Contemporary Art Biography
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A review of the contemporary Art world, from the second half of the 20th century to the talents of nowadays. Some of the world's most important artists are displayed here, from abstract expressionist masters like Pollock or de Kooning to the latest works by Damien Hirst or Jasper Johns. Please check this page regularly as we add new artists quite often. If you observe any error or omission, please contact us
The exhibition begins with studies for abstract geometric compositions from the late 1930s, when Albers—a onetime instructor at the Bauhaus— returned to painting after having devoted his recent years to working with glass. Albers’s studies for the "Variant / Adobe" series, from the 1940s, reveal the influence that his time in Mexico, and specifically the country’s pre-Columbian architecture, had upon his art. The majority of the exhibition—over fifty works—is devoted to the Homage to the Square series (1950–1976). These vibrant sketches—never exhibited in the artist’s lifetime and rarely seen after his death—provide important insight into Albers’s working method and, in contrast to the austerity and strict geometry of the finished paintings, are remarkable for their freedom and sensuality.
Painting on paper
Born in Bottrop, Germany in 1888, Albers came from a family of craftsmen, and the virtues of craftsmanship—precision, discipline, and technical proficiency—were of central importance to his work. Whereas his paintings themselves took only a few hours to complete, Albers’s preparatory work entailed producing series upon series of meticulous studies. In 1933, the Bauhaus was forced to close under pressure from the new Nazi government. Albers and his wife, Anni, immigrated to America, where he would head the art department of Black Mountain College in North Carolina. In the United States, Albers matured as a painter as his fascination with geometric form grew and his travels took him to Mexico, a place that would have a lasting influence upon his work.
Mexico and the variants/adobe series
The Albers’ visited Mexico for the first time in 1935. They returned to the country regularly over the next several decades, sometimes staying for several months. The profound effect of Mexico’s colors and pre-Columbian architecture and sculpture upon Albers’s work is difficult to overestimate. “Mexico,” he wrote to Nina and Wassily Kandinsky in 1936, “is truly the promised land of abstract art.” Mexico reconfirmed Albers’s faith in the expressive power of color, and it was here—after years of producing nothing but stained glass, furniture designs, woodcuts, and linocuts—that Albers returned to painting. He significantly expanded his color range, incorporating magenta, turquoise, violet, and ocher, among other colors, in varying combinations.
Homage to the square
In 1950, Albers found the ideal vessel through which to explore his fascination with the interaction of color: a group of nested squares. Like the Adobe series, it is possible that Homage to the Square evolved from Albers’s preoccupation with the ancient architecture and sculpture of Mexico. His main concern in these paintings, however, was not the form of the square itself, but rather color. "I’m not paying ‘homage to the square’", said Albers, "It’s only the dish I serve my craziness about color in.” As evidenced in the notes Albers sometimes wrote in the margins of a work, or at times within the color field itself, these studies were essentially experimenting nature.
The dynamic pictorial panorama of the second half of the 20th century had a lot of protagonists, but very few of them reached as much importance as Karel Appel
As many others artists of his generation, Appel suffered the tragedy of the World War II, which had a considerable influence -in a conscious or unconscious way- in all his artistic oeuvre. A native from Amsterdam, Appel was forced to leave the city to avoid being arrested by the occupying Nazi forces in 1944. Shortly afterwards, he returned to the Dutch capital to take part in an exhibition of young artists in the Stedelijk Museum.
THE NUDE BRUSHSTROKE
"The nude brushstroke, that's what I search" , Appel said early in his career. With his emaciated figures and bright -often disturbing- colours, Appel´s paintings were not well accepted by most critics, still used to the geometric abstraction of their fellow countryman Pietr Mondrian.
Nevertheless, Appel's interest and eagerness to recover the primitivism as the main engine of the artistic expression were shared by many of his young contemporaries, and in 1948, when he was only 27 years old, Appel took part as a founder member in an artistic movement that played a highly important role in the artistic evolution in Europe in the second half of the 20th Century: The Cobra Group.
AN ANIMAL, A NIGHT, A SCREAM, A HUMAN BEING, A WHOLE." THE COBRA GROUP
Founded in 1948 as an answer to geometric abstraction, the Cobra Group (named with the first letters of the native cities of its founder members - Copenhagen , Brussels and Amsterdam- ) had such famous members as PIERRE ALECHINSKY (1927), AGER JORN (1914-1973), CORNEILLE (Cornelis van Beverloo, 1922) or Appel himself. Their art were characterized by spontaneous, vitalistic and impulsive brushstrokes, demanding a complete artistic freedom. Karel Appel declared that "I paint like a barbarian in a barbarous age" . The huge mural created in 1949 in the Amsterdam City Hall caused an enormous controversy and was covered up for nearly a decade.
