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(b Niigata, Oct 4, 1965).

Japanese painter, installation, performance, and conceptual artist. A controversial, eclectic, and inspirational artist in Japan, Makoto Aida was widely feted on the Tokyo contemporary art scene in the 1990s and 2000s, yet had limited success internationally. Aida can be read as a shadow of the internationally more famous Takashi Murakami: both came out of the Tokyo National Art school in the early 1990s, both developed an art blending contemporary pop and street culture—particularly its often weird sexuality—with classical national art references and techniques, and both shared a similarly ambiguous critique of US (and Western) cultural domination. Whereas the underlying edge of Murakami (see also Superflat) was carefully airbrushed for commercial Western tastes, Aida was an unrepentantly anti-global artist, sometimes perversely uncommercial in his approach. His work incorporated themes that are opaquely Japanese, blending acute, often raucous, humor, analysis of the contemporary political psychosis of the Japanese nation, and an unflinching exposure of Japan’s social underbelly through deliberately vulgar references. This encompassed an often sordid sweep in his paintings, videos, and installations through some of the most unpalatable aspects of everyday, middle-aged, urban male culture and its entertainment zones, notably its fetishism of young girls. The work frequently featured himself as a nerdish and self-deprecating comic artist, mouthing a harsh but bitterly funny satire of Japanese political figures and social particulars that carefully kept ambiguous its critical perspective....

(b Borgofranco d’Ivrea, Piedmont, Aug 5, 1934).

Italian sculptor. After working as a painter from 1959 to 1964, he turned to conceptual art in 1965 and by 1968 was associated with the emergence of Arte Povera, of which he became one of the strictest and most coherent exponents. His limited output consisted largely of the staging of major physical processes whose long-term effects the audience was invited to imagine, in such a way that the non-material dimension of thought was brought to bear on bulky and spectacular physical phenomena. In Direction (150×500×800 mm, 1967–9; Paris, Pompidou), for instance, a magnetic compass is set within a circular recess of a slab of granite shaped like an arrowhead and displayed pointing north, thus proposing two different ways of expressing the concept alluded to by the title.

A consistent message in Anselmo’s work is that one should not entirely believe one’s eyes, since there is always a component that lies beyond appearances. In one sculpture, ...

[Bates, Barrie]

(b Auckland, Jan 1, 1935).

New Zealand sculptor and conceptual artist. He studied at the Royal College of Art in London in the early 1960s and first showed his work alongside that of fellow students such as David Hockney and Derek Boshier, helping to mark the emergence of British Pop art. The pseudonym that he adopted in 1962 reflected his obsession with different ways of representing fruit. On moving in 1964 to New York he began to produce neon versions of popular icons. In 1970 he established Apple as one of New York’s first artist-run ‘alternative’ art spaces.

The conceptual element in Apple’s early Pop work became dominant in the late 1960s and 1970s. From 1975 to 1980 he concentrated on the deconstruction of the ‘white cube’ gallery exhibition space, proposing alterations to or actually changing existing interiors, notably at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York (1977, 1978, 1980) and at a number of public galleries in New Zealand (...

(b Karachi, 1935).

Pakistani conceptual artist, sculptor, painter, activist, writer, and curator, active in England. Originally trained as a civil engineer, Araeen began painting in the 1950s while living in Karachi, Pakistan, where he and a few artists created art in a modern style that was not fully accepted in the cultural milieu of the time. Lack of positive reception in Pakistan prompted his move to London in 1964, where he found more like-minded artists and gained further exposure to contemporary art. This helped him to develop his practice, which gradually shifted from painting to sculpture. Araeen was especially influenced by the works of Anthony Caro and Sol LeWitt, and started producing objects in a highly reduced abstract vocabulary, becoming a pioneer of British Minimalism. He drew on his experience as a civil engineer when constructing grid-like forms using lattice patterns similar to window structures. His sculpture Second Structure (1966–1967) employed crossing elements imbued with political content and articulated his solidarity with the oppressed around the world. Moving to London did not result in reception so different from Karachi—museums and galleries in England overlooked his work and did not provide support for him as an artist. These acts of institutional marginalization appalled Araeen and fueled the politicization of his art and life. He began to make art addressing identity politics and racism and became active in groups such as the Black Panthers. In ...

[Art and Language]

Anglo-American group of conceptual artists . Art & Language was founded in Coventry in 1968 by Terry Atkinson (b 1939), David Bainbridge (b 1941), Michael Baldwin (b 1945), and Harold Hurrell (b 1940). Their name reflected their early aspiration to eliminate the accepted distinctions between artistic practice and critical discourse, and, in 1969, they pursued this aspiration by founding the theoretical journal Art-Language. During that same year, the group invited the conceptual artist Joseph Kosuth to serve as the journal’s American editor, and, in 1971, the art historian and critic Charles Harrison (1942–2009) joined the group and assumed editorial responsibility after leaving a position as editor at Studio International. During the same year as Harrison’s arrival, the group was also joined by Mel Ramsden (b 1944) and Ian Burn (1939–93) of the Society for Theoretical Art and Analysis in New York (although their collaboration had pre-dated this moment by a couple of years), and, until ...

