Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) is one of the most influential artists and provocateurs of our time. He is celebrated for blending Chinese history and tradition with artistic expression and political activism, all within a wholly contemporary practice. Beyond traditional mediums, his artistic work extends to architecture, documentary filmmaking, and large-scale public installations, each serving as a form of human rights activism, cultural commentary, and critiques of the global imbalance of power.&nbsp;Born into exile due to his father’s political persecution, Ai Weiwei's early life was marked by hardship, shaping his lifelong commitment to questioning authority. This commitment has often made him a political target in the past. He studied at the Beijing Film Academy before moving to New York in the 1980s, where he was influenced by conceptual art and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Returning to China in the 1990s, Ai Weiwei emerged as a key figure in contemporary Chinese art while also co-founding independent art spaces and experimenting with radical forms of artistic expression. After years of surveillance and restrictions, he was eventually allowed to leave China in 2015 and has since lived in Germany, the United Kingdom, and Portugal.&nbsp;Ai Weiwei gained international recognition through powerful works such as Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995), Sunflower Seeds (2010), Neolithic Vase with Coca Cola Logo (Gold) (2015), Illumination (2019), and Straight (2008–2012), a poignant memorial to the victims of the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. Ai Weiwei’s works are held in major museums worldwide and have been exhibited in leading institutions such as Tate Modern, the Royal Academy of Arts, and the Venice Biennale. His relentless pursuit of truth and justice, coupled with his innovative artistic vision, continues to inspire global audiences and redefine the role of art in society. As Ai Weiwei himself asserts, “Everything is art. Everything is politics.”

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.

Jia Aili (b. 1979, Dandong, China) is a Chinese contemporary artist celebrated for his large-scale, psychologically charged paintings that blend realism, fantasy, and dystopian allegory. Trained at the Lu Xun Academy of Fine Arts, Jia’s work reflects the complexities of a rapidly transforming China while grappling with universal themes of technology, mortality, and isolation.His canvases—often vast in scale and populated by fragmented bodies, surreal machinery, and desolate landscapes—evoke both post-apocalyptic anxiety and spiritual introspection. Merging classical painting techniques with a distinctly modern sensibility, Jia’s visual language recalls both Western art history and Chinese Socialist Realism, filtered through a lens of existential unease.Deeply influenced by literature, philosophy, and science, Jia Aili creates emotionally resonant works that suggest both collapse and renewal. Figures drift through his compositions in astronaut suits, gas masks, or states of undress—symbols of both fragility and resistance in a changing world.Jia’s practice challenges the boundaries between personal and collective trauma, and between past and future. His work has been exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Fondation Louis Vuitton, Palais de Tokyo, and the Ullens Center for Contemporary Art (UCCA), and is included in major public and private collections worldwide.

Jia Aili

Jia Aili is a Chinese contemporary artist born in 1979 in Liaoning province, China. His pieces feature the dark side of human progress and warfare, including symbols like&nbsp;gas masks,&nbsp;industrial waste, the&nbsp;hammer and sickle sign, and&nbsp;mushroom clouds.&nbsp;

An MFA graduate of the University of California, Los Angeles, Refik Anadol (b. 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey) is internationally renowned for his visual simulations, which he calls “data sculptures” or “data paintings.” To create these mesmerizing, often immersive moving images, he trains machines to process and transform a wide array of real-world data sets such as wind patterns, Bluetooth signals, or, as in Quantum Memories (2020) —shown at the 2020 NGV Triennial in Melbourne —200 million images of nature. For Anadol, data is a pigment and machines are human collaborators, capable of hallucinating new and vivid impressions of reality. He continues to push the boundaries of art and technology with his eponymous studio and research initiative RAS LAB in Los Angeles.

Refik Anadol

The award-winning New Media artist Refik Anadol explores the potential of artificial intelligence, using machine-learning algorithms to transform vast datasets into highly sensory aesthetic experiences.

El Anatsui (b. 1944, Anyako, Ghana) is one of the most acclaimed contemporary artists of our time, celebrated for his monumental, shape-shifting sculptures made from repurposed materials. Living and working between Nsukka, Nigeria, and Tema, Ghana, Anatsui has spent decades developing a distinct visual language that merges personal history, pan-African identity, and global abstraction.Anatsui is best known for his dazzling, large-scale wall hangings constructed from thousands of discarded liquor bottle caps, flattened, folded, and linked together with copper wire. These intricate assemblages, which shimmer with light and movement, defy traditional definitions of sculpture and painting. With each installation, the works are reconfigured, taking on new shapes and meanings—challenging notions of permanence and authorship in the sculptural form.His materials—often sourced from local recycling stations—reflect his deep interest in transformation, reuse, and the socio-political histories embedded in everyday objects. Themes of consumption, waste, and the legacy of colonialism surface subtly in his work, which never loses sight of beauty, tactility, and formal innovation.Anatsui's practice fuses indigenous aesthetic traditions with global artistic movements, creating works that are both deeply rooted and expansively resonant. His studio practice is a collaborative force, producing some of the most visually and emotionally arresting works in contemporary art today.

El Anatsui

In his sculptures and installations, El Anatsui transforms simple, everyday objects into grand, totemic assemblages.

Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960, Padua, Italy) is one of contemporary art’s most irreverent and enigmatic figures, known for his dark humour, conceptual wit, and sharp critiques of institutional power. Through provocative sculptures and staged interventions, Cattelan explores themes of death, celebrity, religion, and the absurdity of art itself.Often blurring the line between reality and performance, Cattelan has created some of the most iconic and controversial artworks of the 21st century. His infamous Comedian (2019)—a banana duct-taped to a wall—sparked global headlines and became an instant meme, while earlier works such as La Nona Ora (1999), depicting Pope John Paul II struck down by a meteorite, challenge sacred symbols with audacious irreverence.Cattelan’s practice is also marked by self-effacement and subversion. He has “retired” multiple times, staged a full retrospective hanging all his works from the ceiling (Maurizio Cattelan: All, Guggenheim, 2011), and founded the satirical art magazine Toiletpaper.Far from mere provocateur, Cattelan uses humour as a scalpel, cutting into the hypocrisies of art, politics, and society with equal parts mischief and precision. His work is held in major museum collections including the Guggenheim, MoMA, and Centre Pompidou.

Maurizio Cattelan

Maurizio Cattelan’s playful, provocative conceptual practice skewers the conventions of art, institutions, and contemporary value systems at large.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were a pioneering artist duo renowned for their monumental, site-specific environmental installations that temporarily transformed public spaces around the world. Working collaboratively from 1961 until Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009, the pair employed materials such as fabric, rope, and barrels to create large-scale artworks that redefined the boundaries between sculpture, architecture, and landscape. These ambitious projects—often years or even decades in the making—were ephemeral by design, existing only for days or weeks before being dismantled, their materials recycled, and the sites returned to their original state.Christo Vladimirov Javacheff was born in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, and studied at the National Academy of Art in Sofia before fleeing to the West. In Paris, he met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (b. Casablanca, also 1935), beginning both a personal and creative partnership that would span decades. The couple moved to New York City in 1964, making it their home base.Early works like Surfaces d’Empaquetage and Wrapped Objects explored themes of concealment, transformation, and materiality. Their large-scale interventions began with Wall of Oil Barrels – The Iron Curtain (Paris, 1962), followed by Wrapped Coast (Australia, 1968–69), Running Fence (California, 1972–76), and Surrounded Islands (Miami, 1980–83). Their 2005 installation, The Gates, transformed New York’s Central Park with 7,503 saffron-colored fabric panels.Later projects included The London Mastaba (2018) and L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped (realized posthumously in 2021), honoring both artists’ legacy.Each project, financed entirely through the sale of Christo’s preparatory drawings and models, emphasized freedom, impermanence, and the profound impact of collective experience. Their enduring vision reimagined the role of public art, transforming everyday landscapes into moments of wonder, contemplation, and shared humanity.

