In Grand canyon (2008), Abdessemed dangled from a precipice over the canyon’s abyss and carved the single word “DEATH” into the underside of the boulder from which he was hanging. The work consisted of Abdessemed's daring act, as well as photograph of it and the engraved rock itself, relocated to the gallery.

Adel Abdessemed

Conceptual artist Adel Abdessemed, like William Lamson and Cai Guo-Qiang, creates situations based on deliberate actions—or “acts” as he calls them—carried out on everyday materials, which he documents with videos, photographs, and later juxtaposes with a sculptural remainder from the action itself.

Serbian artist Marina Abramović (b. 1946) is widely known for her use of the female body, adopted both as a subject and a vehicle.



Since the early 1970s, the artist has been especially committed to performance art, which gives her the possibility to use her body as an artistic and spiritual means to explore physical and emotional boundaries.
Abramović began creating performance art when this form of art was still emerging in Europe. She declared that the experience of growing under a Communist dictatorship and the strict implementations set by her mother gave her the inspiration for such works.

In her works, Marina Abramović wants to push the limits of the body and the mind exploring the connection between the artist the audience.

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.

The Chinese artist is one of the most celebrated contemporary artists in the East and West, a global citizen who calls for political investigation within his wide practice. Ai Weiwei investigates and questions institutions and regimes at the core of his work, he measures our existence in relation to economic, political, and social forces, while his practice is rooted in Chinese tradition he executes within a contemporary and conceptual creativity.

His provocative blend of Chinese tradition and craftsmanship within fully contemporary practice serves his strong criticism of human rights violations and condemnations of governmental corruption. His own life since childhood has been marked by his struggles and fights against the Chinese Government. His father, a renewed poet, was declared “class enemy” and sent to labor camp with his family. Migrating to New York was his opportunity to expand his artistic vocabularies where he stayed for over a decade. During this time, he became influenced by the works of Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, and Hasper Johns.
He was secretly detained without any official charges being filed for 81 days from April 3 to June 22, 2011 by the Chinese government, and his passport was held for 4 years afterward. Since being allowed to leave China in 2015 he has produced monumental installations and artworks that advocate for refugee rights and make awareness on the global crisis of displacement.

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.

Shirin Aliabadi (1973 – 2018) and Farhad Moshiri (b.1963) have been an Iranian contemporary art couple.

Aliabadi´s work was focused on women's issues, gender representation, and the beauty industry, while her husband´s production is strongly rooted in Pop Art dialect with a subtle and subversive socio-political commentary.

Moshiri is well-known fur overturning both pop culture and highbrow imaginary and transforming them into artworks. His pieces combine everyday objects with luxurious materials, thus appearing playful and decorative. However, behind the shimmering surface, the artist is criticizing contemporary societies and highlighting the limitations of the Western world.

Together, the art couple developed the project Operation Supermarket (2006), a series of prints featuring commodity advertisements and manipulated packages of household objects, mixing “poetry with detergent”, as the artists describe.

The world Supermarket refers to global consumerism, whose primary vehicle of manifestation is represented by such products.

Indeed, the whole project aims to point out the pervasive effect of Western capitalism on the lives of the general public, with particular reference to the commodification of mainstream media traits of the Middle East.

Farhad Moshiri & Shirin Aliabadi

Drawing equally from Eastern and Western traditions, Iranian artist Farhad Moshiri is best known for his technically exquisite, conceptually rich paintings.

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.

He combines such disparate materials as bottle caps, printing plates, cassava graters, copper wiring, and sheet metal into both floor-based sculptures and shimmering wall pieces that sway and flex like cloth, despite their rigid composite materials. In transforming discarded objects into large-scale artworks, Ghanaian-born Anatsui explores the effects of human consumption on the environment and the fraught material and ideological relations between Africa and the Western world at large. Anatsui has exhibited in New York, London, Lagos, Barcelona, and Doha. He has participated in the Venice Biennale twice, once in 1990 and again in 2007, and received a Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement in 2009. His work has achieved seven figures at auction and belongs in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the National Museum of African Art, and the British Museum, among others.

El Anatsui

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

The American artist, who became part of the flourishing Lower Manhattan arts scene in the 1980s, showing in the East Village and exhibition spaces such as Artists Space and the Drawing Center. Baechler rose to prominence with his depictions of everyday objects and naive simple figures that appeal to the sentimental longing for childhood.

As a student at Cooper Union, in the late 1970s, Baechler found himself surrounded by the works of Pop artists and Neo-Expressionists, who played a big role in influencing his style. He got acquainted with Tony Shafrazi, who was focusing on graffiti-oriented works, and founded a downtown gallery that represented Baechler, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf, and eventually Jean-Michel Basquiat.
His use of various mediums in his paintings by combining drawings and collage. His imagery includes nostalgic banal objects that draw associations with childhood; grammar school primers, old maps, and children’s drawings, a skull, a rose, a globe, and a soccer ball. Despite the associations with the graffiti art movement, however, the artist emphasizes that his art is rooted in abstraction.

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.

He worked in a variety of media including sculpture, printmaking, photography, painting, film, performance, installation, and books. Text frequently appears throughout Baldessari’s oeuvre. The artist often concealed faces in found photographs with colored dots, a strategy that forces his viewer to look at the images’ contexts, rather than at the particularities of the subjects. Baldessari exhibited widely within his lifetime, showing in cities including New York, London, Paris, Los Angeles, Zürich, and Berlin. His work belongs in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, the Tate, the J. Paul Getty Museum, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Guggenheim Museum, among others.

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.

Enhancing his mystique by maintaining an anonymous identity, the artist has modified street signs, illegally printed his own currency, and illicitly hung his own work in the Louvre and the Museum of Modern Art. He often uses spray paint and stencils in his critiques of consumerism, political authority, terrorism, and the status of art and its display. His street art, installations, and studio-produced works have been shown in Los Angeles, New York, London, Bethlehem, and beyond. His art has been subject to widespread interest on the secondary market and has fetched eight figures at auction.

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.

The artist rejected both nonrepresentational abstraction and narratively driven Social Realism in favor of an enigmatic, symbolic style that addresses the chaos of 20th-century Germany. Baselitz’s canvases depict mythic, often grotesque figures situated in sparse fields or scenes of destruction. They’re usually oriented upside down, a tactic that toys with viewers’ perceptions and conjures a topsy-turvy aesthetic universe. Baselitz studied at the Academy of Arts in East Berlin, got kicked out, then attended the Academy of Arts in West Berlin. He has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Hong Kong, Zürich, and Tokyo. His work regularly sells for millions on the secondary market and belongs in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, the Fondation Beyeler, the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Tate. Baselitz has also made drawings, prints, and monumental sculptures.

Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz’s raw, expressive paintings helped expand notions of figurative art in the mid–20th century.

The Bechers captured what they called the “anonymous sculpture” of water towers, blast furnaces, coal mine tipples, and framework houses in striking black-and-white compositions, which they almost always arranged in gridlike series they referred to as “typologies.” These typologies act as catalogs of industrial design, historic documents of obsolete technologies, and expansions on the possibilities of landscape photography. The Bechers have been the subject of exhibitions at the Van Abbemuseum, Die Photographische Sammlung/SK Stiftung Kultur, the Centre Pompidou, and the Museum of Modern Art. They won the Erasmus Prize and the Hasselblad Award, and their work has sold for six figures on the secondary market.

Bernd and Hilla Becher

Bernd and Hilla Becher are best known for their austere, elegiac, and widely influential photographs of industrial architecture in their native Germany.

Austrian feminist avant-garde artist, Renate Bertlmann´s multimedia practice explores the gender roles within societal conventions. Her provocative pieces challenge the way women are held back by societal conventions.

Active since the 1970s Bertlmann, who was born in Vienna in 1943, has worked in a variety of mixed media; including collages, drawings, photographs, photo-films, performances, and sculptural objects. The fil rouge of her work is the ambivalence of the feminine and masculine relationship, pursuing, often also with humor, an interrogation on gender relations.
In 1975, Bertlmann participated in the ground-breaking exhibition 'MAGNA. Feminismus: Kunst und Kreativität' [MAGNA. Feminism: Art and Creativity] curated by fellow feminist artist Valie Export. Another milestone followed in 1978 where she started to use her motto 'AMO ERGO SUM' [I love, therefore I am], which inspires the production of an eponymous titled letter-box filled with 77 letters containing secret messages from the artist to other people. In addition, she starts to organize her work into the three related themes of 'Pornography', 'Irony' and 'Utopia'. In 1994 she became a member of the Secession in Vienna.

In 2019, Bertlmann represented Austria´s Pavillion at the 58th Venice Biennale, as the first solo female artist. Her installation of 312 knife roses made out of Murano glass were installed in the backyard.

Renate Bertlmann

Renate Bertlmann has been challenging social constructs surrounding gender and sexuality in her photographs, collages, performances, and sculptures since the 1970s.

Though best known for designing the album cover for the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, he considers painting to be central to his oeuvre. While celebrity figures inform his work, folk art, fairground signs, and an overall sense of nostalgia also influence his style. In 1997, at the age of 65, Blake emotionally retired from painting, he said, and entered what he calls his late period. He continues to work but is no longer interested in the art world’s opinion of his art, instead creating what he wants regardless of its relation to his previous paintings.

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.

A peer of David Hockney and R.B. Kitaj at the Royal Academy of Art, in London, his earlier work, which includes references to his Guyanese heritage, riffs on the work of Color-field painters such as Barnett Newman and Mark Rothko. In the early 1970s, he began pouring paint directly from the can onto his canvases. This period heralded his interest in pure abstraction, which he continues to explore, though his titles or color palettes often reference the landscape of his native Guyana.

Frank Bowling

Adopting an Abstract Expressionist vernacular since the mid-1960s when he moved to New York, Frank Bowling paints in a unique style that draws from abstraction and his Guyanese heritage.

Born in Padua, Italy, in 1960, Cattelan has no formal training and considers himself an “art worker” rather than an artist. He has said that in addition to reading art catalogues, "making shows has been my school". He has been described by Jonathan P. Binstock, curator of contemporary art at the Corcoran Gallery of Art "as one of the great post-Duchampian artists and a smartass, too".

A mixed-media artist, curator, and publisher - following his collaboration with Italian photographer Pierpaolo Ferrari to create an editorial for W magazine's Art Issue in 2009. The following year, they founded the magazine Toiletpaper, a bi-annual, picture-based publication. In 2011, he provoked a lively debate with an installation of two thousand stuffed pigeons, presented at the 54th Venice Biennale. That same year, Maurizio Cattelan was the subject of a retrospective exhibition at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, titled All. The exhibition compiled of 130 artworks that were suspended from the ceiling. On the occasion of the exhibition, Cattelan announced his early retirement, only to return back to creating art and exhibiting further.
From September 2016 and for one year long, in the same museum's restroom, he replaced the toilet with a fully functional replica cast in 18-karat gold, titled America, the toilet was made available for use to the public. In late 2019, a solo exhibition of his major works, Victory is Not an Option, at the Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire: on the night of the opening, America, which was already exhibited at the Guggenheim, was stolen from. Another controversy followed in December 2019, during the Art Basel Miami Beach art fair, where Cattelan exhibited a banana duct-taped on a gallery´s booth, Cattelan´s artwork stimulated debates and discussions among audiences about the nature and the value of art.

Maurizio Cattelan

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

Known as the power artists duo, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, created ephemeral environmental installations in urban and rural global locations.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude (respectively, born June 13, 1935, Bulgaria—died May 31, 2020, New York, U.S.; born June 13, 1935, Morocco—died November 18, 2009, New York, U.S.) stand out for their environmental and sometimes controversial temporary outdoor installations, most notably the wrapping of world-famous architectonic icons like the “Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin”, 1995 or the project "The Gates, New York", which consists of over 7'503 steel gates with orange coloured fabric stretched acres 37 km of walkaway in Central Park.
After Jeanne-Claude´s passing in 2009, Christo continued to carry out the couple’s proposed projects: “Big Air Package”, 2013 inflating an immense fabric dome within the cavernous Gasometer Oberhausen in Germany. As well as “The Floating Piers”, 2016 connecting two islands in Lake Iseo in Italy. These monumental works were seen not only by those that would visit the installations but also by passers-by. These works confront observers not only with its aesthetic properties but explore environmental, democratic, and humanist questions and it creating new ways of seeing familiar landscapes.

Christo

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

Playing with ideas of color, scale, and form, he later gained renown for gridded paintings that appear abstract from up close and highly realistic and pixelated from afar. Close has exhibited extensively since the ’60s and enjoyed solo shows at the Walker Art Center, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the State Hermitage Museum, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia, among other institutions. He has featured in group exhibitions at the Venice Biennale and Documenta on multiple occasions. At auction, his work has sold for seven figures. Close has often depicted his family and friends, including fellow artists Robert Rauschenberg, Cindy Sherman, and Richard Serra. His work links him not only to other Photorealists such as Richard Estes and Audrey Flack, but also to the Conceptual art movement.

