French, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1966, in Marseilles.
Installation artist, sculptor, action artist, photographer.
Conceptual Art.
Boris Achour, who was a graduate of the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, received a three-month extra-mural bursary from the Villa Médicis that he spent in Los Angeles in ...
Finnish, 20th – 21st century, female.
Active in Helsinki.
Born 1959, in Hämeenlinna.
Video installation artist, film producer, photographer, performance artist.
Conceptual Art.
Eija-Liisa Ahtila was a student at the university of Helsinki from 1980 to 1985 and studied film and video at the London College of Painting. In ...
Native American (Tlingit and Aleut), 20th–21st century, male.
Born 1979, in Sitka (Alaska).
Conceptual artist, performance artist, musician. Installation, video, mixed media.
Nicholas Galanin is a Tlingit and Aleut artist. He received a BA in jewellery design at London Guildhall University (2003), and a MA in Indigenous Visual Arts at Massey University (...
British, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1966, in Glasgow.
Video installation artist, environmental artist, video artist, performance artist, photographer.
Conceptual Art, Appropriation Art.
Douglas Gordon studied at the Glasgow School of Art from 1984 to 1988 and at the Slade School in London from 1988 to 1990...
(b Bethlehem, 1970).
Palestinian conceptual artist. Jacir’s works use a variety of media including film, photography, installation, performance, video, sound, sculpture and painting. Jacir was raised in Saudi Arabia and attended high school in Rome, Italy. She received her BA from the University of Dallas, Irving, TX in 1992, her MFA from the Memphis College of Art, Memphis, TN in 1994, and participated in the Whitney Independent Study Program from 1998 to 1999. She became a professor at the International Academy of Art, Palestine in Ramallah in 2007. Jacir’s conceptual works explore the physical and psychological effects of social and political displacement and exile, primarily how they affect the Palestinian community. Her work investigated the impact of Israeli action on the Palestinian people and countered representations of Palestinians in the press as primarily militant. Jacir often collaborated with members of the Palestinian community, both local and international, in the creation of her works....
(b Göttingen, 1968).
German conceptual artist. Jankowski studied at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste, Hamburg. Working in video, film, photography, installation, and performance, he reinserted ritual and its intrinsic mystery into the creative act and, subsequently, into the act of viewing a work of art. For the artist, ritual enabled the recognition of a specific world view and built a site where dialogue could take place between different people or different belief systems. Jankowski arrived at this point of recognition through his transformative use of collaboration, a circular method of creation, the utilization of magic or wonder, and humour. By making clear these devices in his art, Jankowski enabled the viewer to experience an ‘aha’ moment, or a climatic ‘Big Wow’, a phrase coined by Walt Disney to describe the high point on an amusement park ride or the big, concluding special effect in a movie. These approaches, together with Jankowski’s use of popular forms of mass culture, provided a critique of the detached nature of contemporary art production and positioned Jankowski as one of the most thought-provoking image makers of his time....
(b Ha Tien, Nov 16, 1968).
Vietnamese conceptual artist. Lê was born near the Cambodian border, but fled with his family when his hometown was invaded by the Khmer Rouge in 1979. Lê moved to Los Angeles and studied photography at the University of California, Santa Barbara and received his MFA from the School of Visual Arts, New York in 1992. In 1989, while at the University of California, Lê enrolled in a class on the Vietnam War (1955–75) that emphasized American hardship. This sparked Lê’s earliest public art project, Accountability, a series of posters that Lê put up on his college campus (reproduced in 1992 for Creative Time, New York, Washington, DC, and Los Angeles). These posters juxtaposed American media images of the Vietnam War with explicit pictures of Vietnamese suffering, accompanied by captions detailing the damage done to Vietnam. The desire to intervene in dominant perceptions of the Vietnam War propelled Lê for much of his artistic career....
Canadian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1956, in Vancouver.
Painter, performance artist, installation artist, photographer. Artists' books.
Conceptual Art.