Christo

Christo became famous for his monumental collaborations with his wife and creative partner, Jeanne-Claude.

Brian Clarke was born in 1953 in Oldham, England. Even though he is widely considered the most important contemporary artist in stained glass practice, he has exercised with a wide range of different media: paint, sculpture, mosaic, drawing, collage, and tapestry among others.&nbsp;Clarke has revolutionised stained glass not only technologically but also philosophically, pushing the boundaries of what this material can achieve. Since the early 1970s, he has collaborated with some of the world’s most prominent architects to create stained-glass designs and installations for hundreds of projects worldwide. The artist interrogates the extremes of transparency and opacity, light and dark, absence and presence, order and chaos.&nbsp;His unique and radical approach has earned him numerous awards and honours. His artworks have been shown in prestigious collections and institutions worldwide such as The Victoria and Albert Museum, Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Corning Museum of Glass New York and Tate London. His artistic collaborations have also included works with David Bailey, Hugh Hudson, Malcolm McLaren, and with Linda and Paul McCartney.

Brian Clarke

Brian Clarke was born in 1953 in Oldham, England. Even though he is widely considered the most important contemporary artist in stained glass practice, he has exercised with a wide range of different media: paint, sculpture, mosaic, drawing, collage, and tapestry among others.

Peter Doig (b. 1959, Edinburgh) is a Scottish painter renowned for his dreamlike, evocative landscapes that blend personal memory with cultural references. Raised in Trinidad and Canada, Doig’s work draws on the visual and emotional atmospheres of both regions—snow-covered forests, isolated cabins, tropical jungles, and luminous beaches—rendered with a lush, painterly sensibility that invites both intimacy and mystery.Doig studied at the Wimbledon School of Art, Saint Martin’s School of Art, and completed his MA at Chelsea College of Art and Design in 1990. That same year, he won the Whitechapel Artist Prize, leading to a solo exhibition featuring key early works such as Swamped (1990) and The Architect’s Home in the Ravine (1991). Often working from photographs, postcards, and film stills, Doig resists photorealism, instead painting “by proxy” to capture a mood or atmosphere rather than a direct likeness.Since 2002, Doig lived and worked in Trinidad for nearly two decades, where he co-founded StudioFilmClub and maintained a studio near Port of Spain. He was also a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf until 2017. In 2021, he returned to London, where he continues to live and work.Doig’s major exhibitions include retrospectives at Tate Britain, Fondation Beyeler, Musée d’Art Moderne de Paris, and the Scottish National Gallery. In 2023, he became the first contemporary artist to exhibit at the Courtauld Gallery following its redevelopment, and in 2024, his work was the subject of two exhibitions at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Today, Peter Doig is widely regarded as one of the most important painters of his generation, admired for his technical mastery and rich, transportive imagery.

Peter Doig

Peter Doig’s serene, fantastical paintings feature kaleidoscope landscapes punctuated by enigmatic, partially obscured figures.

Tracey Emin (b. 1963, London) is one of Britain’s most prominent contemporary artists, known for her deeply personal, confessional, and emotionally raw work across media including drawing, painting, installation, sculpture, film, photography, neon, and embroidery. A leading figure of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Emin first gained public attention in the 1990s for works that defied convention and embraced vulnerability, memory, and autobiography.Her breakthrough came with Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995), a tent appliquéd with names of everyone she had shared a bed with—family, lovers, and unborn children. In 1999, she was shortlisted for the Turner Prize with My Bed, an unflinching installation of her own unmade bed surrounded by personal debris, capturing a moment of profound emotional crisis. These works, both iconic and controversial, redefined intimacy and confession in contemporary art.Emin’s practice is rooted in self-portraiture and life experience, confronting themes of love, sexuality, trauma, illness, and mortality with striking honesty. Her neon text works, embroidered quilts, and raw figural drawings extend her exploration of the female body and inner life. More recently, her large-scale sculpture The Mother (2021), permanently installed beside Oslo’s Munch Museum, honors both her own mother and Edvard Munch’s legacy—an artist who deeply influenced her.In 2020, following a cancer diagnosis and major surgery, Emin returned to painting with renewed intensity, channeling her physical and emotional reality into gestural, urgent works. She lives and works between London, the South of France, and Margate, where she founded TKE Studios and a free residency program for emerging artists.Emin has exhibited internationally, with major shows at Tate Britain, the Musée d’Orsay, Munchmuseet, and the Royal Academy. She was appointed Professor of Drawing at the RA in 2011 and was made a Dame in 2024 for her services to art.

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin’s poetic, confessional practice spans film, painting, neon, embroidery, drawing, installation, and sculpture.

Brian Eno (b. 1948, Suffolk, UK) is a pioneering British musician, composer, producer, and visual artist whose influence spans ambient music, conceptual art, and sound-based installation. A key figure in experimental and popular music since the 1970s, Eno is best known for coining the term ambient music and for developing new creative methodologies in both music and visual art.Trained in painting and experimental music at Ipswich Art School and Winchester School of Art, Eno’s early exposure to Minimalism and conceptualism shaped his lifelong interest in generative and process-based art. He joined Roxy Music as synthesizer player in 1971, leaving two years later to pursue a solo career marked by acclaimed albums like Discreet Music (1975) and Ambient 1: Music for Airports (1978).Eno’s collaborative projects are equally renowned. He has worked with artists such as David Bowie, Robert Fripp, David Byrne, U2, Coldplay, and Peter Gabriel, both as a creative partner and producer. A self-described “non-musician,” Eno has introduced radical approaches to sound, structure, and studio production that have transformed contemporary music.Parallel to his sonic innovations, Eno has maintained a prolific visual art practice centered on light and sound installations. Since the late 1970s, his immersive environments have been exhibited worldwide, including at the Biennale de Lyon, Serpentine Gallery, and The Barbican Centre. In 2009, he illuminated the sails of the Sydney Opera House using large-scale projections, marking one of his most iconic public works.Eno’s interdisciplinary career also includes co-developing Oblique Strategies (1975), a creative prompt system for artists, and advocating for humanitarian and environmental causes. A founding member of the Long Now Foundation, he continues to be a vocal public thinker and activist.

Brian Eno

Brian Eno is a British musician, composer, record producer and visual artist known as one of the main innovators of ambient music and generative painting.

Douglas Gordon (b. 1966, Glasgow, Scotland) is an internationally acclaimed artist whose multidisciplinary practice spans video, film, installation, sculpture, photography, text, and sound. Known for his conceptual rigor and psychological depth, Gordon’s work explores themes of memory, morality, duality, and the disruption of perception. Using found footage, literary references, religious symbolism, and his own recordings, he probes the human condition through acts of distortion and repetition.Gordon studied sculpture and environmental art at the Glasgow School of Art (1984–88) and earned his MFA at the Slade School of Fine Art, London (1988–90), where he began engaging deeply with the cinematic medium. His breakthrough work, 24 Hour Psycho (1993), stretched Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film to a full day’s duration, dramatically altering its psychological impact and challenging viewers' relationship to time and narrative.Binary oppositions—good and evil, light and dark, life and death—are central to Gordon’s work, often explored through haunting juxtapositions and conceptual subversion. In Three Inches Black (1997), a tattooed fingertip becomes a meditation on violence and intimacy. In Between Darkness and Light (after William Blake) (1997), he screens a film about divine revelation simultaneously with one about demonic possession, blending sacred and profane.Gordon’s work has been widely exhibited in major institutions including MoMA New York, Tate Britain, Hayward Gallery, Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, and ARoS Aarhus. He represented Britain at the Venice Biennale and participated in Documenta 14 (2017). He received the Turner Prize in 1996 and has also been recognized at major film festivals including Cannes, Venice, and Toronto.

