Andrew Wyeth

http://www.andrewwyeth.com/

Andrew Newell Wyeth  was a visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century.

In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine. One of the most well-known images in 20th-century American art is his painting, Christina's World, currently in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

In 1937, at age twenty, Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings sold out, and his life path seemed certain. His style was different from his father’s: more spare, "drier," and more limited in color range. He stated his belief that "…the great danger of the Pyle school is picture-making."He did some book illustrations in his early career, but not to the extent that N.C. Wyeth did.

Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily classified as a realist painter, like Winslow Homer or Eakins. In a "Life Magazine" article in 1965, Wyeth said that although he was thought of as a realist, he thought of himself as an abstractionist: "My people, my objects breathe in a different way: there’s another core — an excitement that’s definitely abstract. My God, when you really begin to peer into something, a simple object, and realize the profound meaning of that thing — if you have an emotion about it, there’s no end."

He worked predominantly in a regionalist style. In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in Cushing, Maine.

Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth maintained a realist painting style for over fifty years. He gravitated to several identifiable landscape subjects and models. His solitary walks were the primary means of inspiration for his landscapes. He developed an extraordinary intimacy with the land and sea and strove for a spiritual understanding based on history and unspoken emotion. He typically created dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting, either in watercolor, drybrush (a watercolor style in which the water is squeezed from the brush), or egg tempera.

Bruno Fonseca

Fonseca was born in New York to a family of artists. His younger brother Caio Fonseca is a well known contemporary painter. His father, Gonzalo Fonseca, was an Uruguayan sculptor. Fonseca suffered from dyslexia and stuttering as a child, conditions so severe he was treated by a psychiatrist. Fonseca was able to compensate for his verbal difficulties with a tremendous visual fluency, reproducing paintings by Michelangelo and other Great Masters at an early age. Raised in a house on West Eleventh Street in Greenwich Village, Fonseca studied at the Dalton School in Manhattan and St. Ann's School in Brooklyn Heights. Fonseca failed to graduate from high school and at age 18, he moved to Barcelona, where he studied with Augusto Torres. Fonseca lived in Barcelona until 1993, when he returned to New York a few months before his death.

Fonseca had what his sister called "a slightly perverse anti-taste for exquisite goods and 'luxuries' of all kinds." He preferred old objects, old clothes and junk that he collected from the streets of Barcelona. He chose to live in Barcelona's red-light district, among the city's poor, cripples, addicts, street girls, and bohemians.

Late in his life, Fonseca painted four large paintings known as "The War Murals" depicting scenes of warfare. The individual works are titled Tank (oil on canvas, 208.2 x 269.2 cm) Fire (oil on canvas, 207 x 284.5 cm), Bucharest (oil on canvas, 208.2 x 279.4 cm), and Timişoara[6] (oil on canvas, 210.8 x 271.7 cm). One writer described the anti-war theme in "The War Murals", begun in 1989 and finished in 1993, as "the most powerful statement of their kind since Picasso's great Guernica." The murals were inspired by images of boy soldiers torn from the newspaper and by images of violence in Eastern Europe, including the public execution of Nicolae Ceauşescu. His sister recalled watching scenes of the upheavals in Eastern Europe on CNN with Bruno and wrote: "The War Murals - Bruno's four larger narrative paintings inspired by the anti-communist upheavals - represent his greatest synthesis of abstract and representational painting, something he had struggled for throughout his working life."Fonseca worked on the murals for several years, finishing them while he was suffering from the effects of AIDS. A public showing of "The War Murals" was the opening exhibition for the John McEnroe Gallery in SoHo in January 1994. Fonseca also had a solo show at New York's Salander-O'Reilly in 1993.

After contracting AIDS, Fonseca returned to New York. He married his pupil, German painter Anke Blaue, shortly before his death. He died of AIDS in 1994 at age 36

Jan Fabre

http://janfabre.be/

jan Fabre (born 1958, Antwerp, Belgium) is a Belgian multidisciplinary artist, playwright, stage director, choreographer and designer.

He studied at the Municipal Institute of Decorative Arts and the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp. Between 1976 and 1980 he wrote his first scripts for the theatre and made his début performances.

Between 1976 en 1980 he wrote his first texts for the theatre and did his first solo performances. During his 'money-performances' he burned money and wrote the word 'MONEY' with the ashes. In 1977 he renames the street where he lives to "Jan Fabre street" and fixes a commemorative plaque "Here lives and works Jan Fabre" to the house of his parents, by analogy to the commemorative plate on the house of Vincent Van Gogh in the same street. In 1978 he makes drawings with his own blood during the solo performance 'My body, my blood, my landscape'. In 1980 'The Bic-Art Room' he had himself locked up for three days and three nights in a white cube full of objects, drawing with blue Bic ballpoint pens as an alternative to Big art Established in 1986, Troubleyn/Jan Fabre is a theatre company with extensive international operations, with its home base in Antwerp, Belgium.

