Select an artist to learn more about them and explore their works in the ARTIST ROOMS collection.
Carl Andre has been a central figure in American art since the 1960’s. The rigorous simplicity of his geometrically repeated forms has made his work the epitome of minimalist sculpture.
Diane Arbus' (1923-71) profoundly original works record the astonishing variety of attitudes, emotions and appearances to be found amongst the people around us, blurring the line between art and reportage.
In 2016, Phyllida Barlow became the fortieth artist to join the ARTIST ROOMS collection, with the introduction of untitled: upturnedhouse, 2 2012, a gift from the artist. Phyllida Barlow uses everyday household or DIY materials which she transforms through processes...
Georg Baselitz (b. 1938) is one of the major artists to come out of the former East Germany, and among the leading figures who helped to re-establish German painting after World War II.
The German sculptor Joseph Beuys (1921-1986) is recognised as one of the most influential figures of the second half of the twentieth century. Artist, political and social activist, scientist and educator, Beuys’s philosophy proposed the healing power and social function of art, especially in the context of the period following World War Two.
Louise Bourgeois (1911-2010) was a French-American sculptor, painter and printmaker whose confessional, autobiographical approach to art left behind one of the most extraordinary bodies of work of the past century.
The Latvian-born artist Vija Celmins (b.1938) uses a variety of media including charcoal, graphite and erasers to produce exquisitely intricate work which includes paintings, drawings and prints based on photographs of natural phenomena, notably the sea, deserts and the night sky.
Martin Creed (b.1968) takes commonplace events and objects as the subject of, and the material for, art that celebrates everyday life. His magpie enthusiasm for the beautiful and strange all about us is expressed in a wide variety of forms, including performance, film, painting, installation and music.
Ellen Gallagher (b. 1965) comes from Irish and African-American stock. Her work draws on a broad spectrum of influences that spans the writings of Gertrude Stein and Herman Melville, the art of Sol LeWitt and Agnes Martin, the musical and theatrical tradition of blackface minstrelsy, the free jazz of Sun Ra, the Black Power movement and the visual tropes of advertising targeted at African-Americans.
Gilbert (b. 1943) and George (b.1942) have been important figures in the international art world since 1970. Working as a pair and presenting themselves as ‘living sculpture’, incorporating themselves and their lives into their art, they set out to provoke their viewers, to make them think and question conventions and taboos.
Douglas Gordon (b. 1966) is a Scottish artist, working with photographs, film, text and installations. He explores the nature of perception and memory and force us to reassess how we fabricate meaning from our experience of the world.
Johan Grimonprez (b. 1962) is a Belgian artist and film-maker who first came to prominence when his hour-long video montage 'dial H-I-S-T-0-R-Y' was exhibited at the Pompidou Centre and then Documenta X in 1997.
Richard Hamilton (1922 – 2011) was not only a key figure in the development of Pop Art in Britain but also one of the movement’s pioneers internationally. His work, which draws from and comments on popular culture, technology, the mass...
Damien Hirst is the most prominent artist to have emerged from the British art scene in the 1990s. He uses the preoccupations and passions of the time to confront the age-old fears of his audience about the fragility of life, of death and decay.
Jenny Holzer's use of language has made her one of the pioneers of conceptual art. Working on both a small and, more recently, large scale, her use of new technologies and subtle understanding of architectural and even landscape spaces shows her to be one of the most most significant, uncompromising and truth-seeking artists of our time.
Primarily working from life, Katz (b. 1927) produces images in which line and form are expressed through carefully composed strokes and planes of flat colour.
A key figure in European post-war culture Anselm Kiefer (b.1945) derives his art from his awareness of history, theology, mythology, literature and philosophy and the extraordinary ability to work with all kinds of materials from lead to concrete, from straw to human hair and sunflower seeds.
Pursuing his interests in the basic dreams and desires of human society from the cradle to the grave and in the psychological, economic and social structures of the historic past Koons, like Warhol and others, takes objects from the 'real' world and renders them iconic by changing their size and turning them into High Art.
Jannis Kounellis (1936 - 2017) was born in the Greek port city of Piraeus, but lived in Rome after 1956. His first exhibition in Rome in 1960 was titled 'Kounellis Alphabet' and combined living and inert materials. He used steel...
