Self-portrait 21st century
Nuria Farre Abejon is a Spanish hyperrealist artist living and working in Barcelona, Spain.
Her often hyper-realistic works revolve around issues that concern her as a young woman: anxiety, melancholy, family, memories and identity. At first, Nuria created translucent paintings through which she represented the duality between life and death. Later she explored self-portraiture, and today Nuria tries to explore her present through photographs from her family album, through which she creates interesting visual oil collages.
Frederico Aguilar Alcuaz is a Filipino abstract painter, sculptor and ceramist, and master tapestry artist.
He studied painting at the University of the Philippines' School of Fine Arts, then lived and worked both in the Philippines and Spain, and in Brno, Czech Republic, he worked extensively on tapestries.
Alcuaz has earned international acclaim with his vivid abstract works in various genres and techniques, and he has exhibited extensively internationally.
Bernhard Johannes Blume is a German art photographer.
Bernhard Blume and his wife Anna Blume created many staged black and white photographs in which they themselves took part. They are considered among the pioneers of staged photography.
Micha Brendel is a German artist living and working in Hohendorf/Lower Lusatia.
Brendel started his career as an assistant artist, then studied at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weißensee and at the HfBK Dresden. He was one of the founders of the Auto-Perforations-Artisten association and editor of independent magazines for artists.
Brendel's early works centered on self-portraits and photographs of his own body, distorted with photographic techniques. He also made extensive use of organics, including animal bones and skin, in the creation of a wide variety of works. A common theme is self-destruction and alienation, shock and disgust. Brendel wrote detailed accounts of his creative process that became the basis for books.
Brendel's work, which often crosses boundaries, includes drawings, photographs, inscriptions, artist's books, taxidermy objects, installations and performances. He is currently intensifying his work with writing and nature and curating exhibition projects.
James Brown was an American-born painter active in Paris and Oaxaca, Mexico. He was most well known in the 1980s for his rough painterly semi-figurative paintings, bearing affinities to Jean-Michel Basquiat and East Village painting of the time, but with influences from primitive art and classical Western modernism. His work has taken on several styles over the years but maintains a hand-made look combining concerns of the modernist tradition with motifs and spiritual interests from tribal art. Much of his work is a non-realistic but contains depictions or signs of recognizable faces or objects. However, the line between representation and abstraction is often a difficult one in his work. Besides paintings Brown has also produced sculptures and series of prints at various points in his career, and in the 1990s started to heavily utilize collage.
Alfredo Castañeda was a Mexican surrealist painter.
Castañeda had been interested in painting and drawing since childhood, but first became an architect, earning a degree in architecture from the University of Mexico. During his studies, he continued to paint as a hobby, which he became more and more serious about over the years. At university, Alfredo became acquainted with the painter, sculptor and architect Matthias Goeritz, as well as the work of René Magritte. Both played a huge role in the young artist's worldview.
After his studies, Castañeda worked as an architect and in 1969 had his first solo exhibition at Galeria de Arte Mexicano. His work has also been shown internationally numerous times in the United States and in many Latin American countries, including Mexico. His work is collected in collections and museums throughout the Americas, Europe and Asia.
Alfredo Castañeda is known for his surrealist paintings, often portraits. The same character appears in many of his paintings, sometimes revealed in multiple versions of himself. This person (often resembling the artist himself) seems to be engaged in an endless dialog with himself, involving the viewer as well.
LaToya Ruby Frazier is an American visual artist, renowned for her profound work that delves into social justice, cultural change, and the American experience. Born in 1982 in Braddock, Pennsylvania, Frazier utilizes various media, including photography, video, and performance, to explore themes of industrialism, environmental justice, and human rights. Her art, deeply rooted in collaborative storytelling, often portrays her family and community, offering a lens into the lived experiences of working-class families amid societal and environmental challenges.
Her notable series "The Notion of Family" explores her family's life in Braddock, revealing the impacts of industrial decline on the community and environment. This work not only highlights LaToya Ruby Frazier's personal narrative but also serves as a broader commentary on race, class, and the American industrial landscape. Her commitment to social documentation is further exemplified in projects like "Flint is Family," where she immersed herself in Flint, Michigan, to document the water crisis's impact on local families.
LaToya Ruby Frazier's exhibitions span across prestigious venues in the US and Europe, reflecting her influence and recognition in the art world. Her works are part of esteemed collections like The Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Frazier's accolades include a MacArthur Fellowship, demonstrating her significant contributions to contemporary art and social activism.
For art collectors and experts, Frazier's work offers a compelling intersection of art, activism, and storytelling, providing insightful perspectives on pressing social issues through the lens of personal and community narratives.
To stay informed about LaToya Ruby Frazier's work and related updates, including new product sales and auction events, subscribing to updates is a valuable opportunity for enthusiasts and collectors alike to engage with her impactful artistry and advocacy.