Chuck Close

In the 1960s, Chuck Close pioneered Photorealism with his monumental, exquisitely detailed portraits, whose subjects he took from photographic sources.

Notable for his unique exploration of different materials within sculptural forms, including found objects and raw matter of various kinds. Cragg´s sculptures are very popular within site-specific public installation in various countries.

Born in 1949 in Liverpool, Tony Cragg understands sculpture as a study of how material and its forms affect and form ideas and emotions. Studying the human figure is a prime example of something that looks ultimately organic eliciting emotional responses while being fundamentally an extremely complicated geometric composition of molecules, cells, organs, and processes. Cragg´s work does not imitate nature and what we look like, rather it concerns itself with why we look like we do and why we are as we are.
A Royal Academician, Tony Cragg won the Turner Prize in 1988 and represented Britain at the 42nd Venice Biennale in the same year. In 2002 he was named a CBE (Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to art.

Tony Cragg

Turner Prize–winning sculptor Tony Cragg draws new connections between humans and the material world.

Dean’s 35mm color and black-and-white film JG, with kaleidoscopic visuals, explores her search to find Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah, as well as her correspondence with the writer J.G. Ballard about the likeness that Smithson’s work bears to a Ballard short story. “Both works have an analog heart,” Dean has said, “not just because they were made or written when spooling and reeling were the means to record and transmit images and sound, but because their spiraling is analogous to time itself.” Her drawings have taken the form of storyboards and large-scale, dramatic chalk-on-blackboard drawings of landscapes. Dean won a Hugo Boss Prize in 2006.

Tacita Dean

Tacita Dean creates photographs, films, and drawings that explore themes of chance, narrative, and time, often featuring nautical imagery and derelict spaces.

After capturing these facsimiles on camera, Demand destroys them, leaving only photographic evidence of their fleeting existence. Both facets of his conceptual approach allow him to explore collective memory and the nature of truth in our image-saturated era. Since the 1990s, Demand has enjoyed solo shows at Serpentine Galleries, Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, among other institutions. In 2004, he represented Germany at the São Paulo Bienal. Since 2002, Demand has also made stop-motion films from his photographs. His work has sold for six figures at auction.

Thomas Demand

With colored paper and cardboard, Thomas Demand meticulously reconstructs interior scenes from photographs of historic events, sometimes at life-size scale, then photographs them.

One of the most renowned contemporary artists, Peter Doig, who was born in 1959, in Scotland, was the central figure in the revival of painting in the contemporary art scene during the '90s. At present his oneiric landscapes are highly sought after by world-leading collectors and museums.

After a childhood spent in Trinidad and Canada, Doig only returned to Great Britain at the age of twenty in order to study art. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1994, which cemented his public recognition. Themes of magical realism are recurrent through Peter Doig’s paintings, capturing timeless moments of perfect tranquillity. Doig´s dreamlike depictions are often scattered with ghostly human traces in a sensuous palette.

Many of Doig's artworks are depicting landscapes, layered formally and conceptually, somewhat abstract, with a number harking back to the snowy scenes of his childhood lived in Canada. While his works are frequently based on found images (photographs, newspaper clippings, movie scenes, record album covers), they are not painted in a photorealistic. Doig instead uses the photographs simply for reference.
The canoes have become an inspiring image throughout his work; their reflection in the water is a fantasy mirror to the unknown. This inventive style, sensuous palette, and suggestive imagery are also maintained in Peter Doig’s prints through the mastery use of different printmaking techniques. Peter Doig is one of a number of pioneering contemporary figurative artists, and recent major solo exhibitions have been staged at institutional venues, including Fondation Beyeler, Basel; National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh; Musée des Beaux-Arts de Montreal; Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera, New York; and Tate Britain, London. His auction record on the painting Rosedale, created in 1991 sold for over $28 million at Phillips New York in May 2017.

Art critic Jonathan Jones said about Doig: "Amid all the nonsense, impostors, rhetorical bullshit and sheer trash that pass for art in the 21st century, Doig is a jewel of genuine imagination, sincere work and humble creativity."

Peter Doig

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

Known for his sculptural works as well as large-scale installations, which employ elemental materials such as light, water, and air temperature to enhance the viewer’s experience. The Danish-Icelandic artist, Olafur Eliasson was born in 1964, in New York, USA. He established his own studio in Berlin in 1995, which can be defined as a laboratory for spatial research. Eliasson represented Denmark at the 50th Venice Biennale in 2003 and later that year installed The Weather Project in the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern Museum, in London.

His artistic practice is elegant simplicity and lack of materiality, his installations are rooted in a belief that art can create a space sensitive to both individual and collective. Probing the cognitive aspects of what it means to see, Eliasson creates complex optical phenomena using simple, makeshift technical devices: colored bulbs bathe a room in yellow light, turning everything inside monochrome; strobes illuminate a thin curtain of falling water, causing the eye to "freeze" the droplets in midair... By making visible the mechanics of his works and laying bare the artifice of the illusion, Eliasson points to the elliptical relationship between reality, perception, and representation. As a professor at the Berlin University of the Arts, from 2009 to 2014, Olafur Eliasson founded the Institute for Spatial Experiments (Institut für Raumexperimente, IfREX), which opened within his studio building in April 2009. A vastly exhibited artist, Eliasson´s work is held in the following permanent collections: Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, in New York, Centre for International Light Art (CILA), in Unna, Germany, and the Museum of Contemporary Art, in Los Angeles. An artist that rarely appears to be offered at auction, his public sale record was set for his sculptural work "Fivefold eye", created in 2000, which was sold for over $1,5 million at Christie´s auction house in London in October 2007.

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.

A prominent member of the Young British Artists (YBAs), Tracey Emin´s production encompasses different mediums including film, painting, neon, embroidery, drawing, writing, installation and sculpture. Her work is intensely personal, revealing intimate details of her life with honesty and humour. Tracey Emin uses all aspects of her life in her art, turning her autobiography into broader statements about sex, love, death, freedom, and everyday life. This audacious and confessional approach earned her a nomination for the Turner Prize in 1999. The artist received notable acclaim, among others, for her installation My Bed, featuring her unmade bed surrounded by personal items, which explored the allegorical qualities of a bed as a place of birth, sex, and death.

Tracey Emin

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

Elger Esser (born 1967 in Stuttgart, raised in Rome) is known for his silent, almost meditative large-format landscapes. Although a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher, Esser nevertheless backed away from their characteristic industrial and architectural landscapes to pursue the exploraiton of nature.

