AMERICAN ARTIST
Potential
Judges: ARTISTS
Claes
Oldenburg (born January 28, 1929) is a sculptor, best known for his public art installations typically
featuring very large replicas of everyday
objects.
Another theme in his work is soft sculpture
versions of everyday objects. Many of Oldenburg's giant sculptures of mundane
objects elicited public ridicule before being embraced as whimsical,
insightful, and fun additions to public outdoor art. In the 1960s he became
associated with the Pop Art
movement and attended many so-called happenings, which were performance art
related productions of that time. The name he gave to his own productions was
"Ray Gun Theatre".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Claes_Oldenburg
Chuck Thomas Close
,
(born July 5,
1940, Monroe, Washington)[1]
is an American painter and photographer who achieved fame as a photorealist, through his
massive-scale portraits. Though a catastrophic spinal artery collapse in 1988
left him severely paralyzed, he has continued to paint and produce work which remains sought after by museums and collectors.
lthough
his later paintings differ in method from his earlier canvases, the preliminary
process remains the same. To create his grid work copies of photos,
Close puts a grid on the photo and on the canvas and copies cell by cell.
Typically, each square within the grid is filled with roughly executed regions
of color (usually consisting of painted rings on a contrasting background) which give the cell a perceived 'average' hue which makes
sense from a distance. His first tools for this included an airbrush, rags,
razor blade, and an eraser mounted on a power drill. His first picture with
this method was Big Self Portrait, a black and white enlargement of his
face to a 107.5 in by 83.5 in (2.73 m by 2.12 m) canvas,
made in over four months in 1968. He made seven more black and white portraits
during this period. He has been quoted as saying that he used such diluted
paint in the airbrush that all eight of the paintings were made with a single
tube of mars black acrylic.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Close
Brice Marden
(born October 15, 1938), is an American artist, generally described as Minimalist, although his work defies specific categorization. He is represented by the Matthew Marks Gallery
. Marden was born in Bronxville, New York. Marden earned his MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture (1963), where he studied with Esteban Vicente, Alex Katz, Jon Schueler, Jack Tworkov, Reginald Pollack, Philip Pearlstein, and Gabor Peterdi. Among his fellow students were the future artists Richard Serra, Chuck Close, Nancy Graves, and Robert Mangold. It was at Yale that Marden developed the formal strategies that would characterize his drawings and paintings in the proceeding decades: a preoccupation with rectangular formats, and the repeated use of a muted, extremely individualized palette. In 1983, Marden and family traveled to Thailand, Sri Lanka, and India; the artist became fascinated by the art, landscape, and culture of Asia. Marden has subsequently incorporated numerous elements of these traditions into his work, making them one key to his process (the Shell Drawings, 1985-87). In 2000, Marden embarked on the most ambitious paintings of his career: The Propitious Garden of Plane Image, the longest two of which measure 24 feet. Marden is considered to rank among the most important American painters of contemporary period. Writing in The New Yorker in 2006, the critic Peter Schjeldahl described him as "the most profound abstract painter of the past four decades."http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brice_Marden
Brice Marden and His
wife Nancy recently bought a hotel on the Island of Nevis in the Caribean and Brought their own personal artistry to its
design.
Video: Brice Marden with Charlie Rose
http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=983257097746078134
Ross Bleckner (born May 12, 1949) is an American artist. 
Life and work
"'I always absolutely thought there was a difference between
being a young artist and an important young artist,' said Mr. Bleckner, who grew up in Hewlett, L.I., graduated in 1971
from New York University and earned an M.F.A. from the California
Institute of the Arts in 1973."[1]
For the last 20 years, his art has been largely an investigation of
change, loss, and memory, often addressing the subject of AIDS. Mr. Bleckner uses symbolic imagery rather than direct
representation, and his work is visually elusive, with forms that constantly
change focus.[2] While much of Bleckner's
work can be divided into distinct groups or series with motifs repeated from
painting to painting, he is also in the habit of redeploying and combining old
motifs. [3]Works by the artist are held in collections
around the world including [1] Museum of Modern Art, NY], Museum of Contemporary Art, LA, Astrup Fearnley Museet for Moderne Kunst, Museo National Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, NY.
In 1995, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum had a major retrospective of his works from
the last two decades of exhibitions at acclaimed institutions such as San Francisco MoMA, Stockholm Moderna Museet, and the Carnegie Museum of Art. Through his philanthropic efforts, Ross Bleckner has enabled many community organizations to
perform their vital work. He is on the board of AIDS Community Research Initiative of America (ACRIA), a non-profit community-based AIDS research
and treatment education center. He is a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador and
currently lives in New York City.
