1970 Onward

James Turrell 1943– | American | Installations; Land Art Turrell produces gallery installations and tunnel projections that are light-filled spaces. He wants to capture the physical reality (rather than the symbolic) of light and space. In Turrell, the viewer is asked to move about, and becomes so involved and absorbed that you experience a different level of consciousness (spiritual or cosmic). James Turrell Skyspace I, 1974 Lunette , 1974 KEY WORKS:   Lunette , 1974 (New Yo

Christian Boltanski 1944– | French | Sculpture; Installations; Photography Boltanski is a Frenchman who produces disturbing installations that are gloomy, dimly lit, and mysterious. He often selects relics of lost childhood, death, anonymity, and the Holocaust. Boltanski attempts to create a visual requiem for all innocent victims. He brings a new wistful subject matter, to which he brings a new twist. Christian Boltanski, Personnes (Persons/Nobodies) (2010). Exhibition view

Rebecca Horn 1944– | German | Installations; Video Horn is the creator of highly original installations. Some involve machinery that may drip blood-like paint, or flap wings, and are generally surprising or unpredictable. Her work is compulsive viewing, often creating disturbing or compelling trains of thought (which is what she is after). Many of the ideas, perfected, create many breakdowns. Rebecca Horn, White Body Fan , 1972. Photograph. Rebecca Horn Collection. © 2019 Reb

Blinky Palermo 1943–77 | German | Sculpture; Mixed Media Palermo’s real name was Peter Heisterkamp. He was a short-lived refugee from communist East Germany to Düsseldorf (1954) and a disciple of Joseph Beuys. He adopted the pseudonym Palermo of a notorious gangster in the film The Godfather  (1972). Palermo’s work was to use art as a means of modern salvation. This pursuit of redemption ran too far ahead of the achievement. Blinky Palermo Retrospective 1964-1977 KEY WORKS:  

Gilbert and George 1943– and 1942– | British | Performance Art; Photography; Mixed Media Gilbert and George are highly successful, narcissistic couple who regularly appear in their own work as two cheap-suited “living sculptures,” and started as real-life “living sculptures.” The large “photopieces” (produced since 1971) are technically very impressive. Their subject matter comes out of inner-city decay and is openly moralistic and politically subversive to all sides, to libe

Jan Dibbets 1941– | Dutch | Photography; Installations Dibbets is a photographer, black-and-white, and color, as well as a maker of installations. His paintings are precise, with exacting and meticulous qualities—formal and dry—and their limited experiments with perspective and geometry produce installations that are strong sociological or political observations and critiques of capitalism. His work reveals a traditional Dutch interest in perspective and order that goes back

Bruce Nauman 1941– | American | Installations; Performance Art; Sculpture; Conceptual Art; Video Regarded as one of the gurus of the official art world, Nauman aims to examine, document, and explore the boundaries of artistic activity, human behavior, performance, humiliation, stress, and frustration. He works in many media—video, performance, neon, installation, sculpture, and printmaking. He claims to be communicating his observations of human nature and examining social si

Sigmar Polke 1941–2010 | German | Photography; Oils; Mixed Media Polke’s family migrated from East to West Germany in 1953. His work in the 1960s and 1970s can often be described as a chaotic appropriation of images from consumer society, painted onto unorthodox surfaces. His paintings are sometimes claimed to be attacking cliché-ridden banalities of current society, and operate at an ironical level of consciousness. Property from an Important European Collection 10 Ο Sigmar

Tracey Emin b. 1963 | British | Installations; Conceptual Art; Sculpture; Video Emin is one of the great survivors in the art world. She is deeply and admirably loyal to her friends, colleagues, the students she teaches, the Royal Academy, and many worthy charitable causes. But what of her art? It is by this that she will ultimately be remembered, or not. In her signature piece My Bed  she laid bare her tragically unhappy youth (raped at 13; endless promiscuity; transient rel

Grayson Perry b. 1960 | British | Mixed Media; Ceramics; Textiles; Metalwork; Drawings Perry is one of the most intelligent artists working today. Realising the necessity of establishing a persona which would interest the media, he presented himself as a transvestite. Having satisfied the media’s agenda, he now makes it pay attention to his art. Deeply interested in his fellow human beings, he explores what makes them tick in most subtle ways. Although known for his ceramic p

