Pinocchio, Jagger, My Marilyn.....
Richard Hamilton
The artist has, among other things through his professorate at the Newcastle University and his interpretation of pop-art, had a significant impact on the next generation of English artists and their development. He worked with graphics himself during his school years, and in 1956 he started the pop-era with the work "What is it that makes today's homes so different, so appealing?". In the work, he draws on various images picked up from mass culture. Two fundamental sources of inspiration in Hamilton's art have been the art and art theories of Marcel Duchamp and James Joyce's book "Ulysses". With regard to technique, his curiosity has made him search expressive possibilities in every conceivable media over the years, including work with the computer in recent years.
Richard Hamilton was born in 1922 in London.
David Hockney
David Hockney's style is easily recognisable, be it in paintings, drawings, photography or graphics. With a point of departure in among other things pop-art, he can be seen – as with other great artists – constantly evolving his style as a consequence of creativity. As early as 1961, he won "The Guiness Award for Etching" at a Paris biennale, and this award allowed his first journey to the US. He documented the journey through a series of etchings: "A Rake's Progress". The collection on display primarily has examples of Hockney's early works, including the mentioned series as well as several other exquisite graphics works.
In recent years, the style has become very forceful, which has been evident at the major Hockney exhibitions in Bonn and at Louisiana in Humlebæk in 2001 and 2002.
David Hockney was born in 1937 in Bradford, England, where he also received his education. He lives in Los Angeles.
Robert Rauschenberg
The artist's works are characterised by a collage-like composition. Artistic as well as non-artistic material like images from periodicals, newspapers, etc. are combined merrily into new images. Rauschenberg studied art in Paris and Kansas. He moved to New York in 1949, and held his first exhibition there two years later. Along with Robert Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, and Andy Warhol, he is considered to be one of the most significant American pop-artists. His technique includes experiments with the possibilities of graphics in order to achieve his quite often very delicate expressions. In the work "Sling-Shots #3" from 1985, he demonstrates physically how the countless layers of the work shape the image, and how the meaning of individual elements change with the addition of others. The two works on display by the entrance were also made by this artist.
Robert Rauschenberg was born in 1925 in Texas, USA.
Roy Lichtenstein
The artist exhibited works very early in Ohio, where he also received his education. He was soon to be attracted to popular art and returned to New York in 1961. The following year, he had his break-through at an exhibition at the Leo Castelli Gallery (also in New York) with his cartoon-inspired characters and series. Sources of inspiration for this are everyday life and images of modern day USA.
He created the work "Whamm" in 1963, and it was gradually to become an icon of the entire phenomenon of pop-art. The screen technique that can be seen in many of Lichtenstein's works also develops into sculpture and painting. Lichtenstein often borrowed subject parts from the bigwigs of art history like Picasso, Mondrian, van Gogh, and others.
Roy Lichtenstein was born in 1923 in New York. He died in 1997.
Andy Warhol
After his art studies in Pittsburgh, Warhol moved to New York in 1949, where he worked as an advertising designer and decorator for several years. He exhibited his work there as early as 1952, but an additional 10 years were to pass before his real breakthrough as a pop-artist. Warhol's art was deeply rooted in American minimalism. Warhol takes some of mass cultures everyday objects and make them universal, e.g. the Coke bottle and the Campbell soup can. Even idol worship receives a comment from his side in the shape of the well-known images with Marilyn Monroe in every conceivable colour but always in the same way. Even another side of American society is commented on with the lithograph that has the electric chair as the only subject. He dubbed his studio "The Factory", and it was to see frequent visits from society's vanguard.
Andy Warhol was born in 1928 in Pennsylvania to Slovak parents. He died in 1987.
Jim Dine
Jim Dine is extraordinarily productive. He works everywhere and moves constantly. In the 1960s, he belonged to the circle of pop-artists and spent a lot of time on installations of different kinds. His expression is generally American, "ruthless", and direct, but over the years the artist has adopted a somewhat more European style.
He is known for his very narrow choice of subjects: tools, the heart, the self-portrait, Venus de Milo, etc. These common everyday objects receive an almost human character in his images. Jim Dine has great expertise in the technical execution. He co-operates with world-leading printers, and his works are generally marked by an exquisite technical execution.
Jim Dine was born in 1935 in Cincinnati, USA. He has been a guest professor at several American universities and in London.
Chuck Close
Chuck Close began working with photography as stencil as early as 1965. He exhibited works for the first time in New York in 1970, and at first he was mostly noticed because of his hyper-realistic portraits in giant formats. Later, the minimalist point of departure evolved, and the image expression was relaxed to some extent.