Sol LeWitt (1928 - 2007), a hugely respected and influential theorist as well as practitioner, was a pioneer of Conceptual and Minimalist art during the 1960s. The first of his 'Sentences on Conceptual Art' (1968) reads ‘Conceptual artists are mystics...
Roy Lichtenstein was an American pop artist. During the 1960s, along with Andy Warhol, Jasper Johns, and James Rosenquist, he became a leading figure in the new art movement. His work defined the premise of pop art through parody. Inspired...
Richard Long (b. 1945) was among the foremost of a new generation of British sculptors to emerge in the 1960s who extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond the confines of the studio and gave it meaningful existence as part of the place, time and substance of which it is made.
The American photographer Robert Mapplethorpe (1946 - 1989) pushed the boundaries of his medium with both his subject matter and innovative techniques. Originally trained as a sculptor, his understanding of the human body in relation to the light which reveals...
The career of Agnes Martin (1912 - 2004) spanned nearly five decades during which she came to be regarded as one of America's foremost abstract painters.
Don McCullin (b. 1935) is one of the world's greatest photojournalists, famous around the world for his work in conflict zones from Northern Ireland to Vietnam. McCullin learned his trade in the Royal Air Force in the 1950s, during which...
A major figure in the Arte Povera movement, the Italian artist Mario Merz (1925 - 2003) combined a fascination with the material and metaphorical qualities of natural objects with ideas regarding infinity and repetition. Much of his work was based...
Initially trained in graphic design, Moriyama moved to Tokyo in 1961 where he was taken on as an assistant by experimental filmmaker and photographer Eikoh Hosoe. Pursuing a freelance career in 1964, he soon acquired a reputation as a provocative...
Ron Mueck (b. 1958) has become internationally famous for his unnervingly lifelike sculptures of the human figure, executed with extraordinary technical precision.
Since the mid-1960s the American sculptor Bruce Nauman (b. 1941) has been one of the most highly respected and influential figures in contemporary art. He is noted for his toughness, his refusal to compromise, his exploratory way of working and...
Charles Ray (b. 1953) has worked with film, photography, sculpture and installations to explore the notion of representation and to conflate reality with the surreal. Based in Los Angeles, his early practice can be viewed in the context of the...
Gerhard Richter was born in 1932 in Dresden, which after World War II became part of the German Democratic Republic. He left the DDR shortly before the Berlin Wall went up in 1962 and settled in Düsseldorf. He has since...
Ed Ruscha’s exploration of language and American West Coast culture centred on Hollywood has made him one of the pre-eminent artists of his generation.
At the heart of the paintings of Robert Ryman (b. 1930) is a concern with the materiality of painting. Since the 1950s he has reduced his work to a simple equation of canvas (or other support) plus white or off-white...
August Sander (1876 - 1964) is one of the finest photographers of the twentieth century. He pioneered a realist, almost scientific approach based on observation which made him one of the heroes of modern photography. In 1910 Sander moved to...
Robert Therrien (b. 1947) presents a world of the unexpected filled with objects which are both familiar and strange. It can seem a fairytale place of deceptively childish charm and logic where ideas can literally be translated into reality. Inanimate...
For over fifty years the American artist Cy Twombly (1928 - 2011) explored the natural world, literature, poetry, classical history and mythology through poetic, gestural painting and abstract sculptures. His lyrical use of letters and words as formal elements in...
Bill Viola (b. 1951) was among the first artists to explore the possibilities of film and video in a fine-art context. Long respected as a groundbreaking artist, his depictions of raw human emotion have achieved popular acclaim in recent years...
The most famous proponent of Pop Art, Andy Warhol (1928-1987) took images from the popular press, advertising and other ubiquitous images such as dollar bills and signs, and fixed them forever in the public imagination through his enduring fascination with...
Lawrence Weiner (1942-2021) was among the pioneers of conceptual art, and one of the most influential artists at work in the world. A self-taught artist born in the Bronx, in New York City, Wiener considered himself to be a sculptor...
American photographer Francesca Woodman (1958 - 1981) has eighteen rare vintage black and white photographs in ARTIST ROOMS, from a collection once owned by the artist’s boyfriend. Woodman’s photographs exhibit many influences, from symbolism and surrealism to fashion photography and...
