Yayoi Kusama (草間 彌生 or 弥生 Kusama Yayoi?, born March 22, 1929) is a Japanese artist and writer. Throughout her career she has worked in a wide variety of media, including painting, collage, sculpture, performance art and environmental installations, most of which exhibit her thematic interest in psychedelic colors, repetition and pattern. A precursor of the pop art, minimalist and feminist art movements, Kusama influenced contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Claes Oldenburg.[1] Although largely forgotten after departing the New York art scene in the early 1970s, Kusama is now acknowledged as one of the most important living artists to come out of Japan, and an important voice of the avant-garde.

Born in Matsumoto, Nagano into an upper-middle-class family of seedling merchants,[2] Kusama started creating art at an early age, going on to study Nihonga painting in Kyoto in 1948. Frustrated with this distinctly Japanese style, she became interested in the European and American avant-garde, staging several solo exhibitions of her paintings in Matsumoto and Tokyo during the 1950s. In 1957 she moved to the United States, settling down in New York City where she produced a series of paintings influenced by the abstract expressionist movement. Switching to sculpture and installation as her primary mediums, Kusama became a fixture of the New York avant-garde, having her works exhibited alongside the likes of Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and George Segal during the early 1960s, where she became associated with the pop art movement. Embracing the rise of the hippie counterculture of the late 1960s, Kusama came to public attention when she organized a series of happenings in which naked participants were painted with brightly colored polka dots.

In 1973, Kusama moved back to her native Japan, where she found the art scene far more conservative than that in New York. Becoming an art dealer, her business folded after several years, and after experiencing psychiatric problems, in 1977 she voluntarily admitted herself to a hospital, where she has spent the rest of her life. From here, she continued to produce artworks in a variety of mediums, as well as launching a literary career by publishing several novels, a poetry collection and an autobiography.

Kusama's work is based in conceptual art and shows some attributes of feminism, minimalism, surrealism, Art Brut, pop art, and abstract expressionism, and is infused with autobiographical, psychological, and sexual content. Kusama is also a published novelist and poet, and has created notable work in film and fashion design. Major retrospectives of her work have been held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Whitney Museum, and Tate Modern, whilst in 2008 Christies New York sold a work by her for $5.1 million, then a record for a living female artist.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yayoi_Kusama

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Oil on canvas; 188.3 x 174.5 cm.

Pablo Palazuelo was a Spanish painter and sculptor.

Pablo Palazuelo was born in Madrid in 1916. In 1933 he studied architecture at the School of Arts and Crafts at Oxford University. Upon returning to Madrid in 1939, he began to devote all of his time to painting. During these early years, reflecting the influence of Picasso and Cézanne, his figurative art became progressively more abstract, simplified and transformed.

Palazuelo was attracted to, and later influenced by, the work of Paul Klee, which he saw for the first time in 1947. It was in this year that Palazuelo's first abstract art appeared. The following year he was awarded a grant by the French Institute in Madrid to pursue his art in Paris. In the same year, 1948, he was selected to exhibit at the Salon de Mai, which led to an invitation to join the prestigious Galérie Maeght (currently Galérie Lelong), an association of nearly fifty years that continues to this day. Palazuelo went on to receive the coveted Kandinsky Prize in 1952.

His attention became focused on the nature of "form" itself rather than on what it represented. In 1953 his investigation into form led to his discovery: Trans-geometría-the rhythms of nature translated into plastic art. This new way of seeing was initially expressed in his Solitudes series shown in his first solo exhibition in 1955.

"Ascendente no. 2", his first sculpture, appeared in 1954. However, it was not until 1962 that his exploration of the qualities of space through his metal sculpture began in earnest, and his two-dimensional drawings became transformed into their three-dimensional counterparts. Conflict between large, flat, colorful forms characterized the series entitled Onda, Onfalo and Tierra, exhibited in 1963, and indicated a significant change in the direction of his art. In 1969 Pablo Palazuelo returned to Spain, where he continued to probe the mysteries of form through his paintings, sculptures, writings and research. He began to work in a 14th-century castle in Monroy, near Cáceres in 1974. During this time he captured the phenomenon of transformation, from its origin to its cyclic end, in his Monroy series.

The surprising appearance of "signs" in his El número y las aguas series in 1978 marked another level of his inquiry into "the moment of formation." Palazuelo's Yanta paintings, exhibited in 1985, represented diagrams of two-dimensional force and structures of three-dimensional force, which constituted figures of conception. Constantly changing lineal rhythms characterized his Nigredo, Anamne and Sinesis series, which were exhibited at the Galería Soledad Lorenzo in Madrid in 1991.

Since 1955 Palazuelo has shared his relentless journey of formal discovery in twenty-three solo exhibitions, as well as in numerous group exhibitions in France, Spain and throughout Europe. Palazuelo continued the realization of the endless potentialities of form through his Sydus series.

In order to appreciate fully the unique nature of Pablo Palazuelo's art, one must trace his ongoing investigation of "form."

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Dispersion and pencil on canvas; 140 x 100 cm.

Polke was born in Oels in Lower Silesia. He fled with his family to Thuringia, in 1945 during the Expulsion of Germans after World War II. His family escaped from the Communist regime in East Germany in 1953, traveling first to West Berlin and then to West German Rhineland. Upon his arrival in West Germany, Polke began to spend time in galleries and museums and worked as an apprentice in a stained glass factory in Düsseldorf , before entering the Kunstakademie at age twenty. From 1961 to 1967 he studied at the Academy under Karl Otto Götz, Gerhard Hoehme and deeply influenced by his teacher Joseph Beuys. In 1963 Polke founded the painting movement "Kapitalistischer Realismus" with Gerhard Richter and Konrad Fischer. It is an anti-style of art, appropriating the pictorial short-hand of advertising. This title also referred to the realist style of art known as "Socialist Realism", then the official art doctrine of the Soviet Union but it also commented upon the consumer-driven art "doctrine" of western capitalism.

