The contemporary artist

Has contemporary art become an art of concepts, leaving emotion to old movements?

If we consider contemporary art from the angle of living artists, their number is dizzying.

We have never known in the history of art such a crowd of contemporary artists. We are directly witnessing a globalization of artistic production.

The contemporary artist, defined as a living artist, is at the heart of a cultural industry which continues to grow.
A work created in one country can be seen all over the planet thanks to the concept of an online art gallery . This is a game changer from the traditional art gallery model. Many of these galleries are being forced to quickly adapt to selling art online.

Many amateur artists become professionals.

The media coverage of contemporary art stars, through extraordinary sales or prestigious exhibitions, is the driving force behind this great global movement.

We can deplore it, but more than 90% of the art market is concentrated on a few artists. Major collectors and institutions such as foundations, museums and state organizations make them their muses.

Behind this window, many creators work and some have a bright future.

From artisan to contemporary artist

During the Renaissance, the artist gradually differentiated himself from the craftsman. He is considered according to his style, his work, his history and in particular his personality. ( Vasari's Lives of the Best Painters, Sculptors and Architects (1574)). It is the first catalog intended for wealthy collectors.

The fashion for cabinets of curiosities and libraries, where people meet to talk about politics and business, gives impetus to the art market which must be present in these privileged places.

It shows its power and culture by exhibiting the most beautiful paintings.

Thus, the “collection” extends to the upper middle class, which provokes speculation.

The great artists of the Renaissance like Michelangelo (1475-1564), Raphael (1483-1520) already sold their paintings at a very high price.

Northern Italy with its cities of Venice, Milan, Rome and Florence dominate art. In the Netherlands, Flemish art developed.

The painters emancipate themselves from the purely religious concept. They became known throughout Europe for their recognizable style. We are looking for these painters.

They attracted the first merchants like Giovanni Arnolfini , who settled in Bruges while his daughter remained in Paris. He commissioned a painting representing him accompanied by his wife (The Arnolfini Spouses, 1434) from the painter Jan Van Eyck (around 1390 – 1441). This painting is one of the best known from the period of the Flemish masters.

New relationships then take place between the artist and the dealer. Priority is given to the original work, while artists still largely lived from painting copies.

The themes and subjects painted diversify and do not only focus on religion. Scenes of daily life also interest collectors.

A new hierarchy of artists appears. The value of the works increases a lot for some. These new relationships between the artist and the dealer will transform the value of the works, both financially and artistically. The artist becomes freer and less dependent on a patron.

It is therefore a winning economy between the dealer and the artist. Both collaborate, they are linked by a common interest. The merchant, who is a connoisseur, also becomes an artistic partner.

He knows the artist, the painter, the sculptor and highlights them. It sometimes influences his choice. These new relationships between artist and dealer will transform the art market.

It was only in the 19th century that this market was structured on a larger scale. Then appeared the auction rooms and the first exhibitions of painting and sculpture, which allowed collectors to buy art. The antique shop also offers works for sale.

Best-selling living artists

We often hear that works of art only increase in value when the artist who created the work has died. This is partly true, but a few living artists are at the heart of enormous financial speculation. Contemporary painting is not dead and rather very much alive.

The painter David Hockney (1937) has been painting works over the years inspired by various artistic movements such as pop art or hyperrealism. He has published several works on the technique of the great masters. He is one of the greatest figurative artists. At Christie's, the auction of the painting “Portrait of an Artist” reached the sum of 90 million dollars.

Edward Joseph Ruscha, who is a pop art artist (born 1937) – has sold a total of 799 works for a total of $145 million.

In a completely different field, the Chinese painter Fan Zeng , considered a modern master of traditional Chinese art, sold a total of more than fifteen hundred works for a total amount of 185 million dollars. Only one of his works, “Finishing Touch of the Dragon Eye” sold at auction for more than two million euros.

Peter Doig (born 1959), sold 254 works, for a total of $197 million. He shares a generation and the same trajectory as artists such as Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, who emerged in the 1990s – notably thanks to the art collector Charles Saatchi .

A painting by Peter Doig, titled "White Canoe" and dating from 1990, made headlines when it was sold by Sotheby's in 2007, as the most expensive painting ever made by a living artist, for 5.7 million pounds sterling. Moreover, Peter Doig described it as indecent to see his works sold for such sums.

We could also talk about Yayoi Kusama (born in 1929) and her world of colored bubbles, one of the best-selling artists in the world.

Richard Prince (born 1949). His famous 1989 image "Untitled (Cowboy)" which is a copy of a cigarette advertisement. It was the first photograph to sell for more than a million dollars at Christie's in New York in 2005.

Richard Prince's interest in consumer culture and his method of copying advertising images would be followed by other artists. Cindy Sherman, Jack Goldstein, Barbara Kruger and Sherrie Levine also use photography to blur the line between reality and artifice.