In the early 50s, Appel reached the zenith of his art, with his devious pictures of human beings and animals of vivid colours, violent foreshortenings and no evidence of perspective.
THE LAST YEARS
Nevertheless, in the following years Appel led his painting into the figuration or even the abstraction. In the late sixties, he dealt with artistic fields such as sculpture or illustration. However, he never abandoned the human figure as a reference in his creations.
Karel Appel died on May 3rd, 2006, and he was buried in the Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris, along with other famous artists such as Oscar Wilde, Theodore Gericault or Jim Morrison.
This exhibition explores an extraordinary group of paintings of post-war London building sites by Frank Auerbach (born 1931), one of Britain’s greatest living artists. The series of fourteen major paintings was produced during the first decade of Auerbach’s career and gives a remarkable account of his early artistic development. It was during this period that Auerbach emerged alongside Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud as part of a powerful new generation of British painters. Frank Auerbach: London Building Sites, 1952-62, on view at The Courtauld Gallery from 16 October 2009 to 19 January 2010, will give the first comprehensive account of these works, which are among the most profound responses made by any artist to the post-war urban landscape.
Auerbach’s years as a young art student in London, from 1947 to 1952, were spent in a city deeply scarred by the aftermath of the Second World War and at the beginning of a long period of recovery and rebuilding. The Blitz had levelled whole areas of London and left numerous buildings severely damaged or destroyed. This wounded landscape was punctuated by remarkable survivals, most famously St Paul’s Cathedral standing defiantly among the ruins. Another spectacular sight was the rebuilding effort which saw armies of workmen clearing the debris and excavating new foundations. Ubiquitous symbols of the rebuilding were the tower cranes which sprang up across the city in advance of the new steel-framed offices and blocks of flats which were to transform London’s urban landscape (fig. 10). For Auerbach, hungry to prove himself as a modern painter, the building sites of London made the most compelling of contemporary subjects. As he recalled recently, “London after the War was a marvellous landscape with precipice and mountains and crags, full of drama… and it seemed mad to waste the opportunity and not to take notice of the fact that there were these marvellous images… all around one”.
Towards the end of his studies at various London art schools including, most importantly, David Bomberg’s inspirational teaching at the Borough Polytechnic, Auerbach began voraciously sketching the city’s building sites, as did his close friend and fellow student, Leon Kossoff. There was, Auerbach says, “a sense of survivors scurrying among a ruined city… and a sort of curious freedom… I remember a feeling of camaraderie among the people in the street”. For Auerbach, the sense of survival must have seemed particularly profound. He had been sent to England from his home city, Berlin, shortly before his eighth birthday and the outbreak of war. Both of his Jewish parents were killed in the concentration camps and Auerbach made London his new home. He combed the city, filling his sketchbooks with details of particular sites, capturing the activities of workmen and machinery as they reshaped London’s bombsites into new structures. He recalls how he would enter a site “by inching along the planks, out over the excavation, just clinging on and dodging the wheelbarrows”. It was the early stages of a construction site that most excited Auerbach, before the building had fully emerged from the ground and there was still a sense of struggle between the formlessness of the raw earth being excavated and the beginnings of architectural order.
Auerbach’s first painting, in what would become a group of fourteen major works, was Summer Building Site, 1952, (fig. 1), a construction site on the Earl’s Court Road. It was a breakthrough work for the twenty-one year old artist and he considered it to be his first truly original picture. “I had done my own painting,” Auerbach recalled, “I didn’t know if I would ever be able to do it again, but at least I knew what it felt like.”
Auerbach’s subjects included many of the major construction sites of the period, such as the Time and Life Building on Bruton Street, the rebuilding around St Paul’s Cathedral (fig. 7) and the John Lewis building on Oxford Street. He made repeated visits to perhaps the most spectacular site of all: the Shell Building on the South Bank, London’s first ‘skyscraper’ built on the site of the 1951 Festival of Britain (figs. 9, 10 and 11). Its height necessitated dramatically deep excavations which Auerbach described as being like the “Grand Canyon”. His Shell Building Site from the Thames (fig. 4) is a particularly dramatic evocation of his experiences there. The composition is dominated by a crane from which a cable drops into a deep excavation which appears to radiate light from within. Rembrandt’s Deposition in the National Gallery was a source of inspiration for the work and the crane’s form faintly recalls that of a crucifix, further imbuing the image with the theme of death and resurrection, which perhaps lies at the heart of all Auerbach’s building site paintings
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Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
Contemporary Art Islamic Art Calligraphy And Architecture Designs Patterns Wallpapers Desktop Wallpapers Hd Calligraphy Wallpapers Calligraphy Canvas Wallpapers Canvas
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