Janine Antoni

Janine Antoni (born January 19, 1964, in Freeport, Bahamas) is a contemporary artist and sculptor whose work focuses mostly on process. She often uses her whole body or different parts of it, such as her mouth, hair, eyelashes, and brain as tools and with them performs everyday activities to create her artwork.

She graduated from Sarah Lawrence College with a BA, and from the Rhode Island School of Design with an MFA in 1989. She was a 1998 MacArthur Fellow. She is a 2011 Guggenheim Fellow.

In her work Gnaw (1992) Antoni uses her mouth and the activity of eating or chewing to carve two 600 lb (300 kg) cubes, one made of chocolate, the other of lard, and then used the chewed out bits to create chocolate boxes and lipstick tubes, which she then displayed in a mock store front. In this work and others, Antoni often confronts issues such as materiality, process, the body, cultural perceptions of femininity, and her art historical roots.

In Loving Care (1992) Antoni uses her hair as a paintbrush and Loving Care hair dye as her paint. Antoni dips her hair in a bucket of hair dye and mops the gallery floor on her hands and knees and in the process pushes the viewers out of the gallery space. Once again, in this process Antoni explores the body, as well as themes of power, femininity, and the style of abstract expressionism.

Tableaux vivants is another form of creation that Antoni has been described as utilizing. In her installation Slumber (1994) Antoni sleeps in the gallery. While she sleeps, an EEG machine records her REM patterns, which she then weaves into a blanket under which she sleeps. This particular work is seen as a tableau vivant because of the spectacle aspect of it.

The aspirational focus of this tableau vivant, while situating the artist as an object on view, simulataneously insists on an aesthetics of connections: between the artist and beholders, between the artists and the art institutions, and between the artist’s conscious and unconscious processes.

Antoni is still an active member of the art world.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Janine_Antoni)

 

Bruce Beasley

Beasley ranks among the most productive sculptors of the post- Henry Moore/David Smith generation of abstract sculptors. His work can be found in the permanent collection of 30 art museums around the world, including: Museum of Modern Art in New York City; the Guggenheim Museum, New York City; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the National Art Museum of China in Beijing; the Musee National d’Art Moderne-Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris; the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC; the Kunsthalle Mannheim in Germany; and the Islamic Museum in Cairo.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce_Beasley)

Louise Bourgeois

Louise Bourgeois is one of the world’s most respected sculptors. Over a long career she has worked through most of the twentieth century’s avant-garde artistic movements from abstraction to realism, yet has always remained uniquely individual, powerfully inventive, and often at the forefront of contemporary art.

(taken from http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/louisebourgeois/default.shtm)

 

 

Anish Kapoor

Anish Kapoor CBE RA (born 12 March 1954) is a British sculptor of Indian birth. Born in Mumbai (Bombay), Kapoor has lived and worked in London since the early 1970s when he moved to study art, first at the Hornsey College of Art and later at the Chelsea School of Art and Design.

He represented Britain in the XLIV Venice Biennale in 1990, when he was awarded the Premio Duemila Prize. In 1991 he received the Turner Prize and in 2002 received the Unilever Commission for the Turbine Hall at Tate Modern. Notable public sculptures include Cloud Gate, Millennium Park, Chicago, Sky Mirror exhibited at the Rockefeller Center, New York in 2006 and Kensington Gardens in 2010, Temenos, at Middlehaven, Middlesbrough, ‘Leviathan’ at the Grand Palais in 2011 and ArcelorMittal Orbit commissioned as a permanent artwork for the Olympic Park and due for completion in 2012.

Anish Kapoor was elected a Royal Academician in 1999 and in 2003 he was made a Commander of the British Empire. In 2011 he was made a Commander in the French Ordre des Arts et des Lettres and was awarded the Japanese Praemium Imperiale.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anish_Kapoor)

Tony Cragg

Tony Cragg was born in Liverpool in 1949. He worked as a laboratory technician at the Natural Rubber Producers Research Association (1966-68) before attending Gloucestershire College of Art and Design, Cheltenham College, and the Royal College of Art, London (1973-77). Tony Cragg has lived and worked in Wuppertal, Germany, since 1977.

An artist of great international acclaim and immense energy, Cragg has developed more possibilities in the making of sculpture than any other sculptor since Henry Moore discovered the ‘hole’ as positive space. He has employed more materials than most, and tested them to their limits through a wide variety of means, so that he seems to be one hundred sculptors at any one time. Cragg’s contribution to the debate on contemporary sculpture practice is considerable. Early works of the 1970s were mostly made with found objects through which Cragg questioned and tested possibilities. Later pieces demonstrated a shift of interest to surface quality and how that could be manipulated, and a play with unlikely juxtapositions of materials. Results vary from the exquisite to the grotesque, from the refined to the crude, in bronze, steel, plastic, rubber, glass, wood, plaster and more.

Tony Cragg was elected Royal Academician in 1994. In the summer of 1999 the forecourt of Burlington House housed an installation of his new work. These complex bronze sculptures demonstrate his mastery over form and material. A solo exhibition, A New Thing Breathing, was held at the Tate Gallery, Liverpool, in spring 2000 and five monumental sculptures formed the first exhibition on the Terrace of Somerset House, London in autumn 2001.