It took Chinese artist Zeng Fanzhi to sell her work “Mask Series No. 6” to an American tourist in Shanghai for just over 13 thousand euros before the same painting sold for 8.7 million 'euros at Christie's. The sale made an American tourist a rich man.

We could also cite the painter Cui Ruzhuo (born in 1944) with a total of 309 works sold for millions of dollars. Cui Ruzhuo is a Chinese artist renowned for his images of flowers, birds and landscapes.

The painter Ruzhuo sold a painting entitled “Lotus” for no less than 15 million dollars at Christie's in Hong Kong in 2011. Then “Landscape in the Snow”, for the staggering sum of 30 million dollars, at the Poly auction in Hong Kong in 2015. He is the best-selling Chinese artist of all time.

Chistopher Wool (born in 1955), ranks third among best sellers with 255 works sold for a total of $378 million. He began painting in the 1980s, a time when many considered painting outdated and unrelated to avant-garde practices. This demonstrates that no rule is absolute in this area and that it is investors who create values and not institutions.

Jeff Koons (born 1955) is in second place with sales exceeding $438 million.

Jeff Koons' high-profile works include a series of three gilded porcelain statues depicting musician Michael Jackson (1985) and the iconic 40-foot-tall floral puppy sculpture, Poppy (1992). Without forgetting the famous Balloon dog, sold at Christie's in 2013 for the modest sum of 58.4 million dollars. Balloon dog then becomes “the most expensive work sold by a living artist at auction”. Rabbit, another series of sculptures by Jeff Koons created in 1986, will break this record in 2019, with the sale of one of three copies from the series reaching the sum of $91.1 million.

Gerhard Richter (born in 1932) is the painting phenomenon by the scale of his sales. One thousand four hundred works sold for more than a billion and 207 million dollars.

Richter is known for his "photographic paintings", particularly landscapes, as well as his abstract paintings. His works present a tension between the reality depicted and the actuality of the paintings, the process and the material.

One of its trademarks is a blurred surface, which gives the image a photographic appearance

Representative artists of contemporary art

Donald Judd

Donald Judd is one of the most important minimalist artists. He conceived the concept of “specific objects”.

The object itself is elevated to pure art without being linked to the feelings or social conditions of the artist. It pursues the essence of matter to the extreme limit.

The works are composed only of simple colors, lines such as straight lines and surfaces, and materials such as wood and iron that are used in industry.

In 1986, he established the Sinati Foundation to support artists, and is an artist who has contributed to society by getting involved in the environmental protection movement.

Yayoi Kusama

She is nicknamed the “queen of avant-garde”. It is known for its colorful dots. She is one of the greatest Japanese artists.

From a young age, she suffered from hallucinations and auditory hallucinations, and to escape them, she painted circles to fill the space. Her desire was to abolish the boundary between herself and the world, by immersing herself in infinite repetition**.**

The pumpkin is the most famous motif in Yayoi Kusama's work. It is a work influenced by the fact that his biological family ran a seed business and that pumpkin was a familiar vegetable to him.

“What attracted me to pumpkin was its generous, unadorned appearance and its vegetal strength. »

Lee Ufan “Relational”

He lives in Japan, but he was born in South Korea. Lee Ufan is a Mono movement artist.

Mono-ha is an artistic movement that uses raw materials such as stone, wood, paper, cotton, iron plates and paraffin. The goal is to express the state of things using them as the main characters with as little human intervention as possible.

“Relatum” by Lee Ufan is an iconic work. It represents a large stone which rests on a plate of broken glass.

James Turrell

James Turrell creates very well-known installations.

He expresses the relationship between light and perception and produces works around the theme of the existence of light.

“Blue Planet Sky” is a permanent exhibition that can be viewed free of charge at the 21st Century Museum of Contemporary Art, Kanazawa.

Called "Turrell's Room", looking into the space, there is a square cut sky in the middle part of the square ceiling.

The viewer can discover the sky and the light in constant evolution.

Anish Kapoor

World-renowned artist Anish Kapoor was discovered as a Turner Prize winner in 1991. He is an Indian sculptor.

It raises the question of visual perception and spatial design in a minimalist organic form. He produces works that integrate European modernism, Buddhism and Indian philosophy.

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons was sold at auction for the highest price among living artists.

He is a fan of the ready-made and pop art artistic movement.

His works express kitsch with secular motifs and products of popular culture.

Since his beginnings, he has continued to create works using ready-made products, such as his first works "Inflatable Flower and Bunny", which consists of balloon bunnies and flowers with mirrors.

The “Celebration” series is a giant mirror-finish stainless steel sculpture, based on balloon art.

Andreas Gursky

German-born photographer Andreas Gursky is famous as part of the “Becher school”. He received teachings from Bernd Becher and his wife Hilla. Their particularity was to take photos of old buildings from the industrial era.

He is an internationally renowned artist who creates large format photographs of modern society. His work is increasingly digitized, from a panoramic perspective.

“99 Cents” is produced by photographing stores that sell 99 cent items.

