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American, 20th century, male.

Born 24 January 1940, in New York.

Painter, sculptor, performance artist, video artist. Multimedia.

Body Art, Conceptual Art.

Vito Acconci was born in the Bronx, New York and lives and works in Brooklyn. He studied at Holy Cross College in Worcester, Massachusetts and at the University of Iowa. He has taught in various art schools and universities and in particular at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Yale University and the Parsons School of Design in New York....

French, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1971, in Nanterre.

Draughtsman, sculptor.

Conceptual Art.

Albert lives and works in Paris and Nice. Stéphane Albert enquires into things and their relative individuality. He also plays upon the ordinariness of his family name, which he has made a subject of his work as an artist. He 'draws', which is to say, writes, copies of pages of books having characters by the name of Albert. By this process, he shows the desperation of the contemporary hero. In the same vein, he also produces formal duplicates in wood of various familiar objects (garbage, crates, palettes, rubble), achieving almost their dematerialisation before giving them a new singularity through his artistic gesture....

Italian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 17 July 1947, in Milan.

Painter, sculptor, theorist.

Arte Povera, Conceptual Art.

Adriano Altamira put forward his first critical observations on the phenomena of vision in 1967. Next he began to use minimalist structures, plaits and interlacings, like some of the methods used in France by the ...

(b Karachi, 1935).

Pakistani conceptual artist, sculptor, painter, activist, writer, and curator, active in England. Originally trained as a civil engineer, Araeen began painting in the 1950s while living in Karachi, Pakistan, where he and a few artists created art in a modern style that was not fully accepted in the cultural milieu of the time. Lack of positive reception in Pakistan prompted his move to London in 1964, where he found more like-minded artists and gained further exposure to contemporary art. This helped him to develop his practice, which gradually shifted from painting to sculpture. Araeen was especially influenced by the works of Anthony Caro and Sol LeWitt, and started producing objects in a highly reduced abstract vocabulary, becoming a pioneer of British Minimalism. He drew on his experience as a civil engineer when constructing grid-like forms using lattice patterns similar to window structures. His sculpture Second Structure (1966–1967) employed crossing elements imbued with political content and articulated his solidarity with the oppressed around the world. Moving to London did not result in reception so different from Karachi—museums and galleries in England overlooked his work and did not provide support for him as an artist. These acts of institutional marginalization appalled Araeen and fueled the politicization of his art and life. He began to make art addressing identity politics and racism and became active in groups such as the Black Panthers. In ...

Pakistani, 20th century, male.

Active in Britain.

Born 1935, in Karachi.

Installation artist, painter, sculptor.

Conceptual Art.

Araeen initially studied to be a civil engineer. He has exhibited in Karachi, New York and in a number of British cities. His work often addresses issues facing ethnic groups in Britain. He is also a writer and editor and founded the ...

(b Thurnscoe, nr Barnsley, 1939).

British painter and sculptor. He studied at the Slade School of Art (1960–4). Atkinson first came to prominence as part of the conceptual art group Art and Language, of which he was a founding member, in 1967. His work at that time included both essays for the group’s journal and discussion, which resulted in works exhibited under the group’s name. Gradually he began to grow apart from the group’s interest in Conceptualism and he left in 1974. His work continued to pursue Art and Language’s concerns with politics, history painting and the recent history of Modernism, but he approached these issues through paintings and, often, accompanying texts. The Happy Snap–History Snap series (1984–5; see exh cat. 1985–6) is typical of his work in the mid-1980s: the broad handling and bright palette marked a distance from the traditional values of Beaux-Arts painting, while the content, drawn from photographs, sought to situate his family in the context of major historical events; World War II, the Cold War and the politics of North Ireland have been recurrent interests. Towards the end of the 1980s he became more interested in late Modernism and began to mix ostensibly formalist styles with historically specific events. ...

German, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active in Hamburg.

Born 1957, in Fritzlar.

Sculptor, draughtsman. Figures, portraits.

Stephan Balkenhol was a pupil of Ulrich Rückriem. Influenced by Minimal Art and Conceptual Art, Balkenhol's mode of expression is nonetheless figurative. He carves in wood (often birch), later painting it to produce heads or large figures, which he sometimes integrates into city life as trompe-l'oeils in squares or buildings. His sculptures are monumental in three dimensions or almost flat, painted casually and still bearing the mark of the burin. They do not represent specific beings but people encountered in the crowd, distinguishable in their physiognomies, and sometimes by the colours of their clothes. In the same way, he presents animals such as penguins, snails, bears or lions, setting them in group scenes. He started to add a symbolic note to his work with ...

(b Cartagena, Oct 27, 1945).

Colombian painter, sculptor, and conceptual artist. He studied at the Escuela de Bellas Artes of the University of Atlántico in Barranquilla, Colombia, from 1958 to 1960, and in Italy from 1966 to 1967 at the University of Perugia. In 1966, under the influence of Pop art, he made the first of a series of collages combining cut-outs of well-known individuals and comic strips with drawn elements. Two years later he added frosty effects and velvet flowers to his interpretations in black and red ink of figures with distorted bodies and the faces of film stars. In 1969 he began to present these in increasingly three-dimensional boxes or glass cases, accompanied by clouds of cotton wool, plastic figures, and other additions that combined to make up fantastic or nostalgic scenes, dream-like and surrealist in appearance and tone.

Barrios was among those who introduced conceptual art to Colombia, for example by publishing in newspapers a series of ...

British, Canadian, 20th–21st century, male.

