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....
Belgian, 20th century, female.
Born 1945, in Antwerp.
Painter, sculptor, installation artist, video artist. Cartoons for tapestries, multimedia.
Before entering La Cambre, the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et des Arts Visuels, Brussels, Lafontaine studied law.
Influenced by American 'hard-edge' abstract painting, she started by painting monochromes, before moving on to sculpture. She uses textiles as well as metal to make her works. Alongside her sculptural work, she also makes videos to illustrate her intentions with regard to the body and its visual representation. Her works include: ...
Uruguayan, 20th century, male.
Born 1940, in Montevideo.
Painter, collage artist.
Rafael Lorente studied at the Montevideo faculty of architecture from 1965 to 1968. In 1964 he was awarded first prize in a poster competition and in 1974 he travelled to Europe and Paris with a bursary....
German, 20th – 21st century, male.
Born 1953.
Performance artist, video artist, draughtsman. Multimedia.
Marcel Odenbach studied architecture and history of art. Since 1976, he has produced performances and video installations at numerous galleries in Hamburg, Wiesbaden, Bonn, Cologne, Amsterdam, Berlin, Antwerp, Munich, Basel, São Paulo, Los Angeles and Boston....
Culture of images and visuality that creates meaning in our world today. This includes media forms such as photography, film, television, and digital media; art media such as painting, drawing, prints, and installations; architecture and design; comic books and graphic novels; fashion design, and other visual forms including the look of urban life itself. It also encompasses such social realms as art, news, popular culture, advertising and consumerism, politics, law, religion, and science and medicine. The term visual culture also refers to the interdisciplinary academic field of study that aims to study and understand the role that images and visuality play in our society; how images, gazes, and looks make meaning socially, culturally, and politically; how images are integrated with other media; and how visuality shapes power, meaning, and identity in contemporary global culture.
The emergence of the concept of visual culture as a means to think about the role of images in culture and as an academic field of study is a relatively recent phenomenon, emerging in the late 1980s and becoming established by the late 1990s. There were numerous factors that contributed to the idea that images should be understood and analysed across social arenas rather than as separate categories, including the impact of digital media on the circulation of images across social realms, the modern use of images from other social arenas (such as news and advertising) in art, and the cross-referencing of cultural forms displayed in popular culture and art. It was also influenced by the increasingly visible role played by images in political conflict and a general trend toward interdisciplinarity in academia....
