Gillian Wearing

The influence of Wearing’s 1992 Signs that Say can be seen across recent contemporary popular culture and media, particularly social media, wherein a photographic portrait of a stranger holding a handwritten sign in front of them is now a recognized format for truth-telling or confession.

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Nan Goldin

Most famously working through themes of love, gender, domesticity, and sexuality, Goldin used her personal experiences to visualise the political nature of these subjects, especially when subjugated by social taboos and expectations.

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Catherine Opie

From Opie’s subcultural roots working out on the margins of society, the photographer is now a well established artist and personality.

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Sarah Lucas

Lucas seems to have gone from strength-to-strength following her acclaimed solo exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery in 2013 and her triumphant pavilion showing at the 2015 Venice Biennale.

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Tracey Emin

Emin’s work as part of the Young British Artists movement placed her firmly within a key legacy that was to affect the development of art in Britain for years to come.

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Roni Horn

Roni Horn played a major role in developing the visual and material language of Minimalism. From the 1980s onwards, she began to create sculptures that picked up on the movement’s interest in materials, yet ventured into Post-Minimalism by emphasizing the centrality of the viewer’s mind and body to the work’s meaning.

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Jessie Lillian Buckland

By the late 1890s photographer Jessie Buckland was sending work across the Tasman for judging in competitions run by a Melbourne publication, the Australasian. Here she gained her first successes, winning a number of awards.

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Sophie Calle

One of France’s leading Conceptual artists, Calle’s life and work redefines the role of the artist or author. Her influence can be seen in the work of later “first-person” artists, whose lives and art are also intertwined.

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Annie Leibovitz

Annie Leibovitz is known as a celebrity portrait photographer, and has become just as famous as the people she photographs. A master at capturing popular culture icons in dramatic and innovative ways, she has paved the way for other contemporary commercial photographs, like those of Mario Testino, to also be seen as legitimate works of art.

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