Search Results

(b Jan 25, 1930; d Lomé, Jan 4, 2010).

Togolese painter, sculptor, engraver, stained glass designer, potter and textile designer. Beginning in 1946, he received his secondary education in Dakar, where he also worked in an architecture firm. He travelled to France and received his diplôme supérieur from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Paris. A versatile artist, Ahyi is best known for his murals and for monumental stone, marble and cement public sculptures. His work reflects the fusion of his Togolese roots, European training and an international outlook, and he counts among his influences Moore, Braque, Modigliani, Tamayo, Siqueiros and Tall. His work combines ancient and modern themes and materials, maternity being a prominent topic. The messages of his larger, public pieces operate on a broad level to appeal to the general populace, while smaller works often reflect his private engagement with challenges confronting the human condition. His compositions are both abstract and figurative and evoke the heroism and hope of the two world wars, Togo's colonial period and the struggle for independence from France, as well as the political efforts of the peoples of Vietnam, South Africa and Palestine. Ahyi has won numerous international prizes, including the prize of the city of Lyon (...

(b Mennecy, Seine-et-Oise, Feb 3, 1895; d Paris, June 6, 1979).

French painter, sculptor, draughtsman, graphic artist, ceramicist and tapestry designer. He attended the Ecole des Arts Décoratifs, Paris, from 1911, until he joined the army in 1915. After World War I he devoted himself primarily to painting. In 1922 he met Juan Gris with whose encouragement his early Matisse-influenced rhythmical compositions acquired greater stability. In the late 1920s he was promoted by Tériade as a successor to the Cubists, with such works as The Mirror (1929; Paris, Pompidou), in which a highly simplified figure and its mirror-image are defined by patches of flat colour and fragments of linear contrast, and by the 1940s he was seen as one of the major representatives of the Ecole de Paris. In the 1950s his earlier predilection for curvilinear shapes gave way to a more angular and dynamic geometry, as in the First Race (1952; Paris, Pompidou). His subject-matter was taken from daily life, with marked preferences for the nude in movement, as in ...

British, 20th century, male.

Active in Crays Pond, near Reading.

Born 1909, in Essex; died November 1996, in London.

Painter, printmaker, sculptor, ceramicist, textile designer. Portraits, landscapes, urban landscapes.

London Group.

André Bicât was a self-taught artist. Born to French and Anglo-Irish parents, he worked as a theatre designer and scene painter in the 1930s. His theatre work included work for Mercury Theatre Productions in ...

Portuguese, 20th century, male.

Active in France from 1963.

Born 1926, in Lisbon.

Painter, engraver, sculptor, ceramicist, illustrator. Designs for stained glass, tapestries.

A graduate of the school of decorative arts in Lisbon, Julio Pomar worked in the art colleges of Lisbon and Paris. He was originally influenced by Socialist Realism, especially by Portinari. A virtuoso graphic artist, his realism excels in the curlicues of a decorative style exaggerated to the point of being non-representational. He has illustrated Cervantes's ...

German, 19th – 20th century, male.

Born 20 June 1868, in Munich; died 15 April 1957, in Munich.

Painter, sculptor, decorative designer, designer, architect, interior designer. Genre scenes. Furniture, fabrics, ceramic, glassware, carpets, toys.

Richard Riemerschmid trained in painting at the Kunstakademie of Munich from 1888...

Belgian, 20th century, male.

Born 1922, in Besançon, of Corsican origin.

Painter, sculptor, potter. Designs for stained glass, tapestries.

Jean Rigazzi studied law in Paris and went to sea for a number of years before settling down to work in Antwerp. He started out as a painter but subsequently turned to sculpture, stained glass, ceramics and tapestry work. His paintings, typically by palette-knife, hover at the fringes of the figurative and the informal, with a mixture of ochres, reds, yellows and blues combining to produce strikingly luminous compositions....

(b Łódź, May 3, 1924).

Polish sculptor, draughtsman, painter, ceramicist, printmaker and tapestry designer. He studied at the School of Fine Arts in Łódź, graduating in 1951. His style derives from Constructivism and from the ‘Unism’ of his teacher Władysław Strzemiński. Starczewski’s complex art uses the complementary treatment in combination with different visual disciplines. He was particularly interested in rhythmic, precise arrangements of forms and signs (e.g. MF 7/9, embossed paper, 1972, see D. Wróblewska: Polish Contemporary Graphic Art (Warsaw, 1983), fig.). One of his earliest works was a large-scale ceramic bas-relief entitled Disposition for Two Hands (1959–60), a geometric abstraction made for the University Library in Łódź. In 1963 he produced his first Alphabet of sculptural signs, a series of works that led to his conception of Tables (examples of both in Łódź, Mus. A.), which he started to create in 1973. On a long, rectangular table covered with a white tablecloth, Starczewski arranged alternate rows of identical forms, such as potatoes or bread rolls (ceramic or real), or sequences of three objects (e.g. a wine glass, toothbrush and tube of toothpaste). These arrangements are accompanied by graphic compositions that explore different types of signs (print, braille, handwriting) and examine their relationship (e.g. ...

Czech, 20th century, male.

Born 1882, in Prague, to German and Austrian parents; died 1976, in Bad Ischl.

Sculptor, draughtsman, designer. Designs for mosaics, glassware, metal objects, ceramics, fabrics, wallpapers.

Wolfgang von Wersin studied painting and architecture in Prague. In 1901 he settled in Munich where he pursued both of his careers. He was attracted to the quality of Jugendstil, particularly the innovations of Endell or Riemerschmid. He entered the private school founded by Hermann Obrist and Wilhelm Debschitz. He later became a teacher of modelling ...