06.06.1936–05.01.2011
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Artists
Biographies, facts and images with open sources and verified rights.
Found: 1775
26.07.1937–22.03.1980
Hélio Oiticica
Hélio Oiticica (1937–1980) began in Rio de Janeiro with geometric painting, and by the mid-1960s he was making boxes with little doors, walk-in installations and capes that viewers put on themselves. His work “Tropicália” (1967) gave its name to the Tropicália movement in Brazilian culture. In 1959 he joined the Neo-Concrete group alongside Lygia Clark and Lygia Pape.
22.10.1925–12.05.2008
Robert Rauschenberg
In the mid-1950s Robert Rauschenberg (1925–2008) began bringing things from the streets of New York into painting: a quilt, a stuffed goat, a car tyre. These Combines erased the boundary between painting and sculpture, and his silkscreens of the early 1960s brought him close to Pop art. In 1964 he won the Grand Prize for painting at the Venice Biennale.08.10.1955–03.06.2014
Gordon Bennett
Gordon Bennett (1955–2014) came to art late: he left school at fifteen and graduated from art college in Brisbane in 1988, yet three years later his painting “Nine Ricochets” won him one of Australia’s leading art fellowships. Descended from the Birri Gubba and Darumbal peoples and from settlers from Britain, he worked again and again with Australian racism and the colonial past.
1360–17.10.1428
Andrei Rublev
Andrei Rublev (c. 1360 – c. 1430), a monk and icon painter, is known from four mentions in the chronicles: mural paintings in cathedrals in the Moscow Kremlin, in Vladimir, and in the Trinity-Sergius and Andronikov monasteries. Only the icon of the Trinity is indisputably by his hand. In 1551 the Stoglav Council made his manner the model for church painting, and in 1988 the Russian Orthodox Church canonised him as a venerable saint.01.02.1920–09.04.2013
Zao Wou-Ki
Zao Wou-Ki (1920–2013) studied painting and calligraphy in Hangzhou, came to Paris in 1948 and spent most of his life in France. Under the influence of Klee he turned to non-figurative painting by the mid-1950s, joining it with Chinese ink work, and titled his canvases with the date of their completion. He was a member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts and a laureate of the Praemium Imperiale.30.04.1933–05.01.2016
Uche Okeke
Uche Okeke (1933–2016), a Nigerian draughtsman, painter, sculptor and teacher, was among the founders of the Zaria Art Society in 1958, and from the 1970s at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka he built a school on uli, the traditional painting of Igbo women. He illustrated Chinua Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart” and assembled the archive and collection of the Asele Institute in his native Nimo.
07.04.1927–03.05.2004
Lygia Pape
Lygia Pape (1927–2004) began in Rio de Janeiro with geometric woodcuts, signed the Neo-Concrete Manifesto in 1959 and went on to make more and more works that the viewer enters with the body: from the “Book of Creation” to the cube-shaped “O Ovo” (The Egg) and the gold threads of the “Ttéias”. From 1972 she taught at universities in Rio de Janeiro.
19.01.1954–present
Cindy Sherman
Since the 1970s Cindy Sherman (b. 1954) has photographed herself in other people’s roles, acting as author, make-up artist, costumier and model. She made her name with the series “Untitled Film Stills” (1977–1980), in which she plays the heroines of non-existent films. Large colour formats followed, then the “History Portraits”, “Clowns” and “Society Portraits”; retrospectives have been held at the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the National Portrait Gallery in London.
17.12.1924–14.10.1990
Clifton Pugh
Clifton Pugh (1924–1990) won Australia’s Archibald Prize for portraiture three times, including for his portrait of Prime Minister Gough Whitlam (1972). A landscape painter and portraitist influenced by German Expressionism and Kandinsky, in 1951 he bought a block of bush near Melbourne, and around him there grew up the artists’ colony of Dunmoochin.
01.10.1541–07.04.1614
El Greco
Doménikos Theotokópoulos, known as El Greco (1541–1614), began as an icon painter on Crete, learned from the Venetians, worked in Rome and from 1577 until his death lived in Toledo. There he painted “The Burial of the Count of Orgaz”, “View of Toledo” and “Opening of the Fifth Seal”. He signed in Greek letters, often adding the word “Cretan”; in the twentieth century he was seen as a forerunner of Expressionism and Cubism.
0956–1026
Fan Kuan
Fan Kuan worked at the turn of the tenth and eleventh centuries, under the Northern Song dynasty, and is remembered above all for a single scroll: “Travelers among Mountains and Streams” in the National Palace Museum in Taipei, a landscape on silk about two meters high. Together with Li Cheng, with whom he most likely studied, and Guan Tong, he is called one of the three founders of the Chinese landscape school.
