Painting Modern — 20th/21st Century: Amsterdam
Marina Abramović is a Serbian conceptual and performance artist. Her work explores body art, endurance art, feminist art, the relationship between the performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Being active for over four decades, Abramović refers to herself as the "grandmother of performance art". She pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body". In 2007, she founded the Marina Abramović Institute (MAI), a non-profit foundation for performance art.
Richard Serra was a prominent American sculptor, renowned for his monumental steel sculptures that transform viewers' perceptions of space and environment. Born on November 2, 1938, in San Francisco, California, Serra pursued his education in Art History and Fine Arts at Yale University, where he graduated with a BA and an MFA in 1964. His early career was marked by experimentation with nontraditional materials such as rubber, neon, and lead, reflecting a departure from traditional sculptural forms towards more abstract expressions.
Serra's work is characterized by its engagement with the physical properties of his materials and the spatial dynamics of his installation sites. He is perhaps best known for "Tilted Arc" (1981), a controversial installation in New York City's Federal Plaza, which was eventually removed following public debate over its presence. Despite the controversy, "Tilted Arc" exemplifies Serra's interest in site-specificity and the relationship between artwork, site, and viewer.
Throughout his career, Serra's sculptures have been exhibited globally, with significant works like "Snake" (1994-97) at the Guggenheim Bilbao and "Torqued Ellipse" series, reflecting his ongoing exploration of curvilinear forms and the interaction between space, viewer, and sculpture. His contributions to art have been acknowledged with awards such as the Praemium Imperiale in 1994.
For collectors and experts in art and antiques, Serra's work represents a pivotal shift in contemporary sculpture, emphasizing the materiality and physical engagement of artworks within their environments. To stay updated on exhibitions and auction events related to Richard Serra's influential sculptures, signing up for updates is highly recommended, ensuring enthusiasts are informed about the latest developments and opportunities to engage with his groundbreaking work.
Salvo, real name Salvatore Mangione, was an Italian painter and sculptor who lived and worked in Turin.
He is known for his landscapes and still-lifes painted in vivid colors. Salvo also worked with marble, carving inscriptions on it.
Alan Charlton is a British conceptual artist living and working in London.
Alan studied at Camberwell School of Art and the Royal Academy School, and from the very beginning of his artistic journey, since 1969 he has worked with only one color - gray. For Charlton, it is the most important as well as emotional color in existence, being, for example, the color of melancholy. "I am an artist who makes a gray picture" - this principle he follows all his life.
Alan Charlton creates simple, monochromatic gray abstractions based on rectangular shapes placed in space in a planned way. His conceptual works, uniformly painted in different shades of gray, often consist of simple geometric shapes broken down into modular elements.
Charlton's work has been exhibited at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, Castello di Rivoli in Turin and the Tate in London.
William Nelson Copley was an American painter, writer, gallerist, collector, patron, publisher and art entrepreneur. His works as an artist have been classified as late Surrealist and precursory to Pop Art.
Walter Dahn is a German Neue Wilde artist who lives and works in Cologne.
Walter Dahn's work includes works of various media: photographs, drawings, logos, paintings, collages, stencil printing, installations and videos.
In addition to visual art, Dahn also works in music.
Jiří Georg Dokoupil is a Czech-German painter and graphic artist. He was founding-member of the German artist group Mülheimer Freiheit and the Junge Wilde Art movement, which arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Walter Dahn is a German Neue Wilde artist who lives and works in Cologne.
Walter Dahn's work includes works of various media: photographs, drawings, logos, paintings, collages, stencil printing, installations and videos.
In addition to visual art, Dahn also works in music.
Jiří Georg Dokoupil is a Czech-German painter and graphic artist. He was founding-member of the German artist group Mülheimer Freiheit and the Junge Wilde Art movement, which arose in the late 1970s and early 1980s.
Francis Alÿs is a Belgian-born, Mexico-based artist.
His work emerges in the interdisciplinary space of art, architecture, and social practice. In 1986, Alÿs left behind his profession as an architect and relocated to Mexico City.
