George Condo

George Condo

George Condo is an American artist known for combining Cubist-inspired faces with realistic forms to realistically represent the unreal, an approach that he has dubbed ‘Artificial Realism’. He blends elements from the European Old Masters with popular culture in his paintings, drawings, sculptures, and prints. Inspired by notable artists like Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, and Diego Velázquez, Condo created a surrealistic style for himself that he has also termed ‘psychological cubism’.

He studied Art History and Music Theory at the University of Massachusetts and moved to Boston where he worked as a silkscreen printer after graduation. Condo met Jean-Michel Basquiat in 1979 and was soon after inspired to pursue a career in the arts. He began to exhibit at galleries in New York in 1981 and, during this time, he worked in Andy Warhol’s silkscreen production studio. As Condo progressed throughout the 1980s, he began exhibiting in more prestigious institutions in New York, Los Angeles, and throughout Europe, a high point being his participation in the 1987 Whitney Biennial.

In 1999, Condo received an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has been an invited lecturer at prestigious institutions including Yale University, the Guggenheim, and Harvard University where he taught a six-month course titled Painting Memory in 2004.

Condo has received numerous commissions throughout his career including book covers, album artwork for rappers such as Kanye West, and t-shirt designs for Barney’s New York. He continues to exhibit extensively in North America and Europe in institutions such as the Whitney Museum, the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY. He currently lives and works in New York.

Robert Cottingham

Robert Cottingham

Robert Cottingham is an American artist predominantly known for his paintings and prints of urban building façades, neon signs, and shop fronts. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1935. After completing his service in the U.S. Army, Cottingham studied at the Pratt Institute in New York, earning his Bachelor of Fine Arts in 1963.

During the 1960s, he worked as an artistic director for an advertising firm while producing paintings inspired by the works of American Photorealists such as Edward Hopper and Charles Sheeler. Additionally, like many artists in the 1960s, Cottingham’s work was heavily influenced by Pop Art. His enlarged scales evoke the work of James Rosenquist and his employment of text echoes that of Andy Warhol and Robert Indiana.

In 1964, Cottingham moved to Los Angeles where he focused exclusively on his art practice. He experimented with photography and used his photographs as a reference point for his paintings. In the 1970s he moved to rural Connecticut and, although removed from the urban environment, he continued to paint more expansive and broad urban landscapes.

During his career, he exhibited extensively, most notably at the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Deutsche Guggenheim in Berlin, Germany, Documenta in Kassel, Germany, the Serpentine Gallery in London, England, and the Samsung Museum of Modern Art in Seoul, South Korea. Cottingham continues to live and work in Connecticut.

Maurice Cullen

Maurice Cullen

Maurice Cullen was a Canadian landscape painter known for his winter landscape paintings. He was born in St. John’s, Newfoundland in 1866 but was mostly raised in Montreal, Quebec. In 1889, he travelled to Paris to study at the École des Beaux-Arts and at the Académie Julian where he learned the traditional French style of Academic painting. While in Paris, Cullen discovered and was greatly inspired by the work of the Impressionists. During World War I, Cullen was assigned to be an official war artist to document the horrors of battle.

Cullen’s landscape paintings maintained the tradition of both European and Canadian painting, but employed more luminous, Impressionistic colours. Cullen’s Impressionist influence helped inspire the next generation of Canadian artists, having taught from 1891 to 1920 at the Art Association of Montreal. He was the first Canadian to be elected an associate member of the Société national des Beaux-Arts, Paris. In 1899, he was also elected to be an associate member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Jean Philippe Dallaire

Jean Philippe Dallaire

Jean Philippe Dallaire was a Canadian painter known for his festive imagery and macabre characters often painted in his highly original style reminiscent of both Surrealism and Cubism. During his artistic career, Dallaire rarely paid attention to trends and developed his own unique practice. In contrast to the cheerful colours of his palette, Dallaire’s work often features visibly troubled subjects affected by fear, madness, and violence.

Dallaire was born in Hull, Quebec in 1916. He studied at the Central Technical School in Toronto from 1932-1935, at the École des Beaux-Arts, Montreal and at the Ateliers d’Art Sacré, Paris in 1938. While in France, young Dallaire encountered the works of Pablo Picasso, Salvador Dali, and Joan Miró all of whom strongly influenced his art practice. Although technically trained, Dallaire is noted for his self-education and originality.

