Hans Jean Arp

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

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

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

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

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.

Paul-Émile Borduas

Paul-Émile Borduas

Painter Paul-Émile Borduas was born in Sainte-Hilaire, Quebec in 1905. He gained an international reputation as a painter and is considered a renowned and celebrated figure of great influence in Quebec. During his youth, Borduas served as an apprentice for the Quebecois decorative church painter, Ozias Leduc, who convinced Borduas to enroll in the École des beaux-arts in Montreal and sent him to Paris to study at the Ateliers d’art sacré. After his studies, Borduas taught drawing and painting in primary schools in Montreal and served as a professor at the École du Meuble.

Influenced by the work of Surrealist André Breton, he created his first automatist work, Abstraction verte, in 1941. The following year, he showed forty-five Surrealist works painted in gouache at the Théâtre de l’Érmitage, Montreal that were very well received.

Borduas became the leader of the Automatistes, a group of likeminded painters who exhibited together from 1943-1947 inspired by the Surrealist movement’s interest in the subconscious. He was the main author of the group’s manifesto, Refus global (1948), which denounced old ideologies and aimed instead to open Quebec to new cultural and intellectual developments.

From 1953-1955, Borduas lived in New York where his painting practice evolved as a result of his experience with American Abstract Expressionists. At this time, he began to apply paint solely with a spatula to create more texture. 

Today, his work is on display at the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Vancouver Art Gallery in British Columbia, and the Musée d’art contemporain and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Quebec. Borduas’ work helped shape a distinctly Canadian artistic visual identity that is remembered to this day.

Sam Borenstein

Sam Borenstein

Sam Borenstein was a Lithuanian-born Canadian Expressionist painter who immigrated with his family to Montreal, Canada in 1921. His work has been compared that of Marc Chagall and Vincent Van Gogh, though Borenstein’s oeuvre is distinct in his Surrealist flavour. Borenstein created hundreds of works over the course of his career and, although he did not find much success during his lifetime, his work has become quite desirable in the contemporary Canadian market.

During his youth, Borenstein taught himself to paint by capturing the people and places surrounding him with exaggerated brushstrokes and vivid colours, working directly on his canvas with a palette knife. He aimed to paint the essence of things such as responses to the weather as well as emotions associated with people and places. His work is at once personal and expressive of universal human experience.

His work can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the Art Gallery of Ontario in Toronto, the Winnipeg Art Gallery in Manitoba, the Art Gallery of Hamilton in Ontario, the National Portrait Gallery in England, as well as the Musée national des beaux-arts du Québec and the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in Quebec, the last of which held a retrospective of his work in 2005. His daughter, Joyce Borenstein, a filmmaker and artist herself, created a short film of his life titled, Colours of My Father: A Portrait of Sam Borenstein (1991), which won nine international awards.

Mr. Brainwash

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.

Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky

Edward Burtynsky is a Canadian photographer known for his expansive industrial landscape photographs taken from aerial perspective. His work explores the systems humans have imposed on the environment as well as the negative consequential impact the planet has suffered as a result. Burtynsky has photographed a number of series of industrial sites in Canada, the United States, China, India, Europe, and Australia.

Born in 1955 in St. Catharines, Ontario, Burtynsky received his Bachelor of Applied Arts in Photography and Media Studies from Ryerson University in 1982. Only three years later in 1985, he founded Toronto Image Works, a darkroom, rental facility and training center available to all levels of the art community in Toronto.

Burtynsky has built an international reputation for himself in the art world. His work is in over sixty major museums including the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, the MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, and the Tate in London. In addition to producing photographs, the artist is an active lecturer. He has spoken at many institutions across North America as well as for the TED conference. His work has been published in National Geographic, the New York Times, Harper’s Magazine, and Canadian Art, among many others.

Jack Hamilton Bush

Jack Hamilton Bush

Jack Hamilton Bush was one of the first Canadian artists to garner international recognition. He was raised in London, Ontario and Montreal, Quebec. Bush initially worked as a commercial artist, but was inspired to pursue a career in the fine arts when he encountered the work of the Group of Seven.

During the 1930s in Toronto, Bush studied painting at the Ontario College of Art where he zealously painted landscapes. During this time, he developed his own unique style that employed a thoughtful arrangement of form and colour. He applied vibrantly coloured bars, and other geometric shapes with assertive motions, into compositions that were inspired by nature. These works retained a feeling of the landscape despite being rendered with abstracted motifs. Bush initially painted with oil paints, then acrylic and, later on, gouache as he strived to create strong, opaque imagery.

Dissatisfied with Canada’s detachment from the international art scene, he soon became a founding member of the Painters Eleven, a group of Toronto-based Abstract painters. In the late 1950s, the Painters Eleven and Bush made many connections in New York, including a friendship with revered art critic, Clement Greenberg.

In the 1960s, his international success grew. Notably, his work was included in Greenberg’s Post Painterly Abstraction 1964 exhibition and he was chosen as one of the artists to represent Canada at the São Paulo Biennial in 1967. Major retrospectives of his work have been held at the Art Gallery of Ontario (1976) in Toronto and the National Gallery of Canada (2014) in Ottawa. His work can be found in their permanent collections as well as in those of the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montréal in Quebec, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston in Massachusetts, and the Tate in London.