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American, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1966, in New York.

Sculptor, painter, installation artist. Murals.

Ricci Albenda studied at the Rhode Island School of Design, including courses in architecture, receiving a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in 1988. His interest in architecture (as well as in graphic design and physics) figures prominently in his installation art, in which he creates environments which challenge the viewer's spatial perceptions. He uses such materials as fibreglass, wallboard, aluminium and acrylic paint. In his exhibition ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active in New York and Berlin.

Born 1949, in Columbus (Ohio).

Installation artist, sculptor, mixed media, video artist. Multimedia.

Judith Barry studied finance, architecture and art at the University of Florida, graduating in 1972. She received an MA in Communication Arts from New York Institute of Technology in ...

(Losch)

(b Long Beach, CA, March 14, 1941).

American installation artist, painter, printmaker and sculptor. Bartlett studied at Mills College, Oakland, CA (1960–63), and at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, CT (1964–5). The progressive approach to modern art taught at Yale and the nearby thriving art scene of New York were instrumental in her early development (1963–early 1970s). Bartlett’s first one-person exhibition was in New York (1970) in the loft of the artist Alan Saret. Nine-point Pieces (1973–4), a later work, was shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and was experimental both conceptually and materially. Her ambivalent use of systems to establish an order and to oppose it allowed her to explore the material and the conceptual process of making images and objects. Rhapsody (1975–6; priv. col., see exh. cat., p. 21), one of her best-known installations, consists of 988 steel plates covered with screenprint grids and hand-painted Testors enamel and hung on a wall (2.28×47.86 m). Each plate exists individually and in relation to its adjoining plate and may be read vertically or horizontally, creating a mesh of stylistic variability exploring both figurative and non-figurative motifs. Another work of the 1970s is ...

Spanish, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1962, in Barcelona.

Sculptor, video installation artist, photographer, scenographer.

Colomer studied art history at Universitat Autònoma, in Barcelona, and then studied architecture at Escola Tècnica Superior in Barcelona. He lives and works in Barcelona. He produces scenography for the theatre, notably for Valère Novarina's play ...

Italian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 14 November 1949, in Morro d'Alba (province of Ancona, Marche).

Sculptor, draughtsman, painter, mixed media, potter. Figures, landscapes, architectural views.

Transavanguardia.

Enzo Cucchi is 'the third C' of the Italian Transavangardia movement, with Sandro Chia and Francesco Clemente. He spent some time at the school in Macerata working in conceptual art and also as a restorer. He lives and works in Ancona and Rome....

Brazilian, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1955, in Recife.

Sculptor, installation artist, draughtswoman. Architectural integration.

Ester Grinspum's first vase-shaped sculptures were an early exploration of the open-closed, full-empty relationship found in her piece Free Access ( Einfang), a monumental cavern that invites the viewer to enter and explore the shadow within. Her drawings, composed of thin sheets of very fine paper, offer the same type of experience but through transparency.Ester Grinspum has taken part in numerous collective exhibitions, including: 20th São Paulo Biennale (...

American, 20th century, female.

Born 5 April 1938, in Worcester, Massachusetts; died 8 February 2014, in New York.

Sculptor, installation artist, filmmaker, photographer. Land Art, Environmental Art, Public Art, Post-Minimalism.

Nancy Holt received a BA in Biology from Tufts University in 1960 and then briefly travelled through Europe, before moving to New York City. There, she met influential Minimalist and Post-Minimalist artists, many of whom would become collaborators, including: Carl Andre, Dan Graham, Eva Hesse, Joan Jonas, Donald Judd, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris, and Richard Serra. Holt’s early artistic output was primarily photography, video, and Concrete poetry, mediums in which she continued to work throughout her career....

(b Semily, Czechoslovakia [now Czech Republic], June 4, 1946).

Czech sculptor, draughtswoman and installation artist. She studied sculpture, together with some architecture, history of art and philosophy at the Academy of Fine Arts in Prague (1965–71) and the Accademia di Belle Arti di Brera, Milan (1967–8), where she was a student of Marino Marini. She began exhibiting in 1979 and became known for her large-scale sculptures constructed from rough-hewn tree trunks and timber of various kinds. Her imagery refers to domestic objects and architectural elements including chairs, wardrobes, tables and stairs, partly inspired by the other-worldly architecture of Prague. Early works, such as the pearwood and steel Chair (1979–80; Nuremberg, priv. col.), are anthropomorphic with an awkward, childlike quality: an oversized chair (h. 2.15 m), a pair of dwarfed houses, only just large enough to enter, or narrow stairs supported by a pillar and leading nowhere are other examples. Later works have included ‘space’ drawings, which were photographed laser projections shown at Dean Clough Industrial Park, Halifax (...