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.

Conceptual art pioneer Wang Guangle was born in Fujian Province, China, in 1976 and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2000. There he began exploring the potential of texture and painting surfaces, which later translated into his minimalist monochrome painting practice.&nbsp;Wang’s process-based paintings delve into themes such as memento mori, temporality, repetition, and abstraction, making these concepts tangible through his work.&nbsp;Wang has been awarded several prestigious prizes, such as the Montblanc Artist Award in 2015 and the China Artist of the Year Award in 2016. Wang has participated in notable international exhibitions, including the 4th Prague Biennale (2009), the Busan Biennale (2010), and the California-Pacific Triennial at the Orange County Museum of Art (2013).&nbsp;His works are part of permanent collections in several esteemed institutions, including the Rubell Family Collection and Contemporary Arts Foundation which are both located in Miami, the White Rabbit Art Museum in Australia and Museum Ludwig in Germany. His works have also been presented in solo shows worldwide, including at Beijing Commune (2015) in Beijing, and Soka Art Centre (2011) in Taipei, among others.

Wang Guangle

Conceptual art pioneer Wang Guangle was born in Fujian Province, China, in 1976 and graduated from the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing in 2000. There he began exploring the potential of texture and painting surfaces, which later translated into his minimalist monochrome painting practice.

Peter Halley is a painter and printmaker born in New York in 1953.Associated with the Minimalist, Neo-Geo, and Neo-Conceptualist movements, he is best known for his brightly colored geometric abstractions, which he started painting in the 1980s and which he calls “prisons” and “cells”.Halley's paintings explore both physical and psychological structures of social space. He combines the hermetic language of geometric abstraction with the realities of urban space and the digital landscape. His prisons and cells, &nbsp;painted with fluorescent Day-Glo acrylics and Roll-a-Tex textured paint, are often connected by pipes. These shapes represent the division of space in a modern urban environment.Halleys paintings have been exhibited at the Kitakyushu Municipal Museum of Art in Japan, the Museum Haus Esters in Krefeld, Germany, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York.

Peter Halley

Peter Halley is a painter and printmaker born in New York in 1953. Associated with the Minimalist, Neo-Geo, and Neo-Conceptualist movements, he is best known for his brightly colored geometric abstractions, which he started painting in the 1980s and which he calls “prisons” and “cells”.

Jan Henderikse

Damien Hirst (b. 1965, Bristol) is one of the most influential and provocative figures in contemporary art. A leading member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Hirst rose to prominence in the 1990s with a practice that confronts themes of life, death, science, religion, and consumerism through sculpture, painting, installation, and mixed media. His work is known for its dramatic use of materials—formaldehyde-preserved animals, surgical instruments, pharmaceutical packaging, diamonds, and butterflies—encased in vitrines or arranged in highly polished displays.Hirst first gained attention while still a student at Goldsmiths College when he curated Freeze (1988), the seminal exhibition that launched the YBAs. He won the Turner Prize in 1995 and became closely associated with collector Charles Saatchi, before breaking away in 2003. His landmark work The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991)—a tiger shark suspended in formaldehyde—became an icon of 1990s British art and epitomized his Natural History series.Known for his exploration of repetition, belief, and spectacle, Hirst has produced major series including the Spot Paintings (1986–), Pharmaceutical Cabinets (1988–2012), and Butterfly Paintings (2001–08). His controversial For the Love of God (2007)—a platinum-cast human skull encrusted with 8,601 diamonds—underscored his fascination with mortality, beauty, and value.In 2008, Hirst made headlines by bypassing galleries and auctioning an entire show directly at Sotheby’s, raising over £111 million. His 2017 exhibition Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable filled the Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice with imagined artifacts and questioned the boundaries between myth, truth, and artifice.Hirst’s work is held in major public collections including Tate, MoMA, and the Gagosian Gallery network. He lives and works in London and founded the Newport Street Gallery in 2015 to share his art collection with the public.

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.

A pioneer of the British Pop Art movement in the early 1960s alongside Richard Hamilton, David Hockney gained recognition for his semi-abstract paintings on the theme of homosexual love before it was decriminalized in England in 1967. In We Two Boys Clinging Together, 1961; red-painted couples embrace one other while floating amidst fragments from a Walt Whitman poem.

After moving to California at the end of 1963, Hockney began painting scenes of the sensual and uninhibited life of athletic young men, depicting swimming pools, palm trees, and perpetual sunshine. Experimenting with photography in the mid-1970s, Hockney went on to create his famous photocollages with Polaroids and snapshot prints arranged in a grid formation, pushing the two-dimensionality of photography to the limit, fragmenting the monocular vision of the camera and activating the viewer in the process.

A versatile artist, Hockney has produced work in almost every medium—including full-scale opera set designs, prints, and drawings using cutting-edge technology such as fax machines, laser photocopiers, computers, and even iPhones and iPads.

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.

Candida Höfer (b. 1944, Eberswalde, Germany) is internationally acclaimed for her large-scale color photographs of architectural interiors that explore the cultural and psychological dimensions of public space. A prominent member of the Düsseldorf School, Höfer studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf from 1973 to 1982, where she was mentored by influential photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher—alongside peers such as Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and Thomas Ruff.Höfer is best known for her rigorously composed images of libraries, museums, concert halls, palaces, and other institutional interiors. Often devoid of people, her photographs prompt viewers to reflect on the function of these spaces and the presence of their absent users. As she notes, “What people do in these spaces—and what these spaces do to them—is clearer when no one is present.” Her work investigates how architecture shapes experience, conveying both grandeur and intimacy through subtle light, symmetry, and structure.Since the 1980s, Höfer’s work has been widely exhibited in Europe, North America, and beyond. She has had solo exhibitions at the Louvre, Hermitage Museum, Museum Folkwang, Irish Museum of Modern Art, and Museo Amparo, among others. Her work has been featured in major group exhibitions including Documenta XI, MoMA New York, and the Guggenheim Bilbao. In 2003, she represented Germany at the Venice Biennale.Höfer has received numerous accolades, including the Sony World Photography Award for Outstanding Contribution to Photography (2018) and the Käthe Kollwitz Prize from the Academy of Arts, Berlin (2024). Her photographs are held in leading international collections and continue to shape conversations around the role of architecture, memory, and cultural identity.Candida Höfer lives and works in Cologne, Germany.

Candida Höfer

In majestic large-format color photography, Candida Höfer captures the psychological residue left behind in empty public and institutional spaces.

Painter, scene artist and costume designer, Robert Indiana (born 1928, Indiana, USA) has always been associated with Pop Art. With his Love piece, Robert Indiana is one of those rare artists who succeeded in creating a universally recognized motif.
Painter, scene artist, and costume designer, Robert Indiana has always been associated with Pop Art. With his Love piece, Robert Indiana, real name Robert Clark (1928-2018) is one of those rare artists who can boast of having created a universally recognized motif. After studying in various American art schools as well as Edinburgh College of Art and in London, Robert Indiana traveled throughout Mexico, Europe, and the United States before settling in New York in 1954. In 1962 he took part in the exhibition “New Realists” which gathered together a large number of the international artists associated with the Pop Art movement. A key artist of this movement, Indiana is part of the second wave of American Pop artists, after Rauschenberg, Johns, Chamberlain, and others. An admirer of Edward Hopper and the painter Charles Demuth, Robert Indiana became fascinated by graphic signs very early on. In the early ‘sixties, he developed his characteristically vibrant, colorful style encompassing letters, words, and numbers. Created during the war in Vietnam, his celebrated work LOVE with the slanted O was originally associated with the peace movement before becoming a Pop Art icon. The artist was to make steady and obsessive use of it, invading the world and reducing its impact in sculptures, stamps, silk-screens, and carpets.

