Abstractionism
Pacita Abad was an American-Filipino artist of the last third of the 20th and early 21st centuries. She is known for her invention of the "trapunto" painting technique, which involved stitching together painted canvases to give them a three-dimensional effect.
Pacita Abad is most famous for her cycle of colorful abstract works executed on various materials - canvas, paper, fabric, metal, ceramics, glass. In total the artist created more than 4000 works which were exhibited at more than 200 venues. Today her works can be seen in various collections in more than 70 countries.
Shafic Abboud, also known as Chafic Abboud, was a renowned Lebanese painter whose artistic journey led him from Beirut to the vibrant art scene of Paris in 1947. Embracing the modernist and abstract movements of the mid 20th century, Abboud honed his skills at the ateliers of prominent artists like Jean Metzinger and Fernand Léger. This exposure influenced his transition from figurative and landscape painting to his signature colorful personal abstractions. Despite his years in France, Abboud remained deeply connected to his oriental roots, drawing inspiration from oral storytelling and Byzantine icons.
Abboud´s creativity extended to ceramics, terracotta, carpets, and lithography. His exceptional talent garnered global recognition, with exhibitions in prestigious venues like Doha's Mathaf and Paris's Institut du Monde Arabe. In May 2012, Beirut Exhibition Center celebrated his artistic legacy in a comprehensive exhibition.
Margitta Abels is a German artist known for her abstract paintings and mixed media works.
Margitta Abels has received numerous awards and honors for her work.
Abels' work is characterized by its use of color and texture to create complex and layered compositions. She often works with a variety of materials including acrylic paint, charcoal, and collage elements, and her work often incorporates textural elements such as sand and fabric.
Ruth Davidson Abrams, a Jewish-American painter, left a lasting impact on the art world. As the art director at the Research Association of The New School and a lecturer at Parsons The New School for Design, she influenced aspiring artists.
Abrams gained recognition for her outer-space-themed paintings, notably "There Are Unknown Elements in the Universe as Old as Mankind" (1962). She actively engaged in art classes led by influential artists like Alexander Archipenko and William Zorach, known for their abstract approach. Despite being overlooked in a male-dominated era, Abrams' talent is now acknowledged. Her papers are preserved at the Yeshiva University Museum and the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. She collaborated with renowned artists such as William Zorach, Alexander Archipenko, and John D. Graham.
Carla Accardi was an Italian abstractionist painter associated with the Arte Informel and Arte Povera movements and a founding member of the art groups Forma (1947) and Continuità (1961). She studied painting at the Academy of Fine Arts in Palermo and Florence.
Carla Accardi was known for her innovative use of materials and her exploration of geometric shapes and vivid colours. One of her notable contributions was the introduction of the "tela intrecciata" (interwoven canvas) technique, in which she used strips of coloured canvas to create textured and layered compositions.
Accardi's work often exhibited a sense of rhythm and movement, a dynamic arrangement of forms and lines. Her compositions are characterised by a sense of balance and harmony and often incorporate elements of repetition and symmetry.
Franz Ackermann is a German media artist.
He studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and at the University of Fine Arts in Hamburg, lives and works in Berlin and Karlsruhe.
Franz Ackermann's work includes drawings, watercolors, murals, paintings and installations, which he complements with photographic works, projections and architectural models. His works deal with the themes of tourism, globalization and urbanism and reflect the social changes and political problems caused by increasing globalization.
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.
Abdul Ghani Ahmad is a contemporary Malaysian artist. He is known as a watercolorist working in the styles of realism and abstraction.
Abdul Ghani Ahmad creates landscape and rural landscapes as well as abstractions. His work is characterized by photographic precision and detail. Some of the artist's best known works include the Pristine Nature, Journey and Flora of Malaysia series. He has also produced a series of postcards with views of Malaysia.
Ahmad is a member of various art organizations including the Asian Watercolorists Confederation and the Malaysian Artists Union.
Giuseppe Ajmone was an Italian painter and printmaker.
He studied painting at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan and in 1946 was one of the signatories of the Realist Manifesto, also known as "Oltre Guernica.
Ajmone painted both landscapes and still lifes as well as semi-abstract figures.
Josef Albers was a German-born artist and educator. The first living artist to be given a solo shows at MoMA and at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, he taught at the Bauhaus and Black Mountain College, headed Yale University's department of design, and is considered one of the most influential teachers of the visual arts in the twentieth century.
As an artist, Albers worked in several disciplines, including photography, typography, murals and printmaking. He is best known for his work as an abstract painter and a theorist. His book Interaction of Color was published in 1963.
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.