(b Antwerp, Nov 17, 1945).

Belgian sculptor, video artist and installation artist. She studied at the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et des Arts Visuels in Brussels (1975–8). Lafontaine first became known for her large, imposing, monochromatic woven-textile sculptures (e.g. Black Monochrome, cotton, 2.0×2.5 m, 1976; Ghent, Mus. Hedendaag. Kst). She was influenced by the work of such artists as Robert Ryman and Brice Marden and their ideas about the material nature of both colour and support. In 1979 she made her first video work, The Pile-driver, for an exhibition at the International Cultural Centre in Antwerp. As with her woven sculptures, the theme of repetition was central to this and subsequent videos. Repetition of the image and the slowing down of the speed of the film disrupted any narrative and also set up a rhythm that underlined its sensuous and material nature. Lafontaine’s decision to work with video installations enabled her to develop an interest in the closely related phenomena of aggression and desire: ...

(b Long Beach, CA, Jan 1, 1941).

American sculptor and installation artist. He studied architecture and mathematics at California State University and art at the Los Angeles College of Art and Design in 1963 before going on to receive a BFA in 1964 and an MFA in 1967 from the Otis Art Institute of Los Angeles County. He is often regarded as a key contributor to the development of Post-minimalism and Process art during late 1960s, and he is sometimes credited with more or less inventing the so-called ‘scatter piece’ as a form in contemporary art.

Le Va became widely celebrated for a series of scatter pieces or ‘distributions’, to use his preferred term, that he began in 1966 while still a graduate student at the Otis Art Institute. In these pieces, he deposited a heterogeneous array of materials into loosely configured piles on the gallery floor. Many of these early works featured cut pieces of canvas or felt that he mixed in with other materials such as scraps of wood, puzzle pieces, lengths of string and ball bearings. These pieces refused both the monumentality and the singularity of modernist sculpture, and although these works were carefully planned, they nevertheless introduced an element of chance into the completed object because they could never be realized in exactly the same way twice. Through this element of chance, and through their use of both multiplicity and horizontality, these pieces seemed to extend the implications of Jackson Pollock’s paintings into sculptural practice. In this sense, these works marked a shift in emphasis from the discrete sculptural product to the process and conditions of display. In 1969–70 pieces such as ...

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 25 April 1964, in Caen.

Sculptor, painter, mixed media.

Éric Liot studied architecture in Rouen and then in Paris. In his work as both sculptor and painter, he seems to be drawing up a catalogue of strange pieces of machinery. He emphasises their gear wheels and their robust construction. A poetic view of machinery that has its origin in our own modernity, according to Fernand Léger, which Liot likes to transform materially into illusions: the appearance of metal created from cardboard, wood, plastic, the illusion of rust created by paint, and other materials. He has participated in group exhibitions in Paris, including the Salon de Mai in ...

(b Madrid, 1961).

Chicago-based American sculptor, photographer, video artist, installation artist of Spanish birth. He received a BA in art and art history and a BA in Latin American and Spanish literature from Williams College in 1983. In 1989 he earned a MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Manglano-Ovalle’s hybrid practice emerged with Tele-vecindario: A Street-Level Video Block Party, a public art project created for Culture in Action, a community-based art program in Chicago in 1992–1993. Working with Latino youth in Chicago’s West Town community, an area often challenged by substandard housing, drugs, and gang violence, the artist facilitated a multimedia portrait of their lives in which these youth constructed their own images and concept of self. Issues of identity, community, and migration, as they relate to both cultural and geographic borders, have been explored throughout his career that includes collaborative modes of working, as well as individual works sited within the museum or gallery. For Manglano-Ovalle, culture encompassed a broad network of systems—artistic, political, environmental, scientific—in constant dialogue, negotiated by both artist and viewer....

American, 20th–21st century, female.

Born 27 May 1944, in New York City.

Installation artist, sculptor, designer. Land Art, environmental art, site-specific art.

Mary Miss studied at the University of California at Santa Barbara, graduating with a BA in 1966. She received her MFA from the Rhinehart School of Sculpture at the Maryland Art Institute in ...

(b Loughborough, Leics, Aug 20, 1968).