Lee Friedlander—photographer
http://www.cnn.com/2009/SHOWBIZ/Music/02/12/madonna.photo.auction/index.html?iref=mpstoryview
Friedlander studied photography at the Art Center College of Design located in Pasadena, California. In 1956, he moved to New York City where he photographed jazz musicians for record covers. His early work was influenced by Eugne Atget, Robert Frank, and Walker Evans
. In 1960, the Guggenheim Memorial Foundation awarded Friedlander a grant to focus on his art and made subsequent grants in 1962 and 1977. Some of his most famous photographs appeared in the September 1985 Playboy, black and white nude photographs of Madonna from the late 1970's. A student at the time, she was paid only $25 for her 1979 set, and in 2009, one of the images fetched $37,500 at a Christie's Art House auction.[1]Working
primarily with Leica 35mm cameras and black and white
film, Friedlander's style focused on the "social landscape". His art
used detached images of urban life, store-front reflections, structures framed
by fences, and posters and signs all combining to capture the look of modern
life. Friedlander now works
primarily with medium format cameras (e.g. Hasselblad
Superwide). While suffering from arthritis and housebound,
he focused on photographing his surroundings. His book, Stems, reflects
his life during the time of his knee replacement surgery. He has said that his
"limbs" reminded him of plant stems. These images display textures which were not a feature of his earlier work. In
this sense, the images are similar to those of Josef Sudek
who also photographed the confines of his home and studio.
Matthew Barney—artist 
|
Matthew Barney was born in San Francisco in
1967; at age six, he moved to Idaho with his family. After his parents
divorced, Barney continued to live with his father in Idaho, playing football
on his high school team, and visiting his mother in New York City, where he
was introduced to art and museums. This intermingling of sports and art
informs his work as a sculptor and filmmaker. After graduating from Yale in
1991, Barney entered the art world to almost instant controversy and success.
He is best known as the producer and creator of the CREMASTER films, a
series of five visually extravagant works created out of sequence (CREMASTER
4 began the cycle, followed by CREMASTER 1, etc.). The films generally
feature Barney in myriad roles, including characters as diverse as a satyr, a
magician, a ram, Harry Houdini, and even the infamous murderer Gary Gilmore.
The title of the films refers to the muscle that raises and lowers the male
reproductive system according to temperature, external stimulation, or fear.
The films themselves are a grand mixture of history, autobiography, and
mythology, an intensely private universe in which symbols and images are
densely layered and interconnected. The resulting cosmology is both beautiful
and complex. His final film in the series, CREMASTER 3, begins beneath New
York Citys Chrysler Building and includes scenes at the Saratoga race track,
where apparently dead costumed horses race through a dream sequence, and at
the Guggenheim Museum, where artist Richard Serra throws hot Vaseline down
the Museums famous spiral ramp. The film is scheduled for release in 2002.
Matthew Barney won the prestigious Europa 2000
prize at the 45th Venice Biennale in 1996. He was also the first recipient of
the Guggenheim Museums Hugo Boss Award. |
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_Barney
Shepard Fairey—artist/graphic
designer
(born February 15,
1970) is a contemporary artist,
graphic designer,
and illustrator who emerged
from the skateboarding
scene.[1] He first became known for his "Andr the Giant
Has a Posse" sticker campaign, in which Fairey
appropriated images from the comedic super market tabloid Weekly World News
(defunct). His work became more widely known in the 2008 United
States Presidential Election, specifically his Barack Obama
"HOPE" poster. The Institute of
Contemporary Art, Boston calls him one of today's best known and
most influential street artists.[2] He usually omits his first name. His work is included in
the collections at The Smithsonian,
the Los Angeles
County Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern
Art in New York, and the Victoria and
Albert Museum in London.[3]
Called by The New Yorker
art critic Peter Schjeldahl "the most efficacious American
political illustration since 'Uncle Sam Wants You,'"[24] Fairey created a series of
posters supporting Barack Obama's
2008 candidacy for President of the United States, including the iconic
"HOPE" portrait.[25][26][27] He also created an exclusive design for Rock the Vote. Because the HOPE poster had been "perpetuated illegally"[28] and independently by the street artist, the Obama
campaign could not risk any direct affiliation with it. Although the
campaign officially disavowed any involvement in the creation or popularization
of the poster, Fairey has commented in interviews
that he was in communication with campaign officials during the period
immediately following the poster's release. Fairey
has stated that the original version featured the word "PROGRESS"
instead of the word "HOPE," and that within
weeks of its release, the campaign requested that he issue (and legally
disseminate) a new version, keeping the powerful image of Obama's face but
captioning it with the word "HOPE." [29] The campaign openly embraced the revised poster along
with two additional Fairey posters that featured the
words "CHANGE" and "VOTE."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shepard_Fairey
Jeff Koons--Artist
(born January 21,
1955) is an American artist well known
for his giant reproductions of banal objects such as balloon animals produced
in stainless steel with mirror finish surfaces, often brightly colored. Koons' work has sold for huge amounts including at least
one world record auction price for a work by a living artist. Critics are
sharply divided in their views of Koons. Some see his
work as pioneering and of major art-historical importance. Others dismiss his
work as crass and based on cynical self-merchandizing. Koons
himself has stated that there is no hidden meaning in his works.
