FEATURED ARTISTS
Andy Warhol
AMERICAN, 1928–1987
Known for his cultivation of celebrity, Factory studio (a radical social and creative melting pot), and avant-garde films like Chelsea Girls (1966), Warhol was also a mentor to artists like Keith Haring and JeanMichel Basquiat. His Pop sensibility is now standard practice, taken up by major contemporary artists Richard Prince, Takashi Murakami, and Jeff Koons, among countless others.
Jean-Michel Basquiat
AMERICAN, 1960–1988
A poet, musician, and graffiti prodigy in late-1970s New York, Jean-Michel Basquiat had honed his signature painting style of obsessive scribbling, elusive symbols and diagrams, and mask-and-skull imagery by the time he was 20. “I don’t think about art while I work,” he
once said. “I think about life.” Basquiat drew his subjects from his own Caribbean heritage— his father was Haitian and his mother of Puerto Rican descent—and a convergence of African-American, African, and Aztec cultural histories with Classical themes and contemporary heroes like athletes and musicians.
Damien Hirst
BRITISH, B. 1965
Damien Hirst first came to public attention in London in 1988 when he conceived and curated “Freeze,” an exhibition in a disused warehouse that showed his work and that of his friends and fellow students at Goldsmiths College. In the nearly quarter of a century since
that pivotal show (which would come to define the Young British Artists), Hirst has become one of the most influential artists of his generation.
Alexander Calder
AMERICAN, 1898–1976
American artist Alexander Calder changed the course of modern art by developing an innovative method of sculpting, bending, and twisting wire to create three-dimensional “drawings in space.” Resonating with the Futurists and Constructivists, as well as the language of early nonobjective painting, Calder’s mobiles (a term coined by Marcel Duchamp in 1931 to describe his work) consist of abstract shapes made of industrial materials––often poetic and gracefully formed and at times boldly colored––that hang in an uncanny, perfect balance.
Keith Haring
AMERICAN, 1958–1990
Bridging the gap between the art world and the street, Keith Haring rose to prominence in the early 1980s with his graffiti drawings made in the subways and on the sidewalks of New York City. Combining the appeal of cartoons with the raw energy of Art Brut artists like Jean DuBuffet, Haring developed a distinct pop-graffiti aesthetic centered on fluid, bold outlines against a dense, rhythmic overspread of imagery like that of babies, barking dogs, flying saucers, hearts, and Mickey Mouse. In his subway drawings and murals, Haring explored themes of exploitation, subjugation, drug abuse, and rising fears of nuclear holocaust, which became increasingly apocalyptic after his AIDS diagnosis. Alongside Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf, and Jenny Holzer, Haring is regarded as a leading figure in New York East Village Art scene in the 1970s and ’80s.
Barbara Kruger
AMERICAN, B. 1945
Best known for laying aggressively directive slogans over black-and-white photographs that she finds in magazines, Barbara Kruger developed a visual language that was strongly influenced by her early work as a graphic designer (at magazines including House and Garden, Mademoiselle, and Aperture). Among her most famous pieces are I shop, therefore I am (1987) and Your body is a battleground (1985). Informed by feminism, Kruger’s work critiques consumerism and desire, and has appeared on billboards, bus cards, posters and in public parks, train station platforms, and other public spaces. She has also created sitespecific installations comprised of video, film, audio, and projection.
Takashi Murakami
JAPANESE, B. 1962
One of the most acclaimed artists to emerge from postwar Asia, Takashi Murakami— “the Warhol of Japan”—is known for his contemporary Pop synthesis of fine art and popular culture, particularly his use of a boldly graphic and colorful anime and manga cartoon style. Murakami became famous in the 1990s for his “Superflat” theory and for organizing the paradigmatic exhibition of that title, which linked the origins of contemporary Japanese
visual culture to historical Japanese art. His output includes paintings, sculptures, drawings, animations, and collaborations with brands such as Louis Vuitton. “Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended; and in fact, they are surprised by the rigid and pretentious Western hierarchy of “high art’,” Murakami says. “In the West, it certainly is dangerous to blend the two because people will throw all sorts of stones. But that’s okay— I’m ready with my hard hat.”
David LaChapelle
AMERICAN, B. 1963
Discovered by Andy Warhol at the age of 17, David LaChapelle began working for Interview Magazine at the threshold of his prolific career. Soon to be known for his hyper-real, distinctly saturated depictions of celebrity culture—Paris Hilton, Muhammad Ali, Britney Spears, Madonna, and Tupac Shakur figuring among his subjects—LaChapelle’s earliest work explored themes of mortality and transcendence through fine art, black-and-white photography. After tremendous success in commercial photography, music videos, and filmmaking, LaChapelle has returned to the gallery settings where he first began. His work today explores the metaphysical themes of his earliest work, referencing art history and religious iconography to make profound commentaries on the contemporary world. “I reintroduce my personal ideas of transfiguration, regaining paradise, and the notion of life after death,” says the artist, who now calls a remote farm in a Hawaiian jungle his home.