He has created a diverse body of artwork and performance art that explores urban tensions and geopolitics. Employing a broad range of media, from painting to performance, his works examine the tension between politics and poetics, individual action and impotence.
Markus Lüpertz is a German painter, sculptor, graphic artist, and writer. He also publishes a magazine, and plays jazz piano. He is one of the best-known German contemporary artists. His subjects are characterized by suggestive power and archaic monumentality. Lüpertz insists on capturing the object of representation with an archetypal statement of his existence. His art work is associated to neo-expressionism. Known for his eccentricity, German press has stylized him as a «painter prince».
Jonathan Meese is a German painter, sculptor, performance artist and installation artist based in Berlin and Hamburg. Meese's (often multi-media) works include paintings, collages, drawings and writing. He also designs theater sets and wrote and starred in a play, De Frau: Dr. Poundaddylein — Dr. Ezodysseusszeusuzur in 2007 at the Volksbühne Theater. He is mainly concerned with personalities of world history, primordial myths and heroes. Jonathan Meese lives and works in Ahrensburg and Berlin.
Matthias Weischer is a German artist and painter.
He graduated from the School of Graphic Arts and Book Art in Leipzig and also lives and works in Leipzig. Weischer's imaginative, incompatible interiors have become his calling card.
The never-populated, deserted rooms in his paintings create psychological tension and inexplicable anxiety in the viewer.
Roni Horn is an American visual artist and writer. The granddaughter of Eastern European immigrants, she was born in New York City, where she lives and works. She is currently represented by Xavier Hufkens in Brussels and Hauser & Wirth.
Horn has been intimately involved with the singular geography, geology, climate and culture of Iceland.
Raymond Pettibon is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. Pettibon came to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album art mainly for groups on SST Records, owned and operated by his older brother, Greg Ginn. He has subsequently become widely recognized in the fine art world for using American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, and religion to politics, sport, and sexuality.
Raymond Pettibon is an American artist who lives and works in New York City. Pettibon came to prominence in the early 1980s in the southern California punk rock scene, creating posters and album art mainly for groups on SST Records, owned and operated by his older brother, Greg Ginn. He has subsequently become widely recognized in the fine art world for using American iconography variously pulled from literature, art history, philosophy, and religion to politics, sport, and sexuality.
John Milton Cage Jr. is an American composer, philosopher, poet, musicologist, and artist. Cage is considered one of the leading figures of the post-war avant-garde.
Born in the United States, he studied architecture in Europe, but music and painting seemed more interesting to him and he has achieved impressive success there. John Cage is considered a pioneer of uncertainty in music and the unconventional use of instruments, and is highly regarded for his paintings and prints. In addition, he played a crucial role in the development of modern dance and performance art.
His father John Milton Cage (1886-1964) was an inventor.
Antony Mark David Gormley is a British sculptor. His works include the Angel of the North, a public sculpture in Gateshead in the north of England, commissioned in 1994 and erected in February 1998; Another Place on Crosby Beach near Liverpool; and Event Horizon, a multipart site installation which premiered in London in 2007, then subsequently in Madison Square in New York City (2010), São Paulo, Brazil (2012), and Hong Kong (2015-16).
Gormley's career began with a solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery in 1981. Almost all his work takes the human body as its subject, with his own body used in many works as the basis for metal castings.
Ellsworth Kelly was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker associated with hard-edge painting, Color Field painting and minimalism. His works demonstrate unassuming techniques emphasizing line, color and form, similar to the work of John McLaughlin and Kenneth Noland. Kelly often employed bright colors. He lived and worked in Spencertown, New York.
Lucebert, born Lubertus Jacobus Swaanswijk, is a Dutch poet and artist, a member of the experimental Dutch and Belgian writers' group De Vijftigers (The Fifties Residents) and of the European avant-garde movement COBRA.
Pamela Rosenkranz is a Swiss multimedia artist.
She graduated from the University of Zurich, studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bern and at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam.
Rosenkranz's conceptual work is built on an exploration of man's consumerist attempts to tame nature. She uses light and fluid to demonstrate her ideas, expressing them in the form of performance, sculpture, painting and installation.