Rolf Gith is a German painter, draughtsman and designer. He studied painting at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg. He was involved in teaching at various institutions of higher education. Git is a member of the Association of German Artists.
Rolf Git worked in different genres: he was fond of nudes, painted portraits of the people around him as well as numerous self-portraits. Since 1996 colour and light have been central themes in his work.
Ulrich Hachulla is a German painter and graphic artist, representative of the New Objectivity movement, who lives and works in Leipzig.
He was educated at the Academy of Fine Arts in Leipzig and, in addition to painting, has mastered many graphic techniques.
Hahulla's portraits and self-portraits depict a man in solitude, unsociable, coldly detached - these are numerous types of the respective times. The artist also creates paintings with mythological and allegorical references.
Bahram Hajou is a Kurdish painter whose works can be classified as Neo-Expressionism. He lives and works in Münster as a freelance artist. In 1974 Bahram emigrated to Germany, where he studied at the Münster Art Academy from 1978 to 1984. Since 1981 he has taken part in exhibitions at home and abroad.
Han Hsiang-ning is a Taiwanese-American artist. Han has participated in many prominent museum exhibitions. He often uses spray painting and paints photo-realistic street scenes. In 1961, he joined the "Fifth Moon Group". He began abstract form oil painting, and his works first appeared in the magazine Pen Review. In 1963 he began working with roller and stencils on rice paper, still abstract, emphasizing form and space structure. In 1969 he began spray painting works using acrylic paint on canvas, created the "Invisible Image" series. In 1971, in the process of spray gun painting, found how to create different combinations of sprayed color dots, a form of pointillism. In 1971 he continued the spray gun technique, but began using New York city-scenes as a subject and his camera as sketching tool. In 1972 he launched studies on industrial scenes with vivid images. He completed his first self-portrait in 1981. In 1983 he began using brushes to paint watercolor and ink on paper. His subjects being street crowds and bird's eye views of intersections of New York streets.
Gussy Erika Edith Hippold-Ahnert, née Ahnert, was a German painter and master student of Otto Dix. The early work of the Dix student, such as the painting Lying Nude from 1931, shows her closeness to Dix's New Objectivity or Verism. She reached her artistic peak in 1932/1933, when she developed a painting style of her own, unmistakable character in the glazing technique taught by Dix. Hippold-Ahnert's late work is closely connected to the works of her husband Erhard Hippold and other artists of this region and time.
Ye Hongxing (Chinese: 叶红杏) is a Chinese artist.
Ye Hongxing's work uses traditional Chinese motifs and contemporary elements to create visually sublime scenes that impose an opposition of calm and complex madness. Using the traditional Western medium of oil paint, she creates attractive self-portraits with eyes closed and a calm expression superimposed on multi-coloured currencies or vibrant decorative and sinuous floral patterns derived from traditional Chinese porcelain.
Jörg Immendorff was a German painter and sculptor, stage designer and decorator, and a member of the New Wild movement.
Immendorff painted in cycles that often lasted for years and were political in nature. His series of sixteen large paintings, Café Deutschland (1977-1984), is well known. In these colorful paintings, numerous disco lovers symbolize the conflict between East and West Germany.
Immendorff prepared several stage productions and designed sets for the operas Elektra and The Rider's Voyage. 25 of Immendorf's paintings were selected in 2006 for the illustrated Bible.
Hideaki Kawashima is a Japanese artist who lives and works in Tokyo.
After graduating from the University of Tokyo, he underwent two years of Buddhist temple training before beginning his career as an artist in 2001.
Hideaki Kawashima uses portrait painting and self-portrait masks to show the ambiguity of human life. His characters with expressive eyes express a spectrum of emotions: fear, desire, anxiety, longing. Yet these emotions are ambiguous. Kawashima brings touches of folklore, mythology and surrealism to androgynous faces.
Karl Otto Lagerfeld is a German fashion designer, designer, photographer, collector and publisher.
Karl found himself in the fashion world by chance, as he planned to work as an illustrator. At the age of 21, he entered the 1954 International Woolmark Prize and won first place for his sketch of a coat, which launched his career. For the next 65 years, fashion remained the foundation of his work, although he spent his life actively expressing himself in other areas of art.
In 1987, Karl shot his first advertising campaign and developed a passion for photography. In 1999, he opened his own photography studio in Paris, where he has taken countless images of the world's greatest figures in art and fashion. Many of Carl's photographs have also been used in art books. Karl was also a master of self-portraits: throughout his life he photographed and painted his iconic image.
A passionate bibliophile (his personal library numbered 300,000 volumes), Lagerfeld merged his photography studio with the 7L bookstore and later opened EDITIONS 7L, a publishing house specializing in books on design and photography. He was also involved in various interior design and architecture projects.
