Internationale Archives - Robin Rosenberg Fine Art

Hans Jean Arp

Jean (Hans) Arp was a French / German sculptor, painter, and poet. His work and artistic voice were deeply influential in creating both the Dada and Surrealist movements. He is well known for his biomorphic sculptures, which are described as ‘organic abstraction.’ These sculptures are abstract and non-representational, yet suggest natural motifs such as transformation, metamorphosis, and growth which are common themes within Arp’s art practice.

Arp was born in 1886, in Alsace which is a French town bordering Germany. Arp referred to himself as ‘Jean’ when speaking French, and as ‘Hans’ when speaking German. In 1911, Arp helped establish the first modern art alliance, Der Moderne Bund, thus interacting with artists such as Wassily Kandinsky, Amedeo Modigliani and Pablo Picasso. During World War I, Arp fled the horrors and dangers of war by going to Zurich, Switzerland, where he consequently helped found the Avant-Garde Dada Movement, which aimed to create chaos, while focusing on work that was both interdisciplinary and international.

In 1925, Arp helped form a new major art movement: Surrealism. His work was shown at the first Surrealist exhibition at Galerie Pierre, in Paris, alongside Max Ernst, Paul Klee, Man Ray, and Joan Miro, among others. He experienced extreme commercial success, which continued into the 1930s. His sculptures, in particular, gained much attention, following the 1937 exhibition at the Museum Of Modern Art, New York.

Today Arp’s work can be found in the collections of the Tate Gallery in London, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others.

Milton Avery

Though remaining relatively unknown during the majority of his lifetime, today American painter Milton Avery is considered a master colourist. His oeuvre is often compared to the vibrant and expressive work of Fauvist Henri Matisse in his expressive gestures and vibrant colours. Combining aspects of figuration and abstraction, Avery is considered to have prefigured elements of Color Field Painting. Born in 1885 in Altmar, New York, Avery studied at the Connecticut League of Art Students in Hartford where he received a conservative art education. Due to his family’s precarious financial situation, Avery contributed to the family’s income by taking on night jobs, leaving him limited time during the day to paint.

After moving to New York in 1925, Avery was able to fully dedicate time to his art practice. Though he exhibited his work throughout the 1930s, his career only gained momentum in 1943 when he joined the Paul Rosenberg Gallery. Associated with the European avant-garde movement, the gallery also represented notable artists such as Max Weber and Marsden Hartley. One year later, The Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C. granted him his first solo exhibition.

Avery only emerged as a major figure in the American art scene during the 1960s. His relatively delayed recognition was most likely due to the unbreakable commitment he held to his vision. During the early days of his career, critics were perplexed by his lack of concern for labels and movements; he believed his obligation was to be true to his art.

His work is currently held in the collections of numerous institutions across the United States and the United Kingdom including the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York, NY, the Tate Modern in London, England, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Philadelphia, PA, among others. His innovative use of colour paved the way for later colourists such as Mark Rothko, Adolph Gottlieb, and Barnett Newman – to name a few. Many such artists have acknowledged their debt to Avery and his body of work, a recognition that was first made public with a retrospective exhibition on the artist at the Whitney Museum of American Art, curated by Barbara Haskell in 1982.

Donald Baechler

Donald Baechler is an American painter and sculptor born in Hartford, Connecticut in 1956. He studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art from 1974-1977 and the Cooper Union in New York City from 1977-1978. Dissatisfied with what he thought was an uninspiring educational environment, Baechler transferred to an art school in Frankfurt, Germany to complete his studies.

In 1980, he returned to New York City and quickly became entrenched in the Lower Manhattan art scene, rapidly involving himself with the East Village artists, where the line between social life and artistic life was said to blur. During this period, he was represented by the Shafrazi Art Gallery, which focused on graffiti-oriented art and represented artists such as Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Although he was grouped amongst artists such as these, Baechler felt his work was more concerned with exploring formalism rather than specific subject matter or politics. Despite the fact that Baechler often used clichéd motifs such as skulls, roses, etc., he remains adamant in stating that he is an abstract artist and that line, colour, and form are of the utmost importance in his practice.