German photographer Elger Esser (born 1967 in Stuttgart, raised in Rome) is usually associated with silent, almost meditative landscapes in large formats and with earthy colors. Esser was a student of Bernd and Hilla Becher at the Academy of Arts in Dusseldorf, the same school where talents such as Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer, and Thomas Struth were formed. While clearly influenced by their teachings, Esser nevertheless backed away from their characteristic industrial and architectural landscapes and the rigorous style connected with them. Esser’s semi-romantic landscapes are unmanipulated and usually work with a very low horizon line in a simple, almost empty composition. Nature becomes a totality, indefinite and mysterious, but yet also calming and steady. Sky and water blur into each other to a point of complete disappearance, where everything seems to be mirrored by the same vast emptiness of the sky. As one of the most prominent photographic artists in Germany, Esser's works can be found in the collections of top museums and galleries in New York, Paris, and Amsterdam.

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.

Art of Survival – this stands as a kind of preliminary statement to all the work of Abdulnasser Gharem (born 1973, Saudi Arabia). Gharem is surely the only artist to be both a leading figure on his country's emerging art scene and a major in the Saudi army.

Art of Survival – this stands as a kind of preliminary statement to all the work of this artist born in 1973 in Khamis Mushait, Saudi Arabia. Abdulnasser Gharem is surely the only artist to be both a leading figure on his country’s emerging art scene and a major in the Saudi army. His story began in 2003 when Abdulnasser Gharem, an army recruit, enrolled in the Al-Miftaha Arts Village in Abha, Saudi Arabia. Founded a few years earlier by Ahmed Mater, this institution soon became the nerve center of the new art scene that was represented in the 2004 exhibition "Shattah", which captured the renewal of the Saudi Arabian scene. From now on, Gharem began using the street as his studio, working in response to his local context. In numerous performances and site-specific installations, he drew attention to ecological, geographical, urban, and societal issues, recording his actions on video or in photographs. At the same time, he was working on a series of stamp paintings in which major events are juxtaposed with the excesses of a bureaucratic system that seems capable of expressing itself only by rubberstamping.

Abdulnasser Gharem

Born 1973 in Khamis Mushait where he use to live and work. In 1992 Gharem graduated from the King Abdulaziz Academy before attending The Leader Institute in Riyadh.

Using mass-produced materials, such as aluminum, chipboard, and Plexiglas, Gillick creates modular objects that he arranges in site-specific installations to explore how evidence of our social, political, and economic systems are embedded in the built environment. An early practitioner of Relational Aesthetics, Gillick's cross-disciplinary practice also comprises music composition, writing, and curatorial projects.

Liam Gillick

Young British Artist Liam Gillick is primarily interested in analyzing structures, social organizations, and human interaction.

Douglas Gordon is a Scottish artist born in Glasgow in 1966.

Having begun his career as a performance artist, he has later embraced a variety of different mediums and disciplines. The result is a diverse body of works, which has grown to include video, sound photographic objects and texts aimed at teasing viewers’ perceptions, memories and expectations.

After winning the prestigious Turner Prize in 1996, Gordon represented Great Britain at the 1997 Venice Biennale. One year later, in 1998, he won the Hugo Boss Prize, awarded annually by the Guggenheim Museum to an exceptional emerging or mid-career artist. Whether in the form of film, performance, video installation, sculpture, photography, or conceptual text, his production explores such themes as time, identity, self-image, and mortality, as well as darkness, power, collective memory, or morality. Using literature, folklore, and iconic Hollywood films in addition to his own footage, drawings, and writings, he distorts time and language in order to disorient and challenge.

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.

Starting with the outline of a body—often his own—Gormley builds sculptures, mostly from iron and steel. He transforms the recognizable silhouettes into abstracted tangles and architectural forms, expanding the limits of his medium in the process. In the 1970s, Gormley studied Buddhist meditation and philosophy in India, nearly becoming a monk before he committed to a career as an artist. He has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Tokyo, Brussels, and Singapore, and has mounted public sculptures throughout Asia, Australia, Europe, and North America. In 1994, Gormley was awarded the Turner Prize, and in 2003, he was elected a member of the Royal Academy of Arts. In addition to his sculptures, he has produced a number of line drawings and prints. His work has sold for seven figures at auction.

Antony Gormley

In sculptures, installations, and public artworks, Antony Gormley considers the relationship between time, space, and the human body.

Jan Henderikse

As a seminal artist and curator who rose to prominence during the British Black Arts Movement in the 1980s, Himid made it her mission to foreground the neglected histories of Black people. The Zanzibar-born artist—who creates paintings, drawings, prints, and installations—studied theater design before pursuing her MA in cultural history at the Royal College of Art in London. Her multidisciplinary background has informed some of her most memorable works, including the immersive, monumental Naming the Money (2004). The installation features 100 life-size cut-out figures representing slaves and servants. Himid created thoughtful backstories for each, which are read out on a soundtrack that loops throughout the exhibition. Over her decades-long career, Himid has exhibited across the U.K. and beyond, with shows in Berlin, Havana, New York, Los Angeles, and Gwangju. Institutions including Tate Britain, the Victoria and Albert Museum, and New Hall College in Cambridge, England, have all collected her work.

Lubaina Himid

Lubaina Himid made history in 2017, at age 63, when she became the first Black woman and the oldest artist yet to win the prestigious Turner Prize.

The Turner prize winner and epicenter of the YBA movement. Hirst's emblematic art of our era revolutionizes the art market. Hirst is widely regarded as one of the most important artists working today, creating truly iconic artworks.

A genuine star of the Young British Artists (YBA) movement, Damien Hirst has always made a point of mixing up different media. Whether as a sculptor, an installation artist, a painter, or a printmaker, Hirst has produced many of the most spectacular and widely discussed works in recent years and helped to revolutionize the art market. Damien Hirst’s, For the Love of God, the diamond-encrusted replica of the skull of a thirty-five-year-old man from the thirteenth century, broke all records to become the most expensive contemporary artwork in the world. Damien Hirst´s artworks are truly emblematic icons of our era, with their recurring motives such as dots, butterflies, cows, sharks, skulls, pills, and pharmacy cabinets. His works, captivating and intense as they are, challenge our stereotyped concepts and beliefs. Damien Hirst’s shark, suspended in formaldehyde, The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living (1991), is widely recognized, as are his real butterflies suspended in paint or thousands of butterfly wings arranged in a mandala-like pattern – the famous Damien Hirst butterfly paintings. Since 1986 he has been producing the Spot paintings (sometimes called Dot Paintings), a series of paintings with evocative pharmacological titles, which display lines of colored spots. Damien Hirst´s Spot paintings and his Spin paintings became iconic series. Inspired by such diverse themes as life, death, art, science, and medicine, Damien Hirst’s art takes a direct and challenging approach to ideas about existence. The energy and inventiveness are also to be found in Damien Hirst's prints, which continue to stir controversy within the viewer with the same intensity.

