«A visual artist and pedagogue, Leszek Knaflewski was born in Poznań on the 8th of May, 1960. He created installations, objects, photographs, drawings, video works and sound performances. From the 1990s, he split his activity between visual arts and music. He died suddenly on the 6th of September, 2014.
Knaflewski’s works are not easily interpreted or analyzed, but instead conjure loose associations – their goal is to tease the viewers’ imagination. During the ‘90s, he kept returning to the use of root-like forms in his pieces – treating them as a symbol of the forces of life, growth, and upward expansion. The artist also tended to present them in the form of a cross and present as a metaphor for the human body. In his work Para (A Couple, 1990), two long, wavy roots, topped off with cross-shaped ‘heads’, rest on white sheets strewn around a muddy floor. The life-like roots/crosses resemble a pair of lovers in an intimate position. In his other works from that period, (Akt/The Nude, 1993, Siedząca/The Sitting Woman, 1994),  root-like forms were used to reinterpret the subjects of classical art. The artist also used miniature pieces of plants that looked like spermatozoa. Paintings from the Kalendarz/The Calendar series were made up of hundreds of such mini-roots placed on interfacing flakes. In other works, clusters of roots were intertwined with half-burned matches whose heads faced upwards, laid out on a delicate net made out of hair. In Knaflewski’s works, the natural, organic materials are intermixed with objects borrowed from material culture and transformed into very expressive, yet puzzling figures.

 In 1999, Knaflewski began to introduce sound into his works. He built instrument-like objects, such as Trumna elektryczna/The Electric Coffin, which he could play to create acoustic space installations. Initially, the performances with electric coffins also included Partytury/Scores with notes made out of the spermatozoa-roots. He first performed with this instrument-object at the AT Gallery in Poznań. In his following sound performances, he developed the layers of music. Each appearance was entirely unique, as the performances  were largely improvised. The sounds, produced with the use of a bell, one string, and the coffin’s body, were amplified. The motif of a coffin also appeared in Knaflewski’s Balet biernego oporu/Ballet of Passive Opposition (2000) – an installation comprising three transparent Perspex coffins, filled with little roots. Above them, he hung a shower head whose hose was finished off with a metal skewer. In his subsequent works – Catolic-cola (2001) and Killing me Softly (2005) – Knaflewski set his sights on contemporary consumer culture and clericalism. Catolic-cola is a monumental installation resembling the back wall of a bar. It is made up of a light box with an image of a horse tilling the ground with a cross and a set of shelves with identical mud-filled glasses lined up on top. The glasses and the light box are decorated with a sign based on Coca-Cola’s logo. By turning the cross into a plough, the artist made a reference to the activity of the Catholic Church, which functions in a similar way to superficial popular culture. The Killing Me Softly cycle (an intentional reference to Roberta Flack’s classic hit)  is made up of eight large-format, black & white lightboxes, on which the artist is posing as a priest. The perfectly-designed photo shoot is made to resemble advertisements for luxury products. The figure of the preacher was presented in ambiguous situations – their significance, sometimes controversial or sometimes just obscure, is hard to read in accordance with traditional Christian symbolism. Knaflewski, wearing a custom-made cassock, poses with a balaclava – a clear attribute of terrorists – and a machine gun, with pearls in place of his teeth, or steering the Holy Spirit’s dove (with an antenna on its head) with a joystick. In this multipart piece Knaflewski raises critical questions about the authority of priests and tackles the symbolic dimension of the figure.
(Author: Ewa Gorządek, April 2011; update: LS, AS, September 2014 culture.pl )

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Gyula Kosice (born Ferdinand Fallik; April 26, 1924 – May 25, 2016) was a Czechoslovakian-born Argentine sculptor, plastic artist, and poet. He was one of the most important figures in kinetic and luminal art and luminance vanguard.
He was born in an ethnic Hungarian family in 1924.Kosice used his natal city name as artist name. He was one of the precursors of abstract and non-figurative art in Latin America. He used, for the first time in international art scene, water and neon gas as part of an artwork. Light and movement were also present in his works.
He created monumental sculptures, hydrospatial walks, hydrowalls, etc. He made more than 40 personal and 500 collective exhibitions all over the world.
 Kinetic and luminal art