It is believed that the artist’s frequent employment of dark imagery stems from his experiences during World War II. While living in France in 1940, Dallaire and his wife were placed in the German internment camp, Saint-Denis. Although his wife was released after six months, Dallaire was forced to endure four years of imprisonment.

After the war, Dallaire briefly returned to Canada and later settled in Vence, France. He worked for the École des Beaux-Arts, Quebec from 1946-1952 and for the National Film Board from 1952-1958, where he worked in animation. During this period, he also received numerous commissions for murals, as well as an order to decorate the interior of the Queen Elizabeth Hotel in Montreal.

Dallaire’s work has been exhibited internationally in Paris, São Paolo, Seattle, and San Francisco. Retrospective exhibitions of his work have been held at the Musée d’Art contemporain in Montreal and the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City. In 1957, he participated in the Biennial of Canadian Art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. More recently, from 2005-2008, a traveling exhibition Dallaire, Illustrateurs, Extraits des séries historiques was organized by the city of Gatineau, Quebec and its municipal gallery.

Jim Dine

Jim Dine

Jim Dine is an American painter, printmaker, sculptor, poet, and conceptual performance artist. His artwork employs the use of nostalgic motifs, including Pinocchio, heart shapes, bathrobes, and tools that are both autobiographical and that focus on themes of personal identity and memory.

Dine was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1935. He studied at the University of Cincinnati and the Art Academy of Cincinnati. In 1957, he received a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Ohio University. He moved to New York the following year and became known for his critical role in a group of artists who initiated ‘Happenings’, which is a genre of performance art that challenges the elitism of Abstract Expressionism.

Dine believes in the power of simple images because their familiarity is accessible and relatable to any viewer. Although he uses straightforward and popular imagery, Dine resists his connection to Pop Art. Instead, he insists that his work is an extension of the work put forth by artists who question the power of iconic symbols rather than exploit them, such as Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns.

In addition to his numerous international exhibitions, his work is included in the public collections of the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, the British Museum in London, England, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the MoMA in New York, NY, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California, the Smithsonian American Art Museum and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., the Tate Modern in London, England, the Walker Art Centre in Minneapolis, Minnesota, and the Honolulu Museum of Art in Hawai’i. Today Dine lives in New York, Paris, and Walla Walla, Washington.

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet

Jean Dubuffet was a French painter known for founding the Art Brut movement (a French term that literally translates to ‘raw art’). This term was used to describe artworks made outside the realm of academic tradition, usually in reference to graffiti or naïve art – also called ‘outside art’. Dubuffet concerned himself with anti-culture and anti-art, dismissing conventional aesthetics. He challenged beauty standards, customary academic painting, and notions of realism. Refusing to believe in the difference between the beautiful and the ugly, Dubuffet deliberately chose to evoke the grotesque. 

Dubuffet was born in Le Havre, France in 1901. Though well educated, he rejected the notion of formal institutions, preferring to study on his own. In 1918, he moved to Paris and studied for a short time at the Académie Julian until he withdrew after a brief six months. It was not until 1942 that Dubuffet decided to return to painting. He was heavily influenced by the paintings of Jean Fautrier, a painter of Tachism (or Art Informel). Dubuffet used a similar stylistic approach by applying texture to paint with the combination of sand, gravel, tar, and straw.

While post-war Paris favoured artwork that reaffirmed old values, Dubuffet preferred to create ‘low-brow’, childlike imagery that satirized high art. Opposed to an intellectual approach, Dubuffet sought out the work of children and the mentally ill. He admired their unrepressed style with which they could freely experiment, unrestricted by rigid art theories and normative trends.

His early work is comprised of portraits of everyday people with exaggerated, grotesque features. During the later years of his career, Dubuffet experimented with unusual mediums such as with ballpoint and felt tip pens. He also began to embrace the Surrealist idea of automatic drawing as a means to tap into the subconscious. Dubuffet used this technique to create the graphic style of his later series, Hourloupe (1962), which were comprised of clean black lines forming cells filled with unmixed color that showcased the contrast between physical and mental representation. He considered these works of art to be in their purest form. They would continue to occupy him for the next several decades.

Throughout his career, his work was exhibited in numerous exhibitions and retrospectives internationally. Today, his work can be found in the permanent collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the MoMA, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, and the Tate Modern in London, England. The Foundation Jean Dubuffet in Paris, France continues to actively collect and exhibit his work.