Born 16 November 1936, in Middlesbrough.

Painter, sculptor.

Conceptual Art.

N.E. Thing Co.

Iain Joseph Wilson Baxter immigrated to Calgary with his parents a year after his birth. He obtained a bachelor of science in zoology in 1959 and a master of education in ...

Romanian, 20th century, male.

Born 14 September 1938, in Bucharest; died 4 December 2000, in Paris.

Painter, draughtsman, sculptor. Church interiors, landscapes, architectural views, still-lifes.

Conceptual Art.

Horia Bernea studied mathematics and physics at the University of Bucharest from 1955 to 1958, then followed courses at the city's school of architecture ...

(b Kurów, Sept 7, 1930).

Polish painter, sculptor and conceptual artist. In 1952–5 he studied art history at the Catholic University in Lublin. He was self-taught as an artist, and he made his first works at about the time of the formation of the group Zamek (Castle or Lock), which comprised young artists and theoreticians interested in the structural properties of works of art. His first pictures are abstracts with expressive subject-matter, usually executed in black (e.g. the Feast of Nebuchadnezzar, 1957; priv. col.)

In 1958 Borowski turned from pictures to objects. Using plastic odds and ends as ready-mades, he produced his first Artony—compositions from ikebana bowls, small plates and pieces of wire joined together with the intention of giving them the autonomy of living organisms. He subsequently added movement, electric light, fluid circulating in transparent tubes, and smells. The Manilusy (1963) were environments of loosely hung pieces of mirror distorting spatial perception and drawing the viewer into a game of illusion. These were soon followed by a series of ‘Syncretic Exhibitions’, which by ...

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....

American, 20th century, male.

Born 1932, in Detroit; died May 1997, in Cairo.

Installation artist, performance artist, sculptor, draughtsman.

Conceptual Art.

Using a variety of different forms of expression, including installations, writing, performance, photographs and sculpture, James Lee Byars has created a highly personal collection of work. In the 1950s he focused on comparing oriental civilisation and western mystical thought, notably with folding sculptures which he unfolded in public. He went on to subvert objects by creating them in precious or unusual materials such as gold leaf or marble. He made several visits to Japan from ...

Brazilian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Born 1946.

Painter (mixed media), sculptor.

Conceptual Art.

Waltercio Caldas Junior has taken part in group exhibitions including the Art from Brazil in New York exhibition shown in various museums and galleries in 1995 and the São Paulo Biennale in ...

Brazilian, 20th century, female.

Born 23 October 1920, in Belo Horizonte; died 1988.

Sculptor, painter.

Neo-Constructivism, Conceptual Art, Body Art.

Grupo Frente.

Clark studied in Brazil under the direction of Burle-Marx in 1947, then went to Paris in 1948 and worked with Fernand Léger, Arpad Szenes and Dabrinsky. In ...

Belgian, 20th – 21st century, male.

Active also active in France.

Born 1954, in Audenarde.

Painter (including gouache), sculptor, draughtsman, assemblage artist.

Conceptual Art.

Thierry de Cordier studied painting at the Academie voor Schone Kunsten in Ghent from 1972 to 1976 before moving to the Auvergne region of France to live and work....

(b Buenos Aires, Oct 5, 1940).

Argentine poet, critic, conceptual artist, painter, and sculptor. He studied literature at the Universidad de Buenos Aires (UBA), graduating in 1964. Between 1959 and 1966 he co-published the literary magazine Airón (Heron) with Madela Ezcurra, Leandro Katz, and other former students of Jaime Rest (1927–1979) at UBA’s Philosophy and Literature Department. In 1965 he joined a group of young intellectuals studying semiotics and media theory with the theorist Oscar Masotta (1930–1979). In 1966, working with fellow Masotta associates Raúl Escari (1944–2016) and Roberto Jacoby (b 1944), Costa co-wrote Un arte de los medios de comunicación, a manifesto for inserting works of informational art within the circuits of the mass media. This text accompanied the trio’s first work of this new genre, Happening para un jabalí difunto (Happening for a Dead Boar, 1966; 2014 exh. cat., 29), a fictional description of a happening distributed to different Argentine newspapers and magazines followed by an explanation one month later, in which the artists wrote: “[A]ll that matters is the image that the news media construct out of this artistic occurrence” (see Costa ...

Danish, 20th century, male.

Born 1914; died 1999, in Randers.

Painter, sculptor.

Conceptual Art.

The construction of Dalsgaard's paintings is abstract, although this is contradicted by the very schematic representation of certain objects, animals or figures which are geometrically integrated with the lines and structural surfaces of the composition....

French, 20th century, male.

Born in Clermont-Ferrand.

Sculptor, painter.

Conceptual Art.

Jean Marie Delavalle moved to Montreal from France in 1954. He studied at the fine art school in the city from 1961 to 1965. In around 1969-1970, he executed sculptures close to minimal art, after which he more or less abandoned sculpture to take a closer look at conceptual art, using a camera, video and transparencies. Interested in the area of perception, as is often the case with conceptual artists, he played simultaneously with variations in light, location and seasons, at the same time making specific changes to the tools he used: filter, lens and focus....

German, 20th – 21st century, female.

Active since 1973 active in France.

Born 1954, in Biberach.

Painter (mixed media). Stage costumes.

Conceptual Art.

From 1968, Domenika corresponded at length with the German sculptor Josef Beuys. In 1975 she met Rüdiger. She has exhibited in 1974, in Milan; ...