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(b Delhi, India, Feb 4, 1941; d Lahore, Pakistan, Jan 18, 1999).

Pakistani painter, sculptor and printmaker. Educated in Pakistan and abroad, he has consciously and successfully synthesized Eastern and Western aesthetic traditions. In 1963, a year after graduating from the National College of Arts, Lahore, he joined the faculty as a lecturer in art, later becoming a professor and head of the Department of Fine Arts. His studies abroad have included post-graduate work in London (1966–7, 1968–9) and the United States (1987–9).

Like many of his colleagues, Zahoor was influenced by his mentor, Shakir ‛Ali, principal of the National College of Art from 1961 to 1975. Both artists were motivated by art history, philosophy and aesthetics. Zahoor’s non-figurative paintings of the 1960s evolved into tangible—though not always realistic—images addressing the dualities of space and time, East and West. Most of his triptychs and single canvases were conceived within a grid that provides a stabilizing structure for their compositions. This grid refers to Zahoor’s admiration for the American artist ...

(b Madrid, 1942).

Spanish painter, sculptor and printmaker. After studying at the Escuela Superior de Bellas Artes in Madrid he came under the influence of Pop art during a stay in London in 1965. On settling again in Madrid in that year he began to concentrate on images of movement, as in the screenprint Story of the Man Who Falls I, for which he was awarded a prize at the Kraków Biennale in 1966. He continued to explore movement through serial forms and stereotyped images in plexiglass constructions such as the Changeable Movement series (1967) and from 1968 used computers as part of this process. These interests led to sculptures and paintings titled Transformable Movements, which he presented in association with aleatoric music.

Alexanco became increasingly involved with performance and collaborated with the Spanish composer Luis de Pablo (b 1930) on Soledad interrumpida (1971) and Historia natural...

(b São Paulo, 1935; d São Paulo, 2015).

Brazilian painter and printmaker. After studying engraving in São Paulo, he moved to New York in 1959 to complete his studies at the Pratt Graphic Center, where his contact with international Pop art merged with his own interest in Brazilian popular imagery, for example in the portfolio of woodcuts Mine and Yours (1967). Immediately afterwards he began painting ambiguous and ironic still lifes collectively titled Brasíliana, which use bananas as symbols of underdevelopment and exploitation, for example BR-1 SP (1970; São Paulo, Pin. Estado) and Bananas (1971; Washington, DC, Mus. Mod. A. Latin America). In 1971 he won a trip abroad in the National Salon of Modern Art (Rio de Janeiro), which took him again to New York between 1972 and 1973. On his return to São Paulo he began the series Battlegrounds, in which he submitted the previously reclining bananas to slashing, torture, and putrefaction. Subsequently, shapes were reorganized into configurations of an undramatic Surrealism, playful, colorful, tumescent, and as firmly rooted as ever in his native Brazil and Latin America....

(b New York, Aug 16, 1949).

American printmaker and installation artist. Born and raised in New York City, Arai, a third-generation Japanese American printmaker, mixed-media artist, public artist and cultural activist, studied art at the Philadelphia College of Art and The Printmaking Workshop in New York. Since the 1970s, her diverse projects have ranged from individual works to large-scale public commissions (see Public art in the 21st century). She has designed permanent public works, including an interior mural commemorating the African burial ground in lower Manhattan and an outdoor mural for Philadelphia’s Chinatown. Other works include Wall of Respect for Women (1974), a mural on New York’s Lower East Side, which was a collaboration between Arai and women from the local community. Her art has been exhibited in such venues as the Bronx Museum of the Arts, the Whitney Museum of American Art, the Museum of Modern Art, International Center for Photography, P.S.1 Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Hispanic Art, all New York and the Library of Congress, Washington, DC. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from National Endowment for the Arts, New York Foundation for the Arts, and Joan Mitchell Foundation....

(b Buffalo, NY, May 25, 1978).

American computer artist, performance artist, video artist, installation artist, composer, sculptor, and printmaker. He graduated in 2000 from the Oberlin Conservatory of Music, where he originally studied classical guitar but later switched to the technology of music. At Oberlin he also met Paul B. Davis with whom he formed the Beige Programming Ensemble in 2000, and released a record of 8-bit music entitled The 8-Bit Construction Set. In 2010 he co-founded, with Howie Chen and Alan Licht, the band Title TK.