(taken from http://www.sculpture.org.uk/TonyCragg/)

Martin Puryear

Martin Puryear was born in Washington, D.C., and he spent his youth studying practical crafts, learning how to build guitars and furniture. He received a B.A. from The Catholic University of America in 1963 and was a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone from 1964 to 1966. In the late 1960s, he studied printmaking in Sweden and assisted a master cabinet-maker. He entered the Yale University graduate sculpture program in 1968.

His first solo exhibition was held in the late 1970s at the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In the 1980s he participated in two Whitney Biennials and received a Guggenheim Fellowship. He received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1989.

In 2003, he served on the Jury for the World Trade Center Site Memorial Competition.

The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art presented a 30-year survey of Puryear’s work in 2008-2009. The presentation included “a special installation in the Haas Atrium including Ladder for Booker T. Washington (1996), made from a 36-foot-long split sapling, and Ad Astra (2007), a 63-foot-tall work that rises to the museum’s fifth-floor bridge.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martin_Puryear)

Richard Deacon

Richard Deacon was born in Bangor, Wales and educated at Plymouth College. He then studied at the Somerset College of Art in Taunton, St Martin’s School of Art in London and the Royal College of Art, also in London. He left the Royal College in 1977, and went on to study part time at the Chelsea School of Art. Deacon’s first one-person show came in 1978 in Brixton.

Deacon’s work is abstract, but often alludes to anatomical functions. His works are often constructed from everyday materials such as laminated plywood, and he calls himself a “fabricator” rather than a “sculptor”. His early pieces are typically made up of sleek curved forms, with later works sometimes more bulky.

Deacon’s body of work includes small-scale works suitable for showing in art galleries, as well as much larger pieces shown in sculpture gardens and objects made for specific events, such as dance performances.

Deacon won the Turner Prize in 1987 (nominated for his touring show For Those Who Have Eyes) having previously been nominated in 1984.

Deacon was made a Commander of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1999 New Year Honours List. In 2007, he represented Wales at the Venice Biennale. He was one of the five artists shortlisted for the Angel of the South project in January 2008.

He is represented by Marian Goodman Gallery, New York; Galerie Thomas Schulte, Berlin; Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Salzburg and Paris; and LA Louver Gallery, Los Angeles.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Deacon_%28sculptor%29)

 

Sara Sze

Sarah Sze (Born in Boston in 1969) is a contemporary artist who lives and works in New York City. Sze uses ordinary objects to create sculptures and site-specific installations.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sarah_Sze)

Ursula vonRydingsvard

Ursula von Rydingsvard born in Deensen, Germany (1942 ) is a sculptor who has been working in Brooklyn, New York for the past 30 years. She received her MFA from Columbia University in 1975 after which time she started to work with cedar, a material through which she has explored a wide range of images.

Von Rydingsvard is best known for creating large-scale, often monumental sculpture from the cedar beams which she painstakingly cuts, assembles, and laminates, finally rubbing powdered graphite into the work’s textured, faceted surfaces. She deliberately uses cedar boards milled into 4″ by 4″ widths with varied lengths which create a neutrality or “blank canvas” which enables her to dip into many different possibilities often within the arena of the psychological and emotional. As von Rydingsvard explains this approach: “If I were to say how it is that I break the convention of sculpture (and I’m not sure that’s what I do or even if that’s what I want to do), it would be by climbing into the work in a way that’s highly personal, that I can claim as being mine. The more mine it is, the more I’m able to break the convention.” Her signature abstract shapes refer to things in the real world, each revealing the mark of the human hand while also summoning natural forms and forces. These forms typically include simple vessels and bowls; many suggest tools or other artifacts such as shovels, spoons and fences, or allude to primitive dwellings, geological formations, the landscape, or the body. She now features permanent dents in her cheeks from wearing masks while working for so many years.

(taken from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ursula_von_Rydingsvard)

David Nash

David Nash was born in Esher in 1945. He studied at Kingston College of Art (1963-64), Brighton College of Art (1964-67) and Chelsea School of Art (1969-70). On leaving Chelsea, Nash moved to Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales, purchasing a chapel which has remained since then both his studio and home. Working away from London allowed Nash the intellectual and physical space to develop his art. He not only carves wood, largely from fallen trees, with chain and milling saws – skills that he has perfected over the years – but he also creates sculptures from growing plants, cutting and training them into domes or ladders. His famous Ash Dome, planted as saplings in 1977, is now a mature dome centred on a plot of woodland in North Wales, Nash’s ‘laboratory’ for growing works and a place for thinking.

Many of David Nash’s exhibitions – he has had hundreds of solo and group exhibitions throughout the world – are formed from work he has made in the general location of the museum or art gallery, with local wood. Significant shows of this type have been held in America, Japan and Poland. Nash’s sculptures, made from unseasoned wood, alter after his intervention, cracking and twisting as they dry. In harnessing not only the element of air, but also fire and water, Nash changes the form and surface of his sculptures. His first charred works were made in Japan in the early 1980s. The process is almost as ritualistic as it is intense. Charring changes the surface to carbon, which, when treated with preservative and linseed oil, gives the sculptures a longer life in the open air.

In 1999 David Nash embarked on making some works in bronze, using earth and fire in the process. The resulting sculptures, with their patina resonant of smoke and ash, hold echoes of his works in wood. Nash continues to work in Blaenau Ffestiniog and in many places around the world. In 1999 he was elected Royal Academician.

(taken from http://www.sculpture.org.uk/DavidNash/)