In 1965 Lagerfeld took over the Italian fashion house Fendi, where he created collections of leather and fur garments, and in 1983 he became the artistic director of the French house Chanel - with these companies he had lifetime contracts. In 1984, Lagerfeld founded his own fashion house, Karl Lagerfeld Impression.
Li Tianbing is a Chinese artist. Li Tianbing’s body of work is characterized by the dual influence of the Far-East and the West: the first being a legacy of Chinese painting imbued with Taoism, the second coming from the teachings of art professors such as Vladimir Veličković, Christian Boltanski and Giuseppe Penone while he studied at the Fine Arts School in Paris. His work was marked by a pivotal moment in 2006, when he compiled a family album comprising portraits of him as a child, for the purpose of denouncing the one-child policy, thus depicting an imaginary family through replications of himself. He henceforth developed a new visual language in which portraits abound, creating through his art a dialog between reality, imagination and fantasy. When working on his compositions, Li Tianbing essentially uses oil paint; however, another of his main means of expression remains drawing with Indian ink. He also enjoys working with watercolours, alternating between Chinese and European paintbrushes.
Urs Lüthi is a Swiss eclectic conceptual artist.
He graduated from the School of Applied Arts in Zurich and has experimented with various styles and techniques, including photography, sculpture, performance, silkscreen, video and painting.
Urs Lüthi is known for placing his body and alter ego at the center of his artworks, trying to understand himself and question reality.
Konstantin Yegorovich Makovsky (Russian: Константин Егорович Маковский) was a renowned Russian painter, celebrated for his romantic and historical paintings that often portrayed an idealized view of Russian life in previous centuries. Born in Moscow in 1839, Makovsky became a pivotal figure in Russian art, distinguishing himself early on at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture and later at the Imperial Academy of Arts in Saint Petersburg.
Makovsky was a core member of the "Peredvizhniki" or Wanderers, a group advocating for realism and social critique through art. His commitment to depicting the everyday life of old Russia won him accolades, including the Large Gold Medal at the World's Fair in Paris in 1889. Some of his notable works include "The Russian Bride's Attire" and "The Boyar Wedding Feast," which reflect his mastery in capturing the lavish and picturesque aspects of Russian history and culture.
Tragically, Makovsky's life ended in a road accident in Saint Petersburg in 1915, but his legacy lives on through his profound impact on Russian art and culture. His works continue to be highly regarded and are featured in major museums and collections worldwide.
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Zoran Anton Mušič is a Slovenian painter and graphic artist who has worked in Italy and France.
Zoran studied painting in Maribor and Zagreb, then went to Madrid and Toledo for a year, where he studied and copied works by Goya and El Greco. At the end of 1944, he became a prisoner of the Nazi concentration camp Dachau, where he spent several months. He survived and even made about two hundred drawings on paper in the camp. After his liberation, Mušić moved to Venice and later to Paris.
Zoran Mušić was the only artist of Slovenian origin who managed to establish himself in the elite cultural circles of Italy and France, especially in Paris in the second half of the 20th century, where he lived most of his later life. He painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits and self-portraits, as well as horror scenes from the Dachau concentration camp and Vedute Venice. In 1970-1971, the artist created a pictorial reminiscence cycle "We are not the last", dedicated to concentration camp prisoners and became the most famous of his works.
The figures in Mušić's paintings appear out of empty space and seem unfinished. The colors of his self-portraits are the harsh colors of the desert, eliminating the superfluous and reducing to a minimum. These paintings are evidence of the artist's search for answers to the basic questions of human existence.
Youssef Nabil is an Egyptian photographer and artist living and working in Paris and New York. His work includes photography, painting, video and installations.
Nabil grew up in Cairo on films made during the golden age of Egyptian cinema, which strongly influenced his tastes. Nabil's distinctive technique of hand-colored silver-gelatin prints erases the stains of reality. Nabil shatters common notions of color photography and painting, as well as notions of the aesthetic sensibilities associated with art and pop culture.
Nabil is known for his photographs of Egyptian and international celebrities: Catherine Deneuve, Omar Sharif, Tracey Emin, Zaha Hadid, Robert De Niro and Marina Abramovic are just some of the many icons of the art and film world that Nabil has captured. Like all of his photographs, each portrait is made in the characteristic technique of hand-colored silver-gelatin prints. Nabil's numerous self-portraits reflect his feelings of loneliness, exile and longing. They also play with the notion of time. There is no time in Nabil's work; he lives and dwells in some other world of dreams.
