Animalistic Contemporary art
Richard Adams is a British artist and illustrator living and working in Sussex.
Adams received an honors degree in graphic design from Leicester Polytechnic and initially worked as an illustrator in London. Richard Adams creates all his paintings using chalk pastels, then fixes and impregnates with a special varnish that leaves an impenetrable surface. He depicts a variety of English landscapes and seashores, often inhabited by quirky characters and animals, as well as amusing domestic scenes. The artist successfully captures the humor and absurdity of everyday life in a bygone and contemporary English style.
Adams' work is regularly exhibited in London and other UK cities to great acclaim, and internationally in Sydney, Washington DC, Bremen and Madrid.
Urs Aeschbach is a Swiss media artist working in various techniques. Nature is always a pictorial theme in Urs Aeschbach's paintings. Her main characters are mushrooms, woody plants, animals, jellyfish, as well as dogs and horses. The artist's paintings are inspired by photographs and illustrations. In addition to paintings, Eschbach creates art and construction projects, video works, as well as constructions and installations.
Andreas Amrhein is a contemporary german artist. His first verified exhibition was Arbeiten auf Papier „Blau“ at Galerie Michael Schultz in Berlin in 1994. Andreas Amrhein is most frequently exhibited in Germany, but also had exhibitions in Austria, China and elsewhere.
Joe Andoe is an American artist, painter, and author. His works have been featured in exhibits internationally and also numerous museums including the Denver Art Museum, the Detroit Institute of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.
Christiaan Karel Appel was a Dutch painter, sculptor, and poet. He started painting at the age of fourteen and studied at the Rijksakademie in Amsterdam in the 1940s. He was one of the founders of the avant-garde movement CoBrA in 1948. He was also an avid sculptor and has had works featured in MoMA and other museums worldwide.
Armando, born Herman Dirk van Dodeweerd, was a Dutch painter, sculptor, poet, writer, violinist, actor, journalist, film, television and theater maker. Armando was his official name; his birth name, the pseudonym as he called it, no longer existed for him. He himself saw his work as «Gesamtkunstwerk», based on his experiences from the Second World War in the vicinity of Kamp Amersfoort.
Elfriede Balzar-Kopp is a German ceramic artist.
She trained at the state ceramics engineering workshop in Höhr, worked in Karlsruhe at the State Maiolica Manufactory, and founded her own pottery workshop in Höhr in 1927.
Elfriede Balzar-Kopp initially focused on local Baroque vessels in her work and combined them with other styles. Her unique ceramic animal figurines, jugs, and genre scenes are sought after by collectors, and many of the objects she created adorn galleries around the world. Her son Heiner Balzar (born 1937) is one of the outstanding ceramic artists of the second half of the 20th century.
Peter Hill Beard was an American artist, photographer, diarist, and writer who lived and worked in New York City, Montauk and Kenya. His photographs of Africa, African animals and the journals that often integrated his photographs, have been widely shown and published since the 1960s.
Mauro Bergonzoli is an Italian artist living and working near Munich.
Mauro showed a talent for drawing early on and found work quite quickly in advertising agencies in Milan. This was followed by a 25-year career as a creative director in commercial and animated films. It was only after that that Bergonzoli turned to pure art.
Bergonzoli is best known for his contemporary "canaletto-sketch" interpretations of Venice. In his signature neo-pop style, he shows the ancient trading city in all its splendor and splendor. The artist uses mostly acrylic paints, and his favorite chips - the all-seeing eye and the magic rabbit - give a twist to his creations.
Arne Besser is a contemporary American artist. He received training as an artist at the Art Center School, Los Angeles. There he studied with John Audubon Tyler and Lorser Feidelsson. Beser’s approach to Photo-Realism is to draw from the urban landscape and nature a succinct “set like” image of reality. His city scenes depict New York street life alive with trading and traders, prostitutes and junkies looking for a fix. These visual images iconify the underside of urban life in a way that elevates this point of view to an almost mythic level.