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.

JR (b. 1983, Paris, France) is a French artist known for his large-scale photographic installations that blend public art, social activism, and storytelling. Working at the intersection of photography, street art, filmmaking, and community engagement, JR transforms urban and rural landscapes around the world into powerful platforms for collective expression.Maintaining a degree of anonymity, JR began his career as a street artist, posting black-and-white portraits in public spaces to confront social and cultural divides. His early project Face 2 Face (2007) placed portraits of Israelis and Palestinians side by side along the separation wall, challenging viewers to question identity and difference. In Women Are Heroes (2008–11), JR highlighted the strength and dignity of women living in conflict zones by pasting their faces across buildings, bridges, and trains.In 2011, JR received the prestigious TED Prize, which enabled the launch of the ongoing Inside Out Project—a global participatory art initiative that allows individuals and communities to share their own stories through large-scale portraiture. Since then, JR has orchestrated striking interventions worldwide: in a Brazilian favela, on the US-Mexico border, in the Louvre courtyard, and across the Sahara Desert.JR has exhibited internationally at institutions such as the Brooklyn Museum, Saatchi Gallery, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Kunsthalle Munich, and the Venice Biennale. His first solo exhibition in the Nordic region, Déplacé.e.s, opened at Kulturhuset Stadsteatern in Stockholm in 2024.He is also an accomplished filmmaker, directing four feature-length documentaries including Women Are Heroes (2011), the Oscar-nominated Faces and Places (2017, with Agnès Varda), Paper &amp; Glue (2021), and Tehachapi (2023).JR continues to challenge the boundaries of art and activism, using creativity as a tool for empathy, visibility, and social change.

JR’s practice lies at the intersection of photography, street art, film, and social practice.

Joel Mesler

Alex Katz (b. 1927, Brooklyn, New York) is one of the most influential and distinctive figures in contemporary American art. Renowned for his crisp, flat surfaces, bold use of colour, and striking economy of line, Katz forged a unique visual language that emerged in the 1950s in contrast to the dominance of Abstract Expressionism in the 1940s and 1950s. His style — often seen as a precursor to Pop Art that emerged in the 1950s and flourished in the 1960s in America and Britain — melds elements of abstraction and representation, with influences ranging from Henri Matisse to mid-century American culture, film, and advertising.Over a prolific seven-decade career, Katz has created an expansive body of work encompassing portraiture, landscape, sculpture, and printmaking. His most iconic subjects include his wife and lifelong muse Ada, as well as friends, dancers, and fashionably dressed figures, often depicted in cropped, cinematic compositions that exude cool detachment and modern elegance. In his later years, Katz turned his focus toward nature, exploring light, seasons, and atmosphere in immersive large-scale landscapes.Katz has held over 200 solo exhibitions worldwide and his work is housed in major public collections including MoMA, the Whitney, the Tate, and Centre Pompidou. In 2022, he was honoured with a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, and in 2024, his monumental seasonal landscapes were displayed at MoMA in New York. That same year, he was awarded the National Medal of Arts by the White House, recognising his enduring impact on American visual culture.Katz lives and works in New York City and Lincolnville, Maine, continuing to paint “the immediate present” with timeless clarity and vision.

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 (1928–1962) was a visionary French artist whose radical practice redefined the possibilities of painting, performance, and conceptual art in the postwar era. Born in Nice to a family of painters, Klein initially pursued a career as a judoka, living in Japan before fully committing to art in 1954 upon his return to Paris.Klein is best known for his luminous monochromes, especially his signature hue, International Klein Blue (IKB)—a vivid ultramarine developed to embody the immaterial and infinite. For Klein, color was a vehicle of spiritual experience. He sought to “liberate color from the prison that is the line,” and considered monochrome painting as a means of making the invisible visible.His work went far beyond the canvas. In 1958, he famously exhibited The Void, presenting an empty white gallery space as a meditation on presence and absence. In his Anthropometries (from 1960), Klein directed nude models to apply IKB paint to their bodies and imprint themselves on paper, transforming human presence into living brushes. He also worked with fire, gold leaf, water, and natural elements, channeling what he called “the vital force of nature.”Klein viewed the artist not simply as a maker of objects, but as a conduit of energy and sensibility. He saw beauty as omnipresent yet invisible—something to be revealed rather than created. His brief but blazing career culminated in monumental works like the Gelsenkirchen Opera House murals and his explorations of "immaterial zones of sensibility," which questioned the nature of ownership, value, and art itself.A founding member of the Nouveaux Réalistes, Klein died of a heart attack in 1962, at the age of 34. Yet his influence endures—his work continues to resonate as a daring fusion of body, spirit, and idea.

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 (b. 1955, York, Pennsylvania) is one of the most influential and controversial artists of our time, known for his bold, large-scale sculptures and glossy, photorealistic paintings that reflect on contemporary culture, consumerism, and the art historical canon. Emerging in the 1980s, Koons became a key figure in the dialogue around art and spectacle in a media-saturated world. With a stated aim to "communicate with the masses," his work draws on everyday objects, popular culture, and classical imagery, elevating the banal to the monumental.Koons studied at the Maryland Institute College of Art and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, receiving his BFA in 1976. His first solo exhibition was in 1980, and since then, his practice has evolved from assemblages of found objects to iconic sculptures like Balloon Dog and Puppy, towering figures rendered in polished stainless steel or flowering topiary. Through series such as Banality, Celebration, Popeye, and Gazing Ball, Koons reinterprets familiar images and kitsch objects with dazzling surfaces, often provoking dialogue about taste, value, and authenticity.His work often references the readymade tradition of Marcel Duchamp, merging mass-produced aesthetics with deeply personal and metaphysical themes. Whether through inflatable cartoon characters, hyperrealistic sculptures, or mirrored glass orbs, Koons explores ideas of transcendence, sexuality, innocence, and self-reflection.Koons has exhibited globally, with major retrospectives at the Whitney Museum of American Art, Centre Pompidou, Guggenheim Bilbao, and Palazzo Strozzi, among others. His work is held in numerous prestigious public collections, including MoMA, Tate, and the Broad. He lives and works in New York.

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.

Working predominantly in painting, but also with sculpture, installation and film, Kunath's practice is characterized by juxtapositions: landscapes and still lives recall 19th century Romanticism and Northern painting, while cartoon characters, 90s song lyrics and tropical sunsets refer to contemporary popular culture.
His work layers a poetic, melancholy imagery with poignant phrases, and embraces comedy and pathos, evoking universal feelings of love, hope, longing, and despair.

Friedrich Kunath

German artist Friedrich Kunath reimagines romanticism in dreamlike compositions, while saturating his art in irony, nostalgia and pathos.

Connected to the Conceptual and Minimalist art movements of the 1960s and '70s, artist and theorist Sol LeWitt was a pivotal figure in driving idea art into the mainstream art discourse.

Using a prescription to direct the creation of a work, the artist's hand subordinated to the artist's thoughts, in direct contrast to the Abstract Expressionist movement earlier in the century. Actions, forms, and adjectives were broken down into terms, serially repeated, and reconfigured: grids, lines, shapes, colour, directions and starting points are several examples. These directives and constructs fueled an influential career of vast variety, subtlety and progression.