In his painting-collage-drawings, Baechler draws inspiration from a plethora of sources including art history, contemporary art, folk art, pop culture, and his childhood. His paintings and sculptures are also heavily drawn from images and objects that he has collected over the years in an accumulative process he calls ‘illusions of history’. His childlike imagery reflects pop culture references, echoing the work of Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, and is sometimes interpreted as a critique of innocence, sincerity, and nostalgia.

Today, Baechler lives and works in New York City. His artwork has been exhibited at numerous institutions worldwide including The Whitney Museum of American Art, the MoMA, and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, CA as well as the Centre Pompidou and the Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, France.

John Baldessari

John Baldessari was born in National City, California in 1931. He studied at San Diego State University and completed his post-graduate education at the Otis Art Institute, the Chouinard Art Institute, and the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to being recognized as one of the most renowned Californian conceptual artists of his time, Baldessari also gained a reputation as an influential teacher. He taught at the California Institute of the Arts from 1970-1988 and the University of California in Los Angeles from 1996-2007.

Originally a gestural painter, Baldessari began incorporating text and photography in his practice during the 1960s. In 1970, as a part of his controversial oeuvre entitled, The Cremation Project, he burned all of his paintings produced between 1953 and 1966. The artworks’ ashes were baked into cookies, placed in an urn, and were paired with a bronze plaque inscribed with the destroyed artworks’ birth and death dates.

His more recent conceptual work combines painting, printmaking, performance, video, sculpture, installation, and photography techniques. Baldessari’s frequent use of appropriated images, found photography, and text combines Pop Art motifs to create a narrative using the associative power of language.

His work has been shown in more than two hundred solo exhibitions and over one thousand group exhibitions. He received honorary degrees from San Diego State University, the Otis Art Institute of Parsons School of Design, California College of the Arts, as well as the National University of Ireland. His work has been featured in artist books, films, billboards, videos, and public works. He is currently held in a number of public and private collections including the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C., and the Broad Collection. Baldessari continues to work in Venice, California.

Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner is a leading American Conceptual artist best-known for his signature text-based paintings and prints.

Born in 1940 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Bochner earned his Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts from the Carnegie Institution of Technology in 1962. Shortly after graduating, he settled in New York City where he worked as a guard at the Jewish Museum. At this time, he began experimenting with artistic ideas that strayed away from the dominant art form of Abstract Expressionism. Bochner is recognized as one of the leading figures of artists who departed from this traditional compositional mode of painting and forayed into Conceptual art. He drafted influential critical and theoretical essays on art that have figured as a central components to Conceptualism and to his own artistic oeuvre.

Throughout his career, Bochner has been particularly fascinated with the intersection of linguistic and visual representation. He has received international attention and accolades for pioneering the introduction of the use of language within the visual arts. His popular thesaurus painting series consists of lists of synonyms displayed in rainbow colored palettes, often featuring a single word repeated in painterly capital letters, the most common words being ‘Ha’ and ‘Blah’.

In addition to painting, Bochner frequently employs the monotype printing technique, as he admires the embossing possibilities the medium offers.

Bochner’s artwork has been widely exhibited throughout his career. In 1995, the Yale University Art Gallery initiated a retrospective of his work, which was later turned into a book. His works are included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Courtauld Institute of Art in London, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, The Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., among many others around the globe. He continues to live and work in New York City.

Mr. Brainwash

Thierry Guetta, best known by his moniker, Mr. Brainwash, is a provocative figure in the world of contemporary street art. He was born in Garges-les-Gonesse, France in 1966 and relocated to Los Angeles with this family at the young age of 15. After dropping out of high school, Guetta delved into an array of businesses, including selling vintage clothing, creating a production company and managing a nightclub. Guetta also had an affinity for documentary videography, amassing hours of endless footage that recorded aspects of mundane everyday life.

