Jenny Holzer
Jenny Holzer’s approach to language, choice of unusual settings, and focus on issues of social and cultural importance have influenced a generation of neo-Conceptual artists.
Category Archives: Visual Art
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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.
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.
Louise Lawler
Lawler’s nuanced form of Institutional Critique has suggested a way forward for subsequent generations of artists who would come to examine their own position as creators. Her chief emphasis on the conditions of presentation and reception have paved the way for many strands of contemporary art’s practices that emphasize situation and relationality as an indispensable factor of any artistic experience.
Laurie Simmons
Simmons’ use of dolls to explore prescribed gender roles and representations of femininity has opened up space in which other feminist artists can work, facilitating the legitimacy of styles of cultural critique that do not fit within masculine molds.
Sanja Iveković
Iveković is a role model for artists working within the constraints and restrictions of an oppressive regime.
Martha Rosler
RRosler became a leading figure in the Feminist art movement because much of her work revealed the divide between how women were portrayed as individuals whose only place was within the confines of home, marriage, kitchen, and motherhood and the way they actually felt by being pigeonholed into said domestic roles. She also used brave new technologies such as video to differentiate herself from the male art stars and their traditional mediums that had come before.
Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger’s work has an integral place in the history of feminist, postmodern, and conceptual art. Connected with this, Kruger dissects contemporary culture in her unique combinations of image and text, often targeting multiple oppressions or hypocrisies.
Elaine De Kooning
Elaine de Kooning’s legacy has received increased attention in recent years. Her large, colorful, gestural works of the 1960s show her to be an adept Abstract Expressionist, and her sensitive and dynamic portraits of friends, athletes, and strangers widen the understanding of what Abstract Expressionism can be. But beyond her painting, de Kooning’s astute and rigorous analyses of painting in the 1940s and 1950s, helped to shape what we know of Abstract Expressionism as a whole.
Lee Bontecou
Bontecou’s persistent experimentation – her use of non-traditional techniques and materials – set her apart from other artists of the period and, particularly, the Abstract Expressionists, who still relied largely on conventional materials and processes despite their rejection of objective representation.