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.

Jenny Holzer is an American neo-conceptual artist best known for her text-based works, which convey words and ideas in public spaces.

LED installations have been central to Holzer's practice since 1996 and represent her most visible medium, although her practice incorporates a wide array of media including street posters, painted signs, stone benches, paintings, photographs, sound, video, projections, and the Internet.

Variously insightful, aggressive, or comic, they express multiple viewpoints that the artist hopes will arouse a wide range of responses. Her statements are as short and concise as possible, to be able to reach the largest public and stimulate discussions about violence, sexuality, oppression, human rights, feminism, power, war, and death. Truisms (1977-79) are probably Holzer´s most well-known creation. The series, made up of nearly three hundred aphorisms and slogans featuring modern clichés or maxims, has become part of the public domain. In 1990, she was the first woman to represent the United States at the Venice Biennale, where she was awarded the Golden Lion.

Jenny Holzer

Since the 1970s, Jenny Holzer has inserted language into public settings as part of her singular conceptual practice.

Gary Hume (born 1962, England) emerged in the early ‘nineties as one of the foremost figures on the YBA (Young British Artists) scene, notably with his involvement in the exhibitions “Brilliant!” and “Sensations”. A graduate of Goldsmiths College in 1988, he had a joint show with Damien Hirst, was supported by Charles Saatchi, nominated for the Turner Prize in 1996, and represented the United Kingdom at the Venice Biennale in 1999. Hume was admitted to the Royal Academy in 2001. Immediately recognizable for the gloss painting technique that he has made his own, Gary Hume was originally known for his series of “Doors” paintings. Despite the international success of these hospital doors coated in gloss on panel, which were as much minimalist as abstract art, Hume abandoned this series to concentrate on more figurative work. Working around grand motifs from art history such as the nude, the portrait, still-life compositions, and flowers, or themes connected to the world of childhood, Hume created his own, distinct iconography. With this collection that he has been cultivating for twenty years, ideas of structure, surface, and colour can be linked to the Pop Art tradition, as a reflection on celebrity figures (Michael Jackson and Kate Moss) and on contemporary American culture (as with his series on the figure of the American Cheerleader).

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 (1944, Eberswalde, Germany) has been photographing both public and semi-public spaces in a style defined by an anachronistic approach since 1989. After studying at the Kölner Werkschule between 1964 and 1968, Candida Höfer attended the Kunstakademie in Düsseldorf (Germany), initially reading film with Ole John (1973-1976) and then photography with Bernd Becher (1976 -1982). Following in the tradition of the Düsseldorf School of photography, Candida Höfer has often captured images of waiting rooms, spa resorts, banks, churches, libraries, theaters, and museums. These transitional spaces are also places where universal culture is accumulated, organized, and conserved to an encyclopedic degree, and are photographed by the artist with a rigor and simplicity approaching minimalism. Immediately recognizable, Candida Höfer’s photographs crystallize the peculiar inherent in places where often an illustrious history clashes with their present-day use. As in Spiegelkantine at Hamburg’s Museum für Kunst und Gewerbe, the lighting for these neutral shots comes solely from the natural light of the location. Spaces normally packed with visitors are shown devoid of human presence: all that remains are the outlines of these architectural products of culture or industry.

Candida Höfer

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

Alongside such artistic peers as Andreas Gursky and Thomas Ruff, Hütte studied at the Düsseldorf Art Academy under the influential husband-wife photography duo Bernd and Hilla Becher. He shoots “straight,” aiming to document the scenes before his lens with an almost clinical detachment, and he avoids any manipulation of his negatives and prints. Through this approach, Hütte explores our perception of the world. “In my landscape work I am working with the emptiness, avoiding any signs of civilization or narrative indication, so in [the] best case you are lost in time and space,” Hütte once explained.

Axel Hütte

Among the celebrated postwar German photographers collectively named the Düsseldorf School, Axel Hütte is known for his large-scale, coolly beautiful photographs of urban and natural landscapes.

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 is a photographer and artist whose identity is unconfirmed. After he found a camera in the Paris subway, he did a tour of European Street Art, tracking the people who communicate messages via the walls. Then, he started to work on the vertical limits, watching the people and the passage of life from the forbidden undergrounds and roofs of Paris. He has described himself as a "photograffeur", as he flyposts large black-and-white photographic images in public locations in a manner that is similar to the appropriation of the built environment by the graffiti artist. The artist exhibits freely in the streets of the world, catching the attention of people who are not typical museum visitors. JR's work combines art and performance and its subject varies from commitment, freedom, identity and limitations. JR has exhibited his work at Centre Pompidou, Tate Modern, Watari-Um in Tokyo, Frieder Burda Museum in Baden-Baden, and Power Station of Art in Shanghai.

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

Born in India, Anish Kapoor has lived in England since the 1970s. From 1973 he studied in London at the Hornsey College of Art, before going on to the Chelsea School of Art. After spending some time in India in 1979, he gained recognition on the international scene from the early 1980s. Since the early 1980’s the artist has not only produced some of the most innovative work in contemporary sculpture but has also done much to re-establish certain original sculpture forms. Although he is influenced by his cultural origins, Anish Kapoor continues to incorporate new ideas into his work. Born out of spiritual reflection, his pieces strive to give form to the vital and opposing forces, as in his series of Shadow Prints: full/empty, material/spiritual, light/darkness, visible/invisible, aware/unaware, male/female, land/sea. Through a visual vocabulary that incorporates colour pigments in particular as well as glass fiber and stainless steel, the artist has developed an ambitious body of work in sculpture and installation that at times approaches design and architecture. Often displayed in public spaces, Anish Kapoor’s sculptures are striking for their apparent simplicity and yet his work is hard to overlook and has a hold on its audiences.

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor is known for elegant sculptures of spare geometries and organic forms, which he fabricates with feats of engineering.