Pablo Picasso
SPANISH, 1881–1973
A prolific and tireless innovator of art forms, Pablo Picasso impacted the course of 20thcentury art with unparalleled magnitude. Inspired by African and Iberian art and developments in the world around him, Picasso contributed significantly to a number of artistic movements, notably Cubism, Surrealism, Neoclassicism, and Expressionism. Along with Georges Braque, Picasso is best known for pioneering Cubism in an attempt to reconcile three-dimensional space with the two-dimensional picture plane, once asking, “Are we to paint what’s on the face, what’s inside the face, or what’s behind it?” Responding to the Spanish Civil War, he painted his most famous work, Guernica (1937), whose violent images of anguished figures rendered in grisaille made it a definitive work of anti-war art. “Painting is not made to decorate apartments,” he said. “It’s an offensive and defensive weapon against the enemy.” Picasso’s sizable oeuvre includes over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures, ceramics, theater sets, and costume designs.
Banksy
BRITISH
Whether plastering cities with his trademark parachuting rat, painting imagined openings in the West Bank barrier in Israel, or stenciling “We’re bored of fish” above a penguins’ zoo enclosure, Banksy creates street art with an irreverent wit and an international reputation that precedes his anonymous identity. “TV has made going to the theatre seem pointless, photography has pretty much killed painting,” he says, “but graffiti has remained gloriously unspoilt by progress.” Banksy has gained his notoriety through a range of urban interventions, from modifying street signs and printing his own currency to illegally hanging his own works in institutions such as the Louvre and the Museum of Modern Art. Most often using spray paint and stencils, Banksy has crafted a signature, immediately identifiable graphic style—and a recurring cast of cops, soldiers, children, and celebrities—through which he critically examines contemporary issues of consumerism, political authority, terrorism, and the status of art and its display.
Richard Prince
AMERICAN, B. 1949
Though the quote “good artists borrow, great artists steal” is traditionally attributed to Pablo Picasso, it could well be Richard Prince’s motto. Prince mines mass-media images to redefine concepts of ownership and authorship, a practice he conceived of while working in the tearsheets department of Time-Life. In his “Cowboys” series, for example, started in the early 1980s, he re-photographed Marlboro ads, cropping out text to generate close-ups of mythical cowboy figures. His “Nurse” works—first exhibited in 2003—were produced by scanning the covers of pulp paperbacks, transferring them to canvas, and painting over the prints. An avid collector of American subcultures, Prince has also turned his eye to biker chicks, Borscht Belt jokes, and Willem de Kooning canvases. “I don’t see any difference now between what I collect and what I make,” he says. “It’s become the same.”
Andreas Gursky
GERMAN, B. 1955
In his resplendent large-scale photographs, Andreas Gursky captures the modern world, and its landscapes, people, architecture, and industries, in seductive detail. Shot from an elevated perspective and produced on an epic scale, Gursky’s images show the individual or granular—supermarket products, soccer players, windows on a building, or islands in the sea—subsumed by the masses or the environment. Drawing influence from his schooling under Bernd and Hilla Becher, Gursky rigorously composes his expansive views to envelop viewers with dizzying scale, detail, and color—effects he often heightens through digital manipulation. “In the end I decided to digitalize the pictures and leave out elements that bothered me,” he said of his “Rhine” photographs (1999), one of which set the record in late 2011 for the highest price ever paid for a photograph at auction. Gursky bears a close comparison to other members of the Dusseldorf School, particularly Thomas Struth, Axel Hütte, and Candida Höfer.
Yayoi Kusama
JAPANESE, B. 1929
Avant-garde Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama was an influential figure in the postwar New York art scene, staging provocative happenings and exhibiting works such as her “Infinity Nets,” hallucinatory paintings of loops and dots (and physical representations of the idea of infinity). Narcissus Garden, an installation of hundreds of mirrored balls, earned Kusama notoriety at the 1966 Venice Biennale, where she attempted to sell the individual spheres to passersby. Kusama counted Donald Judd and Eva Hesse among her close friends, and is often considered an influence on Andy Warhol and a precursor to Pop art. Since her return to Japan in the 1970s, Kusama’s work has continued to appeal to the imagination and the senses, including dizzying walk-in installations, public sculptures, and the “Dots Obsessions” paintings.
Christopher Wool
AMERICAN, B. 1955
Making a name in the New York art scene in the early 1980s, Christopher Wool is best known for his word paintings, white aluminum panels with black stenciled letters spelling out text like “Sell the house, sell the car, sell the kids” (in his 1998 work Apocalypse Now). In another group of early paintings, Wool used commercial rollers to apply decorative effects on aluminum panels, and he has continued to explore pattern in his art. Incorporating media and techniques including photography, silkscreen, reproduction, overpainting, and erasing, Wool’s work often combines human and machine marks, as in his paintings in which he smudges black lines drawn with a spray gun into gray fields.