On a trip to Paris, Guetta met his cousin who he learned was the infamous street artist, Space Invader. His knack for filming led him to record his cousin’s nightly artistic endeavors and launched him into the world of graffiti and street art. Shortly after, he met Shepherd Fairy and Banksy, who he also filmed. Impressed with the footage, Banksy suggested Guetta experiment with street art himself.

Seemingly overnight, Guetta adopted the personality of Mr. Brainwash and established his own artistic style. His subversive graffiti-pop oeuvres consist of richly layered screenprints, stencil work and spray paint that fuse historical pop imagery with contemporary cultural iconography.

He quickly gained widespread notoriety with his first solo show, “Life is Beautiful”, in Los Angeles in 2008. The exhibition elicited the attention of celebrities and central figures in the artworld. Wildly successful, Guetta amassed over a million dollars in just a few short weeks. Guetta’s central role in Banksy’s Academy Award nominated film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop” (2010), further launched the artist into stardom.

In addition to being featured in notable art collections and exhibitions worldwide, Guetta has been involved in various high profile commissions. Most notably, he designed the cover for Madonna’s Celebration album and he directed a campaign for the Red Hot Chili Peppers . He continues to live and work in Los Angeles.

Alexander Calder

Alexander Calder was an American artist, best known as a sculptor, who gained notoriety in the 20th century as a pioneer of the kinetic art movement. His sculptures are renowned for their innovative ability to transform mundane found materials such as wire, sheet metal, and metallic rods into whimsical works through the advent of colour, size, and, most famously, movement. Calder is recognized for his ability to transgress the boundaries of sculpture in the unique way he animates his pieces both playfully and performatively.

Calder was born in Pennsylvania to parents that were both artists. He originally pursued a career in mechanical engineering which greatly influenced his artistry, evidenced through his source materials. In the mid 1920s, he moved to Paris and enrolled in the Académie de la Grande Chaumière where he developed his first canonical piece: The Cirque Calder. It consisted of hundreds of miniature wired sculptures the artist manipulated himself to perform a small-scale mechanical circus. Calder received his first solo exhibition in 1927.

In the 1930s, Calder befriended various avant-garde artists including Fernand Léger, Marcel Duchamp, Joan Miro, and Piet Mondrian. His relationships with these artists, particularly Mondrian, heavily influenced his artistic practice as he was introduced to abstraction. Calder’s work evolved from figurative sculpture to more abstract works that emphasized colour and shape, yet continued to be lively in their allusions to the natural world and the presence they take up where ever they reside. In addition to sculpture, he worked heavily in print media as well as in tapestry.

Today, Calder’s sculptures proliferate throughout the art world and are showcased in many major museums around the world such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Recently, in 2018, the Musée des Beaux Art in Montreal hosted a blockbuster retrospective entitled, Alexander Calder: Radical Inventor.

Lynn Chadwick

Lynn Chadwick was an English sculptor known for creating semi-abstract sculptures in bronze and steel. Although he did not attend art school or receive any formal training as a sculptor, Chadwick achieved international recognition and success during his lifetime.

He was born in London in 1914 and studied at the Merchant Taylor’s School. He became a trainee draughtsman and worked in architecture offices throughout his youth. During World War II, he served as a pilot escorting Atlantic convoys. After the war, he became more involved in the design field by working in textiles, furniture, and mobiles.

In 1947, he moved to a more rural area in England and established a studio where he began designing his first sculptures. Three years later, Chadwick had his first solo exhibition and soon after received several large commissions for the Festival of Britain complex, the Arts Council of Great Britain, and the Battersea Park Open Air Sculpture Exhibition.

In 1951, Chadwick had his first international exhibition with the American Abstract Artists Group in New York. The following year, his work was selected to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale, which gained him an international reputation for using bronze rods as opposed to traditional materials to create his pieces. In the late 1950s, the artist was once again chosen to represent Britain at the Venice Biennale where he won the International Sculpture Prize. This exhibition traveled to Vienna, Munich, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, and London. In the 1960s, his work became more experimental with the creation of abstract human forms in addition to other complex figures.