Alex Katz (American, born 1927) is the outstanding protagonist of figurative painting and one of our era's most acclaimed artists. In the late 1950s, the artist began to develop his mature style, characterized by elegance, simplicity, and stylized abstraction, which typifies his entire production. Alex Katz’s paintings are the result of a transformation of the three-dimensional world into simplified landscapes and portraits. He chooses to minimize details and shading and to present bold contours and blocks of colour. Indeed, Alex Katz’s art captures the appearances and transposes them into paintings. Alex Katz’s portraits feature his own social milieu – friends, fellow artists, and most notably his wife Ada, whom he has painted more than 200 times. The artist’s quest to represent the experience of spectatorship is reflected in his portraits, also in his large landscapes, which he characterizes as “environmental”. In his continued experimentation with different media, the artist creates what he calls “cut-outs”, freestanding sculptures that blur the line between painting and object. Back in 1965, Katz began experimenting with printmaking, which became a key aspect of his artistic practice. Alex Katz’s prints, which vary from lithographs, etchings, and silkscreens to linoleum cuts, have been exhibited in major museums, such as the Albertina Museum in Vienna, which, in 2010, showed a retrospective survey of over 150 graphic works, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in an exhibition in 2012. The transposition of his notable paintings into prints allows Alex Katz to make his art more accessible to his collectors, thereby maintaining the same allure and stylish power as his painted works.

Alex Katz

With flat planes of rich, lovely color, Alex Katz’s landscapes and portraits evoke the smooth aesthetics of advertising billboards and film.

Born Brian Donnelly, KAWS is a Brooklyn-based artist and designer who has established himself is one the most prominent heirs of Pop Art. After graduating from the School of Visual Arts in New York, he briefly worked as a freelance illustrator on Disney’s 101 Dalmatians. This fascination and affinity for cartoon and illustration has carried over to his artistic career. He is known to include reworked cartoon icons such as characters from the The Simpsons, SpongeBob SquarePants or the Smurfs as well as the advertisement personalities like the Michelin Man. Gradually expanding his imagery, the artist also invented his own host characters including his most recognizable creation, COMPANION, a cartoon Mickey-Mouse like body and gloved hands, skull-and-crossbones head with X-eyes. 
In exploiting the sentimental potency of iconic imagery, KAWS playful and psychologically charged oeuvre infused with humour, humanity and affection for our times, celebrates generosity, support for others and the deep need we have for companionship. KAWS has gained undisputed prominence in the market with his reconceptualization of popular culture’s most beloved icons within the discourse of contemporary art.

Kaws

One of the most iconic artists of his time, KAWS is known for combining his own characters with beloved popular culture icons to wittingly question the condition of contemporary society.

Yves Klein (1928–1962) was born in Nice, France, to an artistic family. Although Klein grew up in a creative household, he received no formal artistic training. His major artistic breakthrough came in 1947 while lying on the beach with two friends; they divided the universe between themselves. He possessed the ethereal space surrounding the planet and decided that the blue sky would be his first artwork. In the mid-1950s he then began to exhibit his monochrome paintings in which a canvas was uniformly covered in a single colour. His short career was characterised by many radical gestures. Yves Klein´s “Leap Into the Void” presents the artist soaring upwards from the parapet of a building like a Left Bank Superman. In 1958, he attracted attention with an “Exhibition of emptiness”, an empty gallery space in Paris painted white, titled The Void. In his search for colours, he developed – together with chemists and the French pharmaceutical company, Rhône Poulenc – the patented colour ‘International Yves Klein Blue’ (IKB). Between his oeuvre, Yves Klein´s table, a caffee table filled with IKB pigments, is one of the most iconic contemporary artworks. Moreover, Yves Klein´s art influenced minimal, conceptual and performance art by taking the painting out of the frame and blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Yves Klein´s Atropometries are impressions of naked female models smothered in paint, kind of “living brushes”. Using this strategy allowed him to depersonalise the art object. Klein was a pioneer in the development of Performance art, and he is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimal art, as well as Pop art.

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.

Knoebel’s nonrepresentational works innovate on the modernist ideas and styles of Joseph Beuys, Kasimir Malevich, and the Bauhaus; the artist is interested in seriality, spare geometries, reductive color, and the use of industrial materials such as Masonite. Knoebel studied under Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf and under László Moholy-Nagy at the Werkkunstschule Darmstadt; he has exhibited in Berlin, New York, Paris, Zürich, Tokyo, London, Vienna, and Rome. His work belongs in the collections of the Essl Museum, the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, the Museo Reina Sofía, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museum of Modern Art. While Knoebel is best known for his sculptural paintings, his practice also involves drawing, photography, projections, and installation. His work has sold for six figures at auction.

Imi Knoebel

Imi Knoebel’s minimalist hybrids of painting and sculpture explore relationships between color and structure.

Jeff Koons (born 1955) playfully tests the boundaries of commerce, celebrity, banality, and pleasure. He rose to prominence in the mid-1980s as part of a generation of artists who explored the meaning of art in a media-saturated era. Koons turns banal commercial or everyday objects into art icons by using seductive materials, a shift of scale, and a contextual displacement. Jeff Koons’s “Balloon Dog” (featuring his enormous iconic chromium stainless steel dogs); his large-scale vinyl “Inflatables”; or the giant “Split-Rocker” all follow this principle. For instance, Jeff Koons in “Puppy” engaged the past and the present, referencing the eighteenth-century formal garden, while adding the most sugary of iconography. Originally licensed as a commodities broker, Koons decided to become an artist in the late 1970s and moved from Wall Street into a factory-like studio in SoHo with hundreds of assistants. Since then, he has produced different iconic series, like the “Pre-New”, a series of domestic objects in strange new configurations, and “The Equilibrium” series, consisting of basketballs floating in distilled water tanks. The “Banality” series, which includes Jeff Koons´s “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” and “Woman in Tub”, among others, is characterized by oddly eroticized, comic, and kitsch images. However, it is indeed Koons’s “Made in Heaven” series that is his most provocative and controversial work, in which he examines the place of sexuality in visual culture. Koons is widely regarded as one of the most important, influential, and controversial contemporary artists. He constantly tests the boundaries between art and commerce, high culture and mass culture, ready-made and art objects, by decontextualizing his objects and lifting them to iconic status. Jeff Koons´s art is the result of his intention to bring it out of the enclave of the genius-driven artist into the realms of contemporary pop and commerce-driven culture.

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.

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.

Best known for his photorealistic drawings, Longo explores imagery within a complex social and cultural forces. Robert Longo was born in 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, and has had a childhood fascination with mass media: movies, television, magazines, and comic books, which continue to deeply influence his art. One of the quintessential artists of the 1980s, Longo is perhaps best known for the writhing, dancing figures in his iconic Men in the Cities series.

