Michael Kelley was born in 1952 in Wayne, Michigan, and died in Los Angeles in January 2012. He was educated at the University of Michigan and at the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied under artist John Baldessari. He often experimented with various media, including textiles, collage, performance video, and found objects. He also collaborated with the artists Paul McCarthy and Tony Oursler. One of his most often revisited themes was the issue of social boundaries. The Whitney Museum of American Art held a retrospective of his work 1997 retrospective of his work.
Archives: Artists
A featured artist
Peter Doig
Peter Doig was born in 1959 in Edinburgh, Scotland, and experienced an international upbringing in Scotland, Trinidad, and Canada. In 1979, he moved to London to attend the Wimbledon School of Art at Saint Martin’s and the Chelsea School of Art. Doig also taught at the Art Academy of Dusseldorf. His preferred medium is painting, and he often depicts scenes of nature inhabited with people–canoeists and skiers, for example. He also painted a series of works after Le Corbusier’s Unite d’Habitation in France. In 1994, he was nominated for the Turner Prize.
Jeff Wall
Jeffrey Wall was born in 1946 in Vancouver, where he lives today. He has an extensive academic background, having studied at the University of British Columbia and the Courtauld Institute, and taught at the University of British Columbia and the European Graduate School. His signature artistic style consists of large-scale cibachrome photographs, lit from behind. His subjects, urban, suburban, and landscape contexts are often given a seemingly photojournalistic treatment. He has received various prizes for his work, including The Paul de Hueck and Norman Walford Career Achievement Award for Art Photography in 2001, the Erna and Victor Hasselblad Foundation International Award in Photography in 2002, the Roswitha Haftmann Prize for the Visual Arts in 2003, and the Audain Prize for Lifetime Achievement in 2008. Wall is considered an influential figure for the Dusseldorf group artists, including Candida Hofer and Andreas Gursky.
Gilbert & George
Gilbert Proesch from San Martin de Tor, Italy combined creative forces with partner George Passmore of Plymouth, United Kingdom after studying sculpture together at St Martins School of Art in the late 1960s. Gilbert had previously been educated at the Selva School of Art and Hallein School of Art in Austria, as well as at the Art Academy of Munich. George, on the other hand, studied at the Dartington College of Arts and Oxford School of Art. The duo are known for their stereotype-defying public profile. They are open about their conservative political inclination, though claimed to have married in 2008. Moreover, they typically dress meticulously and formally. Famous for their “living sculpture” works, the pair are known for their performance art. Their Pictures series is also one of their most famous endeavours, incorporating photographic images and hand-painted details. In 1986, the couple won the prestigious Turner Prize, and in 2005, they represented the United Kingdom at the Biennale of Venice. In 2007, the Tate held a major retrospective of their work.
Maurizio Cattelan
Maurizio Cattelan is a self-taught artist from Padua, Italy. He began his artistic career making furniture for his apartment, but soon realised he preferred to make sculpture and performance art. Cattelan is one of the best- known Italian artists to emerge internationally in the 1990s. His work challenges contemporary art value systems through irony and humour. Influenced by the anarchism of Dada, Cattelan’s “characters” take on theatrical and absurd appearances. For example, his life-sized representation of the Pope in a prostrate position after being struck by a meteorite, La Nona Ora (the Ninth Hour) subvert the typical representations of the Pope with humour. He refuses to take an ideological stance rather concentrating on representing the complex rules of culture and society.
On Kawara
On Kawara was born in 1933 in Japan, and has lived in New York since the mid 1960s. An exponent of conceptual art, he is best known for his treatment of the subject of time in his Today and One Million Years series. The Today series began in 1966, and depicts the date of the each painting’s execution. Kawara adheres to strict-self imposed rules in this series, routinely painting the date in white Gill Sans or, later, Futura font and monochromatic background. The location of the artist at the time of execution also determines the language and grammar of the painted date recording. Generally, earlier works contain the most vivid background colours. If Kawara is unable to complete a work before the end of the day, he destroys it. One Million Years, however, is an audio performance piece dating to 1993 in which a daily sequence of dates is read aloud for long periods of time.
Henri Cartier-Bresson
Henri Cartier-Bresson is widely considered to be the father of photojournalism. As a student, he first studied music before being introduced to painting first by his uncle and later at the Lhote Academy, the studio of the Cubist painter Andre Lhote. This strict training would later help to inform issues he discovered within his own work, but at this time his interests were largely influenced by the Surrealist movement and he socialized in this circle prior to leaving for the University of Cambridge.
A turning point in his development as a photographer came from his meeting Harry Crosby who shared his interest in photography. An intense affair with Crosby’s wife Caresse ensued, but ended following Harry Crosby’s suicide. Cartier-Bresson sought escape ion the Cote d’Ivoire where he contracted a near fatal case of blackwater fever. On his return to France, he was inspired by Martin Munkacsi’s photograph Three Boys at Lake Tanganyika, and gave up painting for photography, using a Leica camera. In the early 1930s Cartier-Bresson met David ‘Chim’ Szymin (Seymour) and Roberta Capa with whom he would found Magnum Photos following service, capture and escape during World War II. His involvement with Magnum Photos took him to India, China and Indonesia and these experiences led to the publication of his book The Decisive Moment . In later life Cartier-Bresson returned to painting, rarely taking out his camera. He passed away in 2004 and is survived by his second wife Martine Franck, also a Magnum Photographer, and their daughter.
Luc Tuymans
Luc Tuymans’ paintings have a characteristically uneasy style of blurred images in a palette of washed-out pastels, cool greys and flat whites. The reductive colour scheme and out-of-focus figural images reference traces of memory, haunting traumas and serve to be elusive of meaning. The series Diagnostische Blick (1992) based on images taken from a medical handbook capture eerie, dislocated subjects much like frozen images from television screens. Several American films from 2008 including “There Will Be Blood” and “No Country for Old Men” influenced his recent reductive works. His Against the Day I and Against the Day II, a diptych that pictures a gardener digging, captures the effect of pressing pause on a TV remote control. The diversity of Tuymans’ banal subject matter and varied source material drawn from photography, film and television reflect a sense of anxiety and impending doom.
Irving Penn
Irving Penn was born in Plainfied, New Jersey and later attended the Philadelphia Museum School of Industrial Art, where he studied until 1938. Prior to the development of his career in photography, Harper’s Bazaar published his drawings.
Following World War II he became known for his chic portraits, often for Vogue Magazine. Penn’s studio was austere and he was known for shooting very effectively against plain white or grey background, sometimes angled to create stark corners. Penn photographed a wide range of iconic subjects against this type of backdrop, including famous actors, musicians and filmmakers. Penn also published several books between 1960 and 2004. He passed away at his New York home in 2009.
Frank Auerbach
Frank Auerbach was born in Berlin in 1931, though as a young boy escaped Nazism by moving to England. He studied at St Martin’s School of Art in London, as well as at the Royal College of Art. He is most famous for his drawings and paintings. Portraits comprise much of his work, and his three most prolific models include his wife Julia, his model Juliet, and his friend Estella. His painting style is characteristically thick, with large amounts of paint built-up on the canvas, and his colour palette is varied. In 1978, the Hayward Gallery in London organised a retrospective of his work. He has exhibited in the past with the artist Lucian Freud.