Polke's creative output during this time of enormous social, cultural, and artistic changes in Germany and elsewhere, demonstrate most vividly his imagination, sardonic wit, and subversive approach in his drawings, watercolors, and gouaches produced during the 1960s and 1970s. Embedded in these images are incisive and parodic commentaries on consumer society, the postwar political scene in Germany, and classic artistic conventions. The anarchistic element of the work Polke developed, was largely engendered by his mercurial approach. His irreverence for traditional painting techniques and materials and his lack of allegiance to any one mode of representation has established his now-respected reputation as a visual revolutionary. It was not unusual for Polke to combine household materials and paint, lacquers, pigments, screen print and transparent sheeting in one piece. A complicated "narrative" is often implicit in the multi-layered picture, giving the effect of witnessing the projection of a hallucination or dream through a series of veils.

Polke embarked on a series of world travels throughout the 1970s, photographing in Pakistan, Paris, New York City, Afghanistan, and Brazil. From 1977–1991 he was a professor at the Academy of Fine Arts, Hamburg. He settled in Cologne 1978, where he continued to live and work until his death in 2010 after a long battle with cancer. In 2007, Vienna's "Museum Moderner Kunst" held an exhibition of Polke's work that spanned his career from his appropriations of Pop imagery and continuing through decades of perplexing compositions and clever critiques to arrive at current works that employ a haze of chemicals, minerals, and paints.

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Lithograph.

A well-known artist, designer, and educator, Itten is perhaps best known for contributions to the Foundation Course (Vorkurs) at the Bauhaus in Weimar between 1919 and 1923. Born in Switzerland, Itten's early career was in primary school education but he gave it up to study fine art briefly at the École des Beaux Arts in Geneva. However, dissatisfied with the conservatism of the curriculum he went on to study mathematics and science at university before studying painting at the Stuttgart Academy from 1913 to 1916. Well aware of the avant-garde ideas of the Blaue Reiter and Cubism, he exhibited at the Sturm art gallery in Berlin. He then moved to Vienna to teach and paint at his own art school and, having been introduced to Walter Gropius by Alma Mahler (who was married to Gropius) took up a teaching post at the Bauhaus in 1919. In his classes he encouraged students to experiment with form, color, and texture but his commitment to eastern mysticism and the wearing of monk-like robes led to tensions with Gropius, the institution's director. Furthermore, in the difficult political and economic climate in early 1920s Germany Gropius came under increasing pressure to demonstrate the relevance of the Bauhaus in daily life. As a consequence, Itten's experiential and expressionist approach to creativity was increasingly at odds with Gropius' growing commitment to the machine aesthetic as a key goal of the Bauhaus's educational curriculum. On leaving the Bauhaus Itten studied philosophy in Zurich before setting up his own design school in Berlin from 1926 to 1931. He also became director of the technical school for textiles at Krefeld from 1932 to 1938. He left Germany, first working in Amsterdam and then moving to Zurich where he became the director of the Museum and School of Applied Arts from 1938 to 1953. From 1943 to 1953 he also directed the technical school for textiles and the Rietbergmuseum.

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Oil on canvas; 260 x 300 cm.

Jörg Immendorff was one of the best known contemporary German painters; he was also a sculptor, stage designer and art professor. He studied at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf under Joseph Beuys. The academy expelled him because of some of his left-wing political activities and neo-dadaist actions. From 1969 to 1980 he worked as an art teacher at a public school, and then as a free artist, holding visiting professorships all over Europe. In 1989 he became professor at the Städelschule in Frankfurt am Main and in 1996 he became professor at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf -- the same school that had dismissed him as a student.

His paintings are sometimes reminiscent of surrealism and often use irony and heavy symbolism to convey political ideas. He named one of his first acclaimed works "Hört auf zu malen!" ("Stop painting!"). He was a member of the German art movement Neue Wilde. Best known is his Cafe Deutschland series of sixteen large paintings (1977-1984) that were inspired by Renato Guttuso’s Caffè Greco; in these crowded colorful pictures, Immendorff had disco-goers symbolize the conflict between East and West Germany. Since the 1970s, he worked closely with the painter A. R. Penck from Dresden in East Germany. He created several stage designs, including two for the Salzburg Festival. In 1984 he opened the bar La Paloma in Hamburg St. Pauli and created a large bronze sculpture of Hans Albers there. He also contributed to the design of André Heller's avant-garde amusement park "Luna, Luna" in 1987. Immendorff created various sculptures; one spectacular example is a 25 m tall iron sculpture in the form of an oak tree trunk, erected in Riesa in 1999.

In 1997 he won the best endowed art prize in the world, the MARCO prize of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Monterrey, Mexico. In the following year he received the merit medal (Bundesverdienstkreuz) of the Federal Republic of Germany. He was a friend and the favorite painter of former German Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who chose Immendorff to paint the official portrait of Schröder for the Bundeskanzlerleramt. The portrait, which was completed by Immendorff's assistants, was revealed to the public in January 2007; the massive work has ironic character, showing the former Chancellor in stern heroic pose, in the colors of the German flag, painted in the style of an icon, surrounded by little monkeys. These "painter monkeys" were a recurring theme in Immendorff's work, serving as an ironic commentary on the artist's business.

Immendorff was diagnosed with Lou Gehrig's disease in 1998. When he could not paint with his left hand any more, he switched to the right. As of 2006, he used a wheelchair full-time and did not paint anymore; instead he directed his assistants to paint following his instructions. On May 27, 2007, at age 61, he succumbed to the disease.

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