Janine Antoni
Antoni, 44, is one of the country's best-known artists. The Bahamas-born Columbia University professor became famous in the 1990s with a unique brand of performance art that elegantly blended traditional women's roles, female-targeted marketing and feminist polemics. She once made a sculpture by gnawing on a 600-pound block of chocolate. She swabbed a floor with hair dye, using her hair as the mop. She cast a self-portrait in soap, then bathed with it. She created a leather shroud, fitted perfectly to her body, that allowed her to symbolically take the place of the departed cow. In every case, her works were subtle, sublime and easily understood.
Antoni, a former dancer, usually uses her body as part of the process.
blog.nola.com/dougmaccash/
farm3.static.flickr.com
www.lacan.com/antoni3.jpg
Vito Acconci
Since the late 1970s, American artist Vitto Acconci has designed architectural and installation works for public spaces, however he was originally a poet of the New York school before moving towards performance, sound, and video work by the end of the 1960’s.
Acconci changed direction in order to “define his body in space, his early performances—including Claim (1971) and Seedbed (1972)—were extremely controversial, transgressing assumed boundaries between public and private space, and between audience and performer.
Positioning his own body as both the subject and object of the work, Acconci’s used early video recordings to record actions taking advantage of the self-reflective potential of the media. Consistently exploring the dynamics of intimacy, trust, and power, the focus of Acconci’s projects gradually moved from his physical body (Conversions, 1971) toward the psychology of interpersonal transactions (Pryings, 1971), and later, to the cultural and political implications of the performative space he set up for the camera (The Red Tapes, 1976).
http://www.ubu.com/film/acconci.html
contemporaryartetc.wordpress.com/ 2007/04/
Nader Ahriman
Original amorphous forms, geometric abstractions, imaginary architectures, non-functional apparatus in connection with the human figure are painted on flat fields of colour and grid constructions. Some components recur in a large number of his paintings: mechanisms replace parts of the body which seem to set in motion other technical instruments, sorts of amour who appear as protection for the figures themselves, fragments of the human body, historical or literary persons. Throughout his work themes with philosophical references are also repeated with variation of titles and depiction which reflect at the same time the intense interest in the ancient western history and philosophy.
Alex Bag
In Alex Bag's ironic performance videos, the artist adopts a series of personae to create droll conceptual parodies. With her signature deadpan delivery and deliberately low-tech style, Bag mixes the vernacular of pop culture with irreverently humorous monologues. Performing in multiple guises amidst fragments of pop detritus, Bag skewers the tropes of consumer and media culture. Questioning how we define ourselves in relation to television, fashion, advertising and the artworld, she creates mediated parodies that teeter between celebration and critique. EAI is pleased to make available, for the first time, Bag's body of video works from the 1990s and 2000s.
www.eai.org/eai/ artistTitles.htm?id=450
A performance video on art school,Fall '95 documents the fictionalized life of an unnamed School of Visual Arts student, played by Bag herself. Taking the form of a video diary, Bag's character addresses the camera directly, expressing her thoughts on life and art, which mature significantly over the course of eight semesters. Interspersed between these entries are clips commenting on a variety of topics including male aggression, mockingly portrayed by toys, and video art from the 1970s.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alex_Bag
Alex Bag’s latest video, inspired by her mother’s 1970s television shows, at the Whitney.
www.nytimes.com/2009/ 01/30/arts/design/30bag.html
Chris Ballantyne
Chris Ballantyne’s paintings, drawings and sculptural installations are an examination of suburban space. Ballantyne’s inspiration is drawn from the universalities of his different neighborhood homes. Ideas of land boundaries, manipulated space and economic design are developed out of observations from a variety of urban and rural settings. Ballantyne’s works are focused on architecture and landscape design and often explore complex relationships between individuals and their surroundings.
dailyserving.com/ 2007/04/chris-ballantyne/
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www.artltdmag.com/index. php?subaction=showful...
