Henry Moore

Henry Moore

Sculptor Henry Moore is heralded as one of the most significant British artists of the twentieth-century. He is known for his semi-abstract bronze sculptures of human figures, typically in reclining positions. His forms, often suggestive of human bodies or landscapes, consist of hollow spaces and organic shapes. Moore’s work was instrumental to the introduction of Modernism in England and Europe.

Moore was born in Castleford, Yorkshire, England in 1898. In his youth, he was encouraged by his teachers to pursue a career in the arts but his education was put on hold when he served in the British Army during World War I. After an injury resulting from a gas attack at the Battle of Cambrai, he returned to England where he became a student at the Leeds School of Art and, later, he also attended the Royal College of Art in London.

During the 1930s, Moore’s reputation continued to grow but his career was, once again, put on hold due to war. During World War II he was recruited as an Official War Artist and produced his now famous drawings of people taking shelter in the London Underground during the Blitz. Afterwards, Moore was able to return to his sculptural practice and use the reputation he gained during the war to exhibit his work to a larger audience. 

In the 1940s and 1950s, he gained international success. In 1943, his first solo exhibition in the United States was held at the Buchholz Gallery in New York. His first major international retrospective was held at the MoMA in New York in 1946. In 1948, at the first Venice Biennale since the war, Moore was awarded the International Sculpture Prize. His sculptures were celebrated for representing optimism, humanist values, and an opposition to Fascism. Today, his works are part of numerous collections internationally and his public artworks are found around the world.

The Henry Moore Foundation, established in 1977 by the artist’s family, encourages a public appreciation for the arts and supports sculpture projects, exhibitions, and the preservation of Moore’s legacy. Although exceptionally wealthy during his life, Moore lived modestly and endowed most of his earnings to the foundation.

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell was an American painter and printmaker as well as a successful writer and editor. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1915. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and later went on to complete his post graduate work at both Harvard and Columbia University.

His first well-known art pieces were created during a trip to Mexico in 1941, where he created pen and ink drawings. They were abstract in nature and innovatively combined formal compositional elements with spontaneous invention. In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim gave him the opportunity to create work for a show alongside several European Modernist artists. Following the show’s success, Motherwell was invited to participate in many others and, ultimately, was offered a contract with art dealer Sam Kootz. His accomplishments throughout the decade landed him a place in the New York School; a group that included esteemed artists Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Motherwell was greatly impressed by both Surrealist painters and the Abstract Expressionist movement, both of which greatly influenced his practice. His signature style consisted of simple shapes and bold contrasts that create an active balance between moderate and strong gestural markings. He constructed a dialogue between the subdued and rebellious and between traditional and experimental art making.

Motherwell has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout his lifetime and his work is included in numerous private and public collections. His work is currently held in the prestigious collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the MoMA in New York, NY, as well as the Tate in London, England, among many others.  In 1981, Motherwell established the Dedalus Foundation with the primary intention to educate the public on Modern art by supporting research, education, and publications within the field.

Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami is a Japanese Contemporary artist born in Tokyo in 1962. Often referred to as the “Warhol of Japan”, Murakami works in a contemporary Pop style and is one of the most celebrated artists to come out of post-war Asia.

He attended the Tokyo University of the Arts and majored in Nihonga, a traditional style of Japanese painting. It was here that he began to combine his childhood interests in anime and manga with his new interests in Fine Art, thus blurring the lines between “high” art and “low” art. He coined the term “superflat,” which refers to both the aesthetic characteristics of the Japanese tradition and the nature of post-war Japanese culture. The term has had a large influence on other contemporary Japanese artists.

Murakami has a diverse practice, working with classical mediums like painting and sculpture in addition to the commercial mediums of fashion, merchandise and animation. He is an enthusiastic collaborator; throughout his career, he has worked on projects with Marc Jacobs, Louis Vuitton, Kanye West and Kid Cudi. Recently, Murakami has ventured into the emerging NFT market, producing and selling several highly valued images at auction.

The artist has an extensive international exhibition record. Most notably, Murakami has produced solo shows for MoMA PS1 in New York, Serpentine Galleries in London, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, and the Brooklyn Museum. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York, and the Coleccion SOLO in Madrid.

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz

Vik Muniz is a Brazilian artist and photographer known for his use of everyday objects to create photo-representational imagery of pop culture icons and art history. His goal is to create repurposed imagery of old themes in a new, innovative light.