21.05.1942–16.10.1991
Dumile Feni
The South African artist Dumile Feni (1942–1991) drew in pencil and charcoal, painted pictures with sculptural elements and made sculptures, often about life under apartheid. From 1968 he lived in self-imposed exile in London, Los Angeles and New York, mostly in extreme poverty. His panel “African Guernica” was shown outside South Africa for the first time in 2026.
06.07.1840–26.08.1912
José María Velasco Gómez
José María Velasco (1840–1912) painted the Valley of Mexico for almost his whole life and made its landscape an image of the country: “The Valley of Mexico” alone he repeated in seven versions. A pupil of the Italian Eugenio Landesio, he taught for decades at the Academy of San Carlos, won medals in Philadelphia and Paris, illustrated scientific publications and even described a new species of salamander.
15.05.1930–present
Jasper Johns
In 1954 the American artist Jasper Johns (born 1930) destroyed his earlier work and began painting flags, targets, maps, letters and numbers, signs everyone knows, which on canvas become image and abstraction at once. He is associated with Neo-Dada and pop art; besides painting he makes sculpture and works extensively in printmaking.
26.04.1798–13.08.1863
Eugène Delacroix
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) made his name at the Paris Salon of the 1820s with “The Massacre at Chios” and “The Death of Sardanapalus”, and in 1830 he painted “Liberty Leading the People”. A journey to Morocco gave him subjects for the rest of his life. His last decades went into murals for the Palais Bourbon, the Palais du Luxembourg, the Louvre and the church of Saint-Sulpice; his Journal is still read today.
1427–1509
Shen Zhou
Shen Zhou (1427–1509) spent his life as a wealthy scholar-recluse near Suzhou: he refused office, cared for his mother, and wrote poetry, practiced calligraphy and painted. He brought the manner of the four Yuan masters back into Ming painting and is regarded as the founder of the Wu School. His best-known work, “Lofty Mount Lu” (1467), is in Taipei.1934–23.08.2021
Yusuf Grillo
The Nigerian painter Yusuf Grillo (1934–2021) was one of the founders of the Zaria Art Society, the so-called “Zaria Rebels”, and the first president of the Society of Nigerian Artists. He is recognized by his elongated, stylized figures and the predominance of blue, which is compared to adire textiles. From 1962 to 1987 he taught at Yaba, in Lagos.17.08.1923–27.07.2019
Carlos Cruz-Diez
Carlos Cruz-Diez (1923–2019), a native of Caracas, lived in Paris from 1960 and became one of the leading figures of kinetic art. He regarded color as an autonomous reality that needs neither form nor support, and for sixty years explored it in eight series, from the “Physichromies” to the “Chromosaturations”. His monumental works stand in airports, at dams and in squares in Venezuela and Europe.
24.02.1836–29.09.1910
Winslow Homer
Winslow Homer (1836–1910) earned his living for almost twenty years as an illustrator, including at the fronts of the Civil War, and then became America’s foremost painter of the sea. From 1883 he lived on the Prouts Neck peninsula in Maine, painting the struggle between man and the ocean, and on trips to Florida, the Bahamas and the Adirondacks he worked in watercolor.
1267–08.01.1337
Giotto
In 1303–1305 the Florentine Giotto di Bondone (c. 1267–1337) painted the Scrovegni Chapel in Padua, where figures acquired weight, volume and recognisable feelings. He worked in Rome, Assisi, Florence and Naples, and in 1334 he was appointed chief architect of Florence and designed the cathedral bell tower now known as Giotto’s Campanile.
07.10.1928–21.04.1980
Sohrab Sepehri
In Iran, Sohrab Sepehri (1928–1980) is known above all for the poems of his collection “The Eight Books”, which are quoted in the press and included in school textbooks. Yet he graduated from the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Tehran, studied lithography in Paris and Tokyo, and from 1962 lived by selling his books and paintings, preparing between fifty and a hundred and fifty new works for each exhibition.1929–13.04.2014
Peter Clarke
Until the age of twenty-seven Peter Clarke (1929–2014) worked in the docks of Simon’s Town near Cape Town, and he became an artist during a three-month holiday in a farming village. He made his name with woodcuts and later with collage; he also wrote poems and stories. In 1972, under the Group Areas Act, he was forced to move from his native Simon’s Town to Ocean View.
05.07.1924–09.10.2017