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«Fernand Fonssagrives (June 8, 1910 – April 23, 2003), born near Paris, France, was a photographer known for his 'beauty photography' in the early 1940s, and as the first husband of the model Lisa Fonssagrives. He died in 2003 at Little Rock, Arkansas.
Fonssagrives was a fashion photographer in the 1940s and 1950s when he took pictures for Town and Country and Harper's Bazaar magazines. At one point he was the highest paid photographer in New York. His later pictures featured female nudes with patterns of light on their skin. His photographic works are represented in Europe by Michael Hoppen Photography (London) and in the United States by Bonni Benrubi (New York) and Duncan Miller Gallery (Santa Monica). An image he created of his first wife Lisa is on the cover of the Spring Christie's photographic auction catalog (2008).
He was also an award winning sculptor working in Bronze, a painter and a writer.
Fonssagrives was married in 1935 to his first wife Lisa, whom he met at a dance school in Paris, and both became dancers. He said that he gave up dancing after he was injured in a diving accident. As a gift for recuperation Lisa gave Fernand a Rolleiflex camera. It was this that introduced him to photography, he becoming a noted photographer and her a noted model. They divorced in 1950.
Fonssagrives's second marriage—to Diane Capron, a professional figure skater and teacher—also ended in divorce. The native Frenchman lived the last 30 years of his life in Little Rock, Arkansas.
Fonssagrives was survived by a daughter from his first marriage, Mia Fonssagrives-Solow, a sculptor and jewelry designer who is married to real estate developer Sheldon Solow, and a son from his second marriage, Marc Fonssagrives.»

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 Eugène Leroy (Born: 08 August 1910; Tourcoing, France Died: 10 May 2000; Wasquehal, France)
«Eugène Leroy was a French artist known for his expressive and thickly painted surfaces. His primary subject was the nude, created using traditional painting tools and methods applied generously to the canvas—adding layers upon layers of paint until human forms are barely distinguishable. For most of his career, Leroy’s work remained largely unknown until his discovery during the Neo-Expressionist wave of the early 1980s. It was only late into his life that he had his first major solo exhibition at Michael Werner Gallery in Cologne in 1983, and his first American show at Edward Thorp the following year. His paintings were given their own gallery at the ninth documenta in Kassel, Germany. The artist was born on August 8, 1910 in Tourcoing, France, and in 1996 he was awarded the Grand Prix Nationale de la Peinture. Just four years later, he died on May 10, 2000 in Lille, France. The city of Tourcoing renamed its Musée des Beaux-Arts to the MUba Eugène Leroy in his honor in 2010.»

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John Angus Chamberlain (April 16, 1927 – December 21, 2011)was an American sculptor. At the time of his death he resided and worked on Shelter Island, New YorkChamberlain is best known for creating sculptures from old automobiles (or parts of) that bring the Abstract Expressionist style of painting into three dimensions. He began by carving and modelling, but turned to working in metal in 1952 and welding 1953. By 1957, while staying with the painter Larry Rivers in Southampton, New York,[9] he began to include scrap metal from cars with his sculpture Shortstop, and from 1959 onward he concentrated on sculpture built entirely of crushed automobile parts welded together. Far more than just another wrinkle on assemblage Shortstop and subsequent works completely reinvented modeling casting, and volume altering Marcel Duchamp's notion of the readymade and using the car as both medium and tool.In 1962 Donald Judd wrote, «The only reason Chamberlain is not the best American sculptor under forty is the incommensurability of 'the best' which makes it arbitrary to say so.»By the end of the 1960s, Chamberlain had replaced his signature materials initially with galvanized steel, then with mineral-coated Plexiglas, and finally with aluminum foil. In 1966, he began a series of sculptures made of rolled, folded, and tied urethane foam.Since returning in the mid-1970s to metal as his primary material, Chamberlain has limited himself to specific parts of the automobile (fenders, bumpers, or the chassis, for example). In 1973, two 300-pound metal pieces by Chamberlain were mistaken for junk and carted away as they sat outside a gallery warehouse in Chicago.