Sol LeWitt

Sol LeWitt famously stressed the importance of the ideas that animated his artwork over the particulars of their execution.

Annie Leibovitz (b. 1949, Waterbury, Connecticut) is a renowned American portrait photographer celebrated for her compelling, intimate images of celebrities, cultural icons, and historical figures. Her work bridges fine art and photojournalism, capturing both the public personas and private moments of her subjects with a distinctive visual sensitivity.Leibovitz first studied painting at the San Francisco Art Institute before turning to photography, inspired by the work of Robert Frank and Henri Cartier-Bresson. In 1970, she joined Rolling Stone magazine and quickly rose to become its chief photographer by 1973, helping to shape its visual identity. Among her most iconic images is the poignant 1980 photograph of John Lennon and Yoko Ono, taken just hours before Lennon’s death.In 1983, she transitioned to Vanity Fair, where she became known for her elaborate and theatrical portraits, including the groundbreaking 1991 cover of a pregnant Demi Moore. Her portraits have been featured on countless magazine covers and in numerous advertising campaigns, always marked by a strong narrative quality and emotional depth.Leibovitz has exhibited widely, including a major solo exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., and her work is held in many major museum collections. Her published books include Photographs 1970–1990, Women (with Susan Sontag), and Annie Leibovitz: Portraits 2005–2016.She has received numerous honors, including the Centenary Medal from the Royal Photographic Society and the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Leibovitz shared a long personal and creative relationship with writer Susan Sontag, and is a mother of three.A defining figure in contemporary photography, Leibovitz continues to shape how we see fame, identity, and human connection through the lens of her camera.

Annie Leibovitz

One of the most influential photographers of our time, Annie Leibovitz was born in 1949 Waterbury, Connecticut and she is most renowned for her iconic celebrity portraits.

He began his career as a painter before taking up photography in 1971. Upon moving to Paris in 1978, Lindbergh started working for Vogue, which eventually led to assignments for The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, Rolling Stone, and Harper’s Bazaar, among others. He shoots portraits of celebrities and supermodels for these publications and has also worked on sumptuous advertising campaigns for such top fashion houses as Giorgio Armani, Donna Karan, and Comme des Garçons. Although Lindbergh works in both color and black and white, the latter is his preferred medium.

Peter Lindbergh

The fashion photographer Peter Lindbergh is celebrated for his artfully composed narrative photographs, as well as his films and television commercials.

Robert Longo (b. 1953, Brooklyn, NY) is a leading American artist known for his monumental, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings that grapple with power, perception, and the emotional weight of images. Working across drawing, sculpture, photography, performance, and film, Longo explores the visual language of mass media and the symbolic construction of authority, violence, and beauty in contemporary culture.Longo rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the Pictures Generation, alongside peers such as Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. His early Men in the Cities series (1981) became iconic for their stark, cinematic portrayal of sharply dressed figures in mid-motion, signaling his deep engagement with gesture, drama, and media aesthetics.Inspired by events like the Kent State shootings, political unrest, and image saturation in contemporary life, Longo draws from newspapers, film stills, X-rays, and historical artworks to build compelling visual narratives. His subjects range from riot police and migrants to nebulae, shark attacks, and roses in bloom—what he calls “absolutes.” He reinterprets canonical works by artists such as Picasso, Van Gogh, and the Abstract Expressionists, and his Forensic Distance and Gang of Cosmos series reflect on the weight of art history in the present moment.Longo’s mastery of charcoal enables him to slow down the image, transforming fleeting media snapshots into meditative, visceral encounters. His recent bodies of work, including The Destroyer Cycle and A History of the Present, reflect on sociopolitical crises, climate change, and freedom of expression, challenging viewers to confront the world through a heightened visual consciousness.Longo lives and works in New York. His work is held in major international collections, and recent solo exhibitions include the Milwaukee Art Museum (2024–25) and a traveling retrospective at the Albertina Museum, Vienna and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Denmark (2025).

Robert Longo

Robert Longo is known for large-scale, hyperrealistic charcoal portraits that consider power, authority, and social unrest.

Ahmed Mater was born in 1979 in a rural part of Southern Saudi Arabia. He is recognized as one of the most influential of Saudi Arabian artists today. By combining art, science and the concept of identity, his work marks a revival of contemporary art in Saudi Arabia with the emergence of an artistic scene. He grew up in Abha, the capital of Aseer, where he followed a career working both as an artist and as a doctor at the local hospital. Ahmed Mater’s work bears witness to his dual vocation; as an artist and doctor. It reflects the duality between the objective and subjective worlds. With his unique style, the artist mingles scientific reference, medical imagery, and religious symbolism in a truly original way. Widely shown in the Middle East and in Europe, Ahmed Mater is recognized as one of the most influential Saudi Arabian artists today. By combining art, science, and the concept of identity, his work marks a revival of contemporary art in Saudi Arabia with the emergence of an artistic scene.

Ahmed Mater

A mid-career survey by Saudi Arabia’s most acclaimed contemporary artist.

Otto Piene is one of the most important German post-war artists. Born in 1929 Otto Piene was brought up in Lübeck (Germany) and, after his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Munich and Düsseldorf, he completed his academic education with studies on philosophy at the University of Cologne. In 1957- Otto Piene and Heinz Mack founded the group ZERO; which Günther Uecker joined in 1961. Their aim was to create a recommencement of contemporary art, starting at the point ZERO with new artworks emphasizing predominantly on light. Piene primarily aimed in his artworks to visualize light, fire, and air; so he started to create Op-Art inspired raster paintings, followed by smoke and fire paintings, and finally switched to Kinetic Art and created “light ballets”. His oeuvre is very extensive and complex; he worked with different mediums and techniques and was always looking for new transboundary art experiments.

After some years as a visiting professor at the University of Pennsylvania, he was appointed professor for Environmental Art at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1972. He mainly worked and lived in Massachusetts and Düsseldorf. Otto Piene died unexpectedly one day after the opening of his great retrospective show in Berlin “Otto Piene. More Sky” in July 2014.

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 was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and lives and works in upstate New York. Best known as a pioneer of Appropriation Art, he began creating works based on various pop culture images taken from magazines and newspapers, often re-photographing and manipulating the images in his own works. Richard Prince was born in 1949 in the Panama Canal Zone and lives and works in upstate New York. Best known as a pioneer of Appropriation Art, he began creating works based on various pop culture images taken from magazines and newspapers, often re-photographing and manipulating the images using a repertoire of strategies (such as blurring, cropping, and enlarging) to intensify their original artifice. Prince has redefined the concepts of authorship, ownership, and aura while evolving a unique signature filled with echoes of other signatures that are unquestionably his own. Copywriting puns, literal or visual, became the basis for Prince's language, as he developed the rephotograph – a new form of photographic image, redone in order to answer the latest cultural or social context. The majority of his works include scandalous subjects that have provoked controversy around issues of copyright in the art world. Prince's has been the subject of major survey exhibitions, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (1992), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (1993), Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel (2001), Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (2007), and Serpentine Gallery, London (2008). His artworks are in major international museums, such as the Metropolitan Museum, New York; Tate Britain, London; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Chicago among others.

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.

