Artistes en vedette Archives - Page 2 sur 2

Alex Katz

Alex Katz is an American painter recognized for his distinctive style of portraiture. He was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1927. As a teenager, he attended the Woodrow Wilson High School for its art program and in 1946, he began his studies at The Cooper Union Art School in Manhattan, where he was trained primarily in Modernist art theories and techniques.

Katz’s paintings are almost equally divided into the genres of portraiture and landscape, though his portraiture is more well-known and celebrated. In his early career, he strived for realism in his paintings. He painted his friends and his wife, Ada, in his characteristic style of flat, planes of colour. He often worked from painted cut-outs of canvas which were mounted on contoured wood and, later, he would paint these shapes directly on cut wood and aluminum. In the 1960s, Katz painted large-scale paintings, often of faces, and began painting groups of people. He depicted the lives of artist, poets, critics and other colleagues. In 1965, he began printmaking. Throughout his career he has produced many editions in silkscreen, lithography, etching, woodcut and linoleum cut. In the late 1980s and into the 1990s, he focused on large landscape paintings which envelope the viewer in nature.

Today, Katz lives and works in SoHo, New York City. His work has been shown in more than two hundred solo exhibitions and five hundred group exhibitions internationally and is included in the collections of more than one hundred public institutions worldwide. He has received many awards and recognitions throughout his lifetime including the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy Museum, New York.

Roy Lichtenstein

Roy Lichtenstein was an American pop artist famously known for his comic-inspired work which played a vital role in the Pop Art movement of the 1960s.

Lichtenstein was born in Manhattan, New York in 1923. He left New York for Ohio State University to study Fine Arts, though his studies were interrupted for three years due to his Army enlistment in World War II. After the war, he finished his Bachelor’s degree and went on to obtain a Master of Fine Arts at Ohio State University. He was later hired by the university as an art instructor.

After nearly a decade of working and living between Ohio and New York City, Lichtenstein moved to upstate New York where he adopted an art practice in reaction to the Abstract Expressionist style. Instead of painting abstract works devoid of subjects, Lichtenstein took his imagery directly from comic books and advertisements.

The 1960s marked the height of Lichtenstein’s international fame. He moved back to New York City and painted his most famous works including Drowning Girl (1963), painted from a story in DC Comic’s Secret Hearts #83. Many critics questioned Lichtenstein’s originality since his works were near replicas of existing comic book panels. He always stood by his work and legitimized it by claiming its ability to take low art and elevate it to a high art context.

In 1964, Lichtenstein was the first American to exhibit at the Tate. In the following years he exhibited at other institutions throughout Europe. During this period, Lichtenstein also reproduced masterpieces by Picasso, Cézanne and Mondrian, recreating them with his own unique, hard-edge style. Later in his career he also reproduced works by Van Gogh, as he was continually inspired by art history.

Lichtenstein worked on many commissions as well including a Pop Art bedroom suite at the Palace Hotel in St. Mortiz, a BMW Art Car, the DreamWorks Records logo as well as public works in Barcelona, New York and other cities throughout the United States. Today, his work can be found in the collections the of the National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C., the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne and the National Gallery of Australia. In 1999, the Roy Lichtenstein Foundation was founded which holds hundreds of his works.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Donald Sultan

American painter, sculptor and printmaker, Donald Sultan, was born in Asheville, North Carolina in 1951. He obtained his Bachelor of Fine Arts from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in 1973 and his Master of Fine Arts at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago in 1975. During his studies, Sultan abandoned conventional methods of painting and began experimenting with different techniques, surfaces, and media. Today, he is best known for his large-scale, still-life paintings where he employs industrial materials such as tar, enamel, and vinyl tiles.

His fame in the art world first stemmed from his involvement in New York’s “New Image” movement. His first solo exhibition was at Artists Space in New York in 1977. In the 1970s and 1980s, his work was exhibited at the Mary Boone Gallery, the Whitney Biennial at the Whitney Museum, and modern art museums in Indianapolis, New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles. His art is both nonfigurative and representational, exploring the boundaries between the everyday and the abstract. Later in his career, Sultan transitioned his focus from industrial subjects to subjects of nature.

