- Andy Warhol
Andy Warhol was an American artist who became a central figure in the movement known as pop art. After a successful career as a commercial illustrator, Warhol became famous worldwide for his work as a painter; an avant-garde filmmaker, a record producer, an author and a public figure known for his presence in wildly diverse social circles that included bohemian street people, distinguished intellectuals, Hollywood celebrities and wealthy aristocrats.
- Jeff Koons
Jeff Koons (born January 21, 1955), is an American artist. He is noted for his use of kitsch imagery using painting, sculpture and other forms, often in large scale.
- Frank Stella
Frank Stella (born May 12, 1936) is an American painter and printmaker. He is a significant figure in minimalism, post-painterly abstraction, patterns and offset lithography. He was born in Malden, Massachusetts. After attending high school at Phillips Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, he went on to Princeton University, where he painted, influenced by the abstract expressionism of Jackson Pollock and Franz Kline, and majored in history.
- Matthew Barney
Matthew Barney (born March 25, 1967 in San Francisco, California) is a contemporary artist who works with film, video, installations, sculpture, photography, drawing and performance art. Barney has described himself as being primarily a sculptor.
- Spencer Tunick
Spencer Tunick (born January 1 1967) is an American artist. Tunick was born in Middletown, New York, USA. He earned a Bachelor of Arts from Emerson College in 1988. He is best known for his installations that feature large numbers of nude people posed in artistic formations. In these images the nude form becomes abstract due to the sheer number so closely placed together. Known as installations, they are often situated in urban locations throughout the world.
- Sol Lewitt
Sol LeWitt (September 9, 1928 - April 8, 2007) was an American artist linked to various movements including conceptual art and minimalism. His media were predominantly painting, drawing, and structures (a term he preferred in opposition to sculpture). He has been the subject of hundreds of solo exhibitions in museums and galleries worldwide since 1965. His prolific two and three-dimensional work ranges from "Wall Drawings", over 1200 of which have been executed, …
- Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman (born December 6, 1941, in Fort Wayne, Indiana) is a contemporary American artist. His practice spans a broad range of media including sculpture, photography, neon, video, drawing and performance.
- Diane Arbus
Diane Arbus was an American photographer, noted for her portraits of people on the fringes of society. (Her first name is pronounced "dee-ANN.")
- Yoko Ono
Yoko Ono Lennon (小野 洋子 "Ono Yōko (ONO Yōko)", born February 18 1933) is a Japanese-American artist and musician. She gained international fame because of her marriage to British musician John Lennon. She currently lives in New York City. Despite having a kanji reading, Ono's name appears in katakana (ヨーコ・オノ Yōko Ono) in the Japanese press and on album credits.
- Robert Smithson
Robert Smithson was an American artist famous for his land art. Smithson was born in Passaic, New Jersey and studied painting and drawing in New York City at the Art Students League. His early exhibited artworks were collage works influenced by "homoerotic drawings and clippings from beefcake magazines", science fiction, and early Pop Art. He primarily identified himself as a painter during this time, but after a three year rest from the art world, …
- Cai Guo-Qiang
Cai Guo-Qiang (born in 1957, Quanzhou City, Province) is a Chinese contemporary artist and curator.
- Jeff Wall
Jeff Wall (born Vancouver September 29 1946) is a Canadian photographer best known for his large-scale back-lit cibachrome photographs and art-historical writing.
- Shepard Fairey
Frank Shepard Fairey is a contemporary artist/graphic designer/illustrator. He usually goes under his middle and last name, Shepard Fairey. He is most noted for being the artist who, while attending the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) in 1989, created the "André the Giant Has a Posse" sticker campaign, which has evolved into the "Obey Giant" campaign, and can now be seen all over the world.