Handsome, globe-trotting playboy Jeff Koons,
the self-proclaimed "most written-about artist in the world," works
from his busy "Jeff Koons Productions,
Inc." studio at 600 Broadway in NYC. Jeff started his meteoric rise in the
1980's by turning contemporary american
iconography and popular kitsch into controversial high art. Koons
signature works feature strikingly simple imagery transformed into sculptures
using the finest of materials. Koons' sculptures have
recenty sold as for as much as $1.8 million or $721
per sq. inch! He has even written a book about himself and his work: "The
Jeff Koons Handbook."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jeff_Koons
Jenny
Holzer—Projection/Conceptual/LED Artist
Holzer is
considered one of the most significant and pioneering contemporary artists,
both for her approach to language and for her use of nontraditional media and
public settings for her work. The frequent presence of her work in non-art as
well as art world contexts reveals Holzers commitment
to connecting with the public about issues of social and cultural importance.
Her work pairs the use of text and the centrality of installation to examine
emotional and societal realities. Seamlessly blending form and content, her
work is characterized by formal beauty and conceptual rigor. The exhibition,
Jenny Holzer: PROTECT PROTECT
is on view at the MCA from October 25, 2008, to February 1, 2009.
Holzer has consistently and inventively
challenged peoples assumptions about the world we live in through a
multiplicity of contradictory voices, opinions, and attitudes that form the
basis of our society. Alternating between fact and fiction, the public and the
private, the universal and the particular, Holzers
work offers an incisive portrait of our times.
The exhibition at the MCA is Holzers largest and most comprehensive in the United
States in over 15 years. Beginning with its fall 2008 presentation at the MCA
in Chicago, the exhibition travels to other museums in the United States and
Europe during 2009-10 where its components are reconfigured by the artist at
each venue as the basis for a site-specific installation. The
exhibition is curated by Elizabeth Smith, James W. Alsdorf Chief Curator and Deputy Director for Programs at
the MCA.
http://www.yatzer.com/1312_jenny_holzer_-_protect_protect
Christopher Edward Bangle,
Head of Design for BMW
(born October 14, 1956) is an American automobile
designer. Bangle is known best for his work as Chief of Design for BMW Group, where he was responsible for
the BMW, MINI and Rolls-Royce
motor cars.
A wild-eyed revolutionary destroying
one of Europe's blue-chip luxury brands? The most
influential automotive designer of the early 21st century? Passions run
high whenever BMW's design chief is the topic of discussion.
He might have been born and raised in the Midwest, but with Bangle there is, it
seems, no middle ground. Love or loathe his work,
Bangle's impact on auto design has been profound. No other designer, not even
legendary GM design chief Harley Earl, has so rapidly become a part of the
industry lexicon. To "bangle" a design is now an auto-industry verb
for ruining it. Auto writers use "Bangle butt" to describe a tail
with an extra layer of metal on the trunk (think new Mercedes S-Class). Bangle, some rivals will remind you,
is only one letter away from "bungle." Web sites petitioning for
Bangle's dismissal continue to attract support, other designers still treat him
rather as the grands artistes of the Academie des beaux-arts treated the young Manet, and most auto writers still regard Bangle as the
antichrist of car couture. But Bangle BMWs sell. And some
critics are starting to wonder whether maybe, just maybe, this intense
47-year-old, who once considered becoming a Methodist minister before studying
at the renowned Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, California, might be
onto something. J Mays, Ford's global design guru, is no fan, but he
admits Bangle has been significant in reshaping modern cars. Martin
Smith--former GM Europe design chief and now head of design for Ford of
Europe--talks of him as an instigator of the trend toward "surface
entertainment" in cars. Take a look at the complex forms and creases on
the panels of his Frankfurt show-stopping Iosis
concept--said to be the blueprint for Ford's future European design
direction--to see why Smith wholeheartedly buys into that idea.
"He's certainly the most talked about
[designer]," says Patrick Le Quement, design
boss of Renault and probably the world's most admired car designer. "His
designs have a great deal of presence, and they're well proportioned. He's been
highly influential. My only concern is his use of concave surfaces: They're
hollow shapes and lack that tightly muscled look I feel helpsdesign.
http://www.motortrend.com/features/112_0601_chris_bangle_bmw_design_chief/index.html
Ryan McGinness—Deitch Gallery—Pop/silk screen art.
(born 1971) is an American artist, living
and working in New York City.
He grew up in the surf and skate culture of Virginia Beach, Virginia, and then
studied at Carnegie Mellon
University in Pittsburgh,
Pennsylvania as an Andrew Carnegie Scholar. During college, he interned at the Andy Warhol Museum. Known
for his original extensive vocabulary of graphic drawings
which use the visual language of public signage, corporate logos, and
contemporary iconography, McGinness creates
paintings, sculptures, and environments. He is represented by Deitch Projects
and Pace Prints
in New York and has shown internationally at museums and galleries.