Brandon Ballengee
Exploring the boundaries between art, science and technology, Brandon Ballengée creates multidisciplinary works out of information generated from ecological field trips and laboratory research. Since 1996, Ballengée has collaborated with numerous scientists to conduct primary biological research and Ecological Artworks. These activities were outlined in “Ecoventions”, a book published in 2002 by the Contemporary Arts Center of Cincinnati.
www.sat.qc.ca/ post.php?id=40&post_id=1474〈=en
Banks Violette
Violette uses such dark material as death metal, ritual murder and teenage suicide as points of departure for his slick and ghostly sculptures and installations. His aesthetics probe into American culture and are used as a commentary on the anxiety of youth. Violette blurs the boundaries between reality and pure fiction as he recreates the landscape of the teenage mind. The artist has selected contemporary music lyrics that have instigated violence and destruction amongst youth and attributed these lyrics to sculptures and installations that visually incite a similar or opposite emotive response. The artist has used salt to cast the music equipment from rock band Sunn O and has used disassembled forms such as a coffin as a relic of past performances and as an icon of aggressive subcultures.
dailyserving.com/ tag/banks-violette/
www.teamgal.com/.../ 144/banks_violette_untitled
Anna Barriball
Anna Barriball´s work inhabits a fluid territory, somewhere betwixt and between the two disciplines of drawing and sculpture. Hers is an exquisitely patient and poetic process as she seeks, or waits, for the perfect collision of object and idea and medium. She works with various media, often the found and familiar, using objects from her own life and those of unknown others found by chance in markets or city streets. These are then deftly altered with simple materials and actions - some ephemeral and light, others intensely time consuming - to reveal subtle new layers of meaning and significance. Her work will not easily be pinned down and yet seen as a whole it forms a coherent, ongoing dialogue, exploring ideas of finding and making; interference and restraint; chance and intention; time and space (and their collapse into one another).
www.artfacts.net/.../ overview.html
www.artnet.com/artwork/ 424956668/untitled-i.html
www.drawingroom.org.uk/ fundraiser/index.htm
Valerie Belin
Valérie Belin’s large-scale black and white photographs of banal items are coldly beautiful, confrontational and achieve an unsettling balance of being both abstract and representational. Echoing Warhol’s explorations into the mass produced, Belin works with objects deemed familiar and without quality, breathing an almost alchemical transformation into the familiar crisp packet, an item that has the air of the ‘exotic’ to the French artist.
www.michaelhoppengallery.com/ artist,show,3,5,...
Ashley Bickerton
His large-scale paintings are a critical examination of "the art object as commodity." Bickerton's pictures present a "dystopic, end-times vision." In fact, the works are less critique than wry celebration of art as commodity and, if Bickerton paints the end-times, the hedonist in each of us has a lot to look forward to.
His paintings, a sometimes awkward marriage of acrylic or oil paint to digital print, are boldly colored and unabashedly kitschy. In them, scantily clad or naked (except for lei garlands) women strike seductive poses and cavort with a big-toothed blue man, the artist's surrogate, at tropical bars and on beaches. Each work is set into a unique, inlaid and painted wood frame. The effect is theatrical, and, in its way, very successful.
hungryhyaena.blogspot.com/ 2008/04/ashley-bick...
Xu Bing
An emigrant to the United States form China in 1989 following the crackdown on the arts at that time, Xu Bing is a conceptual artist focused on "hybrid cultures and hybrid language", the reconciling of Western and Eastern cultures. To make his point, he does large-scale installations, some with live creatures such as birds, silkworms, sheep and pigs. In Washington DC at the zoo, he did a simulated zoo exhibit of the giant panda environment.
www.askart.com/askart/ b/xu_bing/xu_bing.aspx
Xu Bing | A book from the sky 1987–91 | The Kenneth and Yasuko Myer Collection of Contemporary Asian Art. Purchased 1994 with funds from the International Exhibitions Program and with the assistance of The Myer Foundation and Michael Simcha Baevski through the Queensland Art Gallery Foundation | Collection: Queensland Art Galler
qag.qld.gov.au/exhibitions/ past/recently_arch...