Nick Brandt is a British photographer. He is known for his black and white photographs of wildlife and landscapes in Africa.
Brandt began his career in photography working as a music video director in the 1990s before transitioning to fine art photography. His work often depicts the animals of Africa in a powerful and emotive way, highlighting the beauty and fragility of these creatures and their natural habitats.
Brandt's photographs have been widely exhibited and are included in the collections of many major museums, including the National Portrait Gallery in London, the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, and the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C. He has also published several books of his photography, including "On This Earth," "A Shadow Falls," and "Across The Ravaged Land."
In addition to his photography, Brandt is also the founder of the Big Life Foundation, a non-profit organization dedicated to the conservation of wildlife and ecosystems in East Africa. He has received numerous awards and honors for his photography and conservation work, including the prestigious Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.
Johannes Brus is a German artist. He lives in Essen.
Brus works mainly as a sculptor and as a photographer. He experiments with different techniques with which he breaks the conventions of the respective genre. Many of his works are characterised by an idiosyncratic humour. Brus addresses aspects of cultural memory and the functions of images.
Fran Bull is an American sculptor, painter, and print-maker living and working in Brandon, Vermont and Barcelona, Spain. Bull became known originally for her Photorealism paintings made in the mid 1970s and 80s. In the late 1980s, Bull’s art began to develop towards abstraction, or neo-abstract expressionism. Sparked by her newfound approach to painting, in the mid-1990s Bull began to explore other media. Since that time her artistic output has included performance art, sculpture, mixed media, and printmaking, as well as painting. She has been especially prolific in the area of printmaking. Bull has produced many diverse series of etchings that continue to be exhibited worldwide.
Orville Bulman is a self-taught American artist and former businessman. After working briefly as a cartoonist in Chicago and becoming president of two family-owned companies, he was inspired by the lives of the African-American people of Haiti and the Caribbean islands. Bulman created some 2,000 paintings depicting the flora and fauna of those places and scenes of people's lives.
Deborah Kay Butterfield is an American sculptor. Along with her artist-husband John Buck, she divides her time between a farm in Bozeman, Montana, and studio space in Hawaii. She is known for her sculptures of horses made from found objects, like metal, and especially pieces of wood.
Stefano Calisti is an Italian artist. His paintings, characterised by an unusually lively colour palette, have been widely acclaimed by audiences and critics alike. His favourite subjects include landscape, evoking associations with colour, matter and light.
Calisti's work is characterised by his attention to colour and texture, often creating a sense of movement and dynamism in his works. Behind an intense bordering on surrealist colour, a conceptual element emerges in which naturalness and artificiality are juxtaposed.
Throughout his career, Calisti has exhibited widely in Italy and abroad, including solo shows. He has also participated in group exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and the Museum of Modern Art in Rome.
Timothy Chapman is an American wildlife artist living and working in Phoenix, Arizona.
He holds bachelor's degrees in biology (Occidental College) and printmaking (Arizona State University), and a master's degree in printmaking (Southern Illinois University in Edwardsville). And now he works at the Cattletrack Art Complex and calls his work "invented natural history."
Timothy Chapman has two passions in life - animals and art. He paints wild, striking images of animals, such as flying zebras and giraffes with floral patterns. Finding charm in whimsical ideas is what made Chapman an artist, and it's what he's known for today. He admires the balance between magical realism and the quiet surrealism of Frida Kahlo. And then there are the natural history illustrators, often anonymous, who took creative liberties with their drawings.
Peter Chevalier is a German painter whose paintings and drawings are close to surrealism. In the 1980s, Chevalier juxtaposed the realistic with the abstract in his paintings. Clearly configured individual but combined things (houses, airplanes, stumps of columns, light bulbs, bones, etc.) dominated, which – as if one were cutting out illustrations from magazines and reassembling them as a collage – are inconsistent in their proportions in the pictorial context.