McGinness merges several of the most important directions in
contemporary painting. His work combines all-over composition, inspired by
Jackson Pollock and the mechanical silkscreen process inspired by Andy Warhol.
The work also fuses naturalistic and contemporary pop culture references. His
imagery derives form a broad range of sources: from dreams and hallucinations
to song lyrics and fragments of art history. There is a push and pull between
content and form, and between literal meaning and intuitive feeling. McGinnesss paintings represent his own mental landscape.
His compositions reflect the infinite, ever-flowing continuum of the universe.
"In the past decade, McGinness has become an art star, thanks to his Warholian mix of pop iconography and
silk-screening.—New York Times
An unusual marriage of abstraction
and representation. McGinness slick, colorful paintings
consist of layers of images tidily clustered into baroque
compositions.—Art News
McGinness
has created a semantics of symbolic icons that bluntly explicates the common
chaos in the vernacular that's thrown at us in advertising, signage, and elsewhere
every day.—Village Voice
http://www.deitch.com/artists/sub.php?artistId=24
George Condo - artist
Born in Concorde, New Hampshire, in 1957, Condos
canvases combine Cubism, Expressionism, Classicism and cartoon styles. He is
one of the most influential American artists on the international scene today.
In 2007 and 2008 he painted called Lost Civilization. Condos ideas about
the artwork necessarily undergoing a mutation over time bring to mind Andr
Malrauxs theory of the metamorphosis of art. With Lost Civilization, Condo
produces untimely images in which the influence of the past combines with the
irruption of the present.
George Condos painting is like a slap in the face
to consensus and accepted notions of good taste in art.
http://www.artdaily.org/index.asp?int_sec=11&int_new=30517
Gallery:
http://www.luhringaugustine.com/index.php?mode=artists&object_id=69
Damien Hearst - artist
Damien Steven Hirst[1] (born 7 June 1965) is an English artist and the
most prominent member of the group known as "Young British
Artists" (or YBAs) and is the richest
living artist to date. Hirst dominated the art scene
in Britain during the 1990s and is internationally renowned. During the 1990s
his career was closely linked with the collector Charles Saatchi, but
increasing frictions came to a head in 2003 and the relationship ended.
Death
is a central theme in Hirst's works. He became famous
for a series in which dead animals (including a shark, a sheep and a cow) are
preserved—sometimes having been dissected—in formaldehyde. The Physical
Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living, a 14-foot
(4.3 m) tiger shark
immersed in formaldehyde
in a vitrine
became the iconic work of British art in the 1990s,[2] and the symbol of Britart
worldwide.[3] Its sale in 2004 made him the world's second most
expensive living artist after Jasper Johns whom he
surpassed in 2008.
In
September 2008, he took an unprecedented move for an artist of his status by
selling a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, at Sotheby's by auction and
by-passing his long-standing galleries.[6] The auction exceeded all predictions, raising 111 million
($198 million), breaking the record for a one-artist auction[7] as well as Hirst's own record
with 10.3 million for The Golden Calf, an animal with 18-carat gold
horns and hooves, preserved in formaldehyde.[6]
Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965) is an American painter who rose
to popularity in the mid-1990s. She is a contemporary artist best known for
stylized and idealized portraits of her close friends and boyfriends, pop celebrities,
and European monarchy.
Life and career
In the mid-80s, Elizabeth Peyton studied fine
arts at the School of Visual
Arts in New York City.
In 1987, Peyton had her inaugural solo show at Althea Viafora
Gallery in New York City's SoHo. Ahead of its time, the
exhibition of figurative paintings on glass was supported by art patrons Peter
Jay Sharp, Ahmet Ertegun,
and Dan Lufkin. At the avant-garde Viafora
Gallery, Peyton's work was followed by the first exhibition
of Matthew Barney and other important artists of today.
Peyton's second exhibition in New York City was
held in a room of the Chelsea Hotel
(mainly drawings). People who wished to see the exhibition would just go to the
reception of the hotel and ask for the room key. She went on to exhibit
regularly at the Gavin Brown
Gallery and started receiving positive reviews from the New York Times and The Village
Voice[citation needed].
Her
career was launched, a fact later endorsed by the art market where the price of
her works has steadily increased (an oil on canvas representing John Lennon was sold for a
record $800,000 in 2006). Works by Elizabeth Peyton are now in the collections
of the Museum of Modern
Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.
