Walton Ford by:Heidi G.

Walton Ford was born in Larchmont, New York in 1960. Ford graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with intentions of becoming a filmmaker. As Ford experimented with Watercolor he realized his talent with telling stories through his most times very large scale works.

Ford with an interest in political commentary and natural history finds a way to combine the two in his work. Ford likes to confront the continuing forms of oppression that still exist in todays society and how it effects the social and environmental landscape of our contry.

Ford has a huge interest in natural history and an interest in painting animals. He paints the animals with very realistic detail but always hides things in his paintings such as jokes, clues and erudite lessons in colonial literature and folk tales. In one of his paintings Ford depicts a scene where a bunch of baboons are furociousely eating at a dinner table. With immense detail you can see every hair on the baboons but also get a sense of the humor within the artist.

Ford has a great interest in the explorations of John James Audobon. Some of Ford's naturalistic paintings depict in many ways that of Audobon's naturalistic paintings. This sh0ws how Ford can paint realistically but at some points add in a twist of humor to his work.

Ford is still working today in upstate New York where he resides with his family.

(The information I found is on the website http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/ford/index.html and from the Art 21 documentary on Walton Ford.

Oliver Herring by:Heidi Guthmiller

Oliver Herring was born in 1964 in Heidelberg, Germany. Herring received his BFA from the University of Oxford in Oxford, England. Herring then went on to receive his MFA from Hunter College in New York. Herring now resides and works in Brooklyn, New York.
Some of Herring's early works pay tribute to his close friend Ethyl Eichelberger, a drag performance artist who commited suicide in 1991. The ethereal sculptures he produced bring forth introspection, memory and mortality. The woven sculptures were created by knitting together pieces of Mylar into clothing, furniture and human figures.
After his sculpture pieces Herring moved on to making stop and go action videos. The materials he uses for his sets are recylced from one piece to the next. Herring's videos are very dreamlike and make you wonder if you are in the conscious world or the unconscious. The ending of his videos are always unpredictable and unexpected and always keeping the observer wondering what is next.
Herring's most recent work is that of making human like and life sized sculptures. He photgraphs a real life model from every possible angle over and over, he then takes the photo's and cuts them up and attaches them to the base of his sculpture; which is always in the same pose as the real life posed model. The cut pieces of the photographs becomes the sculpture. From a distance the human like sculptures look very real but as you get closer you can see all the seperate pieces that make up the sculpture as a whole.
Oliver Herring is a young artist with a considerable amount of need to experiment with many different mediums. From photography to sculpture to movie making this artist will be producing great works in the years to come.

(All the information is from http://www.pbs.org/art21/artists/herring/index.html and information I recieved from watching the Art 21 documentary on Herring.

Post modernism (by David)

Post modernism was an art movement that emerged in the late twentieths century, around 1976 and up. It was made in retaliation of the “Modernist preoccupation with purity of form and technique”. The movement strove to ignore the boundaries between different genres and embrace new ideas, forms and medias to promote comedy and irony. The movement was not limited to art but also effected architecture music, writing and film. Many groups of diverse artist emerged from post modernism. Gerhard Richter and Sherrie Levine were successful artist during the 1970s-80s while Michael Graves and Robert Venturi were pioneers in architecture. Others include novelists David Lode and Thomas Pynchon.

Postmondernism (Sean)

The term "postmodernism" is a term that is used when one is speaking about art that has come after the modernist movement. Installation art, multimedia, and conceptual art are all thought of as being postmodern art. Contemporary art is used to describe art since the 1950's, but not all postmodern art is contemporary; even some artists who still work in the modern or late-modern styles are considered to be postmodernists now. The term in and of itself is difficult to pin-down with definition. It can be said, however, that postmodern art is art that has arisen out of and/or rejects ideas in modernism.






Cai Guo-Qiang

PostModernism by (Dani)

Post Modernism is art, architecture, music, film, sociology, fashion, communications, technology or literature that goes against the modern principles by using techniques before like traditional or classical elements of style. It is a set of ideas that rebel against Modernism and the styles that go with Modernism. It is a difficult era to define because there is no specific time it started or ended if it even has ended.

Awesome Hands Artist Unknown

Untitled by Artist Unknown

The Hearst Tower in Manhattan

postmodernism (what I found) - abi

Postmodernism is best known as "20th century art." As opposed to the modernist movement where all historical influence is ignored, postmodernist embrace a lot of styles of historical art and apply them to modern forms. They created a whole new spin on art by using different forms such as video, intermedia, installation, and multimedia. Some examples of postmodern artists I found are Gerhard Ritcher:
Lawrence Weiner:
and Stelarc (performance art)

Neo-Expressionism ( by David)

Neo-Expressionism was an art movement that emerged in the nineteen-seventies and lasted well through the eighties. It was made in retaliation to minimalism and conceptual art. Young painters sick of the highly abstract art of the seventies brought back more traditional methods of painting such as easal painting. The painting style was intense and harsh, most of the time they were distorted figures or other recognizable objects but often overwhelmed by surface activity, most works had a very intense, erotic or violent appearance.

Neo-Expressionism was very popular in Europe and the US during the early to mid-eighties. Through out its course the style took on many different names including Punk art and new fauvism in America, Transavantgarde ( beyond the avant-garde) in Italy and Neue Wilden (new wild ones) in Germany.

Pablo Picasso's later works greatly influence Neo-Expressionism with his hurried visible brush work and distorted sexual figures. The new style also used ancient mythology, historic depictions and even novel covers as sources for their work.

German painters, Georg Baseline and Anselm Kiefer are considered the greatest contributers to Neo-Expressionism followed closely by Julian Schnabel, a very successful American painter. Other notable artist include Jean-Michel Basquiat, Arnold Mesches and Susan Rothenbuerg.


Georg Baseline

Anselm Kiefer

Julian Schnabel