Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso

Pablo Picasso is regarded as one of the most important figures of twentieth-century art. Throughout his lifetime, he was one of the most well-known and prolific names in the art world, a recognition that persists to this day. He is particularly remembered for his role in the development of Cubism.

Picasso was born in Malaga, Spain in 1881. His father, also a painter, encouraged him to pursue an education in the arts. At the age of thirteen, he was admitted into the School of Fine Arts, Barcelona and at the age of sixteen into the Royal Academy of San Fernando, Madrid. There, he received formal instruction and learned the techniques of Realism. As an adult, Picasso spent most of his life in France – Paris in particular – which would greatly influence his work. His styles, varying greatly throughout his career, have been posthumously referred to as different periods: The Blue Period (1901-1904), The Rose Period (1904-1906), African Influence (1907-1909), Cubism (1909-1912), and the Crystal period or Synthetic Cubism (1912–1919).

Together with artist Georges Braque, Picasso co-founded Cubism, an avant-garde art movement that abstracted subjects into cube-like, geometric forms. This style had a significant effect not only on the art world, but on architecture, music, and literature as well. Additionally, Cubism provided the seeds for other avant-garde movements to germinate including, Futurism, Dadaism and Constructivism.

Throughout his lifetime, Picasso created thousands of paintings, sculptures, drawings, and ceramic pieces as well as theatre costumes and sets. His work can be found in numerous major collections in Paris, throughout Spain and in an impressive number of other institutions worldwide. Picasso continues to be the subject of numerous exhibitions internationally, most recently, the From Africa to the Americas: Face-to-Face Picasso, Past and Present exhibition (2018) held at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts.

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg was an American painter, performance artist, sculptor, and graphic artist. Due to his innovative blending of materials and methods, Rauschenberg became one of the most influential American artists of the twentieth century. His work expanded on the traditional boundaries of art making by merging the spheres of kitsch and high art by combining found objects with traditional mediums. He continually questioned the definition of art as well as the role of the artist. Rauschenberg declared that it is the artist who holds the authority to decide what art can be.

Rauschenberg was born in Port Arthur, Texas in 1925. He studied pharmacology at the University of Texas, Austin. He was drafted into World War II in 1943 and, as he refused to kill on the battlefield, was positioned as a medical technician in an army hospital in San Diego. While in California, Rauschenberg encountered art for the first time in his life. Inspired by what he saw, he enrolled in art classes at Kansas State University in 1947 and later at the Academie Julian in Paris. In the early 1950s, Rauschenberg studied at The Arts Students League in New York and his first solo show was held at the Betty Parsons Gallery, New York in 1953. After achieving fame in the 1950s and 1960s, he served as an influence to both Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, along with other prominent artists of the Pop Art movement.

Rauschenberg received many awards and accolades during his long career. In 1983, he received a Grammy Award for his album design Speaking in Tongues by the Talking Heads. In 1993, he received the National Medal of Arts and he was the recipient of the Leonardo da Vinci World Award of Arts (1995). In 1990, the Robert Rauschenberg Foundation was founded as an institution that promotes awareness of environmental and humanitarian issues, as well as other causes that Rauschenberg deeply cared about.

His work has been shown in numerous institutions worldwide, including the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, NY, and Centre Pompidou in Paris, France, among others.

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter is a German visual artist best known for his abstracted portraits. He was born in Dresden, Germany in 1932. As a young man, he had an apprenticeship with an advertising, stage-set painter and he later studied at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts. Before the erection of the Berlin Wall in 1961, Richter escaped to West Germany where he studied, and later taught, at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf.

Throughout his career, Richter has created abstract and photorealistic paintings, photographs, prints, and glass pieces. He became fascinated with the relationship between painting and photography during his school years. He is best known for blurring his photorealistic paintings. With his blurring technique, every part of the composition becomes equally important, thus distorting any traditional set of hierarchies within the composition. In his painting practice, he does not aim to imitate the photographs from which he works, but rather, to reinvent them entirely. He begins with a photograph, projects it onto a canvas, traces the exact forms, then paints to replicate the original picture and achieves his iconic blur by going over the painting with either a soft brush or a squeegee.

In the beginning of his career, Richter painted portraits of people in his life as well as members of the Nazi party and those affected by the regime. As a result, the majority of his artworks have politically charged undertones.   

Today, Richter lives and works in Cologne, Germany. He is the recipient of numerous awards and distinctions and is recognized as one of the most significant living painters today. His work has been shown extensively throughout the world and is part of many museum collections. Solo exhibitions of his work have been held at the Serpentine Gallery (2008), the National Portrait Gallery (2009), and the Tate Modern (2011) in London, England, the Centre Pompidou (2012) in Paris, France, and the Neue National Galerie (2012) in Berlin, Germany.

