Portfolios Archive - Page 4 sur 9 - Robin Rosenberg Fine Art

Yves Gaucher

Yves Gaucher was a Canadian Abstract painter and printmaker who played an influential role in Quebec printmaking in the 1950s and 1960s. He was also a major contributor to the development of minimalism and hardedge painting.

Gaucher was born in Montreal in 1934 and attended Collège Brébeuf in Montreal in 1948. A year later, he studied at Sir George Williams College (today Concordia University). During his youth, he worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC) in the mailroom and, later in life, became a radio announcer with his own jazz program. He also played the trumpet and regularly performed gigs as a jazz musician.

After meeting Arthur Lismer, an artist of the Group of Seven, Gaucher decided to practice art more seriously. He studied at the École des beaux-arts de Montreal in 1954 but was expelled in 1956. From then on, he studied art on his own and took on freelance jobs. Years later, he returned to the École des beaux-arts and studied printmaking, creating his own technique of heavy embossing. His prints were technically innovative and represent his extensive career of experimentation.

His first exhibition was held at the Galerie d’Échange in 1957 after which he found much success in Montreal and throughout Canada. In 1962, he traveled to Europe to study art with a grant awarded by the Canada Council for the Arts. He was the founding president of the Associations des Peintures-Gravures de Montréal. In 1964, Gaucher began to focus on painting. The New York Modernist artists Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko majorly influence his work, evidenced in his use of geometric objects and flat colours on large canvases, emphasizing mathematical relationships, patterns, and spatial relationships.

Gaucher’s work, along with those of Alex Colville and Sorel Etrog, were chosen to represent Canada at the 1966 Venice Biennale. In the 1980s, he taught at Concordia University. In 1981, he was appointment as a member of the Order of Canada and became a member of the Royal Canadian Academy of Arts. His work has been shown at many institutions including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the MoMA in New York, and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Sam Gilliam

Sam Gilliam was born in Tupelo, Mississippi in 1933. He is an African-American colour field painter and lyrical abstractionist artist. He is associated with the Washington Colour School, a group of Washington, D.C. area artists that popularized a form of abstract art from colour field painting in the 1950s and 1960s.

Gilliam innovated the form of abstract expressionism by filling canvases with fields of saturated colour and layers of expressionistic brushstrokes. His work has been impacted by the free form structure of jazz music, citing Miles Davis and John Coltrane as influences.

One of the great innovators in post-war American painting, he often displays his paintings in atypical draping installations – taking the canvas off its stretcher and creating sculpture-painting hybrids. Recently, Gilliam has worked with aluminium, steel, and computer-generated imaging to produce textured paintings that incorporate metal forms.

In 2017, Gilliam participated in the Venice Biennale and in 2018 his work was exhibited at Art Basel. His work is included in the permanent collections of the Tate, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), Lincoln Center Editions, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA). In 2022, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC will exhibit the first major retrospective of his work in nearly two decades.

Gilliam currently works in Washington, D.C.

Adolph Gottlieb

Adolph Gottlieb was a well-known modernist painter and sculptor. A New York School member and a first-generation Abstract Expressionist, his work is characterized by expressions of authentic feelings and human difficulties, such as evil, violence, war, and ignorance. Growing up during the Great Depression and the interwar period, his artistic practice responds to the hardships and complexities of life that he witnessed and lived through.

Gottlieb was born in New York’s East Village, to a family of Jewish Czech immigrants. In 1922, he studied at the Parsons School Of Design and Cooper Union. In 1935, Gottlieb along with fellow artist Mark Rothko became founding members of the New York painters group called “The Ten”, which protested the American Realism painting style. Gotlieb used a common motif in the form of a sun or orb, hovering above calligraphic marks. He was known for using universal visual symbols, positioning them as a parallel to written language.

Today, Gottlieb’s work can be found in art institutions such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and the Reina Sofia National Museum in Madrid, among others.

Keith Haring

Keith Haring was an American artist born in Reading, Pennsylvania in 1958. In 1976, he began studying at a commercial art school in Pittsburgh. Upon realizing he had little interest in commercial art, he dropped out and moved to New York City to study at the School of Visual Arts. There, he participated in a thriving alternative art community that operated outside of the established galleries and museums alongside artists such as Kenny Scharf and Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Haring’s career was devoted to creating public art with his ultimate goal being to create accessible art for everyone. He created hundreds of public drawings for the New York subway system, designed sets and backdrops for theaters and clubs, painted murals, and created advertising campaigns. Additionally, he opened his own retail store called Pop Shop, where he sold merchandise adorned with his imagery. His artistic expression of universal concepts such as love, sex, death, and war, along with his direct visual language, enabled a large and diverse audience to engage with his work and find meaning in it.

After Haring was diagnosed with AIDS in 1988, he used his art as a vehicle to spread awareness about the disease. He also established the Keith Haring Foundation, a non-for-profit organization with the mandate to provide help and support to children and organizations involved in research, education, and care related to AIDS. The Foundation also houses many of Haring’s artworks and archives to facilitate research.

