Street art 20th century
Jim Avignon, born Christian Reisz, is a German contemporary artist known for his bold, colourful and pop-inspired works. He has adopted a pseudonym to separate his creative persona from his everyday life.
Jim Avignon's art often incorporates elements of street art, graffiti and cartoon aesthetics. He is known for his playful and satirical approach to exploring themes such as consumerism, popular culture and the art world itself. His work is characterised by bright colours, simplistic forms and a distinctive graphic style that is both accessible and visually affecting.
In addition to his studio practice, Avignon is active in the art and music scenes, collaborating with musicians, DJs and performers. He has been associated with the Lowbrow art movement and has exhibited his work internationally, gaining recognition for his distinctive style and energetic artistic presence.
His ability to bridge the gap between visual art and popular culture has made him a prominent figure in contemporary art.
Banksy is a pseudonymous England-based street artist, political activist and film director whose real name and identity remain unconfirmed and the subject of speculation. Active since the 1990s, his satirical street art and subversive epigrams combine dark humour with graffiti executed in a distinctive stenciling technique. His works of political and social commentary have appeared on streets, walls and bridges throughout the world. Banksy's work grew out of the Bristol underground scene, which involved collaborations between artists and musicians. Banksy says that he was inspired by 3D, a graffiti artist and founding member of the musical group Massive Attack.
Niclas Castello, real name Norbert Zerbs, is a German painter and sculptor, representative of Pop Art.
Niclas studied art in Germany, Paris and New York. In the 1990s in West Berlin he discovered street art, which became the basis of his career. He is known for a series of sculptures titled "Kiss Sculptures" and the works "Cube Painting-Sculpture". Castello also uses an unusual technique to capture the moment the work emerges: at the end of the realization, the artist takes the piece and compresses it to place it in a box.
Frank Shepard Fairey is an American contemporary artist, activist and founder of OBEY Clothing who emerged from the skateboarding scene. In 1989 he designed the "Andre the Giant Has a Posse" (...OBEY...) sticker campaign while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD).
Fairey designed the Barack Obama "Hope" poster for the 2008 U.S. presidential election. The Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston has described him as one of the best known and most influential street artists. His work is included in the collections at The Smithsonian, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego, the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.
His style has been described as a "bold iconic style that is based on styling and idealizing images."
Dieter Glasmacher is a socio-political German visual artist in the field of painting, art action, animated film and early street art.
Influenced by classical modernism, especially Dadaism, and contemporary art movements such as the works of Jean Dubuffet, Art brut, the expressive painting of the COBRA group and Pop Art, Glasmacher has developed a very independent position and a lively, original visual world over many creative years. Television, cinema, advertising, graffiti and other forms of street art also have a formative influence on his visual worlds, as do the "secret traces" of public space, words and scribbles such as those found in urinals, at bus stops or on the walls of houses. His main theme is his "consternation of current social oppression and deformation."
Richard Art Hambleton was a Canadian artist known for his work as a street artist.He was a surviving member of a group that emerged from the New York City art scene during the booming art market of the 1980s, which also included Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat. While often associated with graffiti art, Hambleton considered himself a conceptual artist who made both public art and gallery works.
Invader is an anonymous French street artist. He is known for his ceramic tile mosaics modeled on the pixelated art of 1970s–1980s 8-bit video games, many of which depict the titular aliens from the arcade games Space Invaders, Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros. (the inspirations for his pseudonym). As of December 2020, his creations can be seen in highly-visible locations in 79 cities in 20 countries. To accompany his citywide installations, or "Invasions", Invader publishes books and maps as guides to the locations of his mosaics.
Invader also makes mosaics using QR codes and stacks of Rubik's Cubes (with the latter typically installed indoors).
Nyoman Masriadi is a painter and a leading artist of the post-Suharto era in Indonesia. His works have gained a collectors base which includes prominent collectors in and around the region.
The visual imagery and narratives in his paintings are derived from keen and intelligent observations of social life and behavioural traits. His visual vocabulary is striking, continuously refreshing and contemporaneously relevant.
Thierry Guetta, better known as Mr Brainwash, is a French-born American street artist and filmmaker known for his unique and unconventional approach to art.
Thierry Guetta is recognised for his collaborations with renowned street artist Banksy. His works combine elements of pop art, street art and graffiti, resulting in colourful and visually impressive works. Getty's work often features cultural icons, famous personalities and popular images, creating a distinctive and recognisable style. With his playful and thought-provoking works, Mr Brainwash continues to push the boundaries of contemporary art and challenge traditional notions of artistic expression.
Thierry Noir is a French artist and muralist based in Berlin. He is considered the first artist to paint the Berlin Wall in the 1980s. He created brightly-colored paintings across large spans of the Berlin Wall and some of these original paintings can still be seen on surviving segments of the Wall in art collections and on the East Side Gallery. Noir's work and style are now considered iconic, and Noir is also regarded as one of the forerunners of the street art movement as a whole. He continues to create murals worldwide in cities including London, Los Angeles, and Sydney.
Jef Aérosol is the pseudonym of Jean-François Perroy, a French stencil graffiti artist. He has been an urban art proponent in France since 1982, and is a contemporary of Blek le Rat and Speedy Graphito.
Aérosol is represented by several galleries in France and abroad.
JR (French: Jean René) is the pseudonym of a French photographer and artist who does not give his full name. He lives and works in Paris and New York.
He describes himself as a "photograffeur" (photographer and graffiti artist in one word) and claims that the street is "the biggest gallery in the world". His work is flyposting large black and white images in public spaces. JR works at the intersection of photography, street art, filmmaking and social activism. Over the past two decades he has developed many public projects in cities around the world, from buildings in the slums of Paris to walls in the Middle East and Africa or favelas in Brazil.
JR places large-scale photographic images in public spaces. He started creating graffiti as a teenager on the streets and rooftops of Paris and on the subway. In 2007, he gained worldwide attention by placing huge photographs of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities on both sides of the separation barrier. In his works, the photographer always addresses current political and social issues in the world. For example, in 2019, JR worked with a group of inmates of a maximum security prison in California and created a large format piece with portraits of the inmates.
JR has traveled to many cities with his work, participating in exhibitions, he has collaborated with magazines and created films about his work. JR has also directed three feature-length documentaries, one of which, Women Are Heroes (2011) was nominated for an Oscar. At the 2017 Cannes Film Festival, he won the Golden Eye for Best Documentary.
RETNA (born Marquis Lewis) is a contemporary artist, primarily recognized for graffiti art. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and started his career in the early 1990s. He developed a distinctive constructed script which is derived from Blackletter, Egyptian Hieroglyphics, Arabic, and Hebrew calligraphy, as well as more traditional types of street-based graffiti. In addition to exhibiting at institutions and galleries in Los Angeles, Miami, London, New York and Hong Kong, Retna has done advertising work for brands such as VistaJet, Louis Vuitton, and Nike. His artwork adorns the cover of Justin Bieber's Purpose album that debuted in 2015. Retna has many high profile patrons, including fast food magnate Sam Nazarian.