- Mike Kelley
Mike Kelley (born 1954 in Detroit, lives and works in Los Angeles) is an American artist. His work involves stuffed animals, textile banners and carpets, and his output also includes drawings, objects, assemblage, collage, performance and video. His oeuvre is often discussed by critics as engaging with the concept of Abjection. He staged his most ambitious show to date in November/December 2005, …
- Bill Viola
Bill Viola (born America, 1951) is a contemporary video artist. With a career spanning 35 years his significant contribution to the genre of video art is today widely acknowledged on the international stage.
- Martin Kippenberger
Martin Kippenberger was an influential German artist whose penchant for mischievousness made him the focus of a generation of German "enfants terrible" including Albert Oehlen and Markus Oehlen, Georg Herold, Dieter Göls, and Günther Förg. His work experimented with polemical ideas; and in a rush to execute every sort of image that occupied his thoughts he made a mark on the art world of the 1990s.
- Carl Andre
Carl Andre (born September 16, 1935) is an American minimalist artist. Andre was born in Quincy, Massachusetts and educated in Quincy public schools and at Philips Academy, Andover, where he became friends with Hollis Frampton and Michael Chapman. Andre served in the U.S. Army in North Carolina from 1955-56. He moved to New York City and in 1958 met Frank Stella in whose studio he developed a series of wooden "cut" sculptures.
- Nobuyoshi Araki
Nobuyoshi Araki is Japan's best-known photographer and its most controversial cultural export. Documenting Tokyo he captures its obscene energy and inhuman emptiness in the sex clubs and entertainment district, crowded streets, buildings and skies. His work is infused with an intense sexuality. He has been widely accused by feminist groups of being a misogynist because of the content of many of his photographs.
- Kara Walker
Kara Walker (born November 26, 1969) is a contemporary American artist who is best known for her exploration of race, gender, sexuality, and identity in her artworks. Walker was born in Stockton, California. Her retired father is a formally educated artist, a professor, and an administrator. Her mother worked as an administrative assistant and was inspired by her family to reveal her own artistic talents.
- Nam June Paik
Nam June Paik (July 20, 1932 - January 29, 2006) was a South Korean-born American artist. He worked with a variety of media and is credited for first working with video art.
- Phil Collins
Philip "Phil" Collins (born 1970) is an English artist, and Turner prize nominee.
- Laurie Anderson
Laurie Anderson (born Laura Phillips Anderson, on June 5 1947, in Glen Ellyn, Illinois) is an American experimental performance artist and musician. She is the inventor of the tape-bow violin, which has a tape head in place of strings, and a strip of magnetic tape in place of the hairs on a bow.
- Peter Doig
Peter Doig is a Scottish painter. He´s one of Europe's most expensive living painters.
- James Turrell
James Turrell (born 1943, Los Angeles) is an artist primarily concerned with light and space. He is best known for his work in progress, "Roden Crater". Located outside Flagstaff, Arizona, Turrell is turning this natural cinder volcanic crater into a massive naked-eye observatory, designed specifically for the viewing of celestial phenomena.
- Dan Flavin
Dan Flavin was an American minimalist artist who is famous for creating sculptural objects and installations from commercially available fluorescent light fixtures. Flavin first conceived of using electric light as art in 1961, the same year he married his first wife Sonja Severdija. The first works to incorporate electric light were his "icons" series: eight colored square box-forms, constructed by the artist and his then wife Sonja, …
- Gottfried Helnwein
Gottfried Helnwein (born October 8, 1948 in Vienna) is an Austrian-Irish fine artist, photographer, installation and performance artist.
- Vito Acconci
Vito Hannibal Acconci (born January 24, 1940) is a Bronx, New York-based architect, landscape architect, and installation artist. His father was an Italian immigrant who took him to museums and opera houses and gave him his first arts education. Vito attended Regis High School on New York City. He received a B.A. in literature from the College of the Holy Cross in 1962 and an M.F.A. in literature and poetry from the University of Iowa.
- John Baldessari
John Baldessari, (b. June 17 1931, National City, California) is a conceptual artist. His work often attempts to point out irony in contemporary art theory and practices or reduce it to absurdity. His art has been featured in more than 120 solo exhibitions in the U.S. and Europe.
