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French, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in France.

Born 11 August 1950, in New York.

Installation artist, photographer. Multimedia.

Art Narratif.

Aballéa studied epistemology. She lives and works in Paris. Aballéa's work stages natural phenomena and scientific descriptions entirely of her own invention, which she describes using writings in the form of tales. Her work generally involves an environment in which light has a predominant place: 'In my work, I like to tell stories. I tell them through space, image, situation and text. I don't believe in any defined limitation between the real and the unreal, but rather a large, fluctuating zone of possibilities. My works are situated in this large zone.' She willingly refers to Borgès and Lewis Carroll, provoking a mêlée between elements of reality and textual fiction. She often uses photographs re-touched with pastel colours which she accompanies with texts....

Yugoslav, 20th–21st century, female.

Active in the Netherlands.

Born 30 November 1946, in Belgrade (now in Serbia).

Performance artist. Multimedia.

Conceptual Art, Body Art.

Marina Abramović studied at the fine arts academy in Belgrade from 1965 to 1970 and began executing her first performance pieces, films, and videos between 1973 and 1976. She taught at the fine arts academy of Novi Sad from 1973 to 1975, the year she met Ulay in Amsterdam. They not only shared the same birth date but also the same artistic concerns. That meeting was described thus: ‘When we met for the first time in Amsterdam in 1975, we decided to meet up again on neutral territory, somewhere between Amsterdam and Belgrade. We chose Prague, which is exactly in the middle.’ From that time until the late 1980s, they lived and worked together. They describe their collaborative works as ‘relation-work’, a phrase that expresses their desire for total fusion....

American, 20th century, male.

Born 24 January 1940, in New York.

Painter, sculptor, performance artist, video artist. Multimedia.

Body Art, Conceptual Art.

Vito Acconci was born in the Bronx, New York and lives and works in Brooklyn. He studied at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts and at the University of Iowa. He has taught in various art schools and universities and in particular at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University and the Parsons School of Design in New York....

(Hannibal)

(b New York, Jan 24, 1940).

American poet, performance, video, and installation artist, and urban designer. Acconci worked for an MFA degree at the University of Iowa from 1962 to 1964. He initially devoted himself to poetry and writing that emphasized the physicality of the page and then began to produce visual work in real space in 1969. He worked as a performance artist from 1969 until 1974. His performance work addressed the social construction of subjectivity. A central work, Seedbed (1972; New York, Sonnabend Gal.), saw Acconci masturbate for six hours a day, hidden under a sloping gallery floor, involving visitors in the public expression of private fantasy. Between 1974 and 1979 he made a series of installations often using video and especially sound, mainly in gallery spaces, examining relations between subjectivity and public space. For Where We Are Now (Who Are We Anyway) (1976; New York, Sonnabend Gal.), a long table in the gallery and recorded voices suggested a realm of public or communal debate, but the table extended out of the window over the street like a diving board, countering idealism with the realities of city life. In the 1980s Acconci made sculptures and installations, many viewer-activated, invoking basic architectural units and domestic space. ...

(b Hameenlinna, Finland, 1959).

Finnish film maker and video artist. She studied at Helsinki University (1980–85), the London College of Printing (1990–91) and then at both UCLA and the American Film Institute, Los Angeles (1994–5). In 1990 she was awarded the Paulo Foundation Prize for Young Artist of the Year. After experimentation with photography, installation art and performance art, Ahtila turned to film and video in the 1990s. The three mini-films Me/We, Okay and Gray (1993) each lasting 90 seconds and written and directed by her, were shown separately and as a trilogy, as trailers in cinemas, on television during commercial breaks and in art galleries. They are noted for their use of narrative conventions derived from film, television and advertising, through which they explore questions of identity and group relations. Ahtila’s main preoccupation with narrative and what she terms ‘human dramas’ was continued in the film ...

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1968, in Redondo Beach (California).

Installation artist, photographer, film maker. Multimedia.

Doug Aitken is a graduate of the Pasadena Art Center College of Design. He started as art director for Fatboy Slim, Iggy Pop and Barenaked Ladies' video clips. He operates from New York and Los Angeles. His installation ...

Mexican, 20th century, male.

Born 1936, in Mexico.

Artist. Multimedia.

Conceptual Art.

Alcaraz-Laus was noticed at the Biennale des Jeunes in Paris in 1971. Under the title Double 1, he presented an encounter between a dancer and that dancer's image, a conceptual production revolving around the theme of the body and its representation, one that was in favour at that time....

(b Johannesburg, 1959).

South African sculptor and installation and multimedia artist. Though Alexander trained as a sculptor at the University of the Witwatersrand, earning a Bachelor in Fine Arts in 1982 and a Masters in 1988, she nevertheless pursued a variety of artistic disciplines, regularly employing photomontage and sometimes using video in her practice. While working towards her Masters’ degree, she produced Butcher Boys (1985–6), an iconic work from this contentious era in South African history. The sculptural tableau presents three monstrous, grey nude male figures built from plaster over a gauze core and glazed with oil paint. Seated casually on a bench, their heads strikingly combine human and animal forms, with twisting horns and sealed-up mouths. While Butcher Boys, like many of the artist’s works, responded to its socio-historical context, Alexander typically has not produced explicitly political work or supplied interpretive statements, preferring pieces to remain open-ended in their meanings....

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1960, in Miami.

Digital artist. E-books, internet art, online performance.