(b Thurnscoe, nr Barnsley, 1939).

British painter and sculptor. He studied at the Slade School of Art (1960–4). Atkinson first came to prominence as part of the conceptual art group Art and Language, of which he was a founding member, in 1967. His work at that time included both essays for the group’s journal and discussion, which resulted in works exhibited under the group’s name. Gradually he began to grow apart from the group’s interest in Conceptualism and he left in 1974. His work continued to pursue Art and Language’s concerns with politics, history painting and the recent history of Modernism, but he approached these issues through paintings and, often, accompanying texts. The Happy Snap–History Snap series (1984–5; see exh cat. 1985–6) is typical of his work in the mid-1980s: the broad handling and bright palette marked a distance from the traditional values of Beaux-Arts painting, while the content, drawn from photographs, sought to situate his family in the context of major historical events; World War II, the Cold War and the politics of North Ireland have been recurrent interests. Towards the end of the 1980s he became more interested in late Modernism and began to mix ostensibly formalist styles with historically specific events. ...

(b National City, CA, July 17, 1931).

American conceptual artist . After studying art at San Diego State College (1949–53) and the Otis Art Institute (1957–9), among other institutions, he began to develop his painting style, soon incorporating letters, words, and photographs in his works. By 1966 he was using photographs and text, or simply hand-lettered text, on canvas as in Semi-close-up of Girl by Geranium … (1966–8; Basle, Kstmus.). From 1970 he worked in printmaking, film, video, installation, sculpture, and photography. His work is characterized by a consciousness of language evident in his use of puns, semantics based on the structuralism of Claude Lévi-Strauss, and the incorporation of material drawn from popular culture. All are apparent in Blasted Allegories (1978; New York, Sonnabend Gal.), a series combining Polaroids of television images captioned and arranged to suggest an unusual syntax. Baldessari differed from other conceptual artists in his humour and commitment to visual images, often obscured by flat, brightly coloured geometric and organic shapes including round forms that he likened to bullet holes. Baldessari dramatized the ordinary, although beneath the apparent simplicity of his words and images lie multiple connotations....

(b Merseyside, June 23, 1966).

English sculptor and conceptual artist. She studied at Kingston Polytechnic, Surrey (1986–9), and at Goldsmiths’ College of Art in London (1992–3). She had her first solo exhibition at City Racing, London, in 1994, and in the following year was included in General Release: Young British Artists at the XLVI Venice Biennale. Banner came to prominence with her ‘wordscapes’, large text works that recount the plots of feature films or other events. The first of these was Top Gun (pencil on paper, 2.13×4.57 m, 1993), a hand-written account of the film Top Gun presented on a cinematic scale. The ‘wordscapes’ led to the publication in 1997 of The Nam, 1000 pages of continuous text describing the Vietnam war movies Apocalypse Now, Born on the Fourth of July, Full Metal Jacket, Platoon, Hamburger Hill and The Deer Hunter. This unreadable text points to the excess of violence in such films, the numbing of critical faculties, as well as the mythologizing and fictionalizing framing devices used to interpret historical events. Towards the end of the 1990s she became interested in the implications of punctuation signs, dwelling on their qualities as abstract marks that give structure to text. By selecting a variety of fonts, enlarging the full stop signs to ...

(b Felanitx, Mallorca, 1957).

Spanish painter . He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes in Barcelona from 1974 and produced his early work in the context of conceptual art groups in Mallorca. He achieved international recognition at an early age, taking part in major group exhibitions such as Documenta 7 (Kassel, 1982) as an important figure within the neo-Expressionist currents then gaining ground in Europe and especially in Germany and Italy; in 1985 he was the first artist under 30 to be awarded the Premio Nacional de Artes Plásticas by the Spanish Ministry of Culture. His typical paintings, such as Stevenson and Baudelaire with Agaarium (mixed media on canvas, 2×2 m, 1984; Paris, priv. col., see 1985 exh. cat., p. 57), are literary and cosmopolitan in their references, with a rigorous construction in conflict with the material, rough quality of his surfaces, which he regarded as his real subject.

(b Cartagena, Oct 27, 1945).