The artist Marc Quinn (born 1964, London) is one of the foremost representatives of the contemporary British art scene. His work focuses mainly on aging and mortality, the beauty and strangeness of the human body, the play between art and science. Via numerous references to the classical themes in art history, Marc Quinn underlines the constant shift between reality and its deflection. Yet his work is distinguished by a sense of humor and a provocative feel peculiar to the YBA (Young British Artists), the generation of British artists who emerged on the scene in the ‘90s. Marc Quinn applies different techniques to his artworks that include some controversial pieces. For example, the sculpture Self (1991) is a cast of the artist’s head filled with his own frozen blood, or Siren (2008), a sculpture in gold representing the supermodel Kate Moss but also the famous installation Winter Garden (2000) at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, made from hundreds of flowers frozen for eternity. Although his first sculptures date from 1984, his work quickly met international acclaim and is equally at home at the Tate Gallery as at the Centre Georges Pompidou. A fascination with the human body has led this Cambridge graduate and freethinker to recreate a veritable mythology around contemporary society through his sculpture, painting, drawing and photography.

Marc Quinn

Marc Quinn expands the material and conceptual possibilities of sculpture.

Born in 1967 in Chbanieh in Lebanon, Walid Raad is an artist whose work reflects the troubled history of his country of origin, which he has witnessed since childhood. By collecting, modifying and creating photographs, texts, and videos, he plays on the idea of the document as it relates to the civil war and the troubles between communities that have shaken this territory. The artist infuses his depictions with a cloudiness intended to throw doubt on the notion of documentation itself and posing a profound question about how History is constructed. "Scratching on Things I Could Disavow: A History of Art in the Arab World" expands upon the research-based methodology of Raad’s The Atlas Group (1989–2004), the visual and performative archival project he has initiated to document the social, political, psychological and aesthetic conditions of the Lebanese wars (1975–1990/91). The new project marks a critical juncture in Raad’s practice, at once a departure from The Atlas Group while expanding its historical and theoretical reference. His works have been exhibited at The Venice Biennale (Venice), The Whitney Biennial (New York), and numerous other festivals in Europe, the Middle East, and North America.

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.

Tom Sachs maintains his conceptual practice mostly through sculptures and installations. He investigates into modern hight-tech consumer culture and luxury culture. His technical approach includes variety of disparate at first sight materials such as, steel, ceramics, resin and so on.

Tom Sachs

Tom Sachs (USA, born 1966) is an American contemporary artist who lives and works in New York City.

Collin Sekajugo was born in Masaka, Uganda. He is a multimedia art practitioner whose art is rooted in his deep sense of empathy for the human condition. Collin Sekajugo approaches his work from a distinct, aesthetic departure point that resides in his repeated return to pop culture and the omnipresent influence exuded by the global mainstream, conversing and critiquing its many biases across visual, oral and digital cultures. Sekajugo’s artistic practice highlights a contemporaneous anthropological reversal of this mainstream culture through the lens of a decidedly African sense for irreverence and play on the ad-hoc. 
Along Acaye Kerunen, Collin Sekajugo was chosen to be one of the firsts artist to represent his country in the first ever Ugandan pavilion at the 59th International Art Exhibition of La Biennale di Venezia 2022.

Collin Sekajugo

Ugandan-Rwandan Collin Sekajugo’s artistic practice examines and questions the notion of personal identity in a self-absorbed contemporaneity by re-imagining subjects from visual, oral and digital culture.

Park Seo-Bo (1931-2023) was a pioneering figure in Korean contemporary art and a leading artist of the Dansaekhwa movement (1960s-1980s). Dansaekhwa emerged in postwar Korea, blending elements of Korean artistic heritage with Western abstraction and gaining international recognition for its emphasis on materiality, process, and meditative repetition.&nbsp; Park’s steadfast commitment to pushing boundaries and embracing new vocabularies of expression has consistently resulted in new and influential bodies of work. His renowned Écriture series (1967-2023) reflects this dedication and has profoundly shaped his artistic journey and contributions to contemporary art.&nbsp;&nbsp; His works have been exhibited at the prestigious Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York (2019-2020), the Langen Foundation in Neuss, Germany (2019-2020), and at the Venice Biennale in 1988 and 2015.&nbsp;&nbsp; Over his career, he received several prestigious accolades, including the Asia Society Asia Game Changer Award in 2018 and the Silver Crown Cultural Medal in Korea in 2011.

Park Seo-Bo

Park Seo-Bo (1931-2023) was a pioneering figure in Korean contemporary art and a leading artist of the Dansaekhwa movement (1960s-1980s). Dansaekhwa emerged in postwar Korea, blending elements of Korean artistic heritage with Western abstraction and gaining international recognition for its emphasis on materiality, process, and meditative repetition.

Chiharu Shiota is a Japanese performance and installation artist based in Berlin. Confronting fundamental human concerns such as life, death, and relationships. A former student of Marina Abramovic, Shiota explores human existence throughout various dimensions by creating an existence in the absence either in her large-scale thread installations that include a variety of common through her drawings, sculptures, photography and videos. 

Shiota gained international fame, when she represented Japan in 2015 at the Venice Biennale with The Key in the Hand. The installation made of dangling 50,000 metal keys, collected from around the world, bound together in a colossal red web hovering above two wooden boat offered a collective metaphor for the distillation of individual experiences into collective memory. The manifestation of Shiota’s emotions and interior battles, truths and memories that are at once personal and collective makes her oeuvre is very intimate but also universal.

Chiharu Shiota

Best known for her delicate, mixed-media web-like composition combined with everyday items, Japanese artist Chiharu Shiota’s oeuvre, explores fundamental human concerns such as life, death and relationships.

The artist delights in satirizing everyday human interactions, filtering the mundane through a sense of childlike wonder and an unguarded sense of humor. Shrigley attended the Glasgow School of Art and has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, and Copenhagen. His works belong in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Foundation, and the Arts Council Collection. Shrigley has also worked in sculpture, photography, and printmaking, and has produced music as well.

David Shrigley

David Shrigley’s drawings, paintings, animations, and neon texts embrace cartoon aesthetics and an absurd, deadpan sensibility.

Thomas Struth (b. 1954, Geldern, Germany) is one of the leading figures in contemporary photography, known for his large-scale, detail-rich images that explore the structures of public and private life. A student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Struth began his career photographing the empty streets of Düsseldorf, later expanding his lens to family portraits, museum visitors, and cutting-edge technological sites.Struth’s work probes the social fabric of modern life through a precise, objective style. His iconic Museum Photographs series, which documents visitors engaging with iconic artworks in cultural institutions, captures moments of collective attention and historical dialogue. In later series such as Paradise and Nature &amp; Politics, he investigates both untouched landscapes and the hidden infrastructures of science and industry, revealing how progress, power, and perception are constructed.Blending conceptual rigour with human sensitivity, Struth’s photographs illuminate how we navigate space, memory, and meaning in a visually saturated world. His work is held in major international collections and has been widely exhibited, including retrospectives at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Whitechapel Gallery, and the Kunsthaus Zürich.

Thomas Struth

Thomas Struth’s mesmerizing, large-format photographs capture the wonders of nature, machinery, architecture, and contemporary life itself.

Donald Sultan (USA, born 1951) is a distinguished painter, sculptor, and printmaker, who rose to prominence in the late 1970s as part of the New Yorker “New Image” movement. He has a unique artistic method and innovative approach to traditional subject matter. Known as Abstract Representation, Donald Sultan´s art is characterized by the use of geometric black forms set against organic areas of bright color, thus bringing an abstract sensibility to his iconographic images of still life. Throughout his career he has revisited and reinvented still life, using images of lemons, poppies, playing cards, fruits, flowers, and other objects. Donald Sultan’s Lemons, a recurrent theme in his artworks, has, in fact, become an iconic image all over the world. Sultan is considered to be at the forefront of contemporary art. Although his paintings are often classified as landscapes and still life, Sultan states that they are first and foremost abstracts. Besides paintings, drawings, and sculptures, he has created many editions. Donald Sultan’s prints are unique: he uses specific materials like “flocking’s” to create expressive and powerful prints that are reminiscent of his forceful paintings. Since his first solo exhibition in 1977, Sultan’s artistic career has progressed rapidly; his works are part of the most prominent public and private collections to be found across the globe.