The artist's way of constructing the image is a mosaic-like procedure that is quite unique to him. The choice of subject is portraits.
Chuck Close was born in 1940 in Monroe, Washington, USA. He has studied art in both Seattle, at the Yale University, and in Vienna.
Alex Katz
Alex Katz works in extension of the classic American realism. He intentionally makes his subjects appear "flat" – in order to imitate the printed image. Katz has made over 150 different graphics subjects. His wife Ada is a frequently occurring subject.
I Maine, USA, there is a one-man museum with over 400 of the artist's works. Furthermore, he has exhibited his works in most of the world.
Alex Katz was born in 1927 in New York, USA, where he resides today.
Jonathan Borofsky
Dreams play an important role in Borofsky's image world. He is also known for creating very large installations. At age 30, he presented a separate exhibition with works created from his childhood years and onward under the title of "Age Piece". The artist works with both sculpture and two-dimensional media, including very large graphics prints. The subjects with numbered sequences are also very typical of him.
Jonathan Borofsky was born in 1942 in Boston, USA, and he studied art in both Pittsburgh, Paris, and at Yale.
Hasse Persson
As a photographer, Hasse Persson has deep roots in American photographic tradition as it is known from Walker Evans, Robert Frank, Garry Winogrand, et al. He is also influenced by the political art that developed in the US during the 1960s. His photographic career started at Swedish newspapers in Borås and Stockholm, but from 1967 he worked in New York.
In 1968, he published the photo book "New York – kontrasternas stad" (New York – City of Contrasts) that received international attention. In the years that followed, an additional 3 books pursuing the American theme were to follow the first one. He even held several exhibitions, of which some were in Sweden.
Hasse Persson is the creative manager at the Hasselblad Center of Gothenburg.
Hasse Persson was born in 1942 in Borås, Sweden.
Marc Quinn
Sculpture, installations, graphics sheets – including photography – are this artist's preferred media of expression. Very early in his artistic career, he received inspiration from Dutch art from the 1600s that comprised among other things still life and highly staged portrait painting. This period was also, however, characterised by a minute attention to nature. The very accurate depiction of man and nature is an important aspect in Quinn's own art. He exhibited his works at an early age, and he has followed-up on his London debut with gallery exhibitions on 3 continents.
The works of the collection followed the artist's exhibition "Garden" in Milan in 2000. Here, he has photographed exotic plants in aquariums that were filled with transparent silicone and then processed the photographs even further.
Marc Quinn was born in 1964 in London, England.
Julian Opie
Julian Opie's subject world is dominated by simple shapes. Subjects are often found in computer processed photographs. The image surface often appears "flat", and in some images he reduces the subject to a strictly symbolic character: The subject is recognisable, and then not quite...
Opie spent a few years in the mid-90s in France and has exhibited his works eagerly in most of Europe. He is represented in several collections, including MOMA, New York.
Julian Opie was born in 1958 in London, where he also resides today.
Sean Scully
Sean Scully works with powerful oil paintings with lines and squares, and with graphics and photography. He started working with graphics as early as in 1968, but since the early 1980s, it has been a more continued part of his art.
The artist is somewhat cosmopolitan with changing bases in Barcelona, New York, and London, and he has held exhibitions in many countries. From age 20-30, he has resided permanently in England.
Sean Scully was born in 1945 in Dublin, Ireland.
Zhang Huan
He creates his works with a spatial expression, outdoors or indoors. Sometimes, a single person is his subject. Other works have many persons involved. The body is in focus as a subject of performances and photography. The first time the artist presented himself naked – in Beijing in 1993 – in connection with his artistic work, he had to pay a hefty fine in order to avoid charges. According to Zhang Huan himself, his manner of presenting himself relates to the fact that he constantly faces problems in life. Conflicts have often resulted in physical exclusion and have contributed to his experience of being left out: "I decided that the only way for me to survive as an artist was to use my body as a subject and means of expression in my art", he once said. One photograph documents a performance where the artist spends 1 hour at a public toilet in Beijing covered in honey in order to attract flies.
Zhang Huan was born in 1965 in the Henan province, China, and has since 1998 been living in New York.
Kiki Smith
Kiki Smith became a public figure in the mid-80s with her studies of the human body. She makes embroideries and drawings and not least sculptures in many different materials. In the early 90s, she took up new subject matters, and birds, sceneries, crystals, and plants can be seen in her works.
Since 1996 where she made her first prints, she has worked regularly with prints and photography. Sceneries or scenery elements are often the point of departure for the subject matter in these works. As it can be seen from the artist's work in this collection, the technique / subject matter combinations are very delicately in tune with the overall expression.