Louise Bourgeois
Born in France in 1911 and residing in New York since 1938, Louise Bourgeois is one of the major artists of the second half of the 20th and early 21st Centuries. Her work, which has traversed Surrealism, Abstract Expressionism and Minimalism, oscillating between abstract geometry and organic reality, escapes all attempts at artistic classification.
Based on memory, emotion and the reactivation of childhood souvenirs, Louise Bourgeois follows a subjective approach, using all types of material and all manner of shapes. Her personal and totally autobiographical vocabulary is consistent with the most contemporary of practices, and exerts an influence on many artists.
www.centrepompidou.fr/.../ /ENS-bourgeois-EN.html
www.flickr.com/photos/ cybertect/2069389382/
Cecily Brown
Cecily’s paintings are like free flowing liquidized jigsaw puzzles, always with a few pieces incomplete, for your eye to solve. These pieces can be jagged and vicious or calm and smokey. Much of her early work contains a passionate sexual energy and the way in which she has applied the oil paint to represent the human form has created either solid, meaty, and succulent features or light airy washes that portray translucent ghost like embodiments. As Brown herself put it, “so that you might have a veil of paint that suggests some very delicate skin, but then I’ll want something very meaty and clogged next to it.”
becksearlescott.wordpress.com/.../ cecily-brown/
Maria Fernando Cardoso
Cardoso’s work draws from her Colombian heritage and adopted Australian culture. While both very different vernaculars, each have given her inspiration and materials to create works that are ephemeral and vulnerable while at the same time communicate notions of violence, metamorphosis and the omnipresence of death. Cardoso creates a sense of wonder and enchantment from the contemplation of natural elements extracted from the world around us – allowing us to see them with fresh eyes.
Cardoso pushes contemporary sculptural practice to new limits, enticing audiences curious to experience her use of materials and stimulating critical debate on the empirical aspect of her artistic practice.
chelseaartmuseum.org/.../ 2006/cardosa/index.html
www.philosophyblog.com.au/.../
Vija Celmins
Vija Celmins was born in Latvia in 1938, fled with her family to Germany in advance of the Soviet army in 1944 and emigrated to the USA in 1948. Since the early 1960s she has made intricate black-and-white drawings of a small range of subjects - seascapes, night skies, the desert floor - some of which have taken a year to complete.
www.tate.org.uk/.../ issue9/thinkingdrawing.htm
contemporaryartsem.wordpress.com/.../
Robert Colescott
Robert Colescott was the first African-American artist to represent the United States in a solo exhibition at the Venice Biennale in 1997. Born in 1925 in Oakland, California, he is of a generation of American artists who largely rejected figurative and expressionist art. Yet, after receiving his BA and MFA degrees from the University of California at Berkeley and studying with Fernand Leger in Paris, he devoted his career to painting expressionist figuration. As he describes it: “I was brought up to make paintings that were important visually, with an internal structure and rhythm that grabs people, surprises them, and moves them, like Duke Ellington.”
It is his abilities as an incisive social commentator taking on taboos in art, sex, politics, race, money, and power for which he is best known. Both humorous and provocative, his work makes us think about racial stereotypes and tensions in contemporary society.
www.albrightknox.org/.../ acq_2000/Colescott.html
www.artadox.com/ on-race-and-art/
Gregory Crewdson
Famed photographer Gregory Crewdson makes large-scale photographs of elaborate and meticulously staged tableaux, which have been described as “micro-epics” that probe the dark corners of the psyche. Working in the manner of a film director, he leads a production crew, which includes a director of photography, special effects and lighting teams, casting director and actors. He typically makes several exposures that he later digitally combines to produce the final image.
artblart.wordpress.com/ 2009/03/03/
Tacita Dean
A leading artist of her generation, Dean works in a variety of media including prints and drawings but most notably film and sound. She is fascinated by the close relationship between film, the passing of time and the possibilities they present in the construction of narrative.
