1970 Onward

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

Jean-Michel Basquiat1960–88 | AMERICAN | ACRYLICS; MIXED MEDIA; COLLAGE Basquiat was a young, black, middle-class New Yorker, who died of a drug overdose aged 28. He was a frenzied and prolific self-taught artist whose work powerfully reflected the obsessions and conflicts of his city and his decade. Basquiat’s large-scale work has the appearance, content, and crudity of graffiti on buildings (he began his career by secretly and illegally painting on public buildings). Their

Gerhard Richter: Painting at the Edge of Perception

Christo & Jeanne-Claude1935– AND 1935–2009 | AMERICANSCULPTURE; ENVIRONMENTAL ART Christo and Jeanne-Claude—a husband and wife partnership based in New York—traveled the world to create highly original, memorable projects. They wrapped objects. They started in 1958 with small items and moved on to very large ones in 1961, including wrapping the Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin, in fabric and ropes, which both suggest and conceal the thing wrapped. They also crea