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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 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 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 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.

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 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 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.

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 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 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.