Exploring Berlin, her films sensitively capture the complex histories imbued in the material culture and architecture of this formerly divided city and its people. Evocative, melancholy and mysterious, her work suggests a personal experience wrapped up in the larger rhythms of history.
www.tate.org.uk/.../ dean/default.shtm
Mark Dion
Dion’s work examines the ways in which dominant ideologies and public institutions shape our understanding of history, knowledge, and the natural world. The job of the artist, he says, is to go against the grain of dominant culture, to challenge perception and convention. Appropriating archaeological and other scientific methods of collecting, ordering, and exhibiting objects, Dion creates works that question the distinctions between ‘objective’ (‘rational’) scientific methods and ’subjective’ (‘irrational’) influences.
Gardar Eide Einarsson
Investigations into various forms of social transgression and arguments for political subversion, Gardar Eide Einarsson’s text-based works provoke the critical analysis associated with reading to augment the immediate visceral experience of viewing his art. To this end, his choice of media is determined by his current discourse on communities in relation to their outsiders. Visual imagery borrowed from underground subcultures including the criminal world and left-wing militias, portrayed in a primarily black-and-white palette, gives Einarsson’s work a stylish punk sheen that evokes rebellion through its cold, hard-edged rejection of sentiment. His installations often combine paintings leaned against walls as “props,” explicit messages printed on flags or illuminated on light boxes, images co-opted from graffitii, skateboarding graphics, or punk music flyers screenprinted or painted directly onto gallery walls, videos screened on televisions, photography, and sculpture such as austere furniture centered in the exhibition space.
www.teamgal.com/artists/ gardar_eide_einarsson...
Olafur Eliasson
His immersive environments, sculptures, and photographs elegantly recreate the extremes of landscape and atmosphere in his native Scandinavia. His constructions, at once eccentric and highly geometric, use multicolored washes, focused projections of light, mirrors, and natural elements such as water, stone, and moss to shift the viewer’s perception of place and self, foregrounding the sensory experience of each work. By transforming the gallery into a hybrid space of nature and culture, Eliasson prompts an intense engagement with the world and offers a fresh consideration of everyday life.
www.cultmodern.com/ archives/881
promulgationofadventuresinsight-sound.blogspo...
Inka Essenhigh
After graduating from the School of the Visual Arts in New York (1993), Inka Essenhigh received unbelievable recognition for her graphically executed paintings. The glossy, well-designed colors and undulating figures in her early work have recently given way to intense scenes with subversive content. The graphic language of Essenhigh’s paintings allow for her complicated figures to be incorporated into a dramatic landscape, giving way for greater depth in the imagery.
dailyserving.com/ 2007/02/page/2/
www.crywalt.com/blog/ 2006/03/inka-essenhigh-b...
Jan Fabre
He is well known both at home and abroad as one of the most innovative and versatile artists of his day. Over the past 25 years, he has produced works as a performance artist, theatre maker, choreographer, opera maker, playwright and visual artist. Jan Fabre is renowned for expanding the horizons of every genre to which he applies his artistic vision.
Fabre has been writing his own plays since 1975, although it was not until 1989 that they were first performed. His texts form an exceptional collection of miniatures, as it were, with a very open writing style and reflect Fabre's concept of theatre as an all-encompassing form of art in which dialogue functions alongside other elements such as dance, music, opera, performance and improvisation. Chaos and discipline, repetition and madness, metamorphosis and the anonymous are all indispensible ingredients in Fabre's theatre.
He makes a clean break with the conventions of contemporary theatre by introducing the concept of 'real-time performance' – sometimes called 'living installations' – and explores radical choreographic possibilities as a means of resurrecting classical dance.
Alongside age-old rituals and philosophical questions, Fabre also deals with such themes as violence, lust, beauty and erotica.
www.troubleyn.be/page. php?pageID=12&parentID=...
www.artinthepicture.com/ blog/?p=488
www.expozaragoza2008.es/ theblog/?m=200802
Karen Finley
Performance artist Karen Finley has smeared herself with chocolate, painted with her own breast milk, put Winnie the Pooh in S&M gear, and locked horns with conservative Sen. Jesse Helms.
