Marina Abramović
Marina Abramović is perhaps the most famous performance artist working today. Employing duration, pain, danger, exhaustion, and viewer participation, she works at extremes as she complicates the relationship between art and audience.
Farhad & Shirin
Drawing equally from Eastern and Western traditions, Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri is best known for his technically exquisite, conceptually rich paintings.
Donald Baechler
Donald Baechler, a member of the East Village art scene in 1980s New York, is known for his painting-collage-drawing works depicting of childhood imagery and nostalgic ephemera like grammar school primers, old maps, and children’s drawings, or purposely cliché motifs such as a skull, a rose, a globe, and a soccer ball.
John Baldessari
A pioneering force in Conceptual art, John Baldessari transformed pop cultural and art historical iconography into meditations on image, language, appropriation, and authenticity.
Banksy
Perhaps the most famous figure in street art working today, Banksy is known for urban interventions that demonstrate irreverent wit and a biting political edge.
Georg Baselitz
Georg Baselitz’s raw, expressive paintings helped expand notions of figurative art in the mid–20th century.
Bernd and Hilla
Bernd and Hilla Becher are best known for their austere, elegiac, and widely influential photographs of industrial architecture in their native Germany.
Renate Bertlmann
Renate Bertlmann has been challenging social constructs surrounding gender and sexuality in her photographs, collages, performances, and sculptures since the 1970s.
Peter Blake
Widely regarded as the godfather of British Pop art and the Young British Artists movement, Peter Blake creates paintings, collages, and prints that blend modernity and nostalgia.
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan’s playful, provocative conceptual practice skewers the conventions of art, institutions, and contemporary value systems at large.
Christo
Christo became famous for his monumental collaborations with his wife and creative partner, Jeanne-Claude.
Chuck Close
In the 1960s, Chuck Close pioneered Photorealism with his monumental, exquisitely detailed portraits, whose subjects he took from photographic sources.
Tony Cragg
Turner Prize–winning sculptor Tony Cragg draws new connections between humans and the material world.
Peter Doig
Peter Doig’s serene, fantastical paintings feature kaleidoscope landscapes punctuated by enigmatic, partially obscured figures.
Olafur Eliasson
Olafur Eliasson uses technical devices and natural elements such as light, water, and fog to transform exhibition spaces into immersive, site-specific environments.
Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin’s poetic, confessional practice spans film, painting, neon, embroidery, drawing, installation, and sculpture.
Elger Esser
Elger Esser’s pale, luminous landscape photographs, which are almost entirely unpeopled and frequently feature a straight, low horizon line, have been compared to both early-19th-century photography and Dutch landscape paintings of the 17th century.
Liam Gillick
Young British Artist Liam Gillick is primarily interested in analyzing structures, social organizations, and human interaction.
Douglas Gordon
Throughout his diverse practice—spanning photography, video, performance, sound, and text-based work—Douglas Gordon recontextualizes familiar images and artworks, distorting time, language, and other aesthetic aspects to challenge viewers’ perception, expectation, and memory.
Wang Guangyi
Wang Guangyi repurposes historical Chinese propaganda into paintings that poke fun at the intersection of China’s communist history and the rise of Western influence.
Damien Hirst
Damien Hirst, a poster boy for the Young British Artists who rose to prominence in late 1980s London, is one of the most notorious artists of his generation.
David Hockney
A pioneer of the 1960s British movement, David Hockney is one of the most celebrated and prolific artists of the 20th and 21st centuries.
Jenny Holzer
Since the 1970s, Jenny Holzer has inserted language into public settings as part of her singular conceptual practice.
Gary Hume
Young British Artist Gary Hume is best known for exuberant, Pop-inflected works which he makes with high-gloss, household enamel paint on aluminum panels.
Candida Höfer
In majestic large-format color photography, Candida Höfer captures the psychological residue left behind in empty public and institutional spaces.
Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana is most famous for his iconic “LOVE” image, which has appeared across media including sculptures, prints, and paintings and epitomizes the artist’s graphic, predominantly text-based Pop art practice.
Anish Kapoor
Anish Kapoor is known for elegant sculptures of spare geometries and organic forms, which he fabricates with feats of engineering.
Alex Katz
With flat planes of rich, lovely color, Alex Katz’s landscapes and portraits evoke the smooth aesthetics of advertising billboards and film.
Yves Klein
Yves Klein is famous for his explorations into pure color—blue in particular. Employing only his signature, patented pigment, International Klein Blue, the artist made iconic monochromes that aimed to bring art into the realm of pure, atmospheric feeling.
Jeff Koons
One of the most famous artists working today, Jeff Koons makes gleeful, tongue-in-cheek sculptures, paintings, and installations that border—and often cross—the edge of good taste.