From
her earliest portraits of musicians like Kurt Cobain, Liam Gallagher, and
Jarvis Cocker to more recent paintings featuring friends and figures from the
worlds of art, fashion, cinema, and politics including Rirkrit
Tiravanija, Matthew Barney, and Marc Jacobs,
Elizabeth Peyton's body of work presents a chronicle of America at the end of
the last century. A painter of modern life, Peyton's small, jewel-like
portraits are also intensely empathetic, intimate, and even personal. Together,
her works capture an artistic zeitgeist that reflects the cultural climate of
the late-twentieth and early-twenty-first centuries.
http://www.newmuseum.org/exhibitions/400
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Peyton
Bill Viola 
(b.1951) is considered a pioneer in the medium of video art and is internationally recognized as one of todays leading artists. He has been instrumental in the establishment of video as a vital form of contemporary art, and in so doing has helped to greatly expand its scope in terms of technology, content, and historical reach. For over 35 years he has created videotapes, architectural video installations, sound environments, electronic music performances, flat panel video pieces, and works for television broadcast. Violas video installations—total environments that envelop the viewer in image and sound—employ state-of-the-art technologies and are distinguished by their precision and direct simplicity. They are shown in museums and galleries worldwide and are found in many distinguished collections. His single channel videotapes have been widely broadcast and presented cinematically, while his writings have been extensively published, and translated for international readers. Viola uses video to explore the phenomena of sense perception as an avenue to self-knowledge. His works focus on universal human experiences—birth, death, the unfolding of consciousness—and have roots in both Eastern and Western art as well as spiritual traditions, including Zen Buddhism, Islamic Sufism, and Christian mysticism. Using the inner language of subjective thoughts and collective memories, his videos communicate to a wide audience, allowing viewers to experience the work directly, and in their own personal way.
http://www.billviola.com/biograph.htm
Self Portrait above.
Nan Goldin—Photographer
(born 1953) is an American fine-art
and documentary
photographer. She is represented by the Matthew Marks
Gallery in New York. Goldin was
born in Washington, D.C.,
and grew up in an upper-middle-class Jewish family in the Boston, Massachusetts
suburb of Lexington. Goldin graduated from the School of the
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston/Tufts University in
1977/1978, where she had worked mostly with Cibachrome
prints. Goldin moved to New York City. She began
documenting the post-punk
new-wave music scene, along with the city's vibrant, post-Stonewall gay subculture of the late 1970s and early
1980s. She was drawn especially to the Bowery's hard-drug
subculture; these photographs, taken between 1979 and 1986, form her famous
work The Ballad of Sexual Dependency — a title taken from a song
in Bertolt Brecht's
Threepenny Opera.[1] These snapshot aesthetic images
depict drug use, violent, aggressive couples and autobiographical moments.
Goldin's work is most often presented in the form of a slideshow, and has been
shown at film festivals; her most famous being a 45
minute show in which 800 pictures are displayed. The main themes of her early
pictures are love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality; these frames are usually
shot with available light.
She has affectionately documented women looking in mirrors, girls in bathrooms
and barrooms, drag queens, sexual acts, and the culture of obsession and
dependency. The images are viewed like a private journal made public. [3]
Cindy Sherman—Photographer
By turning the camera on
herself, Cindy Sherman has built a name as one of the most respected photographers
of the late twentieth century. Although, the majority of her photographs are
pictures of her, however, these photographs are most definitely not
self-portraits. Rather, Sherman uses herself as a vehicle for commentary on a
variety of issues of the modern world: the role of the woman, the role of the
artist and many more. It is through these ambiguous and eclectic photographs
that Sherman has developed a distinct signature style. Through a number of
different series of works, Sherman has raised challenging and important
questions about the role and representation of women in society, the media and
the nature of the creation of art.
Sherman's life began in
1954, in Glen Ridge, New Jersey, a suburb of New York City. Her family having
moved shortly after her birth, Sherman grew up as the youngest of five children
in the town of Huntington, Long Island.
Recently, Sherman has
returned to using herself as model. At a recent show at her New York gallery,
Metro Pictures, Sherman displayed a series of portrait-like images of herself
in the guise of women from California. These women are again simply types - The
Personal Trainer, The Ex-Realtor, The Divorcee, etc. Sherman further
manipulates the notion of portraiture through the use of conventional portrait
signs including the setting of the figure against a neutral background. Unlike
some of her early photographs, these are more straightforward images of created
characters, not narrative fragments. Sherman continues these projects in New
York City, where she currently lives and works.
Taryn Simon—Photographer
(born 1975) is an American photographer. She
is a graduate of Brown University
and a Guggenheim
Fellow. She was born in New York, daughter of a
photographer for the State Department.[1]
She is an assignment photographer for the New York Times
Magazine. She is represented by Gagosian Gallery.
Taryn Simon was born in New York in 1975. Her
most recent work, An American Index of the Hidden and Unfamiliar, reveals that
which is integral to America's foundation, mythology and daily functioning, but
remains inaccessible or unknown to a public audience. Her earlier work, The
Innocents, documents cases of wrongful conviction in the United States and investigates
photography's role in that process.