Jean Paul Riopelle

Jean Paul Riopelle

Jean-Paul Riopelle was one of the first Canadian artists to achieve notable international recognition, considered by many to be one of the most important Canadian artists of the postwar, twentieth century. As an Automatist, he was one of the original signatories of the Refus Global, along with Pauk-Émile Borduas. Extremely prolific, Riopelle produced over six thousand works, including more than two thousand paintings, throughout his career.

Riopelle was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1923 and began taking drawing lessons at the young age of ten. In 1942, he enrolled at the École des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. Inspired by André Breton’s Le Surréalisme et la Peinture, he experimented with non- representational painting. In 1947, Riopelle moved to Paris where he associated himself with the Surrealists. His first solo show took place in 1949 at the Galerie La Dragonne, a popular Surrealist meeting place in Paris.

Riopelle kept a studio near Giverny, France in the 1960s alongside American painter Joan Mitchell, with whom he had a romantic relationship with for the next two decades. During this time, he experimented with other mediums including ink on paper, watercolour, lithography, collage, and sculpture. In the 1980s, Riopelle moved back to Quebec and established his studio in Estérel. Here, he experimented with representational subject matter and aerosol spray cans.

Riopelle’s style is distinguished by a thick layering of hastily applied paint, a technique he employed in order to complete a painting in one session. He prepared all of his colours beforehand and applied them onto large canvases with a palette knife, a spatula, or a trowel. Depending on the gloss finish he applied, light reflects off the surface of the paints in different directions and with varying degrees of intensity. 

Riopelle has received many accolades for his significant contribution to Canadian art history. His work received an Honourable Mention at the São Paulo Art Biennial in 1952 and his work was chosen to represent Canada at the Venice Biennale in 1954 and, again, in 1962. He participated in the Younger European Painters exhibition at the Guggenheim in 1953 and received an Honourable Mention at the Guggenheim International Award exhibition in 1958. Moreover, retrospectives of his work have been held at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée National des Beaux-Arts du Québec in Quebec City, the Fondation Maeght near Saint Paul-de-Vence, the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, and at the Kölnischer Kunstverein in Cologne.

William Ronald

William Ronald

William Ronald was an influential Canadian painter, best known as one of the founding members of the artistic group, Painters Eleven, a Toronto-based group of Abstract artists active during the 1950s, partaking in their first exhibition of 1954. His abstract compositions are characterized by their spontaneity and energy, which he achieved through his particular method of applying paint in an automatic, unplanned manner.

Ronald was born in Stratford, Ontario in 1926. After graduating from the Ontario College of Art and Design University, he started producing abstract works. Feeling shunned by the Toronto art-scene, he worked for the Robert Simpson Co., a department store where he paired abstract paintings with furniture displays with the intention of persuading the public to embrace non-representational art. With Toronto’s growing resentment towards abstract art, Ronald moved to New York City in 1952 where he shared a studio with Frank Stella and studied at the Hans Hofmann’s School of Fine Arts. In 1957, he had his first exhibition at the Samuel Kootz Gallery where his work was well received by art critics and collectors alike.

In addition to painting, Ronald was a successful journalist for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) and was a columnist for the Toronto Telegram. He hosted TV and radio variety shows including, As it Happens (1969-1972) and The Umbrella (1966-1967). Throughout the latter half of the twentieth century, Ronald moved back to Canada and actively painted in various cities across the province of Ontario. He enjoyed painting in public venues, often hiring strippers to dance around him while he painted. He continued to paint until his death – literally – as he suffered a heart attack while painting a canvas 1998. He named the work in question, Heart Attack, before passing away several days later.

Ronald was a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts and his work is part of collections at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal, the MoMA, the Guggenheim, the Whitney Museum of Art, and the Brooklyn Museum in New York, as well as the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, among numerous others.

James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist

James Rosenquist was an American painter regarded as one of the chief artists of the Pop Art movement. He is best known for his enormous collage paintings drawn from advertisements and popular culture. His paintings are so large, they cover entire gallery walls, completely enveloping the viewer in his assemblage of consumer goods, weapons, celebrities, etc. The artist’s fascination with pop culture reflected his social, political, and cultural concerns. 

Rosenquist was born in Grand Forks, North Dakota in 1933. His mother, an amateur painter, fostered her son’s creativity by frequently taking him to art classes and museums. In 1952, Rosenquist began studying at the University of Minnesota under the painter Cameron Booth, an Abstract Expressionist who had worked under renowned painter Hans Hofmann. During university, Rosenquist worked as a commercial artist hand painting large-scale signs and billboards. The materials and techniques used for advertising greatly inspired his work. He was one of the first artists to address the exploitative power of the deceptive and omnipresent qualities of advertising.

Rosenquist’s oeuvre has inspired generations of artists. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Guggenheim Museum, the MoMA, and the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, as well as The Museum of Fine Art in Houston, Texas. His works can also be found in many prominent galleries and museums internationally.

Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha

American Post-War artist, Ed Ruscha was born in 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska and grew up in Oklahoma City where his family relocated in 1941. He moved to Los Angeles after graduating high school to attend the Chouinard Art Institute (now the California Institute of Arts). 

