Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell

Robert Motherwell was an American painter and printmaker as well as a successful writer and editor. He was born in Aberdeen, Washington in 1915. He earned a Bachelor’s degree in Philosophy from Stanford University in 1937 and later went on to complete his post graduate work at both Harvard and Columbia University.

His first well-known art pieces were created during a trip to Mexico in 1941, where he created pen and ink drawings. They were abstract in nature and innovatively combined formal compositional elements with spontaneous invention. In 1943, Peggy Guggenheim gave him the opportunity to create work for a show alongside several European Modernist artists. Following the show’s success, Motherwell was invited to participate in many others and, ultimately, was offered a contract with art dealer Sam Kootz. His accomplishments throughout the decade landed him a place in the New York School; a group that included esteemed artists Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, and Mark Rothko.

Motherwell was greatly impressed by both Surrealist painters and the Abstract Expressionist movement, both of which greatly influenced his practice. His signature style consisted of simple shapes and bold contrasts that create an active balance between moderate and strong gestural markings. He constructed a dialogue between the subdued and rebellious and between traditional and experimental art making.

Motherwell has had numerous solo and group exhibitions throughout his lifetime and his work is included in numerous private and public collections. His work is currently held in the prestigious collections of the Guggenheim Museum and the MoMA in New York, NY, as well as the Tate in London, England, among many others.  In 1981, Motherwell established the Dedalus Foundation with the primary intention to educate the public on Modern art by supporting research, education, and publications within the field.

Takashi Murakami

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

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.

Louise Nevelson

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.

Zoya Niedermann

Zoya Niedermann

Zoya Niedermann is a Canadian artist known for her bronze sculpture depicting architectural elements that incorporate the human form. She fuses the city’s landscape of geometric planes, arches, and doorways together with organic figures, literally connecting mankind with his urban surroundings. 

Niedermann was born in Montreal in 1954. Her grandmother emigrated to Canada from the Ukraine, and her father, from Belarus, was a mechanical engineer who worked at Canadair after the Second World War before pursuing his passion of photography.  She inherited his aesthetics in composition and balance of space.

Niedermann studied at Sir George Williams University and the Fine Arts School of the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts. In 1993 she won the Hakone Open-Air Museum price representing Canada at the Fujisanki Biennale in Japan, alongside artists Joel Shapiro and Magdalena Abakanowicz. She has sculptures in prestigious private collections world wide including that of Lady Victoria de Rothschild, SNC-Lavalin, the George Bernard Shaw Theatre in Niagara-on-the-Lake, the University of Windsor Library, Utsukushi-ga-hara Open-Air Museum in Japan, and the de Young Museum in San Francisco.

She works in Canada and travels to Italy where her bronzes are cast in foundries that Botero, Bernini, and Boccioni have used for centuries.

Julian Opie

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.

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.

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.