A New York-based performer, author, playwright, and director, Finley probes themes of the body, sexual abuse and violence, AIDS, suicide, female sexuality, and American politics. While she has received significant critical and popular acclaim within the art world, it was her 1993 free speech battle with Jesse Helms, the National Endowment for the Arts, and ultimately the Supreme Court that brought Finley to a wider audience.
Her work onstage smashes stereotypes of Performance Art as Gong-Show castoff fare. They are mesmerizing experiential masterpieces. Finley takes her audiences through contemporary terrain at an accelerated pace, unheard of even in this age of instant access and continual gratificiation. Instead of the "shock" so many would have you believe they center on, her performances tend towards religious frenzy, complete with potent, quasi-spiritual transformation.
interactive.usc.edu/.../ archives/003715.html
broadwayworld.com/article/ Finley_Brings_Spitz...
www.citypaper.com/ arts/story.asp?id=4372
Howard Finster
Howard Finster, a former Baptist Preacher and bicycle repairman who never went beyond the 6th grade had experienced visions since the age of 3. When he turned 60, he recieved a divine command to paint “Sacred Art.” A self taught artist, whose colorful paintings tend to embrace evangelical themes, many of them apocalyptic, are filled with illustrations of bible verses along with portraits of American heros and pop subjects reflecting American culture. They are interspersed with all kinds of evangelical messages, printed quotations and original, often witty sayings, or “Finsterisms”, as they have come to be known. Within a few years, Finster`s work was discovered by big city galleries and collectors, for whom Finster`s backwoods theology had an ironic charm, the artist himself probably did not intend. A mix of Andy Warhol and Grandma Moses, his pulpits are now the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and major museums around the world. A backwoods preacher inspired by the WORD of GOD, visitations from the dead, and visions of extraterrestrial life.
gallery721.com/artists/ howardfinster.html
www.famsf.org/blog/ index.asp?archivedate=200610
Slyvie Fleury
Fleury creates a productive interface between ‘market identity’ and artistic identity. She portrays female identity in the wake of the achievements of the women’s movement when the social script has been rewritten, and women can go shopping and be successful artists—or even go shopping in order to be successful artists.
we can also position Fleury in the broader discourse of popism,[58] with key figures such as Andy Warhol and Jeff Koons whose work both parodies and celebrates the interrelationship between identity, celebrity, mass media and consumerism. Like Warhol and Koons, Fleury adopts a postmodern persona.
Her installations are characterised by the projection of a stereotypically female obsession with shopping onto the discourse of what has been until quite recently a male-dominated art world.
www.installationart.net/.../ dissociation06.html
Walton Ford
meticulously rendered watercolors of vividly imagined birds, snakes, monkeys, and tigers. Tigers of Wrath: Watercolors by Walton Ford, is comprised of large-scale watercolors created between 1990 and the present exploring such themes as colonialism, the naturalist tradition, and the extinction of species. Using the animal kingdom as a mirror of the human world, Ford employs his skill as an artist and observer to communicate his views on society.
Ford drew his early inspiration from the work of nineteenth-century artist and naturalist John James Audubon—particularly his prodigious Birds of America series—as well as from visits to the American Museum of Natural History. Other influences include J.J. Grandville and Sir John Tenniel, the French artists whose caricatures of part-human, part-animal subjects satirized nineteenth-century French and British society; Edward Lear, an artist and writer known for his nonsensical poetry and limericks; George Catlin, a self-taught painter of Native Americans; and Francisco Goya, the Spanish artist working at the turn of the nineteenth-century.
www.artknowledgenews.com/ Walton_Ford_Wild_Thi...