The artist moved to the US in the early 70s and studied art at the Hartford School of Art. In 1976, she moved to New York.
Kiki Smith was born in 1954 in Nuremberg, Germany.
Barbara Kruger
Red, white, and black colours are predominant in Barbara Kruger's works. Since the late 70s, she has worked with among other things words in her works that are often very directly addressing the audience. They strike us because her choice of subject is so closely linked to our everyday life and images and thus the imaginary world that surrounds us. Her works have a powerful and expressive story. Kruger works with two-dimensional images as well as sculpture and installation, and she is also characterised by the inclusion of image forms that are not normally considered artistic media of expression: Newspaper covers, postcards, bags, t-shirts, etc. In this way, she has deep roots in the tradition of pop-culture but also in some of the theories on the relationship between life and art that evolved from Marcel Duchamp's theory of art.
Barbara Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, USA. She lives and works in both New York and Los Angeles.
Louise Bourgeois
Around the year 1940 Louise Bourgeois begin to take interest in working with sculptural expressions, very often large-scaled and with organic shapes, and she is today a highly estimated artist all around the world. Her materials can be wood, rubber, stone, bronze, knitting and others. She received influence from the surrealist movement. A theme that occupies her a lot is childhood (her own), because of its magic, mystery and drama.
Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Copenhagen, presented a large exhibitions with Louise Bourgeois in 2003. The artist started her artistic career with graphic and painting as her primarily means of expression. She studied art in her youth, first in France, later in the USA.
Louise Bourgeois is born 1911 in Paris. She immigrated to the USA in 1938. She lives in New York.
Jane Bown
Jane Bown has over 50 years of experience working as a photographer at "The Observer Newspaper". Through her work, she has photographed countless artists, politicians, and other celebrities. She lets her "victims" assume relaxed and immediate poses and photographs them in the same manner. Their personality is often very evident from the portraits, and Bown has received medals and excellent reviews on her work.
Technically, she works exclusively with B/W photography, and more often that not she utilises only natural daylight. 25 years ago – in 1980 – the National Portrait Gallery in London held an exhibition of her works.
Jane Bown was born in 1925 in England.
Jane Bown
Jane Bown has over 50 years of experience working as a photographer at "The Observer Newspaper". Through her work, she has photographed countless artists, politicians, and other celebrities. She lets her "victims" assume relaxed and immediate poses and photographs them in the same manner. Their personality is often very evident from the portraits, and Bown has received medals and excellent reviews on her work.
Technically, she works exclusively with B/W photography, and more often that not she utilises only natural daylight. 25 years ago – in 1980 – the National Portrait Gallery in London held an exhibition of her works.
Jane Bown was born in 1925 in England.
Tim Rautert
In the 70ies he became known for his photographic reportage's, made for the German ZeitMagasin. At the same time he worked in co-operation with a number of German industry enterprises as BMW, Volkswagen, Thyssen, Krupp, and similar, as well as i.e. a central hospital and an aircraft plant. His concern was the change of the working process and the way in which the human being disappears from the course of production in these big companies. And how the production instead is be being surveyed by monitors etc. Hereby he added new viewpoints to the traditional way of creating industry photography. Technically he – as a kind of comment to the general technological change – developed a highly artificial pictorial language, and he influences the whole genre a lot. Tim Rautert was a professor in photography at Hochschule für Grafik- und Buchkunst in Leipzig since 1993.
Tim Rautert is born 1941.
Anders Krisár
Anders Krisár works on adding new qualities to photography and utilises its potential to creating enigmatic and strangely beautiful images, in which visible reality and energy meet.
In the two works of the collection, the photographic exposure time has been kept so long that a group of naked dancers can be seen as nothing but an immaterialised haze in front of the heavy brick building.
Krisár has studied at a London university, worked with advertising in Denmark and Sweden, and studied piano music in Stockholm and New York. Since 2000, he has expressed himself through photography, and since 2002 his works have been exhibited on several occasions in the US and in Sweden.
Tracey Moffat
Moffat is a multi media artist who works with short films and video, among other things. She has, among other events, participated in the Cannes Film Festival. Themes such as life and death, sexuality and power, dreams and recollection are central to her work as an artist. She constructs some of her works as small imagery adventures or serial stories, consisting of several more or less interconnected or singular images. The singular image subjects are staged tableaux where different image recollections and associations converge.
As for the rest of her generation, tv, computers, movies and commercials are a significant part of the artist's immediate surroundings and everyday life. Her works belong somewhere between reality and a surreal, disturbing dream world.
Tracey Moffat was born in 1960 in Brisbane, Australia. She lives and works both in New York and Sydney.