Otto Rogers (born 19 December 1935, died 27 April, 2019) was a Canadian painter and sculptor from rural Saskatchewan whose abstract works reflects his belief as a member of the Bahá'í Faith in unity in diversity. His work has been widely exhibited. It is held in many private and public collections in Canada and other countries.
Wang Wusheng (1945 – 2018) was a Chinese photographer known for his black-and-white photographs of Mount Huangshan.
Wang Wusheng was born 1945 in Wuhu. Anhui, China and graduated from the Department of Physics of Anhui University.Beginning in 1973, Wang worked as a photographer for a news magazine in Anhui Province, Anhui Newsphoto and Pictorial. In 1974, he started shooting Mounts Huangshan in Anhui.In 1981 he moved to Japan. He became a research member at the Japan Foundation in 1983. He studied at the Art Institute of Nihon University in Japan as he won grant from the Japan Foundation’s endowment for Japanese art studies. Beginning in 1986, he studied for three years at the Tokyo Arts University.
Toyo Tsuchiya (1948 – 23 November 2017) was a Japanese born artist and photographer and one of the early artists involved in the Rivington School art movement of the East Village art scene of New York City of the 1980s.Toyo Tsuchiya moved from Japan to New York City in 1980.He was a director of many of the performances and exhibitions at the club No Se No, which was the club that many of the Rivington School artists would meet and perform and show their art work. As a photographer, Tsuchiya was able to document much of the early history of the Rivington School. He was a member of the NO!Art movement
Jean-Paul Riopelle was a Canadian Abstract Expressionist best known for his non-representational landscape paintings. Riopelle squeezed paint straight from the tube and applied it liberally with a palette knife to craft his mosaic-like works. “When I begin a painting I always hope to complete it in a few strokes, starting with the first colors I daub down anywhere and anyhow,” he once said of his practice. “But it never works, so I add more, without realizing it.”
Riopelle's style in the 1940s changed quickly from Surrealism to Lyrical Abstraction (related to abstract expressionism), in which he used myriad tumultuous cubes and triangles of multicolored elements, facetted with a palette knife, spatula, or trowel, on often large canvases to create powerful atmospheres.The presence of long filaments of paint in his painting from 1948 through the early 1950s has often been seen as resulting from a dripping technique like that of Jackson Pollock.
Hassan Sharif (1 January 1951 – 18 September 2016) was an Emirati artist who lived and worked in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. His work is represented in major public collections, such as the Guggenheim New York, Guggenheim Abu Dhabi, Centre Pompidou, Mathaf Arab Museum of Modern Art, Tate Modern, and Sharjah Art Foundation.
From the early ‘80s, Sharif began creating assemblages from cheap, mass-produced materials or items sourced from the UAE’s markets. With these heaps – often large in scale – Sharif was handing back as artwork the surplus of a recently and rapidly-industrialised UAE. Similarly, «as illustrations of meaningless [sic], taking Duchampian philosophy to heart, they were crafted from commonplace materials, cut, bound or tied together with rope or wire, and thus stripped of their original function.»
Michael Gross ( 1920 – 2004) was an Israeli painter, sculptor and conceptual artist.Michael Gross was born in Tiberias in the British-administered Palestine in 1920. He grew up in the farming village of Migdal. In 1939-1940, he left to study at the Teachers’ Training College in Jerusalem. In 1939, while he was away, his father was murdered by Arabs, and the family farm and home were destroyed. This event impacted on his work as an artist.From 1943 to 1945, he studied architecture at Technion – Israel Institute of Technology in Haifa. From 1951 to 1954, he studied art at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He returned to Israel in 1954 and settled in the artists’ village of Ein Hod.
“After making drawings and paintings of plants, landscapes, and buildings over many years, I decided to try abstraction. This change opened up a new world for me to explore how I could express my feelings—at times, joy, at other moments, sorrow, as well as pain and fear—more directly. This gave me far greater power and the freedom to experiment continually.The painters who have influenced me most are Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Richard Diebenkorn, whom I consider the pre-eminent artists of abstract expressionism. ..” Michael Gross
«Holt's most recognized artwork, Sun Tunnels (1973–1976), is a large-scale installation in Utah's Great Basin Desert, a four-hour drive from the UMFA. It consists of four large concrete cylinders, arranged on the desert floor in a cross pattern, that align with the sunrise and sunset on the summer and winter solstices. In addition to this perfect solar framing, each of the cylinders is pierced with smaller holes representing the stars of four constellations: Draco, Perseus, Columba, and Capricorn. Holt's design allows for an ever-changing play of light and shadow upon the surfaces of her work. The four concrete tubes act as viewfinders framing precise images which, in Holt's words, „bring the vast space of the desert back to human scale.“
James Lee Byars (born April 10, 1932 in Detroit, Michigan – died May 23, 1997 in Cairo, Egypt)was an American conceptual artist and performance artist specializing in installations and sculptures, as well as a self-considered mystic. He was best known for his use of personal esoteric motifs, and his creative persona that has been described as 'half dandified trickster and half minimalist seer'.
Chohreh Feyzdjou (September 5, 1955 – February 17, 1996) was an Iranian artist
«Chohreh Feyzdjou grew up in Iran in a Jewish family of intellectuals,and moved to Paris in 1975. It was here that she completed her artistic training at the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts, and also learned about the Kabbalah and Sufism. Her untimely death in 1996 put an abrupt end to a unique body of work, which had only just begun to be exhibited in major museums across Europe. Feyzdjou made her name at the start of the 1990s with a vast corpus of objects culled from her atelier and from her past, among them drawings and paintings, all of which she covered with a more or less diffuse layer of black pigment. Each one was carefully catalogued, stored in boxes, in glass jars, in crates and trunks, or wrapped in plastic, put in tubes, stocked on shelves or tables, and in drawers or on scaffolding which were themselves covered in black pigment. Nothing remains identifiable apart from the fact that each element bears the archive reference, “Product of Chohreh Feyzdjou”. While this installation may bring to mind a post-apocalyptic catastrophe, its presentation also evokes the stalls full of goods that can be found in grocery stores and bazars across the Middle East.
Maliheh Afnan ( 1935 – 2016) was a Palestinian-born artisAs a child, Afnan was fascinated by written language and calligraphy. Her own mail came to her home in three languages- Arabic, English, and Hebrew. However, at the time, she couldn’t read or write, and would instead fill pages with invented writing. This trend continued into her present works, where imagined writing and numbers are always present — even in the landscapes. “I love looking at scripts,” She said. “They excite me visually and excite me even further when I can’t read then because then it’s so much more mysterious and they could be so many other things, rather than some banal statement.