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Anti-fashion is an umbrella term for various styles of dress which are explicitly contrary to the fashion of the day. Anti-fashion styles may represent an attitude of indifference or may arise from political or practical goals which make fashion a secondary priority. The term is sometimes even used for styles championed by high-profile designers, when they encourage or create trends that do not follow the mainstream fashion of the time. This anti-fashion was adopted in response to the 'overly fashion conscious' fans of bands such as the Sex Pistols.
In the 1990s, a minimalist style described as anti fashion emerged on both sides of the Atlantic where young people would typically wear simple clothes such as black jeans and white T-shirts without a visible brand name. Another period of anti-fashion has taken place in the 1950s with the advent of rock and roll, especially with young adolescent women.Instead of the standard of wearing a dress or skirt, particularly hoop skirts and poodle skirts, many young women wore jeans and plaid shirts, or simple plain T shirts in rebellion with the gender roles and societal norms at that time. This fashion has the roots of many modern anti-fashion trends, such as grunge, decades later

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Douglas Dean Ohlson (November 18, 1936 – June 29, 2010) was an American abstract artist who specialized in geometric patterns.
Ohlson's early work was included in an exhibit organized by art historian E. C. Goossen at the Hudson River Museum titled «8 Young Artists» in 1964, and had a solo show that year at the Fischbach Gallery, the first of seven at that location. Goossen also included work by Ohlson in the 1968 exhibition «The Art of the Real: 1948-1968» at the Museum of Modern Art which focused on the development and history of geometric art in the United States.Sharply defined and repeated geometric shapes were characteristic of his earliest painting, that were described by Goossen as depicting «yellowish pink and green dawns, blue noons, and red-orange sunsets that swiftly slide from purple to black», hypothesizing that Ohlson's experience growing up and working long days on the family's farm gave him a unique passion for color Ohlson was recognized with a Guggenheim

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Pegeen Vail Guggenheim (August 18, 1925 – March 1, 1967) was a Swiss-born American painter. Her painting combines two different artistic styles: surrealism and naïve art.
She was the daughter of the art collector Peggy Guggenheim and the writer Laurence Vail, and the granddaughter of Benjamin Guggenheim, who died on the RMS Titanic in 1912.Pegeen Vail Guggenheim was born in Ouchy, Switzerland and spent her childhood in France and England. In 1941, she left Europe for the United States with her mother, Peggy Guggenheim and Max Ernst, who would later become her stepfather. While in the United States, she studied at the prestigious Finch College.
In 1943, she met the French painter, Jean Hélion, who, along with his friends Piet Mondrian and Fernand Léger, helped introduce abstract art in the United States. Guggenheim married Hélion in New York in 1946. The couple moved to Paris the same year. They had three children together: Fabrice, David, and Nicolas Hélion. When they divorced in 1956, Pegeen left Paris with her youngest son, Nicolas, to live with her mother in Venice.

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Ghitta Caiserman-Roth (March 2, 1923 – November 25, 2005) was a Canadian artist. She was a founder of the Montreal Artist School and has work in the National Gallery of Canada. Caiserman Roth was also a member of the Royal Canadian Academy (RCA) and the first artist to receive the Governor General Award.
Ghitta Caiserman-Roth was born in Montreal, Quebec in 1923. Her parents were Sarah Wittal, an owner of a children's wear company and Hannaniah Meir Caiserman, a civic leader in the Montreal Jewish community and union activist.[4] Both parents were heavily involved in socialist causes which had a significant impact on Ghitta's art; she was also influenced by her experiences working in war factories in Montréal and Halifax. By young adulthood much of her art was influenced by her experiences working in war factories in Montréal and Halifax, her work embraced the working class life and explored socialist themes.

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