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Michael van Ofen is a German artist who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
Van Ofen's works are based on well-known paintings from the nineteenth century. He takes them apart into pictorial elements and reassembles them like a mosaic or a puzzle, in the process creating a new work, alienated from its roots, but faithful to its original idea and form. The objects in the artist's works are divided down to the brushstrokes, they are usually dominated by a single color.
Günther Förg was a German painter, graphic designer, sculptor and photographer. His abstract style was influenced by American abstract painting.
Richard Deacon is a Welsh sculptor. He is known for his abstract sculptures that explore the relationships between form, space, and materials.
Deacon initially studied at the Somerset College of Art in Taunton before going on to study at the Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design and the Royal College of Art in London. He began his career as a sculptor in the 1970s and has since become one of the most prominent British sculptors of his generation.
Deacon's sculptures are often made from materials such as laminated wood, steel, and ceramics, and take on a wide range of forms, from organic and biomorphic to geometric and architectural. He is known for his use of curves, lines, and bold colors, as well as his exploration of negative space and the relationship between objects and the space around them.
Deacon has exhibited widely throughout the world, including at the Tate Gallery in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York. He has been awarded numerous honors for his work, including the Turner Prize in 1987 and a CBE in 1999.
Pierre Soulages was a French painter, printmaker, and sculptor. In 2014, François Hollande described him as "the world's greatest living artist."
Soulages is known as "the painter of black," owing to his interest in the colour "both as a colour and a non-colour. When light is reflected on black, it transforms and transmutes it. It opens a mental field all its own." He saw light as a work material; striations of the black surface of his paintings enable him to reflect light, allowing the black to come out of darkness and into brightness, thus becoming a luminous colour.
Helmut Sturm was a German painter.
From 1952 to 1958, he studied at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich. After this he joined Heimrad Prem, Lothar Fischer and Hans-Peter Zimmer in founding Gruppe SPUR, which in 1959 entered the Situationist International.
From 1980 to 1982, he was guest professor at the Hochschule der Künste, Berlin, taking over Hann Trier's class. He continued to exhibit across Germany and from 1985 to 1998 was professor at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste, Munich.
Bernard Schultze was a German painter who co-founded the Quadriga group of artists along with Karl Otto Götz and two other artists.
Norbert Prangenberg was an abstract painter, sculptor, and engraver. Though he had no formal training and did not fully engage with art until his 30s, Prangenberg did finally come up with a style that was uniquely his own, not fitting comfortably into the neo-expressionist or neo-geo movements of his time, in the 1970s and 1980s. At this time, he was considered a major figure in contemporary German art. Though he got his start with abstract paintings, he also became known for making sculptures of all sizes; and while his work initially appears abstract, the titles given sometimes allude to the human body or a landscape. As a trained gold- and silversmith, as well as a glassblower, he always showed an attention to materials and how they could be physically engaged with. He was interested in how his own two hands could affect the painting or sculpture's surface. Traces of the artist's hand appear literally throughout his entire oeuvre, before he lost the battle with liver cancer in 2012.