Sol LeWitt
Sol LeWitt famously stressed the importance of the ideas that animated his artwork over the particulars of their execution.
Robert Longo
Robert Longo is known for large-scale, hyperrealistic charcoal portraits that consider power, authority, and social unrest.
Nate Lowman
Nate Lowman appropriates, paints, and photographs existing imagery, mining the detritus of pop culture in mixed-media works that critique celebrity culture, consumerism, and the saturation of sex and violence in mass media.
Markus Lüpertz
Part of a provocative post-war generation of German artists that included A.R. Penck, Georg Baselitz, and Jörg Immendorff, Markus Lüpertz is known for his expressive paintings and sculptures, which often unite classical and biblical themes, historical references, and nods to mythology.
Yue Minjun
In fantastical paintings populated with heightened, hysterical self-portraits, Yue Minjun satirizes contemporary society and art historical tropes.
Claes Oldenburg
Since the 1960s, Claes Oldenburg has worked at the forefront of the Conceptual and Pop art movements, and he’s best known for his monumental public sculptures of everyday objects.
Yan Pei-Ming
Drawing from European portraiture traditions, Yan Pei-Ming creates large-scale paintings that depict international celebrities including politicians, popes, and actors—or the artist himself.
Otto Piene
Otto Piene, co-founder of the Düsseldorf-based Group Zero, made highly experimental, process-based artworks that embraced unconventional materials including smoke, fire, and light.
Richard Prince
Perennially provocative, Richard Prince has blazed new trails for photography with his explorations of appropriation, identity, and the meaning of images in a mass-media culture.
Laure Prouvost
The Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost is known for her lush, immersive films and mixed-media installations.
Walid Raad
Walid Raad works across installation, performance, video, and photography in order to grapple with the legacy of the Lebanese Civil War; memory, loss, carnage, and dizzying acts of reconstruction are all major motifs.
Gerhard Richter
One of the most famous artists to emerge from post-war Germany, Gerhard Richter is known for his prolific, varied, and widely influential painting practice.
Ugo Rondinone
Ranging from installations and sculptures to psychedelic paintings and large-scale drawings, Ugo Rondinone’s eclectic practice explores the relationships between opposing forces—day and night, real and artificial, euphoria and depression.
Thomas Schütte
A student of Gerhard Richter, Daniel Buren, and Benjamin Buchloh, Thomas Schütte is considered one of the most important sculptors of his generation.
Sean Scully
Since the 1960s, Sean Scully has made abstract canvases that feature stripes, blocks, and grids painted in rich, evocative hues.
Andres Serrano
Andres Serrano is perhaps best known for his unflinching color photographs of controversial subjects including dead bodies, feces, handguns, Ku Klux Klansmen, and Catholic figurines submerged in bodily fluids.
David Shrigley
David Shrigley’s drawings, paintings, animations, and neon texts embrace cartoon aesthetics and an absurd, deadpan sensibility.
Gary Simmons
Gary Simmons references film, architecture, and American popular culture in paintings and drawings that address race, class, and memory on both personal and collective levels.
Sarah Slappey
Sarah Slappey paints grotesque surrealistic compositions populated by contorted hands, limbs, and breasts that have earned her attention and acclaim.
Thomas Struth
Thomas Struth’s mesmerizing, large-format photographs capture the wonders of nature, machinery, architecture, and contemporary life itself.
Donald Sultan
Donald Sultan’s large-scale still-life paintings feature semi-abstract compositions and unique materials: The artist has used tar, spackle, enamel, Masonite, and vinyl floor tiles to create his minimalist renderings of flowers, fruits, and other natural forms.
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans’s muted, mysterious paintings transform source material from television, film, and photography into meditations on history, memory, and the mediation of images in contemporary culture.
Cy Twombly
Cy Twombly’s idiosyncratic style incorporated expressive drips, frenetic scribbles, and gestural, calligraphic linework into lyrical abstractions.
Joana Vasconcelos
Evoking the 1960s Nouveau Réalisme movement, Marcel Duchamp’s readymades, and the symbolic, tactile constructions of Louise Bourgeois and Eva Hesse, Joana Vasconcelos threads everyday objects and materials together in her assemblages, which comment on womanhood, nationality, and consumerism.
Bernar Venet
Bernar Venet is a Conceptual artist best known for his versatility in multiple mediums, including painting, drawing, sculpture, installation, as well as stage design and musical composition.
Andy Warhol
Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical reproduction, Pop artist Andy Warhol created some of the 20th century’s most iconic images.
Ai Weiwei
Dissident artist Ai Weiwei is famous for conceptual artworks that challenge authority and explore the links between the contemporary world and traditional Chinese culture.
Zhang Xiaogang