Richard Aldrich is a Brooklyn-based contemporary American conceptual artist and painter who exhibited in the 2010 Whitney Biennial. Aldrich received his BFA degree from the Ohio State University in 1998. Although mostly abstract and casual, Aldrich's paintings also betray a distinctly literary sensibility, even as he targets what he has called the essential "unwordliness of experience." He addresses his own personal history and the way that humans organize information through the formal language of painting, freely citing various aesthetic tropes with humor and irreverence. Aldrich is best known for his loose, abstract compositions, moving freely from gestural mark-making, text-based printing, and cutting the canvas to reveal stretcher bars underneath.
Andreu Alfaro Hernández was a Spanish sculptor.
Alfaro learned the principles of geometry and applied his knowledge to create abstract works. His sculptures are usually full of nuances that play with the module, the series and light and color. He was also described as a minimalist artist, albeit with reservations.
Mikhail Fedorovich Andrienko-Nechytailo (Russian: Михаил Фёдорович Андриенко-Нечитайло) was a 20th-century French artist of Russian-Ukrainian origin. He is known as a painter-modernist, scenographer, novelist.
Mikhail Andrienko-Nechytailo, having emigrated from revolutionary Russia, in 1923 settled in Paris, where he lived until the end of his life. There the artist created his most famous works in the style of cubism, constructivism, surrealism, neorealism, abstractionism.
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.
John Armleder is a Swiss performance artist, painter, sculptor, critic, and curator. His work is based on his involvement with Fluxus in the 1960s and 1970s, when he created performance art pieces, installations and collective art activities that were strongly influenced by John Cage. However, Armleder's position throughout his career has been to avoid associating his artistic practice with any type of manifesto.
Charles Arnoldi is an American painter, sculptor and printmaker.
In the early 1970s, the artist attracted attention for his wall-relief wood sculptures, such as Honeymoons in the collection of the Honolulu Museum of Art.
The use of wood remained a feature of Arnoldi's oeuvre, although, since the 1980s, he has often employed it in combination with other media. In the 1990s, Arnoldi's output changed radically. He began producing abstract paintings on canvas, first black and white, and later brightly colored.
Jean Arp, born Hans Peter Wilhelm Arp, was a German and French poet, painter, graphic artist and sculptor. one of the founders of the Dada movement in Zurich.
Arp used abstract forms in his work and experimented with different materials such as wood, metal and stone. He was also known for his poetic works, in which he applied a method of randomly selecting words, called the "clutter method". Arp believed that this method helped him express his thoughts more precisely and originally. Arp's influence on the arts is still significant today.
Helen Ashbee is a British artist, sculptor and jeweller. Daughter of renowned architect, designer and social reformer Charles Robert Ashbee.
Helen Ashbee was a textile designer and after the death of her husband, Italian painter Francesco Cristofanetti, she finds her real business in Paris - 'abstract sculpture' and related jewellery, for which she always did many preparatory drawings.
Valentin Assenov is a Bulgarian painter who lives and works in the picturesque city of Pleven.
He studied painting at the Cyril and Methodius University of Veliko Tarnovo. Assenov's canvases are skillful examples of the combination of vivid color and abstract composition inspired by the traditional Bulgarian landscape. His expressive style of painting shows great boldness in the use of color as well as a distinctive style and skill, and his still lifes are literally bursting with color and good humor. Assenov's paintings are part of the collection of the Bulgarian Ministry of Culture and are also widely represented in private collections in Bulgaria, Germany and Turkey.
Pablo Atchugarry is a Uruguayan artist, best known for his abstract sculptural art. His works are included in many major collections, both private and public, and he has held more than one hundred solo and collective exhibitions worldwide.
For each sculpture, Atchugarry personally selects an appropriate block and is actively involved in carving it, with minimal help from assistants. He works with white Carrara marble from Tuscany, gray stone from Bardiglio, black from Belgium, and pink from Portugal. Aside from working with stone, he utilizes bronze finished in various patinas, ceramic, and, more rarely, various types of wood.
Ugo Attardi was an Italian painter, sculptor and writer. Attardi moved from Genoa to Rome in the early 1950s, where he formed the group Forma 1 together with other artists. His sculpture of Ulysses is now permanently installed in Battery Park in New York
Tauba Auerbach is a visual artist working in many disciplines including painting, artists' books, sculpture and weaving. They live and work in New York.
A life-long student of math and physics, Auerbach's work contends with structure and connectivity on the microscopic to the universal scale.
Sally Michel Avery is an American artist known for her paintings in the style of abstract expressionism. Her paintings are often associated with musical rhythm and melody. She began her career as a landscape painter, and in the 1940s she moved to more abstract forms and color schemes.
Avery was one of the few women recognized as influential in American abstract painting in the mid-20th century. Her work can be seen in museums and private collections around the world.