Mark Amerika studied at the University of Florida, obtaining a BA degree in 1985, and a master's degree from Brown University in 1997. He has been Creative Writing Fellow and Lecturer in Network Publishing and Hypertext at Brown University, and is Professor of Digital Art at the University of Colorado in Boulder. He professes a number of influences including William Burroughs, Stanley Kubrick and Robert Rauschenberg. Amerika is regarded as a pioneer in the digital arts field....

American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 5 June 1947, in Chicago.

Installation artist, performance artist, photographer, musician.

Computer Art (Multimedia Art).

Laurie Anderson graduated in art history at Barnard College in 1969, and obtained a second degree of Fine Arts in sculpture from Columbia University in ...

American, 20th century, male.

Active from 1930 in the USA.

Born 1926, in Ayios Nikolaos (Crete), Greece; died 17 August 2013, in New York City.

Sculptor, draughtsman. Multimedia.

Stephen Antonakos immigrated to New York in 1930 and lived there the remainder of his life. He attended Brooklyn Community College and graduated in ...

Greek, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in Germany.

Born 1954, in Athens.

Draughtsman, engraver, sculptor, video artist. Multimedia.

Michalis Arfaras first studied painting at the school of fine arts in Athens between 1972 and 1974. He continued his studies at the college of fine arts in Brunswick in Germany where he specialised in engraving and produced book illustrations and comic strips. He now lives and works in Hildesheim where he teaches graphic art at the university....

French, 20th century, male.

Born 1934, in Fontenay-aux-Roses.

Painter (mixed media), collage artist, sculptor, draughtsman. Multimedia.

After meeting Yves Klein in 1957, Bernard Aubertin produced his first red monochrome works. He varied his methods of applying the paint, using in turn a spatula, knives, forks and spoons. Out of this search for a different density of paint, he created an art which was constantly being renewed by the artist's actions and in the eye of the spectator. From ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 20 November 1946, in Harrisburg (Pennsylvania).

Sculptor, draughtswoman, multimedia artist.

Land Art.

Alice Aycock studied at Rutgers University (Douglass College), New Brunswick, NJ, receiving a BA in 1968, when she moved to New York. She obtained an MA from Hunter College in ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Installation artist, video artist, photographer, sculptor, film maker. Multimedia.

Beth B. attended art school as a child. She studied at University of California, Irvine, and at San Diego State University, and obtained a BFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York. She took her initial as a surname from 'B-Movies', the film company she founded in New York City in the late 1970s. Beth B. has received grants from the National Endowment for the Arts and from the New York State Council on the Arts. She is co-founder of the artists' group Collaborative Projects Inc. She lives in New York City....

Spanish, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1957, in Bilbao.

Sculptor, installation artist. Multimedia.

Txomin Badiola lives and works in Bilbao and spent eight years in New York during the 1990s. He produces large-scale pieces in steel with smooth flat geometric surfaces supported by feet and posts, giving them the appearance of constructions. Alongside his sculptures, he also creates installations that make use of other media, including video, photography and sound and that incorporate elements of popular culture, such as the cinema of Jean-Luc Godard, Fassbinder and Pasolini. His work has been shown in solo exhibitions, including: in ...

(b Geneva, Feb 25, 1872; d Lausanne, Jan 1, 1938).

Swiss painter and multimedia artist . From 1890/91 she studied under Hugues Bovy (1841–1903) and Denise Sarkissof at the Ecole d’Art in Geneva. A travel scholarship enabled her to study in Munich for a year. From 1904 until the outbreak of World War I Bailly lived in Paris, where she associated with Cubist artists, including Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Fernand Léger, Marie Laurencin and Sonia Lewitska (1882–1914). From 1905 to 1926 she exhibited regularly at the Salon d’Automne. From 1906 to 1910 her work was influenced by Fauvism, and from 1910 she became interested in Cubism and Futurism: Equestrian Fantasy with Pink Lady (1913; Zurich, Gal. Strunskaja) is reminiscent of the work of Gino Severini or Franz Marc in its rhythmic movement and planar fragmentation of horses and riders into coloured patterns. Other paintings of this period that are also indebted to these movements include ...

(Davidovich)

(b Kherson, Ukraine, Jan 1, 1888; d France, 1944).

Ukrainian painter and multimedia artist . He studied painting in Odessa, before enrolling at the Academy of Arts in St Petersburg in 1905. His proximity in the mid-1900s to the artists of the nascent avant-garde, especially David Burlyuk and Vladimir Burlyuk, was of decisive importance to his stylistic development. Contributing to The Link (Kiev, 1908) and their other exhibitions in Moscow, Kiev and St Petersburg, he supported their stand against Realism and the Academy, favouring a brightly coloured post-Impressionism reminiscent of Georges Seurat and Louis Valtat.

In 1910 Baranoff-Rossiné moved to Paris where he lived for a number of years, exhibiting at the Salon des Indépendants. He also travelled widely in Germany and Scandinavia. He quickly elaborated an experimental style that relied both on Cubism, especially as interpreted by Albert Gleizes and Jean Metzinger (e.g. his Forge, 1911; Paris, Pompidou), and on the colour theories of Robert Delaunay and Sonia Delaunay (e.g. his ...

American, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 1967, in San Francisco.

Assemblage artist, installation artist, performance artist. Multimedia.

Identity Art.

Matthew Barney studied at Yale University, receiving a BA in 1989. His experiences in sport and modelling are reflected in his artistic work, particularly in videos of his performances requiring significant physical endurance and athleticism, such as ...