Muniz was born in São Paulo, Brazil in 1961. Inspired by the work of Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons, the young Muniz moved to New York and started a career in art. There, he began experimenting with quotidian objects such as sugar, thread, chocolate syrup, garbage, and even diamonds to create his work. Once his initial composition is complete, he captures a photograph of it and destroys the original piece so that the work only exists as a print. Muniz dismisses the idea of the ‘original’ and, instead, embraces the individuality of the reproduction.

Muniz’s work has been featured in international solo and group exhibitions. His work is also included in numerous publications and the collections of the MoMA, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL, the Tate in London, England, and many more. In addition to his art practice, Muniz has worked on a number of curatorial projects as well such as the ninth edition of the exhibition “Artist’s Choice” (2008-2009), staged at MoMA in New York.

Kazuo Nakamura

Kazuo Nakamura

Kazuo Nakamura was a Japanese-Canadian painter and sculptor who was a member of the Painters Eleven, the Toronto-based group of Abstract artists active during the 1950s. He was born in Vancouver, British Columbia in 1926. At the age of fifteen, Nakamura was subject to the Japanese-Canadian internment camps during World War II, a place that became a subject he frequently depicted in his early paintings and watercolours. After the war, in 1948, his family settled in Toronto where he attended the Central Technical School.

In 1953, Nakamura’s work was part of The Abstracts at Home show at The Robert McLaughlin Gallery in Oshawa. At this exhibition, he was introduced to the members of Painters Eleven and was invited to join the group by fellow artist, William Ronald. Nakamura’s work was distinguishable from the rest of the Painters Eleven as his works tended to be simpler in structure and employed a more monochromatic colour palette. Moreover, unlike the other members, Nakamura followed a highly analytical approach to painting, rather than a gestural one.

In the 1970s and 1980s, the artist distanced himself from the group and his work evolved from landscapes to more abstract compositions. Employing a mathematical and scientific approach, Nakamura painted grid paintings based on the Pascal triangle. He investigated the link between form and dimension through his art practice, aiming to discover a fundamental universal pattern in art and nature.

Nakamura’s work has been exhibited extensively throughout Canada and internationally. In 1955, he was part of the first Biennial Exhibition of Canadian Painting at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. His work was included in numerous exhibitions in New York, Holland, Switzerland, Germany, and Yugoslavia throughout the latter half of the century. In 2004, a retrospective of his work titled, Kazuo Nakamura: A Human Measure, was held at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto. In 2000, two years shy of his death, Nakamura was named an honorary fellow of the Ontario College of Art and Design and was made a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts.

Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson

Louise Nevelson is a sculptor best known for her large-scale installation pieces consisting of various found objects painted in a uniform colour. She is also remembered for achieving success in a largely male-dominated art world. Her legacy continues to inspire feminist artists today.

Nevelson was born as Leah Berliawsky in 1899 in Pereiaslav-Khmelnytskyi, Russia (today Ukraine). In 1905, her family emigrated from Russia to the small town of Rockland, Maine. In 1920, she moved to New York City to pursue her artistic career. She attended the Art Students League in New York from 1928-1930 where she studied painting, modern dance, and sculpture. From 1931-1932, she traveled to Munich to study under Hans Hofmann, later returning to New York. In the 1930s, she met Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, and assisted him with his murals for the New Workers’ School.

She began receiving attention for her sculptures in the early 1940s. Despite her growing popularity, many curators and critics continued to dismiss her work due to her gender. In Linda Nochlin’s famous essay Why Have There Been No Great Women Artists? (1971), Nevelson is considered to have been a major influence for female artists and was credited with redefining femininity in art.

Her most well known sculptures consist of wooden objects gathered from the urban environment which were carefully combined and arranged to create enormous installations. These assemblages echo the contrast between the city and nature while protesting the long-believed idea that large invasive sculptures are exclusively a ‘men’s art practice.’ Although her wooden works have gained the most popularity, in the 1960s and 1970s she experimented extensively with other materials including Plexiglass, aluminum, and steel.

Nevelson’s first retrospective was presented at the Whitney Museum and today, her works are held at the Tate in London, England, the MoMA in New York, NY and the Art Institute of Chicago in Chicago, IL, among others.

Zoya Niedermann

Zoya Niedermann

Zoya Niedermann is a Canadian artist known for her bronze sculpture depicting architectural elements that incorporate the human form. She fuses the city’s landscape of geometric planes, arches, and doorways together with organic figures, literally connecting mankind with his urban surroundings. 

