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French, 20th century, male.

Born 1944, in Limoges.

Painter, sculptor, installation artist, engraver.

Conceptual Art.

Bouillon lives and works in Bagnolet, on the outskirts of Paris, and has taught at the École des Beaux-Arts in Dijon since 1988.

He collects objects, haphazardly, and subsequently uses then as symbols. The same object, the same figure, can take on several functions or be used to signify several different things, until it sometimes completely loses its own identity, and is no longer any more than the function it has been given. This was the case, throughout one period of his career, with his objects in stone, wood or metal. They were covered in ashes, so that one could no longer see the material, and could only focus on the function given by him to the object....

(b Somerville, NJ, 1955).

African American sculptor, printmaker, and conceptual artist. He grew up in New Jersey and attended the Boston University School of Fine Arts, the School of Visual Arts and the Art Students League of New York City. Cole is best known for assembling and transforming ordinary domestic objects, such as irons, ironing boards, high-heeled shoes, lawn jockeys, hair dryers, bicycle parts and other discarded appliances and hardware into imaginative and powerful configurations and installations embedded with references to the African American experience and inspired by West African religion, mythology and culture. Visual puns and verbal play characterized his works, thereby creating layered meanings. The objects he chose were often discarded mass-produced American products that had themselves acquired an alternate history through their previous handling and use.

In 1989, he became attracted to the motif of the steam iron both for its form and for its perceived embodiment of the experience and history of the unknown persons who had previously used it. He referred to the earliest versions of these irons as ‘Household Gods’ and ‘Domestic Demons’. With them, he engaged with ideas utilizing not only the found object but also the repetitive scorch mark of the iron arranged in either purely decorative patterns or in such ways as to suggest a face or African mask (...

Native American (Cheyenne and Arapaho), 20th–21st century, male.

Born 22 November, 1954, in Wichita (Kansas).

Painter, draughtsman, sculptor, printmaker, installation artist, conceptual artist, educator.

Edgar Heap of Birds is one of the most distinguished North American indigenous artists of his generation. His works reveal a distinctly critical and historical awareness of the ways that American Indian peoples, their histories and their viewpoints have been ignored and written over under colonialism. He has received numerous honours, presenting his work in competition for the United States Pavilion at the 52nd Venice Biennale (...

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 ...

Belgian, 20th – 21st century, female.

Born 1948, in Tongeren (Limburg).

Painter, sculptor, assemblage artist, screen printer.

Conceptual Art.

Hélène Keil studied at the Hoger Institute for the Fine Arts. She is a member of the Research Group of Hasselt. She exhibits mainly in Belgium and teaches at the Art Academy in Genk. In ...

German, 20th century, male.

Born 12 February 1941, in Oberammergau.

Sculptor, engraver, assemblage artist, installation artist, draughtsman.

Conceptual Art.

Nikolaus Lang trained at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Munich from 1960 to 1966; he was awarded a bursary to study in London and attended the Camberwell School of Arts and Crafts ...

American, 20th century, male.

Active in Italy.

Born 9 September 1928, in Hartford (Connecticut); died 8 April 2007, in New York.

Painter (gouache), installation artist, sculptor, engraver, draughtsman, illustrator. Artists’ books.

Conceptual Art, Minimal Art.

From 1945 to 1949 Sol LeWitt was a student at the University of Syracuse, New York. In 1951–1952 he did military service in Japan and Korea. By 1953 he was studying in New York at Cartoons Illustrators, which later became the School of Visual Arts. He worked for the magazine ...

British, 20th century, male.

Born 6 November 1944, in Glasgow.

Performance artist, painter, sculptor, installation artist, printmaker, ceramicist.

Conceptual Art, Land Art.

Bruce McLean studied at Glasgow School of Art (1961-1963), and at St Martins School of Art in London (1963-1966) under Anthony Caro, Phillip King and William Tucker. He has taught at the Croydon School of Art (...

(b EskifjörÐur, Dec 25, 1929).

Icelandic stage designer, sculptor, printmaker, performance artist and conceptual artist. He studied stage design in Birmingham, Reykjavík and Vienna (1949–56) and was periodically engaged in stage design for Reykjavík theatres from 1956 to 1975. In the late 1950s he became disillusioned with traditional theatre and began to think in terms of proto-happenings or visual tableaux. None of these went beyond the planning stage, but they were undoubtedly precursors of the ‘collage’ plays (random collections of dialogue from literature as well as ephemeral printed material) and performances that Pálsson organized with his students in Reykjavík, the Netherlands and Norway in the 1980s.

Pálsson’s interest in the visual arts was fuelled by his friendship with Dieter Roth. Though their concerns were essentially very different, they shared an ironic, even aggressive attitude to art and an interest in ephemeral or fragile materials. During the 1960s Pálsson’s work was mostly neo-Dadaist: for example the mimeographed prints of ...

Canadian, 20th–21st century, male.

Active in USA 1964–1972.

Born 10 December 1928, in Toronto.

Painter, sculptor, collage artist, lithographer, video installation artist. Artists’ books.

Conceptual Art.

Michael James Snow was a student at the Ontario College of Art in Toronto from 1948 and graduated in 1953. He spent time in Europe in 1954–1955. He also made a name for himself as a jazz musician. He mainly chooses the most ordinary subjects and objects from everyday life, which he empties of their usual significance in order to transmute them by making their place in space and time perceptible. His early works were figurative, interiors and figures. However, from 1961, he particularly exploited the theme of the ...

(b Tel Aviv, 1939).

Israeli sculptor, painter, draughtsman, printmaker and conceptual artist. He studied at Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem and in 1965 at Central School for Arts and Crafts in London. After painting abstract pictures in an expressionist technique he began to make etchings and (from the early 1970s) drawings. He also became involved in land art and conceptual art projects, some of them politically oriented, such as the Messer-Metzer Project in 1972, which involved an exchange of earth between an Arab village and an Israeli kibbutz. On some of these projects he collaborated with other artists, among them Moshe Gershuni and Avital Geva.

From 1978 Ullman evoked graves, archaeological excavations or trenches both in drawings and in sculptures in earth such as Lot’s Wife (1984), a six-foot deep pit dug in Har Sedom, Israel. As Israel’s representative at the Venice Biennale in 1980 he showed a large work, the ...