Ken Fiengold

Kenneth Feingold (USA, 1952 - ) is a contemporary American conceptual artist based in New York. He has been exhibiting his work in video, drawing, film, sculpture, and installations since 1974. He has received a Guggenheim Fellowship  and a Rockefeller Foundation Media Arts Fellowship and has taught at Princeton University and Cooper Union for the Advancement of Art and Science, among others. His works have been shown at the Museum of Modern Art, NY; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Tate Liverpool, the Whitney Museum of American Art,New York, and many other museums.

His works are held in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art Film Collection, NY,  Center for Art and Media, Karslruhe; Kiasma Museum of Contemporary Art, Helsinki; the National Gallery of Canada. Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Hamburger Kunsthalle, Hamburg; Museo de Arte y Diseño Contemporáneo, San Jose, Costa Rica; Museo Palazzo Fortuny, Venice, among others.

Tracey Karmina Emin

http://www.emininternational.com

Tracey Karima Emin RA (born 3 July 1963 in Croydon) is an English artist. She is part of the group known as Britartists or YBAs (Young British Artists).

In 1997 her work Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995, a tent appliquéd with names, was shown at Charles Saatchi's Sensation exhibition held at the Royal Academy in London. The same year, she gained considerable media exposure when she appeared drunk and swearing on a live Channel 4 TV discussion.

In 1999 she was a Turner Prize nominee and exhibited My Bed — an installation, consisting of her own unmade dirty bed with used condoms and blood-stained underwear.

In 2004 her tent artwork was destroyed in the Momart warehouse fire. In March 2007 Emin was chosen to join the Royal Academy of Arts in London as a Royal Academician. She represented Britain at the 2007 Venice Biennale. Her first major retrospective 20 Years was held in Edinburgh 2008, and toured Europe until 2009.

In May 2011 Emin's largest major solo exhibition in a public space was held at Hayward Gallery, London titled Love Is What You Want.

In April 2011 Tracey opened the Turner Contemporary art gallery in Margate with Jools Holland and between May and September 2012 she is holding her first exhibition there, entitled "She Lay Down Deep Beneath The Sea".

Emin is a panelist and speaker: she has lectured at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, the European Graduate School in Saas-Fee, Switzerland the Art Gallery of New South Wales in Sydney (2010),[4] the Royal Academy of Arts (2008), and the Tate Britain in London (2005) about the links between creativity and autobiography, and the role of subjectivity and personal histories in constructing art. Emin's art takes many different forms of expression including needlework and sculpture, drawing, video and installation, photography and painting.

In December 2011 she was appointed Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy; along with Fiona Rae, she is one of the first two female professors since the Academy was founded in 1768.

Dado

Dado (born as Miodrag Đurić, 1933–2010), was a Yugoslavian-born artist who spent most of his life and creative career in France. He is particularly known as a painter but was also active as an engraver, drawer, book illustrator and sculptor.

Dado's painting and drawing activities extended across almost six decades. His paintings are mainly oil painting on linen but he also used acrylic paint and wood or even metal plates as supports.

Though his creative world is highly recognizable, his style and painting technique evolved along the years. While painting, he conducted a permanent search for the essence of energy, progressively abandoning details and fine techniques in favour of more colourful and dynamic compositions.

An illustration of this evolution can be seen in large paintings such as Les Limbes or Le Massacre des Innocents (1958–1959), La Grande Ferme. Hommage à Bernard Réquichot (1962–1963), Le Diptyque d'Hérouval (1975–1976) and L'École de Prescillia (2001–2002), in the collections of the Centre Pompidou, Musée national d'art moderne, Paris.

From the 1990s, Dado also involved himself in several ambitious fresco projects. The four most noticeable achievements are a blockhaus in Fécamp (Normandy), the embassy of the IVth International in Montjavoult (near Hérouval), a set of frescoes in a former vine industry building in Domaine des Orpellières, Hérault and a Last Judgment frescoe in the former chapel of a leper colony in the town of Gisors, Eure.

Drawing had been present in Dado's creative means of expression since his beginnings. The artist initially used pencils and India ink. He also resorted to mixed techniques using gouache, pencils and India ink, realising impressive collages.

Hanne Darboven

Hanne Darboven (born 29 April 1941 in Munich, died 9 March 2009 in Hamburg) was a German conceptual artist. She became best known for her large scale minimalist installations consisting of handwritten tables of numbers.

Hanne Darboven grew up in Rönneburg, a southern suburb of Hamburg, as the second of three daughters of Cäsar Darboven and Kirsten Darboven. Her father was a successful and well-to-do businessman in Hamburg.

Following a brief episode as a pianist, Darboven studied art with Willem Grimm, Theo Garve and Almir Mavignier at the Hochschule für bildende Künste Hamburg from 1962 to 1965. From 1966 to 1968, she lived in New York City, at first in total isolation from the New York art scene. She then moved back to her family home in Hamburg and continued to live and work there among an extraordinary collection of disparate cultural artefacts until her death in 2009

Established in 2000 and named after its founder, the Hanne Darboven Foundation promotes contemporary art by supporting young talents, which, in particular, tackle the theme of ‘space and time’ in the realms of conceptual art, visual arts, compositions, and literature. The heir of the artist's estate, the foundation recorded Darboven’s complete Requiem Cycle. In order to preserve the artist's work and make parts of her own collection available to the public, the foundation purchased her former Rönneburg residence in 2012.