This work, which shows products presented in an endless row, is similar to an abstract painting.

Felix Gonzalez Torres

Of Cuban origin, Felix Gonzalez Torres is known as a pioneer of relational art.

One of her performances “Untitled (fake medicine)” is an installation in which candies weighing equal to her own weight and the weight of her lover who died of AIDS are spread out on the floor of the exhibition hall. The public can freely take the candies home. Every day the candies are replaced.

Felix Gonzalez Torres died of AIDS at the age of 38 .

Cai Guo-Qiang

Cai Guo-Qiang is from Fujian, China. He moved to Japan in 1986.

One of his most famous works is the performance “Gunpowder Painting”. It was produced by burning gunpowder.

He creates many works inspired by feng shui, traditional Chinese arts, Chinese medicine, fireworks, etc. and incorporates quotes from old Maoist and socialist sayings into his works.

In 1999, he received numerous awards, including the Golden Lion at the 48th Venice Biennale, and began to attract worldwide attention.

Takashi Murakami

Takashi Murakami is a well-known Japanese artist.

“My Lonesome Cowboy” is a life-size figure that is also a symbol of otaku culture, joining Japanese pop culture and otaku culture with the context of Western art.

At Sotheby's auction in 2008, a work sold for approximately $15.2 million, setting a record for the highest bid for work by an Asian artist.

Damien Hirst

Damien Hirst is a representative of the conceptual artists called Young British Artists (YBA), who emerged in the 1990s.

From an early age he was interested in death and, while attending Goldsmiths College, he worked in a morgue and photographed decapitated bodies.

In one of his works, a cow and calf soaked in formalin are shown cut in half in a glass case.

This shocking work was exhibited at the Venice Biennale in 1993 and received the Turner Prize.

Leandro Erlich

Argentinian artist Leandro Erlich is known for his humorous works that deal with sight and perception.

“Using optical illusions, I explore how people perceive and interact with a familiar scene when it transforms into a strange space. »

A “building” with a person clinging to the facade plays with gravity.

The facade is on the ground, facing a large mirror tilted at an angle of approximately 45 degrees.

KAWS

Kaws is a graffiti artist. He is a toy designer and sculptor.

He produces works that merge art and toys by creating balloons and sculptures. It uses famous characters such as the batten-eyed character "Companion" and Snoopy as motifs.

“The KAWS Album” is a work based on the Beatles album “Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band" and the animated series The Simpsons.

Banksy

Banksy calls himself a “masked graffiti artist”. He lives in England.

He is famous for selling a work that self-destructed immediately after being auctioned.

Banksy changed the title of the work to “Love is in the Trash Can”.

Contemporary sculptors, the revolution!

Until today, sculpture has been mainly representative. A major shift is taking place with contemporary sculpture. The old rules seem to have disappeared for many artists. The multiplication of synthetic materials and the reuse of everyday objects contribute to the production of a new three-dimensional art.

Many contemporary sculptors attach great importance to the technical work of the material. Gigantism is a recent field of experimentation.

Contemporary photographer

The main question of new photographers concerns the reappropriation of previous practices. If press photography remains a direct testimony to today's world, what can we say about these hybrid works between photography and digital processing? Sometimes, it is the context which brings the main character of a photograph, but often, it is the digital transformation which constitutes the interest of the photographic work. The contemporary photographer today finds himself faced with a multitude of possibilities and choices, which range from film photography to digital photo processing, including all hybrid forms and various treatments. A new world of creation opens up to the artist photographer.

Contemporary photography remains a popular and very dynamic art. The advent of digital technology is also changing the way works are produced, while film photography is being rediscovered and gaining new followers every day, both among professional artists and amateurs. The world of cryptocurrencies and blockchains is currently shaking up the market, particularly with NFTs.

Contemporary painter

Defining oneself as a contemporary painter requires answering questions that concern our time on the practice of painting, but above all on the dynamics of our societies and the way in which contemporary art can change our outlook and influence events in the world. the life.

In our time, an artist must anchor himself in a social, economic and cultural reality. He must invent new art practices in a context he knows well. It must free itself from the power of art galleries by diversifying its sales channels.

Contemporary artists take a fresh and relentless look at their time.

Furthermore, they contribute to raising awareness within our society, in the same way as scientists, about the disruptions in our environment in terms of climate, biodiversity, overconsumption, etc. We could add the problems of social and political instability. The goal of most of these artists is to change our view of art to question our future.

New technologies are not used for what they are, but for what they produce on the mind. It is in reality a quest for a new relationship with reality that contemporary artists tirelessly seek.

Art4you Gallery does not have overvalued stars in its catalog. However, we have assembled a collection of high quality works, available in our online store.

The Art4You artists and their works have been carefully selected by us, for the quality and mastery of their work, but also for their great artistic value. We believe in them, in their work, and we share their values.

Painters, sculptors and photographers present their collections and their contemporary art creations to you.

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