Kenjiro Adzuma (Japanese: 吾妻 兼治郎) is a Japanese abstraction sculptor known for his avant-garde and innovative approach to sculpture and installation art, one of Japan's most important post-World War II artists. He also lived and worked in Italy for many years. He studied sculpture at the Graduate School of Art at the University of Tokyo and at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan, where he attended Marino Marini's class.
Kenjiro Adzuma was a key figure in the Japanese art movement known as Mono-ha (School of Things) in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Mono-ha artists explored the relationship between natural and industrial materials, often juxtaposing them to create thought-provoking installations.
Hermann Bachmann is a German artist, graphic designer and teacher.
Hermann studied at the School of Applied Arts Offenbach am Main and served in the army during World War II. In 1945, Bachmann returned to his hometown and joined the artists of the Halle School. And in 1953 he fled to West Berlin, whose creative atmosphere was closer to him.
In 1957 Hermann Bachmann became a teacher and later a professor at the University of Fine Arts in Berlin, among his students many famous artists. He was a member of the Association of German Artists.
Phyllida Barlow is a British artist. She studied at Chelsea College of Art (1960-63) and the Slade School of Art (1963-66). She joined the staff of the Slade in the late 1960s and taught there for more than forty years. She retired in 2009 and is thus an emerita professor of fine art. She has had an important influence on younger generations of artists; at the Slade her students included Rachel Whiteread and Angela de la Cruz. In 2017 she represented Great Britain at the Venice Biennale.
Jill Baroff is a contemporary American artist. She received her BFA from Antioch University, Yellow Springs, OH in 1976, took part in the Artist Seminars Program at the Whitney Museum of Art, New York in 1978 and received MFA from Hunter College, New York in 1981. In her works, she uses a self-structuring methodology in which their visual form is determined by the process by which they are made. Baroff's work reveals the artist's urge to purify, to distill a gesture or an idea until it reaches its most concentrated form. She exhibited in a range of venues, including Pablo's Birthday, New York, Bartha Contemporary, London, England, Galerie Christian Lethert, Brussels, Belgium etc.
Hermann Bartels is a German artist close to the ZERO movement.
He explored the object nature of painting and moving beyond the two-dimensional surface of the canvas. In the 1950s Bartels worked with thick masses of color and expressive and intuitive strokes, creating white Fleckenbilder. Later he developed the unique technique of strip-sponging, in which he placed colored canvas strips parallel to one another on a white primed canvas. Using this method, Bartels transformed the canvas into a relief that could react more strongly to light and shadow than before. In addition to exploring the three-dimensional picture-object, color also played a crucial role for Bartels, whether in his informal and monochrome painting or in the alternating parallel montages in which he arranged the strips of canvas into a single work.
Lillian Bassman was an American photographer and artist.
A magazine art director and fashion photographer, she became famous in the 1940s and '50s for her high-contrast, dreamy portraits of sylph-like models. Bassman's unique graphic style of photography illustrates the feminine mystique and glamour, as well as the boldness of an artist who blurs the lines between fashion photography and fine art. Working as art director for Bazaar magazine in 1945, she helped launch the careers of many of the century's most famous photographers.
Marcel-Louis Baugniet was a Belgian painter, theorist, furniture designer, creator of posters, costumes and stage sets, and one of the main advocates of the concept of pure plasticity.
He studied painting at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Brussels, where he communicated with Paul Delvaux, René Magritte, Victor Servranck and Pierre-Louis Flouquet.
Gerd Baukhage is a German abstractionist painter.
He studied at the Dusseldorf Academy of Art and painted realistic landscapes. Participation in World War II and Soviet captivity strongly influenced the artist's outlook and he moved on to abstract expressive works.
Human suffering and misery in the form of "blockages" and "obstacles" were the theme of Bauckhage's work in the later years of his life. One of his famous creations on the theme of violence and mass murder is the series Execution Machines.
Erwin Bechtold is a German abstract painter and sculptor. He spent some time in Paris, where he had the opportunity to work with Fernand Léger.
Erwin Bechtold was the founder of the artist's group Ibiza 59, whose members sought to create art free of subjective expression. Bechtold's paintings from this period were characterised by minimal geometric forms and the use of a monochromatic colour palette.
Later in his career, Bechtold began experimenting with sculpture, creating large-scale works that explored the relationship between form and space.
Wolfram Beck was a German sculptor, draughtsman, and painter who worked with wood, steel, bronze, acrylic, and stone. He was trained at the Higher School of Artistic Culture in Berlin, and his work initially included large organic wooden works, portrait busts, and torsos in clay and stone. In the 1970s, Beck created strictly geometric and airy-filigree constructions from mechanical and electronic components that could be moved by actuators or by hand. He also created colorfully accented and fragile looking objects in metal and acrylic. Beck's work can be found in the collections of Axel Springer, Egon Eiermann, and others.