Christian Clerebout is a French contemporary artist. He spent his childhood in Africa, which has left an indelible imprint in his painting style. He studied art from 1966 until 1979 in Paris and Rome. Before settling indefinitely in Brittany, he ran away to North America, lured by the United States, and New York, in particular. This is where his powerful cityscapes evolved: engorged with sweeping movement, brilliant colors and intense darks and lights. He has expanded creatively to include such subject matters as orchestras, airports, elephants and financial themes, but his expressive style is always recognizable.
Lucien Clergue is a French photographer of black and white photography, the first photographer elected a member of the French Academy of Fine Arts.
Lucien Clergue is one of the most famous photographers in France and founder of the annual Arles Festival, which has become the main event in the world of artistic photography, attended by up to 100,000 people. His famous photographic works - modernist black and white studies of female nudes, harlequins, dead animals, gypsies and bullfighting - are considered exemplary of the photographer-artist. Clergue is also known for his friendship with Pablo Picasso, which lasted some 30 years, until the artist's death.
Ann Craven is a contemporary American painter known for her lush depictions of the moon, birds, and multi-colored stripes. Craven’s use of serial motifs belies her interest in ephemeral moments, seasonal cycles, and the changeable qualities of painting. She received her BFA from the Massachusetts College of Art in 1986 and her MFA from Columbia University in 1993. She notably served as an artist assistant to Alex Katz, whose work influenced her own. Much of Craven’s practice revolves around painting en plein air, in this way she has captured the moon on hundreds of nights over the years. The artist currently lives and works in New York. Today, her works are held in the collections of the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and the Institute of Contemporary Art in Miami, among others.
Mercier Philip "Merce" Cunningham was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of American modern dance for more than 50 years. He frequently collaborated with artists of other disciplines, including musicians, graphic artists and fashion designers. Works that he produced with these artists had a profound impact on avant-garde art beyond the world of dance. There have been numerous exhibitions dedicated to Cunningham's work. Also, his visual art is represented by Margarete Roeder Gallery.
Rostislav Alexandrovich Danov (Russian: Ростислав Александрович Данов) was a Soviet artist of the late twentieth century. He is known as a graphic-animalist, naturalist, writer and professional snake artist.
Rostislav Danov began practicing animalistics in the last years of his life. He was the author of many works, some of which are kept in the Darwin Museum in Moscow. The artist illustrated books, including "Rare and Endangered Animals. Amphibians and Reptiles." Gorlov was also working on an unfinished book, "Year of the Snake," where he planned to describe the seasons of Turkmen nature through the eyes of a gyurza. His manuscripts, hundreds of drawings and 15 volumes of field diaries with graphic sketches have been preserved.
Johanna Dumet is a French and German artist and designer living and working in Berlin.
She graduated in fashion design from La Calade, Marseille, France. Dumet uses a variety of techniques, such as gouache-dyed paper glued to canvas, and creates paper sculptures as well. She is known for painting impulsively, with a strong sense of flow and without limitations.
Thomas Duttenhoefer was a German sculptor, draughtsman, graphic artist, and illustrator, and professor at the University of Mannheim.
In addition to his human figures, Thomas Duttenhoefer's figurative work includes many depictions of animals in a deliberately crude manner.
He is a member of the New Darmstadt Secession, the Palatinate Secession and the Argo Group, Speyer.
Marcel Dzama is a contemporary artist from Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada who currently lives and works in New York City. His work has been exhibited internationally, in particular his ink and watercolor drawings. Dzama works extensively in sculpture, painting, collage, and film. The artist is also known for his intricate dioramas and large scale polyptychs that draw from his talents across a range of media. Dzama works in multiple disciplines to bring his cast of human figures, animals, and imaginary hybrids to life, and has developed an international reputation and following for his art that depicts fanciful, anachronistic worlds.
Klaus Eberlein was a German graphic artist, illustrator and ceramic sculptor. He initially completed training as a chromolithographer. From 1962 to 1968 he attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich, and from 1968 he was a master student of Hermann Kaspar, receiving a final diploma from the academy. Eberlein was a member of the Association for Original Etching, the Dachau Artists' Association and the Munich Artists' Association. In 2013 he was accepted into the South German literary association Münchner Turmschreiber.
