American, 20th century, male.
Born 6 December 1939, in Chicago.
Painter (mixed media), sculptor, designer (furniture).
Finish Fetish, Light and Space.
Larry Bell grew up in San Fernando Valley. In 1957 he joined the Chouinard Art Institute in Los Angeles with the intention of becoming a draughtsman at Disney. However, inspired by the teaching of Robert Irwin and his peers, he resolved to become a painter and left the school before graduating in ...
Cuban artist collective founded in 1992 in Havana. Their work examines the concurrent semiotics of bricolage and their relationship to contemporary art, design, and architecture. The collective is composed of Marco Antonio Castillo Valdés (b 1971) and Dagoberto Rodríguez Sánchez (b 1969); Alexandre Jesús Arrechea Zambrano (b 1970) was part of the collective until 2003. The artists graduated from the Instituto Superior de Arte (ISA), Havana, the Cuban national graduate school of arts, in 1994. At ISA they studied painting with Flavio Garciandía (b 1954), and participated in the art students group Desde Una Pragmática Pedagógica (From a Pragmatic Pedagogy) created by René Francisco Rodríguez (b 1960), which explored different avenues for the merging of art and life, and allowed the artists to take carpentry classes. The artists’ collective was given its name by their colleagues because of their engagement with manual trades and repurposing of objects....
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 6 November 1932, in Emporia (Kansas).
Assemblage artist, painter, furniture designer.
Wendell Castle studied at the University of Kansas, receiving a BFA in sculpture in 1958 and an MFA in industrial design in 1961. He has taught at the University of Kansas (...
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1969.
Sculptor of assemblages.
Vincent Fecteau's sculptures have similarities with baroque furniture. He has been exhibiting regularly in the USA since the early 1990s, particularly at Feature Inc. in New York. He has participated in various collective exhibitions, including: ...
German, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1956.
Installation artist, sculptor. Animals.
In the 1980s Grünfeld created rigorously constructed installations portraying bourgeois furniture. These installations integrated composite items of furniture within the gallery space, which were seemingly usable but dangerously unstable; they were designed to be seen and not used, such as wooden frames with the picture missing, instead filled with padding and supported by coloured leather. Similarly, borrowing from animal sculpture, in the 1990s he created the ...
American, 20th century, male.
Born 1930, in Bellingham (Washington State).
Engraver, lithographer, installation artist, sculptor.
Conceptual Art.
David Ireland studied industrial design and printmaking at the Californian College of Arts and Crafts, graduating in 1953. He worked as an architectural draughtsman, a carpenter and an African safari guide before returning to art education in the 1970s. In ...
American, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1955, in Kenosha (Wisconsin).
Installation artist. Furniture.
Jim Isermann lives and works in Palm Springs, California. In his furniture pieces and wall coverings he attempts to broach the middle ground between high art and design. In 1950s America, industrial designers sought to imbue utilitarian objects with utopian ideals borrowed from the visual arts. In turn, artists with Pop, Op Art or Minimalist agendas looked to domestic products for inspiration, recognising their role as mass-produced icons of a new found capitalist optimism. This dialogue between ornamentation, materiality and iconography provides the basis for Isermann's work. In ...
French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 4 November 1952, in Casablanca.
Sculptor (including bronze), assemblage artist, designer. Furniture.
Using a variety of objects and materials, Michel Kiriliuk creates what he calls furniture - tables, consoles and standard lamps - the extremely Baroque nature of which renders their use problematic. He has exhibited at various Salons in Paris, including the Salon des Artistes Décorateurs and the Salon d'Automne....
Hungarian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1959, in Mako.
Painter (mixed media).
Tamas Kotai trained as an industrial designer. He won the Derkovits study prize. Somewhat abstract, his painting style encourages the viewer to establish links between different feelings. In 1986, he became a member of the ...
German, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born 1962, in Munich.
Painter, installation artist, photographer. Wall decorations, furniture.
Regina Möller lives and works in Berlin. Using installations or photographs, she tackles the subject of traditional representations of women in daily life, at home or at work, putting herself in the situation. Since ...