Arcangel’s body of work has consistently addressed a series of themes, such as the manner in which we express ourselves through technological tools and platforms (from Photoshop to YouTube) in funny, original, creative, and awkward ways. His projects often explore our fascination with technology by playfully undermining our expectations of it and limiting viewers’ control. Another theme that frequently surfaces is the speed of technological obsolescence and the absurdity of a given technology’s lifecycle, which often moves from the cutting-edge of design to an insult of good taste (see Siegel, pp. 81–2). Arcangel connects these themes to the history of art, drawing parallels between pop-cultural vernacular and approaches in the fine art world and combining high tech and do-it-yourself (DIY) approaches. Among his best-known works are his hacks and modifications of Nintendo game cartridges and obsolete computer systems from the 1970s and 1980s (...

(b Harlow, Essex, April 11, 1960).

English painter, draughtsman and printmaker. He studied at Maidstone College of Art (1978–81) and from 1982 to 1985 at the Royal College of Art in London, during which time he produced paintings crowded with fantastic incident partly under the inspiration of Paul Klee. Even after he moved to a spare, at times almost Minimalist style, the unfashionable example of Klee remained important to him for the poetic richness of its imagination, for the freedom it represented in creating a new style for every picture, and for the privileged position it gave to working on an intimate scale. Two typical oil paintings of the late 1980s, Pear (355×305 mm, 1988) and Breath (406×356 mm, 1987; for illustrations see Livingstone), demonstrate the extremes of his art at that time: one a straightforward, graceful rendering of a piece of fruit against a scraped-down, dark monochrome background, the other an apparently abstract painting consisting of a balloon-like red shape as a metaphor of any living organism’s most primal act. In his ink drawings and watercolours, too, he moved easily from figurative images to abstract forms without any sense of contradiction, often pairing these very different kinds of works when hanging or reproducing them so as to spark them off against each other....

(b Dublin, Sept 22, 1943).

Irish painter and printmaker . He studied architecture at Bolton Street Technical School, Dublin, from 1961 to 1964. While acting as assistant to Michael Farrell in 1967, he was introduced to hard-edge abstraction and decided to learn to paint. His natural inclination was towards figurative art, initially in his use of the figure as a silhouette in the Marchers series and subsequently in 3rd May—Goya (1970; Dublin, Hugh Lane Mun. Gal.) and other pastiches of paintings by Poussin, Ingres and Delacroix, in which he filled in the outline with flat colour. Such early works were heavily influenced by photography and by a social or political commitment, reinforced with a striking visual wit. These were followed by paintings satirizing the awakening interest in contemporary art in Dublin, as in Woman with Pierre Soulages (1972; Dublin, Bank of Ireland Col.) in which a figure is shown scrutinizing an abstract canvas.

A visit to Brussels, where Ballagh studied the work of Magritte, led him gradually to model his figures, both in portraits and in quasi-Surrealist autobiographical works, in a Photorealist technique in which he alluded to his artistic preoccupations and to his wife and family. The stylistic features of his paintings lent themselves also to silkscreen prints. He has photographed unusual aspects of Dublin architecture, which he published in book form as ...

(b Luton, Bedfordshire, Aug 29, 1940).

English sculptor, draughtsman and printmaker. He studied at Luton College of Technology and Art from 1957 but abandoned the course in 1959, working instead on the assembly-line of the Vauxhall car factory in Luton for 18 months. The experience of helping to build beautiful, machine-made objects on the shop floor proved decisive on his choice of materials for his first sculptures in 1962: leather and chrome-plated metal. The idea of relying on specialist fabricators to achieve the best result made it easy for him to accept Marcel Duchamp’s notion of the ready-made, as applied to ordinary manufactured items designated as sculpture but not made by the artist’s own hands. Rather than simply taking things as he found them, however, Barker either commissioned fabricators to make them to his specifications as with his leather-clad Zip Boxes of 1962, which aligned him with Pop art or had the original objects recast or resurfaced so that the sculptures became non-functional surrogates for them. The techniques and materials he employed, the almost heroic elevation of the commonplace, the humorous touches and the acceptance of the banal and the kitsch all contribute to the provocative originality of Barker’s work of the 1960s and to its importance in anticipating and probably influencing the sculptures with which Jeff Koons made his name in the mid-1980s....

(b San Marcos, Jan 1, 1946).

Guatemalan painter and printmaker. He began his art studies at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Plásticas in Guatemala City, then studied painting at the Facultad de Bellas Artes of the Universidad de Costa Rica (1968–1969) and printmaking at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid (1974–1975). His first works were expressionist woodcuts influenced by Munch, but after studying in Madrid he changed his style, emphasizing the role of drawing and texture and taking his subjects from Latin American literature.

On his return to Guatemala in 1979, Barrios addressed himself to the magic realism that held sway there in literature as well as in the visual arts. From c. 1980 he devoted himself increasingly to watercolor (e.g. Bosch’s Garden, Guatemala City, Mus. A. Contemp.) and to oil painting. His brother César Barrios (b 1945) was also active as a painter and printmaker....