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.

Duke Ellington once said: "Certain artists are beyond category"&nbsp;and this is particularly true for New York-based artist Mickalene Thomas&nbsp;(b. 1971, New Jersey). An undeniable force within the contemporary art world, and an indispensable inspiration to a younger generation of artists, her innovative and playful practice has yielded instantly recognisable and widely celebrated aesthetic languages. Proclaiming and expanding the visibility of black women within the canon of Western art history is at the heart of Thomas’s practice, which she does by eloquently dissecting the intersecting complexities of Black and female sexuality, identity, power, and beauty. And she does it in the boldest ways possible: With sparkly rhinestones, jewel-tone acrylic paint, and a hodgepodge of retro prints, all on sprawling canvases that command attention. Often drawing on an eclectic roster of references, often blurring the distinction between object and subject, concrete and abstract, real and imaginary.&nbsp;Thomas has enjoyed solo exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, the Bass Museum in Miami, the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, among other institutions. At auction, Thomas’s work can command upwards of seven figures. Along with her fine-art practice, Thomas has shot for such publications as&nbsp;W,&nbsp;Out, and T:&nbsp;The New York Times Style Magazine. She has also constructed elaborate installations to showcase her works. She has also been awarded multiple prizes and grants, including the Pratt Institute Legends Award (2022), Rema Hort Mann Foundation 25th Anniversary Honoree (2022), Artistic Impact Award, Newark Museum (2022) and many more.

Mickalene Thomas

Mickalene Thomas is a contemporary artist celebrated for her powerful explorations of identity, femininity, and cultural heritage. Thomas was born and raised in New Jersey and currently resides and works in New York.

Cy Twombly (1928–2011) was born in Lexington, Virginia. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1947–49); the Art Students League, New York (1950–51); and Black Mountain College, North Carolina (1951–52). In the mid-1950s, following travels in Europe and Africa, he emerged as a prominent figure among a group of artists working in New York that included Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. The late American artist brought a distinctive approach to painting and sculpture that evades precise affiliation with the predominant movements of the twentieth century. Inspired by ancient Mediterranean history and geography, Greek and Roman mythology, and epic poetry, Twombly created a sometimes inscrutable world of iconography, metaphor, and myth. Instead of presenting us with a narrative that is fully present and intact, Twombly offers an incomplete archive of impressions on which our own experience must be bought to bear. The artist was invited to exhibit his work at the Venice Biennale in 1964, 1989, and 2001 when he was awarded the Golden Lion at the 49th Venice Biennale. In 2010, he was made Chevalier of the Légion d’Honneur by the French government. During fall 2010, Tacita Dean produced a film on Twombly, titled "Edwin Parker".

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly’s idiosyncratic style incorporated expressive drips, frenetic scribbles, and gestural, calligraphic linework into lyrical abstractions.

Manolo Valdés (b. 1942, Valencia, Spain) is a celebrated Spanish painter, sculptor, and printmaker known for his bold reinterpretations of art historical imagery. A founding member of the influential Pop-inflected collective Equipo Crónica, Valdés emerged in the 1960s as part of a generation of artists responding to the political climate of Francoist Spain with sharp wit and visual innovation.Valdés studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes de San Carlos in Valencia, where he met fellow artists Rafael Solbes and Juan Antonio Toledo. In 1964, the trio established Equipo Crónica, whose narrative-driven, politically charged works adapted the strategies of American Pop Art while maintaining a uniquely European and critical lens. After Solbes’ death in 1981, Valdés began a solo career, evolving his style while maintaining a dialogue with the visual language of the past.Deeply engaged with art history, Valdés draws inspiration from artists such as Velázquez, Matisse, Picasso, and van Eyck, distilling iconic forms into expressive, contemporary compositions. In both painting and sculpture, he explores texture and volume through materials like jute, wood, bronze, alabaster, and marble, often working on a monumental scale. His recurring reinterpretation of Velázquez’s Mariana de Austria has become a signature motif.Valdés has lived and worked in New York since 1990, and his work has been the subject of major solo exhibitions at institutions including the Guggenheim Bilbao and Museo Reina Sofía. He represented Spain at the 1999 Venice Biennale and has exhibited monumental public sculptures in Place Vendôme (Paris) and Valencia’s City of Arts and Sciences. His works are held in prestigious collections worldwide, including MoMA, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Centre Pompidou, and the Kunstmuseum Berlin.Valdés continues to bridge classical tradition with contemporary expression, offering new life to the great icons of art history.

Manolo Valdés

Manolo Valdés (1942, Valencia, Spain) has developed a distinctive style that explores history without taking away from the original subject.

Joana Vasconcelos (b. 1971, Paris) is a Portuguese contemporary artist internationally renowned for her large-scale sculptures and immersive installations that fuse craftsmanship, pop culture, and political commentary. Working across a wide range of media, she deconstructs everyday objects and transforms them into monumental works—provocative, playful, and deeply layered—often engaging with themes of gender, identity, consumerism, and collective memory.After studying at Lisbon’s Centro de Arte &amp; Comunicação Visual, Vasconcelos gained international recognition at the 2005 Venice Biennale with A Noiva (The Bride)—a 20-foot chandelier made from 14,000 tampons. Since then, she has represented Portugal in 2013 with Trafaria Praia, the Biennale’s first floating pavilion, and returned three times overall.In 2012, Vasconcelos became the youngest artist and first woman to exhibit at the Palace of Versailles. Her show became the most visited in France in 50 years, drawing 1.6 million visitors. She was also the first Portuguese artist to present a solo show at the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao in 2018, with I’m Your Mirror, which became one of the museum’s most attended exhibitions.Her Valkyrie series—soft sculptures made from textiles and embroidery—pays tribute to notable women from history and has been shown worldwide, including Valkyrie Mumbet (2020), honoring Elizabeth Freeman in her U.S. debut at MAAM Boston. In 2024, she exhibited Tree of Life (2023) and Valkyrie Mumbet at MICAS, Malta.Vasconcelos’ work has appeared in leading institutions across Europe, the Americas, and Asia, and belongs to prominent collections including the Centre Pompidou, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, and the Louis Vuitton Foundation. She was awarded the Order of Prince Henry in 2009 and named Officer of the Order of Arts and Letters by France in 2022.Based in Lisbon, she leads Atelier Joana Vasconcelos, a team of over 50, and runs her own foundation to support cultural and social initiatives.

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 (b. 1941, Château-Arnoux, France) is a pioneering French conceptual artist whose practice spans sculpture, painting, drawing, installation, sound, poetry, and performance. Known for his radical formal explorations and mathematical rigor, Venet has played a key role in the development of Minimal and Conceptual Art since the 1960s.After briefly studying at La Villa Thiole in Nice, Venet began his career with experimental works involving industrial materials—piles of gravel, coal, or tar, and reliefs made from cardboard and bitumen. His move to New York in 1966 marked a turning point, as he began incorporating mathematical equations and scientific notation into his art, challenging traditional notions of aesthetic value and authorship.From the early 1980s onward, Venet shifted his focus to monumental steel sculptures. His iconic series—Arcs, Straight Lines, and Indeterminate Lines—reflect a dynamic tension between control and unpredictability, structure and chaos. “They are a test of strength,” Venet has said. “A battle between myself and the piece of metal.”Venet's work is included in more than 100 museum collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Guggenheim in New York, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and LACMA in Los Angeles. He has been honored with numerous awards, including the Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur and the 2016 Lifetime Achievement Award from the International Sculpture Center. In 2014, he established the Venet Foundation in Le Muy, France, a private institution dedicated to his work and legacy.Venet has had major retrospectives at MAC Lyon and MAMAC Nice, and his large-scale public sculptures are permanently installed in cities across Europe, Asia, and the Americas. His monumental L’Arc Majeur (2019), one of Europe’s largest public sculptures, stands beside the E411 highway in Belgium.He lives and works between Le Muy and New York.