During his brief career, before passing away at the age of 31, Haring’s work was exhibited in more than one hundred solo and group exhibitions. He collaborated with a diverse array of well-established artists and performers including Madonna, William S. Burroughs, Andy Warhol, Yoko Ono, Timothy Leary, Jenny Holzer, and Grace Jones. His work resides in many established collections including the MoMa and the Whitney Museum in New York, NY, and the Art Institute of Chicago in Illinois, among others.

Lawren Harris

Lawren Harris was a Canadian landscape painter recognized for his participation in the Group of Seven, the famous group of Canadian landscape painters of the 1920s and 1930s. His work redefined the history of Canadian art and contributed to its own distinct style with his innovative representations of the northern landscape.

He was born in Brantford, Ontario in 1885 to a family with wealth and status, which facilitated his pursuit of painting. He studied at the Central Technical School at St. Andrew’s College and, from the age of nineteen, studied in Berlin. After the formation of the Group of Seven, Harris financed the construction of the group’s studio building in Toronto, which also provided other artists space in which to work. Additionally, he financed trips for the Group of Seven to paint in the Algoma region, a district in North-western Ontario.

In the late 1910s, Harris painted colourful, descriptive motifs of urban life and the Algoma region. During the 1920s, his work evolved and became abstracted and simplified, particularly in his stark landscapes of the Canadian north. Over the decade, he took numerous sketching trips around Canada, looking for inspiration in places such as Jasper National Park, Banff National Park, Yoho National Park, and Mount Robson Provincial Park. In 1930, he traveled to the Arctic on a two-month trip with a supply ship, during which time he completed more than fifty sketches. In 1934, Harris lived in and painted in Hanover, New Hampshire, and in 1938, he moved to Santa Fe, New Mexico where he organized the Transcendental Painting Group – an organization of like-minded artists who worked with a spiritual form of abstraction. After Harris achieved fame locally and internationally, he ceased signing and dating his work in the hopes that his audience would judge his pieces solely on their artistic splendour and not on their notoriety for being associated with his name.

In 1969, Harris was made a Companion of the Order of Canada. Today, his work hangs in many prestigious public collections throughout the country including, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, and the Musée des Beaux Arts in Montreal. In 2016, Steve Martin, the famed American actor and comedian, curated a travelling exhibition of Harris’ work entitled, The Idea of North, which voyaged to various institutions throughout Canada and the United States.

Jacob Hashimoto

Jacob Hashimoto was born in Greeley, Colorado in 1973. He studied at Carleton College in Northfield, Minnesota until 1993 and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1996.

Hashimoto is known for creating three-dimensional structures that consist of thousands of miniature kite-like pieces of bamboo-stiffened rice paper, suspended with nylon fishing line. Drawing inspiration from his Japanese heritage, he redefines the art of Japanese screen painting by combining individual abstract elements together to create dynamic graphic imagery. Though video games, cosmology, and virtual environments also inspire his work, the artist remains rooted in traditional mediums of modernism, handcraft, and landscape-based abstraction.

Hashimoto has exhibited his work in numerous solo and group exhibitions internationally and his work is included in many established public collections. Additionally, he has been commissioned to create several site-specific projects. His work is included in many established public collections He is represented by galleries in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, and Italy. He is currently based in New York and is actively represented by the Mary Boone Gallery in New York, NY, the Rhona Hoffman Gallery in Chicago, IL, and Studio la Città in Verona, Italy.

Al Held

Al Held was an American Abstract expressionist painter. Born in 1928 in Brooklyn, New York, Held joined the U.S. Navy in 1945. He showed little interest in art until after his service when he became inspired to enrol in the Arts Student League of New York with the help of a stipend from the G.I. Bill. From 1949 to 1952, Held lived in Paris to attend the Académie de la Grande Chaumière. During his studies, he discovered his distaste for realism and moved his artistic practice into the realm of abstraction. He drew inspiration from other Abstract Expressionist artists like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem De Kooning.

Held moved back to New York and soon became a prominent figure in the second-generation Abstract Expressionists who were quickly gaining popularity at that time. In 1959, he received his first New York solo exhibition at the Poindexter Gallery, firmly establishing his artistic career in both America and Europe. Held was appointed to the Yale University Faculty of Art as an associate professor where he taught from 1962-1980. In 1966, he was awarded both the Guggenheim Fellowship and the Logan Medal of the Arts. In 1988, he was elected as an Associate member of the National Academy of Design and in 1994 he shifted his career to focus full-time on academia.

Although best known for his large-scale hard-edge paintings and as a renowned Abstract Expressionist, Held’s painting practice evolved through a multitude of styles over the years including Pop Art, Geometric Abstraction, and Post-Painterly Abstraction. He openly rejected art critic Clement Greenberg’s modernist doctrine that insisted on the flatness of the canvas.