His first retrospective exhibition was held at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in 1992 and a second was held in 2003 at the Tate Britain. In 2001 he was appointed a position as Senior Royal Academician of the Royal Academy of Arts. Today, his work is in the prestigious collections of the MoMA and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, NY, the Tate Modern in London, England, the Centre Pompidou and the Musée Rodin in Paris, France, and the Art Gallery of Ontario in Canada, among many others throughout North America, Europe, and Africa.

Marc Chagall

Marc Chagall was born near Vitebsk, Russia (today Belarus). He was raised in a Jewish community and attended religious schools throughout his youth. In 1906, Chagall left Vitebsk to study at the Zvantseva School of Drawing and Painting in St. Petersburg. During his studies he was apprenticed under Leon Bakst, an artist and set designer who encouraged Chagall to express his Jewish heritage through his art practice.

He moved to France in 1910 and became a prominent painter at the École de Paris. His work combined Fauvism, Cubism, and Surrealism to create dream-like motifs in a poetic and figurative style. As his practice evolved, Chagall continued to express his Jewish identity, bringing together cultural traditions coupled with aspects of modernism.

When Chagall returned to Russia for a short visit, he was forced to stay in the country due to the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and, while there, took up the political post of Commissar of Arts. During this time, he managed to create new paintings and exhibit in Moscow and St. Petersburg. In 1923, he was able to move back to Paris with his wife. He began working on commissions, traveling and exhibiting his work until the outbreak of World War II. With the threat of Hitler’s Third Reich and his publicly known Jewish identity, Chagall and his family sought refuge in New York City. In 1947, he moved back to Europe and settled in Vance, France.

Throughout the decades that followed, Chagall was commissioned to create numerous large-scale public artworks such as a stained-glass window for the Hadassah University Medical Center in Jerusalem, the memorial Peace window for the United Nations, The American Windows for The Art Institute of Chicago, the ceiling of the Paris Opera House, and murals for the Metropolitan Opera in New York.

Throughout his lifetime, Chagall mastered a number of mediums including oil and gouache, and watercolour painting, etching, lithography, drawing, ceramics, set and costume design, as well as stained glass. His work is housed in the Palais Garnier in Paris, France, the Tate Modern in London, England, and the Metropolitan Opera in New York, NY, among other prestigious international collections.

Christo

Christo Vladimirov Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude were a married couple that created large works of art in different environments. Their works became part of the environments themselves with the intention that spaces could be seen with new perspectives and consciousness. Artistic credit was only given to Christo for their large instillations up until 1994 when their works began being credited to “Christo and Jeanne-Claude.”

Both artists were born on the same day in 1935, Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude in Casablanca, Morocco. Christo studied art at the Sofia Academy from 1953-1956 and lived in both Prague and Austria in the late 1950s. He later studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and moved to Paris in 1958, where he met Jeanne- Claude when he was commissioned to paint a portrait of her mother. Jeanne-Claude graduated with a baccalauréat in Latin and philosophy from the University of Tunis in 1952. She received no formal art education during her lifetime and claims that she became an artist out of her love for Christo. During their projects, it was her responsibility to oversee work crews and raise funds.

In the 1960s, the couple began collaborating on their installations. In 1962, they covered barrels at the port of Cologne and, the following year, they blocked off Rue Visconti in Paris with a wall of oil barrels as a protest against the Berlin Wall. In addition to their barrel works, other major works include Wrapped Trees (1966-1998), The Gates (1971-2005), Wrapped Reichstag (1971-1995), The Pont Neuf Wrapped (1975-1985), Running Fence (1972-1976) and many more.

Although their work was often considered controversial due to their colossal sizes and invasiveness on the environment, the artists maintained that the purpose of their artwork was merely to bring joy and beauty and to create new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

Jean-Claude passed away in 2009 and Christo passed away in 2020.