Arno Rink (26 September 1940 – 5 September 2017) was a German painter. He was accepted to the Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst Leipzig  in 1962 and studied under Werner Tübke, Hans Mayer-Foreyt and Harry Blume. He is associated with the second generation of the Leipzig School, which paints in a German figurative tradition.In 1979 Rink was honoured with a professorship and from 1987 until 1994 held the position of the Head of Faculty at the HGB. Notorious for the elitist education of his school, Arno Rink was renowned as the pioneer of the Neue Leipziger Schule and guided artists such as David Schnell, Christoph Ruckhäberle, Mirjam Vlamming, Timo Baumgärtl and Tim Eitel on their way to international success. The dreamy, architectonically primed worlds of the young graphic painting turned the art market euphoric like no other German movement had before. Arno Rink’s most accomplished pupil, Neo Rauch replaced him eventually in 2005 after over 27 years as the Professor of Painting at the Leipziger Hochschule.

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«Kazuo Shiraga was born in 1924 and was an abstract-expressionist painter. He joined the Gutai movement in 1954 after becoming frustrated with the traditional Japanese style of painting Nihon-ga, which he studied at school. He began his experimental painting at the Gendai Bijutsu Kondankai (Contemporary Art Discussion Group) and explored oil painting with the use of his hands and fingers. Shiraga found new freedom in the art medium, and enjoyed the consistency and texture much more compared to the thin ink-based pigments that was found in traditional Japanese painting. Gutai leader, Jiro Yoshihara, inspired Shiraga and in turn pushed him to create work that has never existed before. From this, Shiraga began performance painting, a key element to the Gutai movement. Shiraga began to paint using his full body in some performances and continued to explore the relationship between body and material. Shiraga is most noted for his foot print paintings that he made into his 80s, which revolve around Japanese, Chinese, and Buddhist themes.»

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Stephen Antonakos (November 1, 1926 in Agios Nikolaos, Laconia, Greece – August 17, 2013, New York City) was a Greek born American
most well known for his abstract sculptures often incorporating neon.
“Antonakos’s work with neon since 1960 has lent the medium new perceptual and formal meanings. His use of spare, complete and incomplete geometric forms has ranged from direct 3-dimensional interior installations to painted canvases, Walls, the well-known back-lit Panels with painted or gold-leafed surfaces, and the Rooms and Chapels. Throughout, he has conceived work in relation to its site — its scale, proportions, and character — and to the space that it shares with the viewer. He calls his art, «real things in real spaces,” intending it to be seen without reference to anything outside the immediate visual and kinetic experience.“

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«Otto Piene was a German kinetic artist and co-founder of the ZERO avant-garde group. A pioneer of media art, Piene worked with light and motion to produce mesmerizing displays, as seen in his Light Ballet (1961). At the core of his practice was the desire to study technological processes and harness them to create a sense of movement. “Light is my medium,» Piene declared. “Previously, paintings and sculptures seemed to glow. Now they do.”

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William Ronald, Canadian painter (born Aug. 13, 1926, Stratford, Ont.—died Feb. 9, 1998, Barrie, Ont.), was the driving force behind the formation in 1953 of Painters Eleven, a group that introduced abstraction to Canadian art. Ronald studied with Jock Macdonald at the Ontario College of Art in 1951 before briefly attending Hans Hofmann’s school in New York City the following year. Ronald embraced the contemporary, international style of Abstract Expressionism, and his monumental canvases were a striking departure from the then-prevailing approach of the Group of Seven, who painted folkloric subjects featuring Canadian themes in an earnest, traditional manner.

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Vladimir Borisovich Yankilevsky (February 15, 1938, Moscow – January 4, 2018, Paris) was a Russian artist known mostly for his participation in the Soviet Nonconformist Art movement of the 1960s through the 1980s. Perhaps his most famous works are his triptychs, works that are difficult to classify, occupying a unique middle ground between painting, and sculpture, similar in some ways to Rauschenberg's combines. On the most basic level, these works use disorienting, often nightmarish imagery to paint a picture of restrictive mental states associated with daily life in the Soviet Union, and with the human condition in general.

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«Shozo Shimamoto was born in Osaka, Japan, in 1928. Together with Jiro Yoshihara, he was co-founder of the Gutai group, and he is considered one of the most experimental artists in the period after World War II. Gutai, the first radical artistic movement in Japan, developed in the late fifties, more or less contemporary with the informal movement in European and American art. Its main aim was to give new life to the Japanese artistic tradition. A work of art, for them, was no longer a simple support, but became a physical transposition of the artist's actions, which is what (like in action painting) turns the work of art into an action. Shimamoto, a pivotal figure in the movement, felt the need for new signs of expression that he found both in action and matter. „

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Giuseppe Spagnulo (28 December 1936 – 15 June 2016) was an Italian sculptor.
Spagnulo was born in Grottaglie, Taranto. At young age he learned to work on the lathe in his father's ceramic workshop. Between 1952 and 1958 he studied at the Faenza Art Institute for Ceramics and then he moved to Milan, where he enrolled at the Brera Academy and worked as an assistant for Arnaldo Pomodoro and Lucio Fontana.In the late 1960s, Spagnulo started working on his first sculptures, including the corten steel installation «Black Panther» (1968-1969), which was exhibited at the 1972 Venice Biennale

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Juan T. Vázquez Martín (born December 23, 1940 — January 31, 2017 ) Cuban abstract painter. A Cuban painter who lived and worked in Havana.
'Looking at Juan Vázquez Martín's paintings, what is immediately recognisable, is the Renaissance concept of 'the window', the dissolution of forms discovered by Kandinski, as well as the sense of textural beauty introduced by the contemporary painters of the matière school.In essence, this involves a private display that allows the artist to make a series of paintings on canvas or cartridge paper, revealing to the viewer an ensemble of optical sensations that reflect the internal world of the artist."

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«Brazilian artist Tunga, born Jose de Barros Carvalho e Mello, was a talented and eclectic creator who worked in sculpture, installation, photography, poetry, and video. His large-scale installations and sculptures were always capable of transforming galleries and museums into dreamlike environments thanks to the most versatile materials such as plastic, thread, and recycled objects. Even though his process was materially intensive, Tunga’s practice was also clearly conceptual. His works are intellectually puzzling, they resist certainty and confuse the audience. For instance, in his piece from 2007 entitled At the Light of Both Worlds from 2007, Tunga hung from a gallery ceiling a massive assemblage of bones and bronze replicas of classical art – this outstanding work is a unique commentary on the intrinsic balance between life and death.»

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