Keith Haring 1958–90 | American | Drawings; Oils; Mixed Media; Sculpture Haring was formally trained and first made his mark as a graffiti artist in the New York subway. In later life he was principally interested in marketing his easily recognizable images (simplistic pin men depicted with thick black outlines, participating in various inconsequential activities) via T-shirts, badges, and so on. The epitome of art and the artist as a brand image. He died of AIDS in 1990. Unt

Georg Baselitz b. 1938 | German | Oils; Sculpture; Mixed Media Baselitz is the creator of big, lively, colorful, and crudely painted upside-down paintings (neither in technique nor subject). Inverting his figures was a radical gesture intended to detach the subject from its narrative meaning. His work is often described as raw, aggressive, and emotionally charged. Trained in East Germany, Baselitz moved to the West, where he developed his signature style. His works have no pa

Frank Stella b. 1936 | German/American | Oils; Acrylics; Mixed Media One of today’s leading abstract painters, Stella is prolific and very varied—but a constant theme is investigating what paintings are and what they can be. His early work reduced painting to all but its most essential and impersonal properties: simple, flat, shaped, and monochrome canvases. He introduced pure, bright, hard-edge color with the aim of removing illusion and emotional reference. Later, his work

Eva Hesse 1936–70 | German/American | Sculpture; Conceptual Art; Oils Hesse was a short-lived, deeply sensitive artist whose work was informed by her complicated background. Born to Jewish parents who fled Nazi Germany, she moved to New York with her family in 1938. Her mother committed suicide when Hesse was 10. She died of a brain tumor at age 34. The decade before her death was a period of extraordinary productivity. During her short career, Hesse was one of the first arti

Francesco Clemente b. 1952 | Italian/American | Tempera, Watercolours, Oils Born in Naples, Clemente now lives in New York. He is one of the most respected members of the current art establishment. He is prolific, producing large and small works. His work is the epitome of official contemporary art. Clemente creates both large-scale works and smaller ones. He explores dual themes that are the most fashionable of the moment: the relationship between the past and present, the h

Robert Gober b. 1954 | American | Sculpture; Installations; Oils; Mixed Media A maker of objects and installations, Gober is well regarded and much exhibited on the international circuit. He explores various fashionable ideas, such as subversion of conventions and social norms (the happy family as oppressive rather than beneficial), gay politics, and green and conservation issues. Some of his objects look like found objects but are in fact made by Gober; others are everyday o

Jeff Koons b. 1955 | American | Sculpture; Conceptual Art; Oils; Photography Koons is good-looking, clever, witty, articulate, popular, good at self-publicity, and successful. A former salesman and Wall Street commodity broker, he is now one of the darlings of the contemporary art world. He is married to La Cicciolina (a famous Italian porn star and politician). He glorifies and deifies the banal consumer object as a work of art. For instance, he presented pristine vacuum cle

Richard Serra1939– | AMERICAN | SCULPTURE Serra is the foremost American creator of sculpture for public spaces. He produces huge works, which have a commanding presence and are held together only by gravity. Look for giant, minimal, monumental slabs of metal, often exhibited in open urban spaces. They are unmissable and unavoidable—and often seem to be unstable, as though the pieces could fall over. Take pleasure in his interest in massive weight and the way he likes to play

Susan Rothenberg1945– | AMERICAN | OILS; ACRYLICS; PRINTS; DRAWINGS Rothenberg is a former dancer who came to prominence as a painter in the mid-1970s, whose work is now much displayed. Her large-scale works usually contain a human or animal form emerging from a hazy background on the point of mutating into something else. Her work is weird, vaguely disturbing, and symptomatic of the American love of anxious self-analysis. Susan Rothenberg Black Blocks, 1977, Acrylic on canva

Jörg Immendorff1945–2007 | GERMAN | OILS; SCULPTURE Immendorff produced heavily painted Expressionist work that is essentially traditional and derivative of Beckmann and 1920s German Expressionism. He addressed political issues such as the divided Germany or the environment. Typical imagery within his work is a café interior with an anonymous crowd and symbolism of watchtowers, uniforms, barbed wire, and eagles. The Rakes’ Progress , 1992 (New Jersey: World House Gallery) Jör