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.

Wang Guangyi (b. 1956) is best known for his work that explores the Chinese Cultural Revolution through the lenses of propaganda. The Chinese artist knows how to marry a juxtaposing couple, politics with commercial ingenuity, which makes him an eminent figure of the "Political Pop" movement. Guangyi´s main work is “Great Criticism”, a series of paintings that explore commercial society and comment on the invasion operated by imported Western commodities on the traditional Chinese culture.

His oeuvre blends together the aesthetics of revolutionary images and consumer logos and becomes an unmistakable commentary on the narratives of political, economic, and social policies as well as an ideological criticism of globalization. While it is true that Western influence is a reality in contemporary Chinese art, it is equally true that Guangyi´s style keeps an instinctive distance from Western art, whose motives are incorporated while "Chinese". As an artist, he also felt himself to be entrusted with a mission: to bring his country on the international art scene - an ambition that soon made his name part of the history of contemporary Chinese art.

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.

Andy Warhol (1928–1987) was an American artist, filmmaker, and cultural icon whose work profoundly shaped the course of contemporary art. A leading figure of the Pop Art movement, Warhol blurred the boundaries between high art and mass culture, turning everyday objects and celebrity icons into enduring artistic subjects. His practice encompassed painting, silkscreen printing, photography, sculpture, performance, and experimental film, and his influence extends across art, fashion, media, and music.Born in Pittsburgh to a family of Rusyn immigrants, Warhol began his career as a commercial illustrator before emerging as a radical new voice in the New York art scene in the early 1960s. His Campbell’s Soup Cans (1962) and Marilyn Diptych (1962) marked a breakthrough, introducing repetition, seriality, and mechanical reproduction as core artistic strategies. Warhol embraced silkscreen printing to create iconic portraits of celebrities such as Marilyn Monroe, Elvis Presley, and Jackie Kennedy, while simultaneously confronting darker themes in his Death and Disaster series.Warhol’s legendary studio, The Factory, became a nexus for artists, musicians, writers, and misfits, giving rise to his underground films and the creation of "superstars." His film work, including Empire (1964) and Chelsea Girls (1966), pushed the boundaries of duration, narrative, and voyeurism. In the 1970s and ’80s, Warhol expanded his influence as a publisher (Interview magazine), author, and television host, and returned to painting with works inspired by abstraction, religion, and art history.Openly queer in a time of repression, Warhol’s work often expressed his identity through coded images and stylized self-presentation. Following his death in 1987, Warhol’s legacy has only grown. His work has broken auction records, and The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh stands as the largest U.S. museum dedicated to a single artist.Warhol remains a defining figure of 20th-century art—a master of image, celebrity, and the cultural moment.

Andy Warhol

Obsessed with celebrity, consumer culture, and mechanical reproduction, Pop artist Andy Warhol created some of the 20th century’s most iconic images.

Erwin Wurm (Born 1954 Bruck an der Mur, Austria) is a pioneering contemporary artist who explores several different mediums and goes beyond their classical concepts. Wurm seems at first to embody a comedic attitude, highly apparent in his Fat Car series, where he intentionally disfigures car models seen as status symbols in modern society. The artist’s production, however, is rather a deeper, humorous critique of our modern, consumer, society; and Wurms gives the viewer who wants to go beyond a first superficial look, the possibility to discover such critique.
 
Wurm started his artistic career studying at the University of Applied Arts in Vienna. Inspired by the tradition of German artist Joseph Beuys, Wurm has offered his own perspective on sculpture mediums with his ‘One Minute Sculptures’. Wurm invited the audience to participate and interact with his sculptures to assess the medium. 

Wurm’s work has been shown at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and Vienna, as well as the Musée d’Art Contemporain in Lyon and the centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Wurm currently resides between Vienna and Limburg, Austria. Today the artist's collections can be seen in The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Modern in London among many others.

Erwin Wurm

Erwin Wurm expands contemporary notions of sculpture with humorous works that often invite viewer participation or anthropomorphize everyday objects.

Yue Minjun (born 1962, Daqing, China) is one of the leading Chinese artists. He is best known for oil paintings depicting formations of his laughing self-portraits in various settings. His iconography is easily recognisable, it challenges social and cultural conventions by depicting objects and political issues in a radical, abstract, ironic and cynical manner. Yue Minjun initially started painting as a hobby, subsequently he graduated from the Oil Painting Department of Hebei Normal University, China in 1985. In the 90s he joined an artist community in Yuan Ming Yuan, a village near Beijing where he began to form his style and iconography. The paintings, sculptures, and installations of Yue Minjun feature uniform laughing pink faces, which appear to be self-portraits. Through various symbols, metaphors, signs, or through depictions of daily life the artist constructs various realities against which the laughing figures are rendered. Yue became famous after his participation in the 48th Venice Biennale in 1999, which granted him access to international art. One of the best-known paintings by Yue Minjun and an icon for modern Chinese art and the Cynical Realism movement is Execution. It was painted in 1995 and is generally regarded as a reaction to the Tiananmen Square crackdown of 1989, as it shows several laughing men in front of an execution squad. The cloned all-smiling Minjun self-portraits have become known in the art world as the "Silly Man". As the preparation for his paintings, the artist uses photographs of himself being photographed in various poses. This approach reflects the self-irony of the artist. Yue Minjun is often classified as part of the Chinese "Cynical Realist" movement, however, the artist does not support such attribution. Nevertheless, Yue often challenges social and cultural conventions by depicting objects and political issues in a radical, abstract, ironic and cynical manner.

Yue Minjun

In fantastical paintings populated with heightened, hysterical self-portraits, Yue Minjun satirizes contemporary society and art historical tropes.

Zhang Xiaogang (born 1958, Kunming, China) is a Chinese symbolist and surrealist painter. He is famous with his Bloodline series, where mostly monochromatic, stylized portraits of Chinese people are presented as part of the artist's exploration of the 'family' concept.
Zhang Xiaogang was trained as an oil painter at the Sichuan Academy of Fine Arts. After his graduation in 1982, he joined a group of young avant-garde artists who came to international prominence in 1980. In his earlier paintings, Xiaogang explored human values through the lens of the traditions coming from the rural Chinese culture. The artist continues to work around the multifaceted concept of 'family', the notion of identity within the Chinese culture, and collectivism. His imagery is inspired by the family photos from the Cultural Revolution period, as well as the European tradition of surrealism. Xiaogang’s portraits represent an infinite genealogies, where the sitters' appearance is almost homogenous. The colour schemes, such as black and white, translate the language of photography into paint that incorporates the aesthetics of the traditional Chinese charcoal drawing, giving the image a nostalgic quality. The occasional splashes of colour and red lines running through the paintings carry a substantial part of Xiaogang's symbolic language. The use of colour has an ambivalent purpose - while it is used to idealize the sitter, the splashes also create demarcations, reminiscent of birthmarks and aged film. Xiaogang was represented in many international exhibitions including Mao Goes Pop at the Sydney Museum of Contemporary Art in 1993, Sao Paolo Biennial in 1994, and Venice Biennial in 1995.

Zhang Xiaogang

Inspired by contemporary tensions in China, Zhang Xiaogang makes grim, unsettling portraits that consider identity and heredity in a collectivist state.

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