Samuel Fosso
Samuel Fosso is one of the most renowned and prodigious young African photographers. His fantastical portraits of different types of people – from African Chiefs to American women – are revealed, upon closer inspection, to be self-portraits. A witty and ironic exploration of self-identity, Fosso’s work has been shown in major global venues such as the Photographers’ Gallery in London and the Guggenheim Museum in New York.
beautifuldecay.com/ 2009/07/24/samuel-fosso/
Barnaby Furnas
Barnaby Furnas’s paintings address contemporary image construction through traditional means. Adhering to painterly convention Furnas mixes his own paint by adding pigment to urethane, a technique that results in radiant finish and pure vibrant colour. Conveying the high-impact dynamism of filmic violence, his canvases merge depicted narrative and formal concern. In pieces such as Hamburger Hill, action is played out in performative brushwork and striated composition: gun powder explosions and gory splatter are represented through simplified gesture, movement is directed through drawn and implied lines. Combining the strategies of cartooning with the decadence of high art, Furnas conceives painting as a media entrenched in historical lineage and constantly expanding to encompass new attitudes of viewing.
Using his materials to replicate bodily substance, his figure paintings are executed on the membrane surface of calf-skin vellum. Charred, punctured, and adorned with tattoo-like script, his figure sits as an emblem of torment and catharsis. Adopting the timeless and immortal qualities of portraiture, Furnas exposes the stretcher and canvas to both undermine and appropriate painting’s function as illusion. In revealing the image as a construction, Furnas evokes a sense of occult mysticism.
www.saatchi-gallery.co.uk/ artists/barnaby_fur...
Ellen Gallagher
Repitition and revision are central to Gallagher's treatment of advertisements that she appropriates from popular magazines. Drawn to wig advertiesments initially for their grid-like structure, she realized that it was the accompanying language that attracted her, and she began to bring these 'narratives' to her paintings - making them function through the characters of the advertisements as a kind of chart of lost words.
Adler Guerrier
Born in 1975 in Haiti, now lives in Miami.
Deploying a variety of media including photography, drawing and video, Guerrier explores the effects of particular geographical, political, and historical environments on identity formation.
"My work has to do with movement, narrative, and is also concerned with the perceived and fictional portrayal of places."
www.artadox.com/ on-race-and-art/
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mbourbaki.blogspot.com/ 2009/10/adler-guerrier...
Leon Golub
Always painted in a unique figural style, drawing upon diverse representations of the body from ancient Greek and Roman sculpture, to photos of athletic competitions, to gay pornography. He likened his painting process to sculptural technique and employed a method of layering and scraping away paint, sometimes using a meat cleaver. leaving varying amounts of canvas untouched.
His work dealing overtly with issues of power, sexual and political.
www.mbam.qc.ca/en/ oeuvres/oeuvre_41.html
www.magnoliaeditions.com/. ../Golub/F00001.html
Felix Gonzzalez Torres
Felix Gonzalez-Torres combined the impulses of Conceptual art, Minimalism, political activism, and chance to produce a number of "democratic artworks"--- including public billboards, give-away piles of candies, and
stacks of paper available to the viewer as souvenirs. These works, often sensuous and directly audience-centered, complicate the questions of public and private space, authorship, originality and the role of institutionalized meaning. He used the stuff of interior design--electric light fixtures, jigsaw puzzles, paired mirrors, wall clocks and beaded curtains--to queer exhibition spaces in the most simple and poignant ways.
The theme of lovers is comingled with themes of mortality, loss and absence which surface in the later work. Always charged with the sensibility of an overtly queer man, his art nonetheless often passed under the radar of the self-appointed moral guardians in both the political and art worlds. Felix Gonzales-Torres was a not-so-secret agent, able to infiltrate main stream consciousness in a most beautiful and poetic way. Activist without being didactic, a catalyst of that rare combination of sensuality and political empathy, he raised the bar on future queer art making, and continues to be one of the most influential artist of his generation.
www.queerculturalcenter.org/.../ FelixIndex.html
www.thebody.com/.../ 2004/hughes/01.html