The American artist´s drawings are, perhaps, his most iconic. They are as much about the content they depict as they are about the artist´s intense devotion to the practice of drawing. His amazingly deep, anthracite charcoal drawings show emotional motives. Perhaps the best known photorealist series of Robert Longo´s is Men in the Cities, depicting contorted, life-size human figures in an urban setting. Robert Longo´s art focuses on his never-ending investigation of the themes of power and authority, which also permeate his series of blackened American flags (Black Flags, 1989–91), and oversized handguns (Bodyhammers, 1993–95). Longo´s series, Monsters, which depict massive breaking waves, and The Sickness of Reason, featuring atomic bomb blasts, followed in 2002 and 2004. It was during the 1980s that Robert Longo started to produce editions, mainly lithographs. He then gradually developed a high-end print technique, Pigment Print, which allows him to reproduce his drawings perfectly. Robert Longo´s prints capture the same level of detail and emotional impact of the original drawings.

Robert Longo

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

American artist Nate Lowman (b.1979) is renowned for his works inspired by history, news, and media. The artist typically extrapolates visuals from these sources to create a diversified body of collages, paintings, installations, prints, and sculptures.

Since the 2000s, Lowman has been stretching the limits of language turning images into political, poetic, and humorous statements. His art investigates themes related to violence, celebrity as well as obsession. Lowman employs a wide array of media in his art: he often incorporates found objects and signs, exhibited cars and gas pumps, and hung his works salon-style, filling gallery walls with canvases of various shapes and sizes. With his art, he aims to express the political intention of never letting a context neutralize the image that reflects it.

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.

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.

One of the most acclaimed artists to emerge from Post-war Asia, Takashi Murakami (b. 1962)—the Warhol of Japan—is renowned for his contemporary combination of fine art and pop culture, particularly the use of a brightly graphic cartoon style.

His production encompasses paintings, sculptures, drawings, animations as well as brand collaborations.

His colourful paintings and objects feature laughing flowers, mushroom clouds, Buddhist imagery, skulls, and recognizable iconographies -such as Mickey Mouse-, which he successfully merges with the familiar aesthetic of Japanese comics. By means of his stylistic choices, Murakami´s goal is to create seemingly democratic and accessible works, while denouncing the universality and unspecificity of consumer goods and culture. True to form, Murakami has signed a number of collaborations with brands and celebrities, and his works enjoy a remarkable global fan base, as well as real art market success. In 2007 a major Murakami retrospective traveled around the world, from the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles to the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In 2010, he became the first Japanese artist displayed at the Palace of Versailles, and his work is now included in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York among many other museums.

Takashi Murakami

Known for his brightly colored and maniacally cheerful works, Takashi Murakami's astronomical rise to fame in the contemporary art world has been met with equal parts celebration and criticism.

Swedish-born, American sculptor Claes Oldenburg (b. 1929) is one of the most prominent figures associated with the Pop Art movement, largely known for his innovative and humorous appropriation of everyday objects often transforming them in both large-scale public installations and soft materials sculptures.

From his Happenings beginning in the 1960s, Oldenburg has remained at the forefront of the Conceptual and Pop Art movements.

He rejected abstract art as conventional and boring and invented a variety of new forms, including installations and the giant soft sculptures that first brought him fame as a pop artist. Starting from the 1970s, Oldenburg´s production began to grow in scale, and he focused his attention on the monumental outdoor public sculptures of everyday objects. He began collaborating on monumental sculptures with his wife, art historian Coosje van Bruggen. Together, they created iconic pieces as Minneapolis's Spoonbridge and Cherry—a giant sculpture of a spoon balancing a ripe cherry—and Cologne's Dropped Cone, an ice cream cone smooshed onto the corner of a building. By manipulating the scale and context of ordinary objects, these artworks could turn the ordinary into the extraordinary.

Nowadays, Oldenburg is considered as a pillar of Postwar Art, and his works are collected by major museums around the world including the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., the Tate Gallery in London, and the Kunstmuseum Basel.

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 (born 1960, Shanghai, China) was the second of four children. He grew up during the Cultural Revolution and started to paint in his spare time. He showed promise as a painter at a young age, excelling in art studies in secondary school. As per the rules of the new regime, he was required to attend propaganda classes wherein students with exceptional drawing skills were obliged to make posters of their communist leader Mao Zedong and his Red Guards. He applied for admission to the Shanghai Art & Design School but was rejected due to his stutter. In 1980 he left Shanghai for France, where he enrolled in the École des Beaux-Arts, graduating in 1999. Yan Pei-Ming creates large-scale works depicting real and imaginary people. Yan’s portraits, typically mono- or bi-chromatic, often verge on abstraction, with broad, patterned brushstrokes and drips of paint. He is perhaps best known for his monumental self-portraits, including Double (Selfportrait at the Morgue), 2006, a watercolor of the artist as a dead man, as well as his eight-foot-tall portraits of Mao Zedong, Bruce Lee, his father and, more recently, Barack Obama. Often executed in expressions of mourning or sorrow, the portraits encompass a combination of Eastern and Western influences.

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.

Inspired by African and Iberian art, he also contributed to the rise of Surrealism and Expressionism. Picasso’s sizable oeuvre grew to include over 20,000 paintings, prints, drawings, sculptures,ceramics, theater sets, and costume designs. He painted his most famous work, Guernica (1937), in response to the Spanish Civil War; the totemic grisaille canvas remains a definitive work of anti-war art. At auction, a number of Picasso’s paintings have sold for more than $100 million. The indefatigable artist has been the subject of exhibitions at the world’s most prestigious institutions, from the Museum of Modern Art and Centre Pompidou to the Stedelijk Museum and Tate Modern.

Pablo Picasso

Perhaps the most influential artist of the 20th century, Pablo Picasso may be best known for pioneering Cubism and fracturing the two-dimensional picture plane in order to convey three-dimensional space.

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.

His large-scale canvases feature thick, looping impasto and disorienting explosions of color. They recall the stylings of fellow Abstract Expressionist luminaries such as Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning, with whom Poons exhibited in the landmark Metropolitan Museum of Art survey “New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970.” Poons studied music composition at the New England Conservatory in Boston, then abandoned his studies to enroll at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He originally produced Op art–style works but soon applied illusionistic techniques to looser, more fluid abstractions. Over the course of his career, the artist has thrown and poured paint onto his canvases, built up their surfaces with unconventional materials, and simply used a paintbrush to apply color. Poons has exhibited in New York, London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles, and Zürich. His work belongs in the collections of the Guggenheim Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Larry Poons

Larry Poons’s gestural abstraction takes inspiration from the rhythm and improvisational methods of musical composition.

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 yet that is unquestionably his own. Copywriting puns, literal or visual, became the basis for Prince 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.

Laure Prouvost is the first French (cheeky) artist to have won the Turner Prize, for an installation named Wantee; an imaginary tea party setting with teacups depicting surreal lips and buttocks.

Prouvost's work is as whimsical as it is penetrating. It addresses miscommunication and ideas becoming lost in translation, playing with language as a tool for the imagination.

