5 x 44
Vija Celmins is a Latvian-American artist. She is best known for her photorealistic paintings and drawings of natural and man-made objects.
Celmins and her family fled Latvia during World War II and eventually settled in the United States. She studied art at the John Herron School of Art in Indianapolis and later at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Celmins began her career as a painter in the 1960s, and by the 1970s she had developed her signature style of photorealism. She is known for her painstaking attention to detail, and her paintings and drawings often take months or even years to complete. Some of her most famous works include images of the night sky, oceans, and rocks.
Celmins has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world, including a retrospective at the Centre Pompidou in Paris in 2006. Her work is held in the collections of many major museums, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
Fumie Sasabuchi is a Japanese artist living and working in Berlin.
Fumie studied painting at Tama Art University in Tokyo and then at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. The artist flirts with the theme of death, depicting human entrails and bones with anatomical precision on the surface of the skin of the depicted person, in the form of tattoos. Sasabuchi's work is based on photographs from fashion magazines or horror movies, which she reworks in her own style.
Perhaps some of the motifs in Fumie Sasabuchi's work have roots in Japanese Yakuza culture. Juxtaposed with the European taboo theme of depicting death, the result of her work may shock or at least amaze.
Bernhard (Bernd) Becher and Hilla Becher were German conceptual artists and photographers working as a collaborative duo. They are best known for their extensive series of photographic images, or typologies, of industrial buildings and structures, often organised in grids. As the founders of what has come to be known as the 'Becher school' or the 'Düsseldorf School' they influenced generations of documentary photographers and artists. They have been awarded the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award.