Jack Pierson, a contemporary American artist born in 1960 in Plymouth, Massachusetts, has carved a distinctive niche in the realms of photography, sculpture, and art. His association with the Boston School, alongside notable figures like Nan Goldin, David Armstrong, and Mark Morrisroe, underscores his significant influence on contemporary art. Jack Pierson's oeuvre is renowned for its exploration of the emotional undercurrents of daily life, ranging from romantic attachment to the idealization of wanderlust.
His practice encompasses a broad spectrum of media, including photography, sculpture, installation, painting, and found objects, through which he delves into life's varied emotional landscapes. Particularly striking are his large-scale wall sculptures composed of letters in diverse sizes and materials, juxtaposed with the hazy, soft-focus effect of his photographic works. These photos, reminiscent of road movies, capture the essence of a rapturous journey across the American landscape, while his word pieces rooted in nostalgia critique the American Dream's underbelly.
Jack Pierson's art does not merely valorize the American Dream; instead, it reveals its more complex, often melancholic dimensions. His word pieces, sourced from everyday vernacular and infused with historical, political, and cultural references, serve as a poignant reminder of Hollywood's bygone era and engage with contemporary philosophical ideas. His works are a testament to the power of language and material in evoking profound cultural and personal reflections, embodying an American variant of concrete poetry.
Currently residing in both New York City and Southern California, Jack Pierson's influence extends globally, with his works included in prestigious collections such as the Museum of Contemporary Art North Miami, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. His career has been marked by significant exhibitions worldwide, demonstrating his pivotal role in shaping contemporary art discourse.
For collectors and experts in art and antiques seeking to explore the nuanced landscapes of contemporary art, Jack Pierson's work offers a compelling study in emotion, nostalgia, and cultural commentary. His ability to bridge the gap between various forms of artistic expression makes him a key figure in understanding the trajectory of modern art.
To stay updated on Jack Pierson's latest works and exhibitions, consider signing up for updates. This subscription is a gateway to the evolving landscape of contemporary art, offering insights and access to one of the most profound voices in today's art world.
Zbigniew Rogalski is a Polish installation artist and photographer.
He is considered not just a painter, but a director of paintings, because he easily mixes painting and photography, taking advantage of both. As a result, Zbigniew Rogalski achieves illusion and optical effects in his creations, whether portrait or landscape.
Salomé (born as Wolfgang Ludwig Cihlarz) is a German artist. His paintings are in renowned museums and collections all over the world. Salomé became known as one of the members of the art group Junge Wilde (Wild Youth) or Neue Wilde (New Wild Ones). He also is recognized as a sculptor and Punk singer.
Jennifer Anne Saville is a contemporary British painter and an original member of the Young British Artists. Saville works and lives in Oxford, England and she is known for her large-scale painted depictions of nude women. Saville has been credited with originating a new and challenging method of painting the female nude and reinventing figure painting for contemporary art.
Peter Schmersal is a German painter who lives and works in his native city and in Berlin. His work is characterized by a stylistic variety. Schmersal studied graphic design in Wuppertal from 1971 to 1975 and then worked as a graphic designer. From 1978 he engaged in painting. In the mid-1980s, primarily still lifes, landscapes and architectural depictions were created. There is already a certain casualness to the motifs from this period, they appear in fleeting snapshots that are characterized by a fragmentary execution. The still lifes show classic subjects: flowers, fruits, dead animals and everyday objects such as bottles, serviettes, stools or tables. At the beginning of the 1990s, in addition to urban landscapes, there were above all examinations of the portrait, which is also often fragmented, not only from the front, but often also in an unusual top or bottom view, up to a physiognomic detail representation, for example the mouth and mouth eye area. Since the beginning of the millennium, the choice of motifs at Schmersal could hardly have been more heterogeneous. Due to the well-considered incoherence of individual motifs, Schmersal juxtaposes the most diverse types of authorship, style, genre and context of exploitation. In terms of motifs, there are still no self-imposed specific guidelines, but figures, still lifes and landscapes continue to dominate
Florian Süssmayr is a German artist.
In the early 80s Florian was a member of the punk movement Freizeit 81 and until 1984 performed with Lorenz Lorenz, worked as a cameraman and lighting technician. And since 1997 he has been involved in visual arts. Self-portraits often play a central role in his paintings and are closely linked to the artist's biography.
Florian Süssmayr's works, often based on photographs, surprise the viewer with their painterly reproduction of various locations. His own image is recognizable only as a shadow or reflection - in a bathroom mirror or an elevator, on the street. The personality is not important, it is fleeting, and the objects surrounding it are brought to the foreground and drawn in much more detail. Florian Süssmayr has participated in numerous solo exhibitions in New York, Tokyo and Munich.
Aldo Tagliaferro is an Italian artist and photographer, representative of the Mec Art movement.
Aldo Tagliaferro's work is based on a constant analysis of the human being and his eternal personal conflict with his environment. In his works the artist critically examines the events in the social context.