Ken Lum graduated from the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, where he began teaching in 1990. He was a visiting professor in the late 1990s in institutions in Paris, Munich and China. He was awarded a Killam Award for Outstanding Research in ...
British, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in New York from 1973.
Born 14 April 1946, in London.
Installation artist, performance artist, video artist. Multimedia.
Conceptual Art.
Anthony McCall studied at the Ravensbourne College of Art and Design from 1964 to 1968. He makes films.
1973, 1975, Paris Biennale
1975, Konsthall, Malmö
1976, Palazzo Reale, Milan
1976, Venice Biennale
2001, Into the Light: The Projected Image in American Art 1964-1977, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (travelling exhibition)
2002, Shoot Shoot Shoot: The First Decade of the London Film-Makers, Tate Modern, London (travelling exhibition)
2004, Eyes, Lies & Illusions, Hayward Gallery, London
2007, Held Together with Water: Art from the Sammlung Verbund, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Vienna
2007, Project, Transform, Erase: Anthony McCall and Imi Knoebel, Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco
2008, The Cinema Effect, Hirshhorn Museum, Washington, DC
2008, Geometry in Motion 1920s/1970s, Museum of Modern Art, New York...
(b Fort Wayne, IN, Dec 6, 1941).
American conceptual artist. Recognized as one of the most influential, innovative, and provocative 20th century American artists, Nauman extended the media of sculpture, film, video, photography, and sound with performance and spatial explorations. Nauman attended the University of Wisconsin–Madison from 1960 to 1964, with early studies in mathematics and physics, which broadened to the study of art under Italo Scanga (1932–2001). He received a master’s degree in Fine Art from the University of California, Davis in 1966 under William T. Wiley, Robert Arneson, Frank Owen (b 1939), and Stephen Kaltenbach (b 1940) and honorary degrees from the San Francisco Art Institute (1989) and California Institute of Art (2000). In 1966 he began to teach at the San Francisco Art Institute.
Nauman’s interactive artworks and performances explore the syntactical nuances of language, text, and figurative gesture to create material culture and in-between places, which often result in a heightened sense of physical and emotional awareness. Nauman’s artistic explorations of spatial perception, bodily consciousness, physical and mental activity, and linguistic manipulation were demonstrated in interactive spatial compositions that accentuated various relationships between the human body and built environments. Early works included body castings and holographic self-images with subsequent works situating the viewer within their own mental and bodily perceptions. In ...
Italian, 20th – 21st century, male.
Active in France.
Born 1964, in Rome.
Installation artist, performance artist, video artist.
Conceptual Art.
Bernhard Rüdiger's art deals with mental concepts and is based on language. He attempts to establish the sense of such ideas as 'beauty', 'truth' and 'looking' by juxtaposing and dispersing objects....
(b Groningen, July 1, 1942).
Dutch conceptual artist, film maker and television actor. He started to experiment with different coloured smoke in 1957. From the 1960s he was active as a Fluxus composer. In 1961 with Ger van Elk and the photographer Bob Wesdorp he founded the Adynamische Groep, which primarily reacted against post-war Expressionism. In 1962 he was given an exhibition at the Fodor Museum, Amsterdam, for which he covered the floor of a room with a 100 mm layer of salt and another with a few tonnes of broken glass. In pursuit of performance art, in 1963 he instigated a happening: he emptied a bottle of lemonade in the sea outside Petten, an action broadcast by Dutch television. In the same year he made a television programme about contemporary art (e.g. Fluxus, Pop art, Zero). Also in 1963 the fire brigade banned the performance of his Economic Concert (1958), which consisted of one single explosion on stage. Two years later he displayed a 5 m high purple chair in the Vondelpark in Amsterdam and organized an exhibition called ...
Chinese, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1964, in Beijing.
Installation artist, performance artist, photographer. Collage. Conceptual art.
Wang Youshen studied illustration at the Central Academy of Fine Arts in Beijing, graduating in 1988. He belonged to the New Generation Art group that emerged in the early 1990s. In ...
