greek painter and graphic artist. He is considered a representative of Greek surrealism. Derpapas grew up in Thessaloniki, at the age of nineteen he moved to Hamburg where he studied business administration, in 1960 he devoted himself exclusively to painting. He had his first solo exhibition in the Hamburg artist club “die Insel”, and in 1967 he moved back to Greece.
Ren Rong
Ren Rong (Chinese 任 戎, Pinyin Rèn Róng), born 1960 in Nanjing, studied painting and graphic art of social realism. 1986 he decided to go to Germany, where he started at first a career as lecturer and curator, while studying on free at the art academy of Münster. Ren Rong is internationally known for its plant people. As a steel or iron sculpture, glossy or rust-red, wood or scissors cut,