Contemporary Artists Part One

Louise Bourgeois

A prolific painter and printmaker. They explored a variety of themes over the course of their long career including domesticity and the family, sexuality and the body, as well as death and the subconscious. Although they exhibited with the Abstract Expressionists and their work has much in common with Surrealism and Feminist art, they were not formally affiliated with a particular artistic movement.

Richard Orlinski

A sculptor since 2004, their work, is conceived around the concept "Born Wild" in a style and with contemporary materials available for a large audience, including children.

Donald Judd

Artist associated with minimalism (a term they nonetheless stridently disavowed). In their work, they sought autonomy and clarity for the constructed object and the space created by it, ultimately achieving a rigorously democratic presentation without compositional hierarchy. It created an outpouring of seemingly effervescent works that defied the term "minimalism". Nevertheless, they are generally considered the leading international exponent of "minimalism," and its most important theoretician through such seminal writings as "Specific Objects" (1964)

Sol LeWitt

Came to fame in the late 1960s with his wall drawings and "structures" (a term they preferred instead of "sculptures") but was prolific in a wide range of media including drawing, printmaking, photography, painting, installation and artist's books. They have been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries around the world since 1965

Alexander Ney

Developing several individualistic styles in modern art, they are most famous for their unique work in terra cotta sculpture, involving heavily perforated surfaces and intriguing forms.

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Emerged from the "Punk" scene in New York as a gritty, street-smart graffiti artist who successfully crossed over from his "downtown" origins to the international art gallery circuit. In a few fast-paced years, they swiftly rose to become one of the most celebrated, and possibly most commercially exploited American "naif" painters of the widely celebrated Neo-Expressionism art movement.

Wolfgang Tillmans

German photographer. Their diverse body of work is distinguished by observation of their surroundings and an ongoing investigation of the photographic medium's foundations

Gerhard Richter

Has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. Their art follows the examples of Picasso and Jean Arp in undermining the concept of the artist's obligation to maintain a single cohesive style.

Jeff Koons

Known for working with popular culture subjects and his reproductions of banal objects—such as balloon animals produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces.

Yoko Ono

Multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist who is also known for her work in performance art and filmmaking

Anish Kapoor

One of the most influential sculptors of their generation. Perhaps most famous for public sculptures that are both adventures in form and feats of engineering, they manoeuvre between vastly different scales, across numerous series of work.

Ida Applebroog

Painter that has been known for creating paintings, sculptures, artists' books and several films that often explore the themes of gender, sexual identity, violence and politics

Bruce Nauman

Practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing, printmaking, and performance

Anselm Kiefer

Their monumental, often confrontational canvases were groundbreaking at a time when painting was considered all but dead as a medium. The artist is most known for their subject matter dealing with German history and myth, particularly as it relates to the Holocaust. These works forced their contemporaries to deal with Germany's past in an era when acknowledgment of Nazism was taboo.

Odd Nerdrum

Themes and style in their work reference anecdote and narrative. Primary influences by the painters Rembrandt and Caravaggio help place their work in direct conflict with the abstraction and conceptual art considered acceptable in much of their native Norway.

Marina Abramovic

Work explores the relationship between performer and audience, the limits of the body, and the possibilities of the mind. Active for over four decades, they have been described as the "grandmother of performance art." They pioneered a new notion of identity by bringing in the participation of observers, focusing on "confronting pain, blood, and physical limits of the body."

Yayoi Kusama

Work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. They also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film, and fashion design.

Takashi Murakami

Works in fine arts media (such as painting and sculpture) as well as commercial media (such as fashion, merchandise, and animation) and is known for blurring the line between high and low arts. They coined the term "superflat", which describes both the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese artistic tradition and the nature of post-war Japanese culture and society, and is also used for their own artistic style and that of other Japanese artists they have influenced

Sophie Calle

Writer, photographer, installation artist, and conceptual artist. Their work is distinguished by its use of arbitrary sets of constraints, and evokes the French literary movement of the 1960s known as Oulipo

Chuck Close

artist and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his massive-scale portraits

Olafur Eliasson

artist known for sculptures and large-scale installation art employing elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer's experience.

Keith Haring

artist whose pop art and graffiti-like work grew out of the New York City street culture of the 1980s. Their imagery has become a widely recognized visual language. Their later work often addressed political and societal themes through his own unique iconography.

Richard Serra

minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large-scale assemblies of sheet metal.

Damien Hirst

the most prominent member of the group known as the Young British Artists (or YBAs), who dominated the art scene in the UK during the 1990s. Art is centrally themed around death, uses frozen, dissected animals.

Shirin Neshat

visual artist who lives in New York City, known primarily for their work in film, video and photography. Their artwork centers on the contrasts between Islam and the West, femininity and masculinity, public life and private life, antiquity and modernity, and bridging the spaces between these subjects.