(Losch)

(b Long Beach, CA, March 14, 1941).

American installation artist, painter, printmaker and sculptor. Bartlett studied at Mills College, Oakland, CA (1960–63), and at the Yale School of Art and Architecture, New Haven, CT (1964–5). The progressive approach to modern art taught at Yale and the nearby thriving art scene of New York were instrumental in her early development (1963–early 1970s). Bartlett’s first one-person exhibition was in New York (1970) in the loft of the artist Alan Saret. Nine-point Pieces (1973–4), a later work, was shown at the Paula Cooper Gallery in New York and was experimental both conceptually and materially. Her ambivalent use of systems to establish an order and to oppose it allowed her to explore the material and the conceptual process of making images and objects. Rhapsody (1975–6; priv. col., see exh. cat., p. 21), one of her best-known installations, consists of 988 steel plates covered with screenprint grids and hand-painted Testors enamel and hung on a wall (2.28×47.86 m). Each plate exists individually and in relation to its adjoining plate and may be read vertically or horizontally, creating a mesh of stylistic variability exploring both figurative and non-figurative motifs. Another work of the 1970s is ...

(b Los Angeles, CA, Aug 12, 1933).

African American filmmaker, sculptor, printmaker and archivist of African American culture. Camille Billops received her BA from California State College and her MFA from the City College of New York. A visual artist, filmmaker and archivist, Billops’s darkly humorous prints and sculpture have been exhibited internationally, including at the Cooper-Hewitt Museum of Design, the New Museum and the Bronx Museum, New York; the Library of Congress, Washington, DC; Clark College, Atlanta University; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA; Museo de Arte Moderno La Tertulia, Cali, Colombia; Gallerie Akhenaton, Cairo, Egypt; the American Center, Karachi, Pakistan; and the American Cultural Center, Taipei, Taiwan. Billops received a Percent for Art commission in New York and was a long-time member of Robert Blackburn’s Printmaking Workshop (PMW), traveling to establish the first summer printmaking workshop in Asilah, Morocco, with the PMW delegation.

As a filmmaker, Billops earned a National Endowment for the Arts award. Her films have been shown on public television and at the Museum of Modern Art, New York. She collaborated with photographer James Van Der Zee (...

(b Nantes, Oct 22, 1956).

French painter and printmaker. He began studying at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts, Reunes, in 1974, obtaining his diploma in 1979. His work of the 1980s was part of a wider effort to reassess the role of figurative painting, challenging the popularity of abstraction and conceptualism. His focus on strong figurative imagery can be compared with the work of Georg Baselitz in Germany or Julian Schnabel in the USA. During this decade he made many works on torn poster surfaces, on which he painted images of heavy figures moving clumsily through landscapes, emphasizing a crude monumentality, as in Untitled (3×4 m, 1985; Aachen, Neue Gal.). The supports used in these works recall those employed by the Nouveau Réaliste artists known as affichistes, who also worked with torn posters using a technique known as décollage. During the 1980s and 1990s Blais’s work underwent a simplification both of form and palette, with the sometimes grotesque humour of his earlier figures exchanged for a more lyrical, suggestive style. These images were often rendered in black and white on increasingly regular surfaces; ...

(b Leicester, April 5, 1944).

English painter and printmaker. From 1962 to 1967 he studied at the University of Newcastle upon Tyne under Richard Hamilton, also benefiting from contact with visiting tutors such as Pop artists Richard Smith (for whom he later worked as an assistant), Joe Tilson and Eduardo Paolozzi. As a student at the University of Reading from 1967 to 1969, Buckley began to present his paintings as substantial physical objects, constructed in frequently eccentric shapes and then decorated. The clues to subject-matter were often indicated in the titles, which could be allusions to places, for example Rannoch (1971; AC Eng); to the techniques used, as in Cut, Burnt and Tied (1971; London, Brit. Council); or to historic styles, such as Cubism, as in Head of a Young Girl No. 1 (1974; Liverpool, Walker A.G.). Often Buckley drew upon the everyday environment: in the early work by referring to crazy pavings, tartan patterns and prosaic interiors, and in the later work by alluding to more specific architectural details and by using cardboard tubing and plastic drainpipes as constructional elements. He not only painted with brushes on stretched canvas but also worked with improvised processes such as tearing, folding, stitching, stapling, patching, screwing together, nailing and weaving. Along with traditional artists’ materials, he used house paint, shoe polish, liquid linoleum, perspex, carpeting and old clothes. Often admired for the breadth of his reference to other 20th-century art, Buckley, like his friend Howard Hodgkin, used the abstraction of simple marks and bold design to convey specific moods and circumstances....