His work has been part of numerous exhibitions and resides in prominent public and private collections internationally including the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, the National Gallery of Australia in Parkes, Tate Modern in London, England, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Guggenheim Museum and the Whitney Museum, in New York, NY, among others. In addition to numerous grants and honours, Sultan was awarded honorary degrees from the Corcoran School of Art, Washington D.C., the New York Academy of Art, and the University of North Carolina. Today, he lives and works in New York City.

Tom Wesselmann

Tom Wesselmann was born in Cincinnati, Ohio in 1931. He attended University in his hometown to study psychology but was forced to put his education on hold after being drafted into the U.S. Army. During his time in the army, Wesselmann began drawing and decided to pursue a career as a cartoonist. Upon his return home, he fulfilled this desire and was successful in designing comic strips for men’s magazines and humour periodicals. His cartoons were often quite sexual in nature, which would later influence his fetishistic artwork.

In 1956, Wesselmann was admitted to Cooper Union, one of the most prestigious art schools in the United States where, under the influence of Willem de Kooning, he developed an interest in landscape painting and nudes. He abandoned his job and pursued his art practice full-time. His early work as a cartoonist and his interest in his Pop Art predecessors influenced his artistic sensibility characterized by sensual colours and a slick aesthetic. With its fetishistic isolation of erogenous zones (hair, lips, nipples, teeth), Wesselmann’s imagery is deemed the most blatantly erotic of the Pop artists.

Wesselmann is considered one of the major artists of the New York Pop Art movement. His work has been included in numerous solo and group exhibitions worldwide and he is represented in many of the world’s most prestigious collections including the Tate in London, England, the MoMa in New York, NY, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles in California, among others.

Andy Warhol

Andy Warhol is one of the world’s most prolific artists of his era. During his lifetime, he redefined art reproduction and pioneered the Pop Art movement. Today, he is widely considered an icon and is remembered for his art practice and lifestyle, both of which involved the celebration and proliferation of consumerist culture.

Warhol was born in 1928 into a working-class neighbourhood in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. During his childhood, he suffered from Sydenham chorea, a neurological disorder characterized by involuntary movements. When bedridden, he would read comics and Hollywood magazines, kindling his adoration of pop culture and icons. During these years, Warhol drew pictures inspired by his readings. His father recognized his talent and saved money for his son to attend Carnegie Mellon University where Warhol studied art.

After graduation, Warhol moved to New York City to pursue a career as a commercial artist. His first published work was an illustration for a story in a 1949 issue of Glamour magazine. Throughout the 1950s, he also worked as an illustrator for Tiffany & Co., Columbia Records, and Vogue.

In post-war, consumerist America, Warhol took note of the benefits of assembly lines devised for manufacturing purposes and employed this method of production in his studio. The Factory, suitably named for his art-making process, was Warhol’s famously silver painted and aluminum foil-covered studio. His studio became a hub for the New York art scene, where artists and celebrities would meet for parties and collaborations.

The early 1960s marked Warhol’s transition from hand-painted work to silkscreens. He created portraits of many famous people including Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, Jackie Kennedy, Elizabeth Taylor, and many more. Later in his career, he was commissioned to create album cover designs and portraits of hundreds of socialites, musicians, and film stars. In 1962, he made his famous series Campbell’s Soup Cans.

Although most famously known for his contributions to the Pop Art movement, throughout his career Warhol experimented with other various mediums including film, music, production, television, fashion, and theater. The largest work of his career was the Time Capsules (1974), which consisted of filled and sealed cardboard boxes filled with his belongings including letters, photographs, records, clothing, food, medicine, toys, artwork, and other random items. Warhol was known for his habit of collecting and documenting as he kept everything and captured his daily life using his Polaroid camera.

Warhol also had a taste for publishing. In 1969, Warhol co-founded the film, fashion, and pop culture magazine Interview. He published his first book, Andy Warhol’s Index in 1967 and, in 1975, The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again). His 1989 book, The Andy Warhol Diaries, was published posthumously and chronicles his life from 1976 to 1987.

Andy Warhol’s work has been featured in countless exhibitions, books, and documentary films. The Andy Warhol Museum, located in his hometown of Pittsburgh, holds a permanent collection of his art and archives.