French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1955, in Rheims.
Painter, installation artist.
The starting point of Jean-Luc Moulene's work is advertising and its styles of expression - logos, brands and packaging - but he also uses artistic references in their generic forms (nudes, portraits, still-lifes, landscapes). His impressive silkscreen prints and posters raise questions about the way art is produced, distributed and retailed....
(b Leith, nr Edinburgh, March 7, 1924; d London, April 22, 2005).
British sculptor, collagist, printmaker, film maker and writer. Born of Italian parents, he attended Edinburgh College of Art in 1943 with a view to becoming a commercial artist. After brief military service, in 1944 he attended St Martin’s School of Art in London, and from 1945 to 1947 he studied sculpture at the Slade School of Fine Art (then based in Oxford). While in Oxford he saw ethnographic sculpture at the Pitt Rivers Museum and also became friendly with William Turnbull and Nigel Henderson. The influence of art from non-Western cultures is evident in such early works as Fisherman and Wife (ink, wash and collage, 1946; London, Tate). In 1947 he had his first one-man show at The Mayor Gallery Ltd in London, and in the summer of that year he moved to Paris. He remained there until 1949, meeting artists such as Arp, Braque, Brancusi, Giacometti, Jean Hélion, Léger and Tristan Tzara. He was attracted to Surrealist art and ideas and was also impressed by the ...
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1927, of Polish origin; died 1989.
Painter, assemblage artist, draughtsman. Figures. Furniture.
Art Brut.
Jean Smilowski lived and worked in Lille at his cabin 'le Ranch', located on the Vaubon fortifications. He filled it with his creations. In 2001 he was represented in the group exhibition ...
Estonian, 20th–21st century, male.
Born 8 October 1949, in Tallinn.
Assemblage artist, collage artist, painter, performance artist.
Hyperrealism.
Soup ’69.
Andres Tolts studied industrial design at the Tallinn Art Institute from 1968 to 1973. Instructor Mare Vint introduced Tolts and his friends to Tõnis Vint and other members of the ANK group, which organised unofficial lectures on subjects such as Pop Art, surrealism, and semiotics....
French, 20th century, male.
Born 1941, in Marseilles.
Assemblage artist.
Pascal Verbena is self-taught, and works with pieces of driftwood recovered from the beach. He uses these to make small pieces of furniture resembling altarpieces, which open up to reveal figures made of wood.
He has shown at group exhibitions, including: Musée d'Art Moderne, Paris, ...
French, 20th century, male.
Active in Germany.
Born 1943, in Carcassonne.
Painter, collage artist, assemblage artist. Figures.
Gérard Walther was a student at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon from 1961 to 1963, then studied commercial art in Hamburg, where he lives and works. His collages and mixed media come close to abstraction. The material he uses, the colours applied with a knife, the relief effects, the scratches and the trails of paint sometimes threaten to overwhelm the large, anonymous and blurred figures, which can get lost in the canvas. In the same spirit, but in a Surrealist vein, he 'booby-traps' his objects....
(b Warsaw, April 14, 1943).
Polish designer and installation artist, active also in the USA . Wodiczko received his MFA in Industrial Design from the Academy of Fine Arts, Warsaw, in 1968. He came to the United States by way of Canada, and in 1991 joined the ranks at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), where he became Director of the Center for Art, Culture, and Technology (formerly the Center for Advanced Visual Studies) and head of the Interrogative Design Group.
Concerned with the social and philosophical implications behind notions of democracy, memory, trauma, testimony, nomadism, immigration, alienation, and marginalization, Wodiczko’s body of work grew to include interactive instruments, site strategic slide and video projections, and monuments to shared histories and recollections. Through his art, Wodiczko literally and metaphorically gave voice to those who could not speak or, for certain political or personal reasons, could not be heard.
In 1980 he began his public projection series of large-scale images on real-world architectural backdrops (to which he added sound and movement in the mid-1990s). By overlaying his phantom images on the actual edifice of a public building, Wodiczko asked audiences to consider how public sites signify—or fail to convey—important contemporary truths. His projections became increasingly more collaborative, and by ...