Her
photography and writing have been featured in numerous publications and
broadcasts including the New York Times
Magazine, The New Yorker,
CNN, BBC, Frontline, and NPR. Simon has been a visiting artist at
institutions including Yale University,
Bard College, Columbia University,
School of Visual
Arts, and Parsons School
of Design.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taryn_Simon
http://www.gagosian.com/artists/taryn-simon/
Anna-Lou
"Annie" Leibovitz (pronounced /ˈliːbəvɪts/)
(born October 2, 1949) is an American portrait photographer whose style
is marked by a close collaboration between the photographer and the subject.
Born
in Waterbury,
Connecticut, Leibovitz is the third of six
children in a Jewish
family. She attended the San Francisco
Art Institute, where she studied painting. She became interested in
photography after taking pictures when she lived in the Philippines, where her
Air Force father was stationed during the Vietnam War. For several years, she
continued to develop her photography skills while she worked various jobs,
including a stint on a kibbutz
Amir in Israel for several months
in 1969.[2]
When Leibovitz returned to the United States in 1970, she worked
for the recently launched Rolling Stone
magazine. In 1973, publisher Jann Wenner named Leibovitz chief photographer of Rolling Stone. Leibovitz worked for the magazine until 1983, and her
intimate photographs of celebrities helped define the Rolling Stone
look.[2]
Lennon and Ono
On December 8, 1980, Leibovitz
had a photo shoot with John Lennon
for Rolling Stone, promising him he would make the cover.[3] After she had initially tried to get a picture with just
Lennon alone, which is what Rolling Stone wanted, Lennon insisted that
both he and Yoko Ono
be on the cover. Leibovitz then tried to re-create
something like the kissing scene from the Double Fantasy album
cover, a picture that she loved. She had John remove his clothes and curl up
next to Yoko. Leibovitz recalls, "What is
interesting is she said she'd take her top off and I said, 'Leave everything
on' — not really preconceiving the picture at all. Then he curled up next
to her and it was very, very strong. You couldn't help but feel that she was
cold and he looked like he was clinging on to her. I think it was amazing to
look at the first Polaroid and they were both very excited. John said, 'You've captured our relationship exactly. Promise me it'll
be on the cover.' I looked him in the eye and we shook on it."[4] Leibovitz was the last person to
professionally photograph Lennon — he was shot and killed
by Mark David
Chapman five hours later.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Annie_Leibovitz
David LaChappelle—Photographer
Background –
a young David Lachapelle was employed during the
early 80s by pop art legend Andy Warhol to work as a photographer taking
photographs of the famous and influential people who where interviewed in his
interview magazine. Lachapelle quickly became as
they say the it photographer creating these stunning portraits of celebrities
with real meaning and depth behind them. I want to take iconic pictures of
them, that say who they are Lachapelle stated in an
interview. From here his career as a photographer went from strength to
strength with celebrities queuing up to work with him. His most notable
subjects include Madonna, Leonardo Dicaprio, Dolly Parton, Marilyn Manson, Naomi Campbell, David Beckham, Courtney Love, Lance Armstrong, Pamela Anderson, Cameron Diaz, Uma Thurman,
Christina
Aguilera, lil Kim, and Angelina Jolie to
name but a few. He is also noted with helping launch the careers of some of
todays biggest stars such as Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. As well as
creating these celebrity portraits his work also includes stunning images with
a gallery setting in mind. He also was one of the noted photographers involved
in using early developments of drastic digital manipulation. Lachapelle has produced four stunning books
which include work of his spanning two decades, which include Lachapelle Land (1996) Hotel Lachapelle
(1999) Artists and Prostitutes (2006) and Heaven to Hell (2006). His influence and vision can also be seen in many pop
videos for artists such as Elton John, Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez.
He also directed the highly acclaimed film Rize in
2005 and has now moved back into creating stunning gallery images of biblical
proportions and focus.
http://www.davidlachapelle.com/home.html
http://www.google.com/images?sa=3&q=David+lachapelle+&btnG=Search+images
Peter Hegre—Erotic
Photography
After studying at the Brooks Institute of
Photography in California, USA, Petter was hired as
an assistant for Richard Avedon in New York before returning to his hometown of
Stavanger, Norway. Only 21, he started his own studio and soon established
himself as one of Norway's most successful photographers. Receiving the
"Erotic Photographer of the Year 2001" award at the 8th annual
"Erotic Oscars" in London in 2001, Petter
secured his status as a world-class erotic photographer.