Colombian painter, sculptor, and conceptual artist. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the University of Atlántico in Barranquilla, Colombia, from 1958 to 1960, and in Italy from 1966 to 1967 at the University of Perugia. In 1966, under the influence of Pop art, he made the first of a series of collages combining cut-outs of well-known individuals and comic strips with drawn elements. Two years later he added frosty effects and velvet flowers to his interpretations in black and red ink of figures with distorted bodies and the faces of film stars. In 1969 he began to present these in increasingly three-dimensional boxes or glass cases, accompanied by clouds of cotton wool, plastic figures, and other additions that combined to make up fantastic or nostalgic scenes, dream-like and surrealist in appearance and tone.

Barrios was among those who introduced conceptual art to Colombia, for example by publishing in newspapers a series of ...

(Mića) [Mangelos]

(b Šid, Serbia, March 14, 1921; d Zagreb, Croatia, Dec 18, 1987).

Croatian art historian, critic, curator, and conceptual artist. His father was the landowner Ilija Bašičević Bosilj, who became a ‘naïve’ painter in the 1950s. Dimitrije studied art history in Vienna, than Zagreb. He graduated from the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Zagreb with the PhD in Art History in 1956. In the fierce polemics about abstract art in the 1950s, he sided with those promoting abstraction. He not only wrote about it, but also participated in organizing Salon 54, the first group exhibition of abstract paintings in Croatia (and the former Yugoslavia), which was held in Rijeka in 1954. From 1960 until 1964 he was a curator at the Gallery of Primitive Art (now Croatian Museum of Naïve Art). In 1965 he became a curator of the Benko Horvat Collection within the Galleries of the City of Zagreb (now Museum of Contemporary Art) and, when its Centre for Film, Photography and Television opened in ...

(b Budapest, Oct 26, 1941).

Hungarian painter, photographer and conceptual artist. He studied under Géza Fónyi at the Fine Art College in Budapest and then from 1966 to 1972 produced portraits, in which the influence of Expressionism was noticeable. From 1973 to 1979, however, he moved in a different direction, producing films, photographic sequences and textual conceptual works, all based on structuralist analysis of pictorial representation and of the institutions of the exhibition and the museum (e.g. the photographic sequences Inquiries on the Exterior Wall of the Museum of Fine Arts, 1975–6; and Reflections, 1976). From 1975 to 1980 he was involved in the Indigo project led by Miklós Erdély, but in 1980 he returned to oil painting, producing abstract works divided into two or three sections and often symmetrical in composition. At first these were vividly coloured, using bold brushstrokes and inspired by the Hungarian landscape, but later works were dominated by schematic representations of the human face, reduced after ...

(b Pittsburgh, PA, Aug 23, 1940).

American conceptual artist, draughtsman, painter, and writer. He studied painting at the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh (BFA, 1962). In 1964 Bochner moved to New York. His first exhibition (1966), described by Benjamin Buchloch as the first conceptual art exhibition, was held at the Visual Arts Gallery, School of Visual Arts, New York, and titled Working Drawings and Other Visible Things on Paper Not Necessarily Meant to be Viewed as Art. In his work he investigated the relation between thinking and seeing. In his first mature works (1966), which are both conceptual and perceptual in basis and philosophical in content, he was interested to eliminate the ‘object’ in art and to communicate his own feelings and personal experience, and he did not wish to accept established art-historical conventions. He also experimented with word-drawings (see fig.) and number systems. For his Measurement series (late 1960s) he used black tape and Letraset to create line drawings accompanied by measurements directly on to walls, effectively making large-scale diagrams of the rooms in which they were installed. Bochner continued to make series of installational line drawings into the 1970s and 1980s, but from ...

(b Turin, Dec 16, 1940; d Rome, April 1994).

Italian conceptual artist and writer. According to his own mythologized account, his fascination with the qualities of ordinary materials began during childhood. Although the extent of any orthodox artistic training remains unrecorded, by 1964 he was making objects and silhouette paintings of familiar items, influenced by such Turinese contemporaries as Michelangelo Pistoletto and Mario Merz. His first one-man show (1967; Turin, Gal. Stein) included large objects made from materials such as corrugated cardboard, whose very ordinariness undermined orthodox notions of art. From the outset he participated in Arte Povera exhibitions and Happenings, in which a generation of Italian conceptual artists reinvented a world then in political turmoil. Boetti’s self-reflexive brand of Arte Povera was typified by his notional ‘twinning’: by cutting a second image of himself into a photographic self-portrait (Twins, 1968; see 1986–7 exh. cat., p. 19) and by inserting ‘e’ (‘and’) between his names, stimulating a dialectic exchange between these two selves. Boetti’s major project of the 1970s was ...

(b Mexico City, 1981).

Mexican conceptual artist. Unlike many of his contemporaries, Bonillas started his career before, and instead of, undertaking an official fine arts education. Widely and internationally exhibited before he reached age 20, his work began with highly analytical studies of ordinary photographic procedures such as printing (in his foundational piece, Trabajos fotográficos, 1998) or pressing the shutter (Diez cámaras documentadas acústicamente, 1998).