(b Florence, April 20, 1946).

Italian painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. After graduating from the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence in 1969, he travelled around Europe and to India. He began exhibiting his work in 1971, a year after moving to Rome, later referring to his early productions as ‘mythical conceptual art’. In the late 1970s he returned to painting and quickly established himself as a major artist of the movement in Italian figurative painting known as the Transavanguardia. In large, vibrantly coloured oil paintings such as ‘In Strange and gloomy Waters a White Spot Shines, a Little Girl Flies by my Side’ (oil on canvas, 2.00×3.56 m, 1979; Amsterdam, Stedel. Mus.) he celebrated man’s sensuality, animal vitality and closeness to the natural world. Cultural and specifically art-historical references abound, especially to Futurism and to earlier Italian art, with a swirling, rhythmic application of paint in themes of eroticism, melancholy and death. In Water Bearer...

(b Chatham, Kent, Dec 1, 1959).

English painter, poet, printmaker and musician. He studied for a short time at St Martin’s School of Art (1980–81) before being expelled. He was famously Tracey Emin’s partner before she achieved fame as a ‘Young British Artist’, his name featuring prominently on her infamous tent, Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–95 (1995; London, Saatchi Gal.) Indeed, their work shares a simplicity of execution and confessional frankness that links them beyond the divide Childish placed between them. A prodigiously prolific artist, he produced reams of self-published poetry, released many albums (through nine groups including Thee Headcoats), wrote novels and created a vast number of paintings. He clung to his outsider status, however, decrying what he saw as the egotism and commercialism of the London Art scene. His style of painting and printmaking was greatly indebted to German Expressionism, specifically to the work of Emil Nolde. Following the example of early 20th-century artists, Childish also published manifestoes, including the Stuckist manifesto of ...

(b Monroe, WA, July 5, 1940).

American painter and printmaker. He studied (1960–65) at the University of Washington, Seattle, at Yale University, and at the Akademie der Bildenden Künste in Vienna. During this period he painted biomorphic abstract works, influenced by the avant-garde American art of the previous two decades. After a brief experiment with figurative constructions, he began copying black-and-white photographs of a female nude in colour on to canvas. After abandoning this approach he used a black-and-white palette, which resulted in the 6.7 m long Big Nude (1967–8; artist’s col., see Lyons and Storr, p. 14). Finding this subject too ‘interesting’, he turned to neutral, black-and-white head-and-shoulder photographs as models, which he again reproduced in large scale on canvas, as in Self-portrait (1968; Minneapolis, MN, Walker A. Cent.). He incorporated every detail of the photograph and allowed himself no interpretative freedom. Working from photographs enabled him to realize the variations in focus due to changing depth of field, something impossible when working from life. He continued in the black-and-white style until ...

(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 (...

(b Oakland, CA, Aug 26, 1925; d Tucson, AZ, June 4, 2009).

American painter, printmaker and teacher. Colescott produced highly expressive and gestural paintings that addressed a wide range of social and cultural themes and challenged stereotypes. Interested in issues of race, gender and power, his work critiqued the representation of minorities in literature, history, art and popular culture. Stylistically, his work is indebted to European modernism, particularly Cubism and Expressionism, but also makes references to African sculpture, African American art and post–World War II American styles.

Colescott was introduced to art at an early age. His mother was a pianist and his father was a classically-trained violinist and jazz musician. Through his parents’ social circles, he often found himself surrounded by creative individuals as he was growing up, like his artistic mentor, the sculptor Sargent Johnson (1888–1967). Colescott received his BA in 1949 and later his MFA in 1952 from the University of California, Berkeley. He also studied with ...

(b New York, July 10, 1948; d Lake Peekskill, NY, July 21, 2013).

American painter, draughtsman, printmaker and sculptor. From 1966 to 1970 he studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York, where he made large figurative paintings around themes such as rescue and survival. He stopped painting in 1970 but continued to make drawings and sculptures, including a series of large iron cages such as The Getting To Know You Cage (1979; USA, priv. col.), in which the reactions between two people inside a confined space could be observed by spectators. Several of Cutrone’s cages were shown at Mudd Club, a combined music venue and gallery in New York which he ran between 1979 and 1982. From 1972 to 1982 Cutrone worked as a studio assistant to Andy Warhol, also briefly co-editing Warhol’s Interview magazine (1972–3). He resumed painting in the early 1980s and began incorporating Biblical imagery into his work, linking it with favourite American cartoon characters in ways that deliberately courted controversy. He established his reputation around the same time as such graffiti artists as ...