His first book "My Wife" (Now ex-wife)
(First edition published in August 2000) has been a best-selling sensation
worldwide, and after three additional printings, demand for this evocative and
revolutionary piece of erotic art continues to soar. In "The Mammoth Book
of Erotic Photography", published in 2001, Petter
Hegre headlined the acclaimed list of 78 leading
global photographers. Next came the internationally acclaimed homage to one of Hegre's most popular young models, Katya,
in the book "Russian Lolita." This sensational book of arresting,
alluring images is already a top erotic seller. Then, in February,
2003, his book "Wild Shaven Angel", featuring the inimitable Vilita - part Dominatrix, part Virgin Mary, part Barbie
Doll - was published by Edition Reuss. Never resting, never out of new ideas, never compromising in
quality, Petter just completed his latest
publication, "Luba", an amazing collection
of photos featuring his wife and model, Luba. This
imagistic testament to sensuality and love is a must-have for any erotic
collection"
On 5
August 2004, Global Media Publishing and Petter Hegre announce the publication of: HEGRE: The New Nude -
No. 1 Autumn 2004. This erotic art photography print magazine would be relaunched as The New Nude in the summer of 2005, with Hegre as the creative director and chief photographer.
http://www.jtgraphics.com/1P-hegre.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Petter_Hegre
Andreas Gursky—Photographer
Andreas
Gursky (1955) is a German visual artist known
for his enormous architecture and landscape color
photographs, often employing a high point of view. He is represented
by the Matthew Marks
Gallery in New York and by Sprth Magers Berlin London
in Europe.
He was
born in Leipzig in 1955, but he
grew up in Dsseldorf,
the son of a commercial photographer.
Before
the middle 1990s, Gursky did not digitally manipulate
his images.[citation needed] In the years since, Gursky
has been frank about his reliance on computers to edit and enhance his
pictures, creating an art of spaces larger than the subjects photographed.[citation needed] Writing in The New Yorker magazine,
the critic Peter Schjeldahl called these pictures
"vast," "splashy," "entertaining," and
"literally unbelievable."[2] In the same publication, critic Calvin Tomkins described Gursky as one of the "two masters" of the
"Dsseldorf" school. In 2001, Tomkins described the experience of
confronting one of Gursky's large works:[1]
Visually,
Gursky is drawn to large, anonymous, urban
spaces—high-rise facades at night, office lobbies, stock exchanges, the
interiors of big box
retailers (See his print 99 Cent II Diptychon). In a 2001 retrospective, New York's Museum of Modern
Art called the artist's work, "a sophisticated art of
unembellished observation. It is thanks to the artfulness of Gursky's fictions that we recognize his world as our
own."[3] Gurskys style is enigmatic and
deadpan. There is little to no explanation or manipulation on the works. His
photography is straightforward. [4]
As of early 2007, Gursky
holds the record for highest price paid at auction for a single photographic
image. His print 99 Cent II, Diptych, sold for GBP 1.7 million (USD $3.3
million) at Sotheby's,
London.[5]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andreas_Gursky
http://images.artnet.com/artwork_images_1158_112130_andreas-gursky.jpg
Bad review of him :
http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/31785/
Sam Taylor Wood—Photographer
born
1967(picture on the right is a self portrait)
English photographer, film and video
artist.
On graduating from Goldsmiths College, London, in
1990, Taylor-Wood worked predominantly as a photographer, often showing herself in sexually confrontational and challenging roles.
In 1994 she made her first film, Killing Time (video projection with
soundtrack, artist's priv. col.; see 1997 exh. cat., pp. 194–201), in which four separate screens show
ordinary people miming the libretto to Elektra. Their fidgeting,
self-awareness and boredom when not singing becomes central to the work,
suggesting affinities with contemporary slacker' culture. The themes of
isolated subjects, self-conscious exhibitionism and anxiety were explored in
subsequent films.
In February 2009, Sam Taylor-Wood collaborating
with Sky Arts chose Vesti la Giubba from Pagliacci
to interpret. She commented: "Im really happy to be involved in such a
great project. I think by capturing one of opera's most moving moments in a
film short, we have put a modern spin on the aria." [6] Watch
In May 2009, it was reported Taylor-Wood was
dating actor Aaron Johnson,
23 years her junior. [7]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Taylor-Wood
Louise Bourgeois- Artist
Louise
Bourgeois (French pronunciation: [luiz buʁʒwa]; born December 25, 1911) is an artist and sculptor. Her most famous
works are possibly the spider structures, titled Maman,
from the last dozen years. Louise Bourgeois was born in Paris, France. Her parents
repaired tapestries.
At 12, she started helping them draw the missing segments of the tapestries. She
began painting, studying at the cole du Louvre
and then the cole des Beaux-Arts, and worked as an assistant to Fernand Lger.
In 1938 she moved with her American husband, Robert Goldwater, to New York City to continue
her studies at the Art Students
League of New York, feeling that she would not have stayed an artist
had she continued to live in Paris. [1]
She
lives and works in New York City.