Bonillas’s work investigates the materiality and semiotic depth of the photographic medium in a somewhat topographic manner: starting, and never ending, in a periphery that stands ambiguously as both the material margins of photography as well as its self-reflective dimension. However, the “peripheral” nature of Bonillas’s inquiry quickly reveals itself as a strategy to address core aspects of a medium whose substance lies, precisely, on its surface. As the artist exerts infinite variations on generic aspects of the photographic practice, alternately related to structure and meaning (primary colors, family photographs, erasures, captioning, fiction, archival habits, etc.), he delivers a paradox with each of his works. In them, background becomes foreground, face becomes pigment, anecdote becomes the main theme, stain becomes signature, and vice versa....

(b Kurów, Sept 7, 1930).

Polish painter, sculptor and conceptual artist. In 1952–5 he studied art history at the Catholic University in Lublin. He was self-taught as an artist, and he made his first works at about the time of the formation of the group Zamek (Castle or Lock), which comprised young artists and theoreticians interested in the structural properties of works of art. His first pictures are abstracts with expressive subject-matter, usually executed in black (e.g. the Feast of Nebuchadnezzar, 1957; priv. col.)

In 1958 Borowski turned from pictures to objects. Using plastic odds and ends as ready-mades, he produced his first Artony—compositions from ikebana bowls, small plates and pieces of wire joined together with the intention of giving them the autonomy of living organisms. He subsequently added movement, electric light, fluid circulating in transparent tubes, and smells. The Manilusy (1963) were environments of loosely hung pieces of mirror distorting spatial perception and drawing the viewer into a game of illusion. These were soon followed by a series of ‘Syncretic Exhibitions’, which by ...

(b Lima, Mar 13, 1965).

Peruvian draftsman and conceptual artist. Between the years 1981 and 1984, he studied in Lima in the studio of the sculptor Cristina Gálvez (1919–1982) at the Facultad de Arte at Pontificia Universidad Católica del Perú, and later with the painter Leslie Lee. Between 1984 and 1986 he studied art at Université Paris VIII, and, between 1986 and 1990, in Christian Boltanski’s workshop at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts. In the 1990s, living between Lima and Berlin, Bryce began to foreground the archive as theme and source material in his practice. His paintings, Cronologías (1997–1998), were based on the media coverage of the era in which Alberto Fujimori was president of Peru (1990–2000). In 1999 he simplified this approach with Untitled, using only black ink on paper, the first example of Bryce’s signature style, which he called análisis mimético (mimetic analysis): the meticulous copying of images or documents from archives, often in large selections. ...

(b Boulogne-Billancourt, Seine-et-Oise, March 25, 1938).

French painter and conceptual artist. He graduated from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Métiers d’Art, Paris, in 1960. After 1966 he developed an aesthetic form that rejected all formal exploration and gave importance solely to the positioning of the work of art. In particular he devised the formula of alternating white and coloured vertical stripes. This became his exclusive mark, at first as a member of the BMPT group with Olivier Mosset (b 1944), Parmentier and Niele Toroni (b 1937). He painted his stripes on a whole range of different supports in various inappropriate settings. After abandoning the idea of painting as object he proposed a critical analysis of painting that would henceforth be like wallpaper pasted up in the streets of Paris, rather like the huge canvas stretched across the middle of the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1971). In his many installations in galleries and museums as well as in the open or in the city, he responded to the surrounding space or the context of an exhibition with great acuity. His work often has a decorative quality, as can be seen in his controversial creation in the courtyard of the Palais Royal in Paris, ...

(b Sheffield, July 24, 1941).

English conceptual artist, writer and photographer. He studied painting at the Royal College of Art from 1962 to 1965 and philosophy and fine art at Yale University from 1965 to 1967. From the late 1960s he adhered to Conceptual art using combinations of photographic images and printed texts to examine the relationship between apparent and implicit meaning. In his ...

(b Paris, Oct 9, 1953).

French photographer, writer, and conceptual artist. Calle’s work engages with absence of others, either loved ones or strangers. Her frequent use of street photography, scene-of-the-crime photography, surveillance cameras, and archival photography lend a documentary character to her work. The stories she tells in that documentary mode, however, are often mysterious and their relationship to reality remains uncertain.

In her art, Calle often acts as the pursuer or voyeur; on other occasions she places herself directly under the observation of others. One of her early works, Suite Vénitienne (1980), involved following someone that she had met at a party in Paris to Venice, without his knowledge. The photographic documentation of the project raised questions as to whether the man’s identity could be revealed by his day-to-day movements through the city, as well as imitating ironically the behaviour of unrequited love. The French philosopher Jean Baudrillard wrote an essay (...