Martin Eder is a German artist.
From 1986 until 1992, he studied at the Augsburg University of Applied Sciences, and from 1993 until 1995 continued his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts Nuremberg, attending the University of Kassel in 1995 and 1996. From 1996 until 1999 he studied under Eberhard Bosslet at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts and was a master student under Professor Bosslet from 1991 until 2001. Eder lives and works in Berlin. He plays in his own experimental rock band under the name Richard Ruin et Les Demoniaques.
Ivan Semyonovich Efimov (Russian: Иван Семёнович Ефимов) was a Russian and Soviet artist of the first half of the twentieth century. He is known as an animal painter, graphic artist, sculptor, illustrator and reformer of the puppet theater.
Ivan Efimov worked in different genres and techniques, but all his work, including decorative and applied art, was focused on animalistic themes. He created works for the Moscow subway, train stations, sanatoriums and many other places and became famous for his technique of through volume relief in sculpture. The master also illustrated more than 20 books.
Efimov also created erotic works - about a thousand sheets with various thematic series, but the public learned about them only after the collapse of the USSR.
Simon English is a contemporary british artist. He is best known for his large and small-scale 'painted drawings' in which he mingles his distinctive imagery and words. He moves lightly between tight draftsmanship and a playfully sloppy application of colour and line. Language is paramount with diaristic musings interspersed with song lyrics, poetry and humorous one-liners. Self-described as 'automatic', his work has the spontaneity of stream-of-consciousness, exploring themes of love and loss, as well as gay and popular culture. Simon English lives and works in London. He emerged on the London Art scene in 1994 with an exhibition of paintings at the Saatchi Gallery as part of Young British Art III. Simon has exhibited internationally at numerous institutions.
Tom Fabritius is a German painter and graphic artist living and working in Leipzig, a representative of the so-called New Leipzig School.
Tom studied painting and drawing at the Academy of Visual Arts in Leipzig. In 2002 he co-founded the production gallery LIGA in Berlin-Mitte. Tom Fabritius paints in a wide variety of genres as he finds his motifs in the stream of images in the television. He switches between programs and quickly and intuitively captures individual moments of an image with his camera. From this collection, he selects individual images, which he then paints with watercolors.
Heinrich Faltermeier was a German sculptor. After an apprenticeship as a goldsmith and years of travel, including to Spain, Faltermeier studied from 1936 to 1943 at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich. He worked in accordance with the Nazi concept of art and created war memorials. From 1938 to 1944, with the exception of 1941, he was represented at all major German art exhibitions. Faltermeier's preferred working materials as a sculptor were bronze, marble and wood.
Maria Paula Figueiroa Rego was a Portuguese-British visual artist known particularly for her paintings and prints based on storybooks. Rego's style evolved from abstract towards representational, and she favoured pastels over oils for much of her career. Her work often reflects feminism, coloured by folk-themes from her native Portugal.
Dieter Finke is a German painter and sculptor.
Dieter Finke studied sculpture at the Hochschule für Arbeit Berlin, and has lived and worked in Berlin and New York. He was interested in painting, drawings, photo-objects and photo-collages, resulting in an extensive collection exhibited in renowned galleries in Berlin, Hanover, Hamburg and New York.
Finke used unusual materials such as wood and cardboard for his sculptural works, especially animals, and he always succeeded in convincingly portraying the fragile nature of the relationship between animals and humans. The form of the animal or bird is hinted at rather than filled in, leaving room for the viewer's imagination.
Fritz Fleer is a German painter and sculptor. He studied at the Hamburg University of Fine Arts in the class of Edwin Paul Scharf.
As independent artist, Fritz Fleer has been creating works for urban planning since the 1950s; in Hamburg he was commissioned for 17 sculptures by the municipal housing company SAGA.
Walton Ford is an American artist. He is known for his large-scale, highly detailed paintings that depict natural history subjects and explore the relationships between humans and animals.