Laure Prouvost

The Turner Prize-winning artist Laure Prouvost is known for her lush, immersive films and mixed-media installations.

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.

Born on February 9th, 1932, in Dresden, Germany, Richter was raised during the Second World War becoming an artist in Eastern Germany and escaping Communism in 1961. His life has followed a series of historical events whose memories are kept alive through his work. From the beginning, Richter explored different paths simultaneously, alternating between the abstract and the figurative, developing a profusion of themes, mediums, and techniques. Deeply affected by the Second World War, he made forays into his own memory as well as that of Germany. History continuing as the dominant theme, he worked from photographs: from an annihilated Dresden, to the Baader-Meinhof gang, to the twin towers of the World Trade Center. Ever unpredictable, Richter has found inspiration in the classic Italian Grand Masters such as Titian (Annunciation after Titian) and painted an immense multi-coloured checkerboard (Colour Chart). When the artist, who has never adhered to any particular convention, fashion, or trend, embarked on his most abstract series (Abstract Paintings), his innovative; overturning buckets of colour that he proceeded to crush onto ten-meter square canvases.

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 (born 1964, in Brunnen, Switzerland) studied at the University of Applied Arts Vienna (in Austria) from 1986 to 1990. Rondinone works with various media, such as photography, video, sculpture, painting, installation art, and prints, and often appropriates phrases from literature and popular culture for his art. Many of his works involve the use of signage – like his rainbow-colored sculpture Hell, Yes! (2001), which long adorned the facade of the New Museum in New York – while other of his works tend to coax the viewer into a meditative state. His work is tinged with melancholy, as he connects the beautiful with the strange, and the clumsy with the naked truth. Ugo Rondinone seems intent on using dissimulation to better reveal reality, as to mask it, and to exaggerate its features, which is a means of revealing human nature. Behind his art, there are Bosch and the Romantics, as well as a disenchanted and skeptical gaze on the world. And yet at the same time, Rondinone shows us possibilities in the making, as well as humor – and what could be better than humor during times of adversity?

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.

Born in Tel-Aviv, female artist Michal Rovner completed film, television and philosophy studies in her hometown followed by the programme at the Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem. Since 1988 she lives and works in New York. Rovner received the honorary doctorate from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem in 2008. In 2010, she was appointed ‘Chevalier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres’. In 2005, Rovner has presented some of her works at the Venice Biennale. Rovner reinterprets historical memory and contemporary themes through her multimedia practice, in which she employs drawing, printmaking, video, sculpture, and installation. By recording and erasing visual information, where specifics of time and place are obscured, her works become gestural, layered, and abstract reflections on the continuum of human experience. Michal Rovner is internationally known with exhibitions at major museums, including the Louvre and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Michal Rovner

Michal Rovner is an Israeli contemporary artist, known for her video, photo, and cinema artwork. Rovner is internationally known with exhibitions at major museums, including the Louvre and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

Since the 1960s, Ruscha has made photographic books, tongue-in-cheek photo collages, paintings, and drawings that demonstrate a keen interest in language and the idiosyncrasies of life in Los Angeles, where the artist has lived since the 1950s. In his most famous works, he places words and phrases from the colloquial and consumerist vernacular atop photographic images or fields of color—a strategy that situates him within a larger Pop art lineage. Ruscha often paints and draws with unusual materials such as gunpowder, blood, and Pepto Bismol, drawing attention to the deterioration of language and the pervasive clichés in American culture. Ruscha’s work has been exhibited across the globe, and the artist has enjoyed solo shows at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, and Moderna Museet, in addition to the Venice Biennale, where he represented the United States in 2005. At auction, his work has sold for eight figures.

Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha’s expansive oeuvre defies easy categorization, though it’s all infused with a kind of deadpan California cool.

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.

Often inspired by unanticipated discoveries in his daily life, Sala’s works defy expectation with counter-intuitive reversals and pairings. For example, in the video installation Why the Lion Roars (2008), Sala devised a mechanism that aired films according to the predicted weather in Paris, linking cinematic genres with the vagaries of the climate.

Anri Sala

Working in film, photography, and performance, Anri Sala explores ruptures in sound and image and creates moments of overlap among the senses.

Thomas Schütte (born 1954) is a German contemporary artist. Schütte's multidisciplinary work ranges widely, from early architectural installations to small-scale modeled figures and proposals for monuments, from extensive series of watercolors, to banners, flags, and photographs. From 1973 to 1981 Schütte studied art at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf alongside Katharina Fritsch under Gerhard Richter, Fritz Schwegler, Daniel Buren, and Benjamin Buchloh. His installations, sculptures, prints, drawings, and watercolors take different and often contradictory forms. Schütte’s art looks utilitarian offering sustenance, shelter and companionship yet deliver false promises and alien worlds. He uses a wide spectrum of colors and a range of materials to revise the basic constituents – natural, cultural, political – of everyday life whilst exploring fundamental questions about the artist and society. Schütte's work is held in the collections of the Tate Modern in London, Museum of Modern Art in New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago and he has received numerous awards, including the Kurt Schwitters Preis für Bildende Kunst der Niedersächsischen Sparkassenstiftung, 1998, and the Kunstpreis der Stadt Wolfsburg, Germany, 1996. In 2005, he was awarded the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale for his work in María de Corral's exhibition "The Experience of Art".

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.

Scully was born in Dublin in 1945 and grew up in the south of London, where his family moved in 1949. He is known for rich, painterly abstractions in which stripes or blocks of layered color are a prevailing motif. The delineated geometry of his work, achieved through the use of repetitive forms such as squares, rectangles, and bands, provides structure for an expressive, physical rendering of color, light, and texture. Though these abstract compositions are not conventional landscapes, his sense of shape and light appeals to a universal understanding and is influenced by the three places he knows best: Ireland, his birthplace and homeland; north London, where he grew up; and New York, where today he mainly lives and works. The stripe has been central to Scully’s work over the course of his career. The artist has transformed the motif of the stripe into an expressive art form, employing colour contrasts and juxtapositions, that creates diverse and emotive compositions with a powerful physical presence. The architectonic structure of Scully’s work derived from twentieth-century artist Mondrian, however, from the beginning of his career, Scully was interested in the work of the Abstract Expressionists, particularly Mark Rothko. Like the Russian artist, Scully’s colour combinations are emotionally charged and illustrate the innate spirituality that is present throughout Scully’s oeuvre.

Sean Scully

Since the 1960s, Sean Scully has made abstract canvases that feature stripes, blocks, and grids painted in rich, evocative hues.

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