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas

Friedel Dzubas was a German-born American abstract painter. He grew up in Berlin in 1915 and studied there before fleeing Nazi Germany to settle in New York City in 1939. In the 1950s, he began creating Abstract Expressionist paintings while sharing a studio with fellow painter, Helen Frankenthaler. During this time, he exhibited in various galleries throughout Manhattan, eventually attracting the attention of renowned art critic Clement Greenberg. Greenberg included Dzubas’ work in his 1964 exhibition, Post-Painterly Abstraction.

Dzubas created his works by applying thick layers of paint over washes, which were rubbed into un-primed canvases. For his large-scale works, he experimented with various techniques to apply colour, such as staining and brushing with acrylic paints as well as with Magna paint, a brand of acrylic resin paint.

During his career, Dzubas taught at Dartmouth College, the University of Pennsylvania, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and Cornell University. He won the Guggenheim Fellowship in 1966 and 1968 as well as the National Council on the Arts Award that same year. Additionally, he had more than sixty solo exhibitions around the world. His work is included in the collections of the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, and numerous other institutions across the United States.

Jessica Eaton

Jessica Eaton

Born in Regina, Saskatchewan in 1977, Jessica Eaton currently resides and works in Montreal, Quebec. She is a contemporary artist who has developed a unique experimental approach to photography which questions the very nature of the medium itself and aims to challenge human perception. 

Eaton received her Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Emily Carr University of Art & Design in Vancouver where she specialized in photography. She first received international acclaim through her series entitled, Cubes for Albers and LeWitt (known as cfaal), which comprised of geometric photographs that deconstruct her studio practice. Her artistic method involves taking multiple in-camera exposures of common studio supplies then manipulating the photographs using various methods such as colour-separation filtering and in-camera masking. The result renders her images with an aesthetic reminiscent more of paintings and drawings of hard-geometric abstraction than the photographs of traditional studio work. In this way, Eaton’s images portray alternate visions of reality that the naked-eye does not have the ability to perceive. 

Eaton’s photographs have been included in many solo and group exhibitions both in Canada and abroad in the United States and the United Kingdom. Her work is included in various prestigious collections, most notably in the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée d’art Contemporarain de Montréal, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the TD Bank Group Collection and the RBC Royal Bank Collection, among many others. 

Most recently, she was awarded with a fellowship at the Guggenheim in 2019.

Janet Fish

Janet Fish

Janet Fish in an American realist painter known for her large-scale still-life paintings. She often paints glass, plastic-wrapped fruit, or mirrors, paying particular attention to the depiction of transparency and reflections of light.

Fish was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1938 and was raised in Bermuda. She studied printmaking and sculpture at Smith College, receiving her Bachelor of Arts in 1960. For her Master of Fine Arts, Fish attended Yale University from 1960-1963, where she studied under Alex Katz and alongside fellow prolific students such as Chuck Close and Richard Serra. In 1967, she had her first solo show at Fairleigh Dickinson University and her first full exhibition shortly after in New York City in 1969.

Fish currently lives and works in New York City and Middletown Springs, Vermont.
In addition to her art practice, she has taught at the School of Visual Arts, Parsons The New School for Design, Syracuse University, and the University of Chicago. Her work can be found in the permanent collections of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, the MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, as well as numerous other institutions throughout the United States.

Günther Förg

Günther Förg

Günther Förg was a German painter, sculptor, photographer and graphic designer born in Füssen, Germany in 1952. He had a strong interest in modernism and developed a multi-disciplinary practice that combined artistic mediums and styles. His works recall Cy Twombly and Ellsworth Kelly, among others.

Förg studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich from 1973 to 1979. It was there that he began to explore abstraction and minimalism, two aesthetics that would go on to greatly influence his body of work. Förg was also influenced by architectural styles like the Bauhaus, which favoured geometric shapes like rectangles and spheres, without elaborate decorations.

Förg had his first solo exhibition at the Rüdiger Schöttle Gallery in Munich (1980) with a series of monochrome paintings. In 1992, he was represented at the Documenta IX, and in 1996, he won the prestigious Wolfgang Hahn Prize, awarded annually by the Museum Ludwig in Cologne.

His work has been exhibited internationally and is housed in the permanent collections of the Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin, the Kunstmuseum in Bonn, the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.