Tracey Emin
BRITISH, B. 1963
A prominent member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Emin works in a wide range of mediums, including film, painting, neon, embroidery, drawing, installation, and sculpture. Her work is intensely personal, revealing intimate details of her life with brutal honesty and poetic humor. She has spoken of “the narcissism behind what I do—the self, self, self—and how difficult it is for me to really share things, even though I think I am sharing all the time.” This paradoxical approach—at once audacious and confessional, narcissistic and selfdeprecatory—earned Emin a nomination for the Turner Prize in 1999. Though she did not win, Emin received significant acclaim for her installation titled My Bed, which featured the artist’s unmade bed surrounded by personal items (from slippers to empty liquor bottles, cigarette butts, and condoms), exploring the allegorical qualities of a bed as a place of birth, sex, and death.
George Condo
AMERICAN, B. 1957
George Condo’s work is populated by a cast of characters whose bulging eyes, bulbous cheeks, proliferating limbs, and hideous over- and under-bites set them apart as a singular species. Drawing on vastly diverse painting practices—like Pablo Picasso, Diego Velázquez, Henri Matisse, and Cy Twombly—Condo absorbs a vast range of art-historical sources, yet, at the same, creates a pictorial language characteristically his own, one that
investigates the macabre, the carnivalesque, and the abject. He calls his surrealistic style “psychological cubism”, exploiting “our own imperfections—the private, off-moments or unseen aspects of humanity—that often give way to some of painting’s most beautiful moments.” Even Condo’s most abstract works, like Internal Space (2005) with its impenetrable geometric scaffolding of forms radiating from the painting’s center, explore the furthest extremes of the human psyche.
Roy Lichtenstein
AMERICAN, 1923–1997
When American Pop artist Roy Lichtenstein painted Look Mickey in 1961, it set the tone for his career. This primary-color portrait of the cartoon mouse introduced Lichtenstein’s detached and deadpan style at a time when introspective Abstract Expressionism reigned. Mining material from advertisements, comics, and the everyday, Lichtenstein brought what was then a great taboo—commercial art—into the gallery. He stressed the artificiality of his images by painting them as though they’d come from a commercial press, with the flat, single-color Ben-Day dots of the newspaper meticulously rendered by hand using paint and stencils. Later in his career, Lichtenstein extended his source material to art history, including the work of Claude Monet and Pablo Picasso, and experimented with three-dimensional works. Lichtenstein’s use of appropriated imagery has influenced artists such as Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and Raymond Pettibon.
KAWS
AMERICAN, B. 1974
KAWS is a multi-faceted artist straddling the worlds of art and design in his prolific body of work that ranges from paintings, murals, and large-scale sculptures to product design and toymaking. His iconic “XX” signature has its roots in the beginning of his career as a street artist in the 1990s, when he began altering found advertisements by incorporating his own masterful paintings. Evoking the sensibilities of Pop artists like Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg, KAWS possesses a sophisticated humor and thoughtful interplay with consumer products and collaborations with global brands. He often draws inspiration and appropriates from popular culture animations to form a unique artistic vocabulary and influential cast of hybrid cartoon and human characters.
Gerhard Richter
GERMAN, B. 1932
Gerhard Richter is known for a prolific and stylistically varied exploration of the medium of painting, often incorporating and exploring the visual effects of photography. “I like everything that has no style: dictionaries, photographs, nature, myself and my paintings,” he says. “Because style is violent, and I am not violent.” In the early 1960s, Richter began to create large-scale photorealist copies of black-and-white photographs rendered in a range of grays, and innovated a blurred effect (sometimes deemed “photographic impressionism”) in which portions of his compositions appear smeared or softened—paradoxically reproducing photographic effects and revealing his painterly hand. With heavily textured abstract gray monochromes, Richter introduced abstraction into his practice, and he has continued to move freely between figuration and abstraction, producing geometric “Colour Charts”, bold, gestural abstractions, and “Photo Paintings” of anything from nudes, flowers, and cars to landscapes, architecture, and scenes from Nazi history. Richter absorbed a range of influences, from Caspar David Friedrich and Roy Lichtenstein to Art Informel and Fluxus.
Manolo Ballesteros
SPANISH, B. 1965
The lines of Manolo Ballesteros carried out through subtle brushstrokes, create geometric shapes that gradually take over the canvas, originating capricious shapes. Sometimes, these geometric compositions are the result of the combination of colour planes. The use of colour softens the coldness that seems to possess these compositions by default. His art is intuitive, spontaneous and without an implicit message where his creation speaks for itself. During the last years, his work has experimented in the field of abstraction, playing with the geometric complexity through the uniformity of the pigments and the reduction of the profiles. As a result of these investigations, his most recent work is a reflection of the convergence of rounded forms on a monochromatic background where the viewer is submerged in an energetic and dynamic art.
