Italian, 20th century, male.
Born 1912, in Ferrara.
Film maker, painter, writer. Landscapes.
An intuitive painter, Michelangelo Antonioni uses watercolour, oil and sometimes unexpected materials. He then makes photographic enlargements of his paintings and exhibits the enlargements. On several occasions he has taken his painter's brush to his films, colouring in natural settings artificially, notably in ...
British, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in the UK.
Born 1958, in Georgetown, Guyana.
Video artist, film maker, photographer, journalist, broadcaster. Scratch videos.
George Barber has a BA from St Martin’s School of Art in London (1980) and an MA from the Slade School of Art in London (...
French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1966, in Lille.
Installation artist, photographer, video artist, film producer, writer, musician.
Stéphane Bérard lives and works in Haute-Provence. Both poet and sculptor, he casts a quizzical and ironic eye on the flotsam of everyday life. His inventions include the ...
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1950, in Brook Alexander, New York.
Installation artist, video artist, poet.
David Bunn graduated with a master's degree from the University of California at Los Angeles and has received several awards and fellowships including two National Endowment for the Arts Individual Artist Fellowships, the City of Los Angeles Individual Artist Fellowship and the Ethel Fortner Award for creative writing....
British, 20th century, male.
Born 16 July 1923, in Falmouth; died 1999.
Painter (including mixed media), sculptor (reliefs), writer, broadcaster. Landscapes, still-lifes, portraits and abstracts.
Michael Canney studied art at Redruth School of Art, Penzance and St Ives (1939-1942) and at Goldsmiths School of Art (...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1944, in Paris.
Installation artist, photographer, film maker, novelist. Multimedia.
Alain Fleischer studied French, linguistics and anthropology at university, and has taught at the University of Paris III, at the École d'Art de Cergy, at the Institut des Hautes Études Cinématographiques, and the École Nationale d'Art de Nice (the Villa Arson). He served as head of the École Expérimentale d'Art Contemporain du Fresnoy, in Tourcoing....
American, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 27 September 1965, in Billings (Montana).
Installation artist, performance artist, video artist, writer. Multimedia.
Andrea Fraser studied at the School for Visual Arts (1982(1983) and at the Whitney Museum of American Art Independent Study Program, New York (...
British, 20th century, male.
Born 31 January 1942, in Northwood (Middlesex); died 19 February 1994, in London.
Painter, filmmaker, designer, author, poet. Landscapes, townscapes. Designs for stage sets, films, gardens.
Derek Jarman studied English, History and Art History at King's College in London before going on to study fine art at the Slade School of Art in London (...
Native American (Haudenosaunee/Cattaraugaus, Huron clan), 20th century, male.
Born in 1945, in New York.
Painter, mixed-media artist (acrylics, video/film), paper-maker, curator.
Peter Jemison received his BA in art education from Buffalo State College. His artwork combines contemporary art practices with traditional Native American themes, such as in the Haudenosaunee notion of ...
British, 20th century, male.
Born 19 August 1907, in Walberswick (Suffolk); died 24 September 1950, in Poros, Greece, as the result of an accident.
Painter (mixed media), filmmaker, theatre designer, photographer, poet.
English Surrealist Group.
Humphrey Jennings was a noted English filmmaker and photographer. He was active with the English Surrealists until ...
Canadian, 20th century, male.
Born 18 January 1926, in Moose Jaw (Saskatchewan), to parents of Japanese origin; died 8 January 1994, in Vancouver.
Painter, photographer, musician, poet, filmmaker.
Roy Kiyooka studied at the Provincial Institute of Technology and Art in Calgary. In 1955 he won a scholarship to the Instituto Allende in Mexico where he studied under James Pinto. From ...
American, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 1945, in Wasco (California), United States.
Installation, video, performance, public art, photography, publishing.
Suzanne Lacy is a Los Angeles–based artist whose work addresses topics such as rape, violence, aging, poverty, racism, and issues of gender and youth culture. She focuses on social practise, creating installations, videos, and unconventional performances that often include collaborations with other artists and members of local communities. Lacy’s larger actions include media-outreach programmes and public-policy debates, effectively blurring the line between art and activism. Lacy is the chair of the Public Practices program at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles. She is also the cofounder of the Women’s Building, a centre of study and activism for women artists that developed from the Feminist Studio Workshop established by Judy Chicago, Arlene Raven, and Sheila Lavrant de Bretteville in 1973.
After receiving her bachelor of arts degree in zoological studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, Lacy abandoned her psychology graduate program in ...
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Born 1920, in Antwerp; died 1993.
Collage artist, photomontage artist, writer, photographer, film maker.
Brussels Surrealist Group, Hainaut Surrealist Group.