She is
best known for her 'Cells', 'Spiders' and various drawings, books and
sculptures. Her works are sometimes abstract and she speaks of them in symbolic
terms with the main focus being "relationships" - considering an
entity in relation to its surroundings. Louise Bourgeois finds inspiration for
her works from her childhood: her adulterous father, who had an affair with her
governess (who resided in the home), and her mother, who refused to acknowledge
it. She claims that she has been the "striking-image" of her father
since birth. Bourgeois conveys feelings of anger, betrayal and jealousy, but
with playfulness. In her sculpture, she has worked in many different mediums,
including rubber, wood, stone, metal, and appropriately for someone who came
from a family of tapestry makers, fabric. Some of her pieces consisted of
erotic and sexual images, with a motif of "cumuls"
(she named the round figures such because they reminded her of cumulus clouds).
Her most famous works are possibly the spider structures, titled Maman,
from the last dozen years. Maman now stands outside
Tate Modern in London. A similar sculpture was featured at an art exhibition in
the Solomon R.
Guggenheim Museum.
Inspiration
for future generations of artists:
In
October 2007, The Observer
interviewed a number of British contemporary artists, Rachel Whiteread,
Dorothy Cross, Stella Vine, Richard Wentworth and Jane and Louise
Wilson, about how Louise Bourgeois's art
inspired them, in an article called Kisses for Spiderwoman.[3] Vine described Bourgeois as one of the "greatest ever
artists" and said that "few female artists have been recognised as truly important". She said there was a
"juxtaposition of sinister, controlling elements and full-on macho
materials with a warm, nurturing and cocoon-like feminine side" that
appears within Bourgeois' art. Vine also described Bourgeois as:
""incredible: she's known all these great men and outlived them all."[3]
Documentary: Bourgeois' life, career, and creative process is examined in the 2008 documentary film Louise
Bourgeois: The Spider, the Mistress and the Tangerine.
BDDW—Furniture Design
http://www.bddw.com/furniture/furn.html
Tyler Hays is good. His company, BDDW,
successfully bridges the divide between woody American design and what's modern
right now.
Designed and manufactured with imagination and precision in
Brooklyn, BDDW
is one of the few which matches the hard angles of
modern design with an innate understanding of natural elements. Whether it is a
table, a carpet, or one of the original paintings in the store, every piece is
grand and understated at the same time. Chairs starting at $850, 6' tables
starting at $3800 and queen beds around $4,000 - $6000.
A small
American furniture company dedicated to the creation of well
crafted timeless designs. BDDW builds each piece by hand, one at a time,
in their Williamsburg Brooklyn studio. Tyler Hays, a painter and sculptor, is
the company founder and head designer. Joshua Vogel, an architect and gifted
craftsman, oversees the Brooklyn workshop. BDDW is known for their heirloom
quality solid wood furniture, traditionally joined, in select domestic
hardwoods. Their finishes are all hand rubbed with natural oils and lacquers.
In beds, tables, seating, lamps and storage, BDDW has created dozens of
classics and is constantly producing new and innovative work.
http://www.apartmenttherapy.com/ny/soho/bddw-handmade-american-furniture-000101
Marcel Wanders—Furniture Design
Marcel
Wanders grew up in Boxtel, the Netherlands, and
graduated cum laude from the School of the Arts Arnhem in 1988.
Marcel Wanders fame started with his iconic Knotted
Chair, which he produced for Droog Design in 1996. He
is now ubiquitous, designing for the biggest European contemporary design
manufacturers like B&B Italia, Bisazza, Poliform, Moroso, Flos, Boffi, Cappellini,
Droog Design and Moooi of
which he is also art director and co-owner. Founded in 2000,
Moooi
has grown into an internationally renowned design label. Additionally, Marcel
Wanders works on architectural and interior design projects and recently turned
his attention to consumer home appliances.
If someone ended an email to you with
the salutation "bumblebees and sunshine," you might assume that
person wasn't quite grown up. But Marcel Wanders is fully
grown, and he's not childish so much as he is childlike in his sense of
wonder and appreciation for the world in which we live.
This is the guy, after all, who wears
floral trousers in a sea of dark designer garb. Who designed his lumpy Egg Vase
(1997) by stuffing latex condoms with hard-boiled eggs.
Who smiles and laughs with refreshing frequency. And
who, when asked, "What is important to you in seating design?"
responds with, "My butt; to understand a good butt."
At the same time, Wanders can be
"serious," too. He designed the Square Light Pendant (1998) and the
Container Table (2002), both exemplars of clean lines and pure function. His
Can of Gold (2001) is a gold-plated soup can that sells for $200, with the
proceeds going toward food for the homeless. And Wanders must be able to meet
commitments, because he's in demand all over the place – designing soap
for Bisazza, a lamp for Flos,
tables for Cappellini.
The secret
of his success? A fresh vision born of innocence. "I'm a sort of
amateur, and amateurs aren't so sure about things so they investigate and bring
new ideas that experts might overlook," says Wanders. He adds, "I
work with durability in design – products worth bonding with for a
lifetime. I have an overall respect for ourselves and the world, and I think
this respect is the basis of good design."