English sculptor and installation artist. Nelson makes architectural installations so ambitious they can totally disrupt and overwhelm the reality in which they are located. In 1993, while still studying for his MFA at Chelsea School of Art in London, he submitted a planning application to convert an East London apartment into a series of rooms and courtyards as a recreation of Babylon. Although impossible to realize, this work anticipated his interests in creating spaces that are able to transcend the apparent confines of their exterior. Nelson later created a number of false mythical worlds within large theatrical installations, such as Trading Station Alpha Cma (exh. London, Matt’s Gal., 1996) and Tourist Hotel (exh. Dublin, Trinity Coll., Douglas Hyde Gal., 1999). Stylistically these works are closely aligned to the installations of Edward and Nancy Reddin Kienholz, but the symbolic nature of their content relates them also to the gendered and politicized installations of the 1980s and 1990s by artists such as Ann Hamilton and Il′ya Kabakov. Nelson’s complex and multifarious pieces contain many multicultural or subcultural reference points through an immense array of source material ranging from the industrial to the domestic – furniture, mechanical objects, books and magazines – gathered and arranged to dramatic effect. For ...

British, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 29 July 1943, in Huddersfield; died 23 January 2004, in London.

Sculptor, installation artist.

Conceptual Art.

Carl Plackman worked as an architect's apprentice (1959-1960), studied history and mathematics in Bath (1960-1962), then studied art at West of England College of Art in Bristol (...

Argentinian, French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in France.

Born 8 March 1955, in Buenos Aires.

Sculptor, installation artist.

Pablo Reinoso studied architecture at Buenos Aires University from 1973 to 1976. He now lives in Paris, where he wears a number of hats: as artistic director for the Givenchy perfume house and as a consultant to the French luxury consumer goods manufacturer Moët-Hennessy Louis Vuitton, in addition to running his own independent design consultancy, lecturing on corporate branding and being active in the world of theatre. Reinoso's sculptures are comprised of canvases inflated by air from heating ducts. As metaphors for the human form, they juxtapose transience and permanence, empty space and artefact....

(b Bogotá, Aug 12, 1941).

Colombian sculptor, collagist, and conceptual artist. He studied architecture at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá from 1959 to 1965 and began at this time to make collages influenced by Pop art. In 1966 he made the first of his Boxes, painted in strong flat colors, often red or yellow, to which he affixed industrial elements such as telephone handsets. Soon afterwards he began to make only white boxes, using the color to complement the mystery of the objects they contained, such as the heads, arms, and legs of dolls, machine parts, wooden eggs, and domestic objects; the penetrating humor and arbitrariness with which he juxtaposed such things recalled the spirit of Dada.

In the 1970s Salcedo became involved for a time with conceptual art in mordantly critical and irreverent works, such as The National Coat of Arms (1973; Bogotá, Mus. A. Mod.). He subsequently returned, however, to sculptural objects, bringing together two or more previously unconnected elements into an unsuspected poetic unity when assembled. These in turn gave way to works concerned with the representation of water, for example a group of saw-blades aligned in wavelike patterns or rectangles of glass arranged to resemble rain. Some of these included human figures, bringing to bear a sense of solitude and anxiety that added to their poetry and suggestiveness....

German, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1954, in Oldenburg.

Painter, watercolourist, installation artist, sculptor (steel/bronze/ceramics), draughtsman. Scenes with figures, figures, architectural views, still-lifes. Stage sets.

Düsseldorf Constructive Sculpture.

Thomas Schütte was a pupil of Klaus Rinke, Gerhard Richter and Fritz Schwegler from 1973 to 1981...

(b Shizuoka, March 3, 1965).

Japanese conceptual artist, sculptor and installation artist . Sone earned an MA in architecture at Tokyo National University of Fine Arts and Music (1992), but decided to experiment with a wider range of media in order to explore the concepts of futility and the unattainable. His first work, Her 19th Foot (1993), shown at the Art Tower, in Mito, and later in the Rooseum, in Malmö, consisted of 19 unicycles welded together for 19 cyclists to ride. As several attempts by different participants failed, the work implied the ‘impossibility of communal illusions’ (see Inoue). His next work, Artificial Lawn Performance (1994), consisted of four photographs that seemed to prove the fiction that Sone had laid Astroturf on the surface of the moon as part of NASA’s art programme. The nonsense of the grandiose act is heightened by the artificial quality evident in Sone’s pseudo-documentary photographs. For the opening of the Expo ...

American, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1969, in Boston (Massachusetts).

Sculptor, installation artist. Mixed media.

Sarah Sze studied architecture and painting at Yale University, where she also developed an interest in sculpture. After leaving Yale she spent a year in Japan, then returned to Boston where she worked for four years in a school art education programme. On moving to New York in ...