After graduating, he worked as a graphic designer for an L.A advertising agency which greatly influenced his work as an artist. His early interest in commercial art inspired him to create artwork that challenged traditional hierarchies of painting and prevalent artistic styles such as Abstract Expressionism. Although he continues to reject the labels of Pop or Conceptual artist, Ruscha certainly incorporates elements of both artistic movements into his paintings and photographs. Borrowing from tropes of advertising, he creates word-paintings which explore the noise and fluidity of language. The isolated words and phrases featured in his paintings and prints are often glib in nature and stem from pervasive colloquial clichés and vernacular culture. Since his early years as an artist, Ruscha has also been greatly influenced by the landscape of his home city, often incorporating vacant parking lots, swimming pools and nightspots into his compositions. 

Ruscha is known for employing unusual and untraditional media in his paintings and drawings. Some examples include gunpowder, blood, fruit juice and Pepto Bismol. 

Ruscha’s first solo show was held at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles in 1962. Other major exhibitions have been held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, Centre George Pompidou in Paris, The Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, among many others around the globe. He has also been the subject of several retrospectives in New York, Washington, D.C, London and Paris. Notably, he was elected to the American Academy of Arts in Letters in 2001. The artist continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

Richard Serra

Richard Serra

Richard Serra is an American minimalist sculptor and printmaker known for his large-scale sheet metal works. Born in San Francisco in 1938, he studied English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley in 1957 but later transferred to the University of California, Santa Barbara where he graduated with a Bachelor of Arts in 1961. From 1961-1964, Serra studied painting in the Master’s program at Yale University where he was greatly inspired by artists Philip Guston and Josef Albers. While in university, he supported himself by working in steel mills, surrounded by a material that would greatly shaped his career as an artist.

Serra’s first sculptures were abstract, process-based, and made of non-traditional material such as fiberglass, rubber, and molten lead. In 1969, he worked with the process of both cutting and stacking materials to create large structures that could balance on their own. This process contributed to the creation of his minimalist works, which he is most well known for today, many of which are commissioned public art pieces. In addition to sculpture, Serra has also worked and experimented with performance, video, prints, and drawing.

Serra lives and continues to work in Tribeca, New York as well as in Cape Breton Island, Nova Scotia. His sculptures can be found in the collections of the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, as well as the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art in California.

Erin Shirreff

Erin Shirreff

Erin Shirreff is a Canadian artist who was born in 1975 in Kelowna, British Columbia. She has an interdisciplinary art practice with a focus on photography, sculpture and video. Her work depicts semi-abstract, geometric forms that emphasize the formal characteristics – such as volume, shape and mass – of her artistic subjects.

In 1998 Shirreff received her Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of Victoria in Visual Arts. In 2005, she went on to receive her Masters of Fine Arts in Sculpture from the Yale University School of Art. Shirreff is interested in the relationship between two and three dimensional spaces. She uses flat images and works on paper to represent architectural structures and sculptures that appear flattened or two dimensional.

In 2005, Shirreff received The Hayward Prize for Fine Arts from The Austrian-American Foundation. In 2011, Shirreff was the recipient of both The Louis Comfort Tiffany Foundation Grant. She has also won the Aimia/AGO Photography Prize from the Art Gallery of Ontario. Shirreff’s work is included in the collection of the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston and the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York.

Shirreff currently lives and works in New York.

Frank Stella

Frank Stella

Born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1936, Frank Stella has become a renowned American painter, sculptor and printmaker. Stella attended the Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts where he first learned about Abstract Modernists Josef Albers and Hans Hofmann. Later, he attended Princeton University where he majored in History. Stella took frequent visits to New York galleries during his years of study, exposing himself to artists such as Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and Jasper Johns.

After graduating in 1958, Stella moved to the Lower East Side of New York where he quickly garnered attention in the art world. At the young age of 23, the MoMA purchased one of his works and included four in its 1959-1960 exhibition, Sixteen Americans. Famed gallery owner, Leo Castelli, decided to represent Stella’s work in that same year. In 1970, he was the youngest artist to have a retrospective at the MoMA and he was the first living artist to have a second retrospective seventeen years later.

Stella’s work emphasizes form rather than content. He famously referred to one of his paintings as “a flat surface with paint on it – nothing more.” His abstract paintings have no pictorial illusion, nor any psychological or metaphorical references. His artistic style, characterized by colour variations and circular motifs, is credited with influencing major movements such as Minimalism, Color Field Painting, and Post-Painterly Abstraction. Moreover, he inspired major theorists such as Carl Andre, Donald Judd, and Michael Fried. The esteemed Clement Greenberg regarded Stella’s work as corresponding with his concepts of flatness, the integrity of the picture plane, and the optical integrity of compositions.

Today, Stella lives and works in New York City. He is one of the most recognized and well-known postwar American artists.