Curt Beckmann is a German painter and sculptor.
He studied at the Düsseldorf State Academy of Art, was a member of the Rhine Secession, Das Junge Rheinland, was a member of the Malkasten Association of Artists, the Association of West German Artists and the Association of German Artists.
Beckmann's work is distinguished by the contemplative quality of the female nude bodies. He gradually moved from naturalistic figures to an almost abstract expressionist representation of them.
Ulrich Beier was a North German sculptor who enjoyed a considerable reputation in his region of Schleswig-Holstein and Hamburg. From 1945 to 1948 he studied sculpture in his hometown with Christian Brodersen, before continuing his studies in Hamburg with Richard Steffen, a pupil of Aristide Maillol.
Ulrich Bayer has been a member of Gruppe 56 since 1962.
Maria Beine-Hager was a German artist and graphic artist.
She was brought up in a convent, was widowed early and later worked as a Red Cross nurse before beginning her artistic education in postwar Germany under Soviet academy professor Leonid Bordyuk and graphic artist Norbert Hochsiedler. Beine-Hager subsequently attended the Oskar Kokoschka International Summer Academy in Salzburg and established herself as a thoughtful graphic artist and painter at exhibitions at home and abroad.
Maria Beine-Hager's art has both strong religious and political undertones.
Leland Bell is an American abstraction artist. In his youth he was a jazz drummer, he was interested in painting in school and became a self-taught artist.
Leland Bell's work is characterized by strong, extended strokes, vibrant colors, free and dynamic composition, and an expressive and emotional message.
Leland Bell was also known for his drawing manuals, which are still used in many art schools today. Bell taught at the Kansas City Art Institute, Indiana University, Yale University and the Parsons School of Design. His abilities as a teacher also brought him fame. At the end of his life, Bell became an iconic figure on the New York art scene.
Leland Bell's work can be seen in various museums and galleries around the world.
Sadie T. Benning is an American artist, who has worked primarily in video, painting, drawing, sculpture, photography and sound. Benning creates experimental films and explores a variety of themes including surveillance, gender, ambiguity, transgression, play, intimacy, and identity. They became a known artist as a teenager, with their short films made with a PixelVision camera that have been described as "video diaries".
Anna Beothy-Steiner was a Hungarian-French Avant-Garde painter. She studied journalism at the private art school of Álmos Jaschik in Budapest between 1922 and 1925. Her travels to Austria, Germany, and Italy exposed her to the futuristic ideas of Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and the Orphism of Robert Delaunay, both of which influenced her work. Beothy-Steiner moved to Paris in 1927 and married István Beöthy. Between 1927 and 1934, she created her major works, including gouaches, watercolors, magazine illustrations, fabric, and fashion designs. Her compositions during this period were characterized by the interpenetration and superimposition of simple, geometric color surfaces, revealing the influence of her husband's preoccupation with proportions. From 1932 onwards, her compositions contrasted simple colors, creating flat color spaces that anticipated the ideas of Op Art. Beothy-Steiner interrupted her artistic work in 1934 and did not resume until the 1960s, following her husband's death.
Stefan Berger-Teichmann is a contemporary Swiss painter who specializes in abstract art. He has exhibited his works in various galleries and museums in Switzerland, Germany, and the United States.
Berger-Teichmann's paintings are characterized by their expressive use of color, texture, and form. He often employs a variety of techniques and mediums to create layered, multi-dimensional works that invite the viewer to engage with the art on both a visceral and intellectual level. His work is often inspired by natural landscapes, but he also draws on his own emotional experiences and personal memories to create abstract compositions that are both powerful and evocative.
Katherine Bernhardt is an artist based in St. Louis, Missouri.
Bernhardt is known for painting consumer symbols, tropical animals, and every day objects over bright flat fields of color in an expressionistic and almost abstract style.
Bernhardt has also been involved in numerous collaborations within the art and fashion industries. She has also collaborated with Flaunt magazine, EDUN, and Miss Sixty.
Miguel Ortiz Berrocal was a Spanish figurative and abstract sculptor. He is best known for his puzzle sculptures, which can be disassembled into many abstract pieces. These works are also known for the miniature artworks and jewelry incorporated into or concealed within them, and the fact that some of the sculptures can be reassembled or reconfigured into different arrangements. Berrocal's sculptures span a wide range of physical sizes from monumental outdoor public works, to intricate puzzle sculptures small enough to be worn as pendants, bracelets, or other body ornamentation.
Gastone Biggi was an Italian painter, sculptor, writer, poet, and musicologist.
Biggi combined painting with his activities as an art writer and musicologist. In 1962 his key work The Birth of the Point was published, theorizing the study of the sign module, which he would develop throughout his life. That same year he formed Group 1.