His work was exhibited in a significant number of group and solo exhibitions among North America’s most prestigious art institutions and is currently part of numerous public collections such as the MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, NY, among many others. Today, the Al Held Foundation manages his legacy by offering education to both students and teachers about Held’s works and influence.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is an artist, entrepreneur, and art collector who has been dominating the British art scene since the 1990s. He was born in 1965 in Bristol, England and moved to London in 1984 where he worked for a time in construction. Five years later, he earned his Bachelor of Fine Arts at Goldsmiths College in 1989.

Hirst’s artwork explores the relationship between art, life, and death through different mediums such as installation, sculpture, photography, painting, and drawing. As a teenager, death was fascinating to him and he made regular trips to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School where he drew inspiration for his drawings. In 1991, he began one of his most famous series, Natural History, where he preserved dead animals in steel and glass tanks with formaldehyde solution. The most famous piece of this series, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, is a large preserved shark suspended in a tank. This piece is considered one of the most iconic symbols of modern British art and pop culture of the 1990s.

Other well-known works by the artist include For the Love of God (2007), a platinum cast skull set with 8,601 pavé-set diamonds and the site-specific installation Pharmacy (1992). He has created numerous other well-known series featuring butterflies and colourful dots.

In addition to being an accomplished artist, Hirst has worked in a curatorial capacity. In 1994, he curated the group exhibition Some Went Mad, Some Ran Away at the Serpentine Gallery, London and in 2006, the award-winning exhibition In the darkest hour there may be light, also presented at the Serpentine Gallery.

Since 1987, Damien Hirst has had over eighty solo exhibitions and has participated in over two hundred group shows. In 1995, he won the prestigious Turner Prize in recognition of his significant contribution to British art. He also had a major retrospective at the Tate Modern, London in 2012. Today he lives and works in London, Gloucestershire, and Devon.

David Hockney

David Hockney is regarded as one of the most influential British artists of the twentieth-century due to his contribution to the Pop Art movements in the 1960s. He was born in Bradford, England in 1937 and attended the Bradford College of Art from 1953 to 1957. In 1959, he went on to study at the Royal College of Art, London.

As he started gaining popularity from his work in London in the 1960s, Hockney began making frequent trips to the United States. In December of 1963, Hockney traveled to New York to meet Andy Warhol, Dennis Hopper, as well as the curator of twentieth-century art at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. When traveling to Los Angeles for the first time in 1964, Hockney was inspired by the landscapes, which prompted him to switch from oil to acrylic paints in order to achieve smoother, flatter, and more vibrant colours. During this time, he experimented with Polaroids, worked on a series of Southern Californian landscapes, and created the first of his famed swimming pool paintings. Hockney also taught in several American institutions throughout the decade including the University of Iowa, the University of Colorado, Boulder, and the University of California, Berkeley.

Hockney’s popularity stemmed from his innovative focus on personal subject matter, depicting the domestic realm. He devised new ways of portraying water, particularly in his painterly articulations of reflections in his swimming pool paintings as seen in A Bigger Splash (1967) and A Lawn Being Sprinkled (1967). He also painted many portraits throughout his career and, as an openly gay artist, is an advocate for gay rights and explores the nature of homosexual relationships in his artwork.

In addition to painting, Hockney also worked as a draughtsman, a printmaker, a photographer, and a stage designer. In the 1980s, he began experimenting with photo collages with a technique he called ‘joiners’. Using Polaroids and 35mm pictures, he would shoot a single subject from different perspectives and arrange the photos like patchwork to create the final image. Since 2009, Hockney has embraced technology and painted hundreds of landscapes, portraits, and still-lifes using iPhone and iPad applications.

Today, Hockney’s work is frequently exhibited at prestigious institutions internationally. He has been awarded numerous honours and awards, the most distinguished of which was his appointment to the Order of Merit by Queen Elizabeth II in 2012 for his contributions to the arts. Most recently in 2018, he had a major retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, NY. He currently lives and works in London and California.

Candida Höfer

Candida Höfer is a German photographer who is internationally recognized for her large-scale photographs of empty interiors, specifically of cultural spaces such as libraries, museums, and operas as well as zoos and domestic dwellings. She uses photography as a tool to archive places as well as highlight their monumentality when people are absent.

She was born in Eberswalde, Germany in 1944. She studied at the Cologne Academy of Fine and Applied Arts from 1964-1968 and later at the Kunstakedemie Düsseldorf from 1970-1972. Before she began taking colour photographs of interiors and buildings, she worked as a portrait photographer for various newspapers. Her first solo exhibition was at the Konrad Fischer Galerie, Düsseldorf in 1975 and, since then, she has had solo exhibitions throughout Europe and the United States. In addition to her photography practice, she was a professor at the Hochschule für Gestaltung from 1997-2000.

Today, Höfer lives and works in Cologne, Germany. Her works can be found in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in California, the Philadelphia Museum of Art in Pennsylvania, the Tate in England, and the Hamburg Banhof in Berlin, Germany. In 2018, she was selected as the recipient of the 2018 Outstanding Contribution to Photography Award, presented by the Sony World Photography awards.