- Richard Long
Richard Long (born June 2, 1945) is an English sculptor, photographer and painter, one of the best known British land artists. Long was born in Bristol, and studied art there at the West of England College of Art from 1962 to 1965, and graduated from St Martin's School of Art in London in 1968. Several of his works are based around walks that he has made, and often consist of photographs or maps of the landscape he has walked over.
- Roni Horn
Roni Horn (1955-) is an American visual artist and writer.
- Fred Wilson
Conceptual artist Fred Wilson, born in 1954 in the Bronx, describing himself as of "African, American Indian, European and Amerindian" descent. He received a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant in 1999 and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award in 2003. Wilson represented the United States at the Biennial Cairo in 1992 and the Venice Biennale in 2003. In 2001, he was the subject of a retrospective, "Fred Wilson: Objects and Installations, 1979-2000", …
- Raymond Pettibon
Raymond Pettibon (born Raymond Ginn on June 16, 1957) is an American artist and sometime musician and lyricist. Known for his comic-like drawings with disturbing, ironic or ambiguous captions, Pettibon's subject matter is sometimes violent and anti-authoritarian. From the late 1970s through the mid-1980s, he was closely assocated with the punk rock band Black Flag and the record label SST Records, both founded by his older brother Greg Ginn.
- Grayson Perry
Grayson Perry, is an award-winning English artist, best known for his ceramics and cross-dressing. He has also worked in other forms, including drawing and embroidery, and has written a graphic novel, "Cycle of Violence". Perry's vases have classical forms and are decorated in bright colours. The subjects tackled by the decoration is often at odds with its superficially attractive and genteel nature: child abuse (in "We¹ve Found the Body of your Child", …
- Pierre Huyghe
Pierre Huyghe is an acclaimed French artist who works in a variety of media, from film and video to public interventions. He trained at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs, and started his artistic career as the assistant of Xavier Veilhan. Later, he started showing with the Fac-Simile Gallery in Milan, invited by Horazio Goni. Much of Huyghe's work examines the structural properties of film and its problematic relationship to reality.
- Wolfgang Tillmans
Wolfgang Tillmans (born August 15, 1968) is a German photographer. Born in Remscheid in Germany, Tillmans lived and worked in Hamburg at the end of the 1980s before moving to England. He studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art from 1990 to 1992. Since 1996 he has lived and worked in London. Since the mid-1980s, Wolfgang Tillmans has reinterpreted representational genres from portraiture to still life to landscape through the medium of photography.
- Yinka Shonibare
Yinka Shonibare MBE (born 1962) is a contemporary artist living in Britain.
- Christian Boltanski
Christian Boltanski (born September 6, 1944) is a French photographer, sculptor, self-proclaimed painter, and installation artist. Christian Boltanski was born in Paris to a Jewish father of Ukrainian heritage, and a Corsican mother. He spent the early years of his life hiding from the Nazis. He lives and works in Malakoff. He is married to the artist Annette Messager, with whom he sometimes collaborates. His artistic work is haunted by the problems of death, …
- Xu Bing
Xu Bing (b. 1955) is a China|Chinese-born artist, resident in the United States since 1987. Born in Chongqing, Xu grew up in Beijing. In 1975, near the end of the Cultural Revolution, he was relocated to the countryside for two years. In 1977, he enrolled at the Central Academy of Fine Art (Beijing)|Central Academy of Fine Art in Beijing, receiving an MFA in 1987. In 1990 he moved to the United States, where he lives today.
- Doug Aitken
Doug Aitken is a multimedial American artist. On January 16, 2007, Aitken’s sleepwalkers—a video installation projected onto the outdoor facades of the Museum of Modern Art opened. The project represents a collaboration between the artist, the Museum, and the public arts organization Creative Time. Aitken was born in Redondo Beach, California in 1968 and earned a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree from Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
- Vanessa Beecroft
Vanessa Beecroft (Genoa, Italy, 1969) is an Italian contemporary artist living in New York City.