Ford studied at the Rhode Island School of Design and later from Yale University. His work is inspired by the tradition of natural history painting, but he subverts this tradition by using his paintings to critique colonialism, environmental degradation, and the ways in which humans have interacted with the natural world.
Ford's paintings are highly detailed and often include multiple narratives within a single image. He uses a combination of watercolor, gouache, and ink to create his large-scale works, which can be several feet in height and width. His paintings are also highly stylized, featuring elements of graphic design and pop culture.
Ford has exhibited his work extensively, including at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum in Berlin, and the Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature in Paris. His work is also held in the collections of several major museums, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.
Werner Franzen is a German sculptor known for his sculptural compositions in public spaces.
His works are made very simply, but they are very attractive and human. Franzen's sculptures do not break up interiors or landscapes, but blend in very organically, complementing them and creating a cozy atmosphere.
Johnny Friedlaender was a leading German/French 20th-century artist, whose works have been exhibited in Germany, France, Netherlands, Italy, Japan and the United States. He has been influential upon other notable artists, who were students in his Paris gallery. His preferred medium of aquatint etching is a technically difficult artistic process, of which Friedlaender has been a pioneer.
Katharina Fritsch is a German sculptor who lives and works in Düsseldorf, Germany.
She studied at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art and became known for her iconic and unusual sculptures and installations.
Fritsch's work often evokes disturbing religious or quasi-spiritual associations and is deeply psychological, as if she were trying to give an image to our deepest fears, extracted from the world of myth, religion, cultural history and everyday life. One of her most impressive works, Rat King (1993), is a circle of sixteen giant rats, each nearly ten feet tall, with their tails tied in a massive knot in the center.
Alfred Fritzsching is a German artist known as Painter, graphic artist, draftsman, sculptor, commercial, commercial graphic artist. He began his training as a commercial graphic artist at the Blocherer School for Graphic and Advertising in Munich and worked as an advertising specialist. In 1970 Alfred Fritzsching became a member of Munich Artists 'cooperative and participated in exhibitions at the Haus der Kunst in Munich. From 1978, he worked as a freelance painter and also as board member and juror of the Munich Artists' Cooperative.
Nicolás García Uriburu was an Argentine contemporary artist, landscape architect, and ecologist. His work in land art was aimed at raising consciousness about environmental issues such as water pollution.
Alberto Garutti is an Italian painter and sculptor, the foremost representative of public art in Italy.
He lives and works in Milan, combining creativity with teaching at the Brera Academy. Garutti's works are installed in many public places in Italy.
Thomas Gatzemeier is a German artist, art dealer and writer.
Gatzemeier studied painting and drawing at the University of Graphic and Book Arts in Leipzig, after graduating he worked as a freelance artist. After conflicts with the authorities and a ban on exhibitions, he left the GDR in 1986. Until 2020 he lived and worked mainly in Karlsruhe before moving to Leipzig, where he runs the gallery Soll und Haben. Gatzemeier's painting without reference to any style always revolves around the female body and is nature-oriented. In particular, the artist loves to paint brightly colored butterflies and insects in general.
Gatzemeier has been exhibiting in galleries, art associations and museums since 1987. Numerous works are in renowned collections at home and abroad.
Gatzemeier has published a novel and several short stories, he has also written several art books.
David (Dudu) Gerstein is an Israeli painter, sculptor, draftsman and printmaker.
Gerstein received a broad education: he studied at the Bezalel Academy, then at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, in New York he continued his studies at the Art Students League, and in 1974 he received a diploma from St. Martin's School of Art in London. He works freely in all media: printmaking, painting, sculpture, drawing, murals and monumental creations.
In the 1970's Gerstein began experimenting with three-dimensional works, leaving cut-out fragments hanging in space. After many innovations, David began creating wall sculptures made with laser cutting and automotive paint. He created his own kind of pop art and gained an international reputation for his signature style with colorful images of numerous cyclists, butterflies, dancers, runners and more. With the advent of computers, he was able to convert his drawings into perfectly formatted patterns that can be faithfully reproduced in a metalworking shop.