Marcel Mariën was a self-taught artist who started out in 1934-1936 as an apprentice photographer. He went on to work as an apprentice stockbroker. In ...
born Deveraux Michaux
American, 20th century, male.
Born 1884, in Metropolis, IL; died 25 March 1951, in Charlotte, NC.
Writer, filmmaker, activist.
Oscar Micheaux was an African American writer, film director, producer, publisher, distributor, and an early social activist. Born to enslaved parents in Illinois and raised on a farm, by 1902 the entrepreneurial Micheaux was living in Chicago seeking a better life and work opportunities. After labouring as a shoeshine, Micheaux found a steady pay cheque as a Pullman railroad porter. This vocation led him to travel from the United States southward to Mexico and South America. With savings and the idea of investing, Micheaux acquired land in South Dakota. It is during this period that Micheaux began writing of his experiences and contributed socially charged commentary to mid-western newspapers. Throughout his career, Micheaux championed black Americans through the embrace of racial pride, economic unity, and moral engagement.
In an open letter addressed to Black America titled ‘The Negro Problem’ and published in the ...
American, 20th century, male.
Active in Mountain View (California).
Born 22 October 1876, in Montevideo; died 1947.
Sculptor, illustrator, writer.
Joseph Jacinto Mora, a pupil of his father Domingo Mora, J. Decamp and J.C. Bechwith, sculpted genre works and commemorative monuments such as the Cervantes Monument...
French, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 1969, in Paris.
Installation artist, collage artist, photographer, video artist, film producer, writer.
Valérie Mréjen graduated from the École Nationale d'Arts in Cergy-Pontoise. She lives and works in Paris. Working with various art forms, the subject matter of her films, books and photographs is relationships between individuals, which are often characterised by uncertainty, and the difficulties of verbalising and specifying one´s desires. Her work focuses on the social arena and the language that underpins relationships....
Romanian, 20th century, male.
Active in the USA from 1973.
Born 4 November 1926, in Sighisoara.
Painter, draughtsman, illustrator, poet, film maker.
Stefan Munteanu made numerous films for which he received many prizes.
His work was a product of colourful reality transfigured by fantasy images where landscapes and figures merged. He mainly illustrated poetry and exhibited his drawings for the first time in Bucharest in ...
pseudonym of Winckler Ralf
German, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 5 October 1939, in Dresden, Germany.
Painter (including gouache), sculptor, engraver, performance artist, filmmaker, writer, musician.
New Fauves.
A. R. Penck produced his first paintings (landscapes and portraits) at the age of ten and subsequently studied commercial art in 1955. He was self-taught, practised different professions, and pursued many activities, such as music, poetry, and editing scientific, political, and aesthetic texts. He was a pupil of the painter Jürgen Böttcher-Strawalde and collaborated with him on joint works. He worked with a great many other artists from the West, such as Jörg Immendorf and Georg Baselitz, whom he met in 1961 in the former West Berlin. In 1980, he decided to live in the West, near Cologne; then he settled first in England and then in Ireland. In 1987, he became a teacher at the school of fine art in Düsseldorf. He recorded records with the painters Martin Kippenberger and Immendorf. During his career as an artist, he changed his identity several times: in 1969 to ‘Penck’, in 1973 to ‘Mike Hammer’, in 1974 to ‘TM’, and in 1976 to ‘Y’. He lives and works in Dublin....
American, 20th–21st century, female.
Born 2 February 1964, in Boston.
Filmmaker, video artist, installation artist, journalist.
Laura Poitras is an artist, filmmaker, and journalist who places current events at the centre of her artistic practices. She is best known for her Academy Award–winning documentary, Citizenfour, the third film in her post-9/11 series. Poitras has received the George Polk Award, the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, the Peabody Award, and the Nannan Prize for Press Freedom, among many other awards.
Poitras’s work exposes information to the average American by granting access to material that was formerly confidential or not shown in Western media outlets. Her films focus on her reporting as in one of her best known works, Citizenfour (2014), where she exposed the National Security Agency’s data collection and surveillance activities using information leaked by former CIA employee Edward Snowden. Poitras travelled to Hong Kong for an interview with Snowden in which he gave her classified documents with proof of the NSA’s actions....
Belgian, 20th century, male.
Active in France from 1968.
Born 24 January 1927, in Schaerbeek (Brussels); died 1986, in Rochetaillée-sur-Saône, France.
Painter, draughtsman, film maker, poet, writer.
At a young age, Raine founded a Surrealist group with some friends and made the acquaintance of Magritte, Scutenaire, Lecomte and Ghelderode, who fascinated him. His friendship with Aleckinsky, whom he met in 1949, did not make him abandon Surrealism, and he took part as a writer in the CoBrA movement. He then turned to the cinema, producing his first film in 1949: ...
