French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 20 January 1951, in Paris.
Painter, sculptor, draughtsman, illustrator.
Agid began his studies in 1970-1971 by taking one course of teaching and research on the environment. He studied architecture between 1971 and 1976, before registering in fine arts at the Université de Paris VIII....
Spanish, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1950, in Antequera.
Painter. Figures, landscapes, urban landscapes, interiors.
Alfonso Albacete studied architecture and art in Valencia and Madrid until 1977. He made a trip to Greece in 1983, which had an important effect on the use of light in his work. His first solo exhibition was in ...
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 ...
(b Panama City, Sept 5, 1949).
Panamian painter. A graduate of the University of Panama’s Architecture School, he became a full-time painter following his first solo exhibition in 1979. From 1980 to 1983 he studied at the Art Students League in New York, his only formal training as an artist. Alfaro is best known for his beautifully rendered oil paintings but has also produced drawings, pastels, and three-dimensional pieces. His first images were portraits of young women surrounded by surreal elements or in dream settings. From 1983 he painted humorous images of traditional or religious subjects such as church processions, as well as portraits of imaginary ecclesiastical figures and war heroes; capitalizing on Panama’s strong Catholic tradition. Alfaro even invented his own saints, including the Virgin of All Secrets (1986; see color pl. I, fig.). By 1990, his compositions became increasingly baroque, crowded with human figures in often menacing natural environments that suggest abundant iconographic, literary, and historical interpretations. Towards the end of the decade, Alfaro began to isolate and increasingly distort his models, achieving an expressive deformation characteristic of his disturbing view of humanity and personal vision of surrealism. After ...
Belgian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in Mexico.
Born 1959, in Antwerp.
Painter, draughtsman, video artist, photographer, installation artist.
Francis Alÿs is of Belgian origin but has lived in Mexico since 1986. He trained as an architect at the Instituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice....
(b Antwerp, Aug 22, 1959).
Belgian-born interdisciplinary artist, active in Mexico. He studied architecture at the Institut d’Architecture de Tournai in Belgium (1978–83) and at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura in Venice (1983–6). Alÿs moved to Mexico in 1987 and his art practice initially concentrated on Mexico City as a laboratory of urban living, often documented in the form of evocative, conceptually layered photographs, sculptures, and videos. In the slide series Ambulantes (Pushing and Pulling) (1992–2002), Alÿs photographed street vendors and workers as they passed by carting a wide variety of goods within a ten-block vicinity of his studio. For his project entitled The Liar, The Copy of the Liar (1997) Alÿs created small images of suited men inspired by the commercial sign painters of Mexico City, and subsequently commissioned from them larger versions in their own styles. In this process Alÿs deferred authorship into a semantic chain. Hovering between the banal and the surreal, these works have an uncanny theme, of individuals observed in situations that defy explanation....
Spanish, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active since 1979, also active in the USA.
Born 1952, in Barcelona.
Painter (mixed media), draughtsman.
Frederic Amat studied scenography and architecture from 1969 to 1973, and he also began to paint. His first solo exhibitions took place in Barcelona in ...
French, 20th – 21st century, female.
Born c. 1950.
Painter (including gouache), draughtswoman, lithographer. Figures, interiors with figures. Wall decorations.
Dominique Andrier studied architecture at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris from 1970 to 1975. She has mostly painted since 1976. Since 1988, she has devoted herself to figurative painting, notably of women in their daily occupations, especially at their toilette....
French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1953, in Paris.
Sculptor, draughtsman.
Symbolism.
Jean Anguera is the grandson of the sculptor Pablo Gargallo. He graduated in architecture in 1978 (UP2) in Paris. He also attended lectures by César Baldaccini at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris (...
Swiss-French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1963.
Painter. Figure compositions, architectural views.
Jean Arcelin settled in Paris. He studied at the school of fine arts there, as well as at the institute of fine arts and archaeology at the Sorbonne. He showed canvases in the exhibition mounted at the Hôpital Suisse in Paris in ...
(b Geneva, June 24, 1948).
Swiss draughtsman, performance artist, painter, and sculptor. He studied at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Geneva (1966–7) and at the Glamorgan Summer School, Britain (1969). Armleder is known primarily for his involvement with Fluxus during the 1960s and 1970s, which included performances, installations, and collective activities. He was a member of the Groupe Luc Bois, based in Geneva in 1963. In 1969, with Patrick Lucchini and Claude Rychner, he was a founder-member of the Groupe Ecart, Geneva, from which stemmed the Galerie Ecart (1973) and its associated performance group (1974) and publications. Armleder’s first exhibition was at the Galerie Ecart in 1973, followed in the same year by one at the Palais de l’Athénée, Geneva. The anti-establishment and anti-formalist philosophy of the Fluxus groups continued in Armleder’s mixed-media works of later years, which include the Furniture Sculpture of the 1980s. In works that couple objects (second-hand or new) with abstract paintings executed by Armleder himself, and which often refer ironically to earlier modernist abstract examples, he questioned the context in which art is placed and the notion of authenticity in art. Such concerns continued to appear in his work. Armleder’s ...