Niedermann was born in Montreal in 1954. Her grandmother emigrated to Canada from the Ukraine, and her father, from Belarus, was a mechanical engineer who worked at Canadair after the Second World War before pursuing his passion of photography.  She inherited his aesthetics in composition and balance of space.

Niedermann studied at Sir George Williams University and the Fine Arts School of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In 1993 she won the Hakone Open-Air Museum price representing Canada at the Fujisanki Biennale in Japan, alongside artists Joel Shapiro and Magdalena Abakanowicz. She has sculptures in prestigious private collections world wide including that of Lady Victoria de Rothschild, SNC-Lavalin, the George Bernard Shaw Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the University of Windsor Library, Utsukushi-ga-hara Open-Air Museum in Japan, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

She works in Canada and travels to Italy where her bronzes are cast in foundries that Botero, Bernini, and Boccioni have used for centuries.

Julian Opie

Julian Opie

Julian Opie is a pop artist whose distinct style of clean lines, solid colours, and flat dimensions is instantly recognizable. Opie draws influence from classical portraiture, woodblock prints, the public, and traffic signs to create his clean visual language. Through his art, the Opie aims to engage with the history of art as well as the human body as subject matter using new technological methods.

Opie was born in London, England in 1958 and raised in Oxford. In 1982, he graduated from Goldsmith’s School of Art, London and quickly became an influential figure in Britain’s art scene. His works include sculpture, painting, film, and printmaking. Opie’s LED sculptures depicting human figures walking or dancing are by far one of his most iconic projects. Many of his LED works are public art installations in various cities including New York, Phoenix, Indianapolis, Calgary, London, Dublin, Zurich, Prague, Seoul, and Tokyo. He has also developed LED projections for the band U2’s Vertigo world tour.

Today, Opie lives and works in his hometown of London. His work has been featured in an extensive number of international exhibitions and collaborations. Artwork by Opie can be found in the collections of the National Portrait Gallery and Tate Modern in London, England, as well as the MoMA in New York, NY.

Alfred Pellan

Alfred Pellan

Alfred Pellan was a Canadian artist whose practice explored painting, illustration, theatre, costume design, and printmaking. He was greatly influenced by European art, particularly the Fauvists, Surrealists and Cubists; he sought to expose elements of these avant-garde movements to the Canadian art scene.

Pellan was born in Quebec City in 1906. In 1926, he graduated from the École des Beaux-Arts de Québec. His first work sold was purchased by the National Gallery of Canada when he was only seventeen. In 1926, he traveled to Paris to study at the École national supérieure des Beaux-Arts, where he incorporated his newfound Fauvist influence into his painting practice.

After returning to Quebec, Pellan settled in Montreal and taught at the École des Beaux- Arts. During the 1940s, he illustrated books, designed theatre costumes, and became involved in printmaking. He became every more interested in Surrealism and Cubism, evident in his adoption of more, vivid, complex, and textured compositions in his paintings. His still life works were created in a mosaic-like surface and were animated with dynamic, fluid lines.

The artist returned to Paris in 1955 when the Musée National d’Art Moderne held an exhibition of more than one hundred of his works. He was the first Canadian to have a solo exhibition at this institution. During his lifetime, Pellan was awarded numerous awards and honours for his significant contribution to Canadian art. Today, his work is held in many prestigious public and private collections across the country and abroad.

William Perehudoff

William Perehudoff

William Perehudoff was a Canadian painter who, throughout his five-decade career, made important contributions to the development of Color Field painting in Canada with his vibrant, abstract works. Inspired by the theories of art critic Clement Greenberg, Perehudoff dedicated his artistic practice to the exploration of non-referential abstraction.

Perehudoff was born in 1919 in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan and was raised on his family’s farm where he spent the majority of his life. He studied abroad at the Colorado Springs Fine Art Centre from 1948-1949 and later in New York. In the 1950s, Perehudoff began experimenting with bold, colourful abstraction, a style he continued to modify throughout his career. His early works were reminiscent of the Saskatchewan landscapes, represented by broad horizontal bands of colour.

The artist was awarded the Saskatchewan Order of Merit in 1994 and became a member of the Order of Canada in 1999. A travelling retrospective of his work, The Optimism of Colour, took place in 2011 and was exhibited in various cities throughout the country. His work is in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada and the Canada Council Art Bank in Ottawa, the Glenbow Museum in Calgary, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, among others.