And Gerstein's recognizable monumental sculptures can be seen in cities around the world. His street sculpture Momentum is Singapore's tallest public sculpture.
Piero Gilardi is an Italian painter and decorator. A catalytic figure in the Arte Povera movement centred in Turin in the late 1960s, Gilardi's utopian and selfless commitment to the association of neo-avant-garde artists from Western Europe and North America made him one of the most influential artistic figures of the period.
Piero Gilardi became internationally renowned and witnessed the influence of Pop Art in Europe. An itinerant artist, theorist and organiser, he contributed to the birth of Arte Povera, especially working to establish relationships with other similar initiatives that were simultaneously taking place outside of Italy.
Much of Gilardi's later work is united by a theme or interaction between the work and the viewer. The master has devoted more than a decade to his most ambitious project, Parco Arte Vivente (Park of Living Art or PAV). A collaborative effort that grew out of Gilardi's design, the PAV is a monumental undertaking that has transformed an abandoned plot of land in the heart of Turin's working-class Lingotto district into a six-acre green space dedicated to public, environmental and artistic interests.
Alexei Nikolaevich Glukharyov (Russian: Алексей Николаевич Глухарёв) is a Soviet and contemporary Russian artist. He is known as a painter and graphic artist, as well as a teacher.
Alexei Glukharyov worked as an art teacher and graphic designer in Central Asia at the beginning of his career. In 1984 his first solo exhibition in Moscow took place. From 1984 to 1990 he created a large collection of horse portraits for state stud farms and breeding farms. His works have been exhibited in Russia and abroad and are also in private and museum collections.
Sebastian Gögel is a German painter and sculptor living and working in Leipzig.
Gögel graduated from the University of Graphic and Book Arts in Leipzig and has been working with Paul Hammer (1975) in the HAGEL project since 2005. Extremely diverse in his work, working methods, themes and concerns, Gögel fits into a unique tradition of German erudite conceptual artists. Through exaggerations, caricatures, and grotesques, Gögel simultaneously utilizes and refutes morality and representationalism. The artist's surrealistic paintings and highly varied styles are appealing and horrifying at the same time.
Vadim Alexeyevich Gorbatov (Russian: Вадим Алексеевич Горбатов) is a Soviet and contemporary Russian artist. He is known as a painter and graphic artist, animalist.
Vadim Gorbatov creates works that are based on field observations and realistic sketches. The artist studied the animal world in his travels from the Siberian tundra to the jungles of Cambodia. He has illustrated many books, including the Red Book of the USSR, and is involved in international projects such as the Artists for Nature Foundation, in which Gorbatov is the only Russian participant. He is also a member of the Union of Artists of Russia and the Wildlife Artists' Union of Great Britain.
Dmitry Vladimirovich Gorlov (Russian: Дмитрий Владимирович Горлов) was a Soviet artist of the twentieth century. He is known as a graphic artist, sculptor, illustrator, master of decorative and applied plastic art and is considered the founder of Soviet animalistics.
Dmitry Gorlov is the author of monumental and decorative and easel sculptures, as well as toys made of different materials. He created a fountain and bas-reliefs for the Moscow Zoo, as well as reliefs on the monument to the fable writer I. A. Krylov on the themes of his fables. Gorlov also worked at the Gzhel ceramic factory, creating animal statuettes.
Günter Wilhelm Grass was a German novelist, poet, playwright, illustrator, graphic artist, sculptor, and recipient of the 1999 Nobel Prize in Literature.
Grass is best known for his first novel, The Tin Drum (1959), a key text in European magic realism. It was the first book of his Danzig Trilogy, the other two being Cat and Mouse and Dog Years. His works are frequently considered to have a left-wing political dimension, and Grass was an active supporter of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). The Tin Drum was adapted as a film of the same name, which won both the 1979 Palme d'Or and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1999, the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize in Literature, praising him as a writer "whose frolicsome black fables portray the forgotten face of history".