French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 16 April 1952, in Suresnes (Hauts-de-Seine).
Painter. Figure compositions, nudes, interiors, architectural views, landscapes.
Rémy Aron was the pupil of Gustave Singier at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, from where he graduated in 1972. He was artist in residence at the Cité Internationale des Arts in Paris in ...
Polish, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in Poland and in France from 1980.
Born 17 January 1948, in Bierna.
Painter (including mixed media), poster artist, architect. Frescoes.
Antoni Bachur followed courses in drawing and painting between 1968 and 1972, when he was taught by Kryzanowski, Czajka and Michalowski in Wroclaw. Having graduated in architecture in Wroclaw, he was a pupil of Jean Prouvé in Paris ...
(b Dublin, Sept 22, 1943).
Irish painter and printmaker . He studied architecture at Bolton Street Technical School, Dublin, from 1961 to 1964. While acting as assistant to Michael Farrell in 1967, he was introduced to hard-edge abstraction and decided to learn to paint. His natural inclination was towards figurative art, initially in his use of the figure as a silhouette in the Marchers series and subsequently in 3rd May—Goya (1970; Dublin, Hugh Lane Mun. Gal.) and other pastiches of paintings by Poussin, Ingres and Delacroix, in which he filled in the outline with flat colour. Such early works were heavily influenced by photography and by a social or political commitment, reinforced with a striking visual wit. These were followed by paintings satirizing the awakening interest in contemporary art in Dublin, as in Woman with Pierre Soulages (1972; Dublin, Bank of Ireland Col.) in which a figure is shown scrutinizing an abstract canvas.
A visit to Brussels, where Ballagh studied the work of Magritte, led him gradually to model his figures, both in portraits and in quasi-Surrealist autobiographical works, in a Photorealist technique in which he alluded to his artistic preoccupations and to his wife and family. The stylistic features of his paintings lent themselves also to silkscreen prints. He has photographed unusual aspects of Dublin architecture, which he published in book form as ...
Belgian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1947, in Ukkel.
Painter, draughtsman.
A student at the Académie de St-Luc, Alain Ballencourt paints architecture, imaginary cities and interplanetary spaces. His works tend towards abstraction, with the colour carrying the meaning.
Romanian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in France.
Born 8 July 1947, in Bucharest.
Painter, engraver, illustrator.
After graduating from the school of architecture and town planning in Bucharest in 1971, Tudor Banus went to the École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Paris to study architecture, painting and engraving. 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 ...
(b New York, Dec 22, 1960; d New York, Aug 12, 1988).
American painter, sculptor, and draftsman. As a child, Basquiat frequented museums and galleries, and made drawings on the office paper his accountant father brought home. He listened to his father’s collection of jazz and opera records, spoke Spanish with his mother, and made cartoon-like drawings from the Bible, comic books, Hitchcock films, and Mad magazine. Briefly hospitalized when hit by a car at seven years old, Basquiat’s mother gave him a copy of the medical textbook Gray’s Anatomy, a favored source in his later art.
While attending the alternative high school City-as-School (1976–1978), Basquiat published stories and illustrations in the school newspaper about a fictional character SAMO (an abbreviation of “Same Old Shit”), who sells fake religion. In 1977 he began collaborating with friends Al Diaz and Shannon Dawson, spray painting slogans and poetry on the walls and doorways of lower Manhattan under the pseudonym SAMO©. Many phrases (e.g. “SAMO [...] as an alternative 2 playing art with the ‘radical chic’ sect on Daddy$ funds”) critiqued 1980s consumer culture, which transformed the SoHo and Tribeca neighborhoods from industrial spaces into chic galleries and restaurants....
Turkish, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active also active in the USA.
Born 26 April 1957, in Ankara.
Painter, performance artist. Figures.
Nouvelle Figuration.
Bedri Baykam, the son of an MP and an architect, began exhibiting his works at a very early age, taking part in exhibitions in Turkey, Switzerland, France, Rome, London and New York. In ...
French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1950, in Angers.
Painter. Figure compositions, figures. Murals.
Symbolism.
Becker is also an architect. He has exhibited since 1971, notably: 1985, Galerie La Timbale, Lyons; 1986, Galerie Sylvestre, Avignon; 1987, Galerie Shifflett, Los Angeles.
Paris, 10 July 1991: The Storm...
