John Latham, (23 February 1921 – 1 January 2006) was a Zambia-born British conceptual artist. Latham was educated at Winchester College. In the Second World War he commanded a motor torpedo boat in the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. After the war he studied art, first at the Regent Street Polytechnic and then at the Chelsea College of Art and Design. He married fellow artist and collaborator Barbara Steveni in Westminster in 1951.The spray can became Latham's primary medium, as can be seen in Man Caught Up with a Yellow Object (oil painting, 1954) in the Tate Gallery collection. In addition to spray paint, Latham tore, sawed, chewed and burnt books to create collage material for his work, such as Film Star (1960).Latham's event-based art was influential in performance art. In 1966, he took part in the Destruction in Art Symposium in London led by Gustav Metzger along with Fluxus artists such as Yoko Ono, Wolf Vostell and Al Hansen.His «skoob» («books» written backwards) works using books or materials derived from them had the power to shock. He moved from collages to towers of books which he then burnt, awakening uncomfortable echoes of the Nazi regime's public burning of banned books.
From 1983 Latham lived and worked at his house, Flat Time House in Peckham. In 1991 he produced God is Great (no. 2), a conceptual artwork featuring copies of the Bible, Quran, and a volume of the Talmud, each cut in two and attached to a sheet of glass.

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Frantisek Muzika (26 June 1900 – 1 November 1974) was a Czech artist and a prominent representative of avant-garde in Czechoslovakia in the first half of the 20th century. He was a member of Devětsil since 1921 and Mánes since 1923.
Muzika was a painter, graphic designer, stage designer, illustrator, editor and professor at the Academy of Arts and Industrial Design (UMPRUM) in Prague.
Muzika was born in Prague, Czechoslovakia. After finishing his study at the Academy of Arts, Prague in 1924, he received a one-year scholarship from the French government for studying at École des Beaux-Arts. In Paris he also received private lessons from František Kupka at his atelier. In Paris he met Max Jacob, who took him to meet Léonce Rosenberg. On Sundays he had regular meetings with Joseph Bernard, where he also met Maillol and Bissière, with whom he exhibited at Salon d'Automne.In 1925, after he returned from Paris, his experiences with the work of Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso led Muzika to change his style of painting.

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«Ken Kiff (29 May 1935 – 15 February 2001) an internationally known figurative artist, was born in Dagenham and trained at Hornsey School of Art 1955-61.Despite his success, Kiff’s position was never a comfortable one. His commitment to the pictorial values of modernism, his deep respect for artists such as Klee, Miro or Chagall, and his ideas about painting were often at odds with prevailing assumptions. In contemporary debates around abstraction versus figuration he tended to push past the battle-lines: ‘colour thinking’ as opposed to ‘image thinking’, pictorial form versus representational meaning, in order to get at something beneath their seeming differences. Images themselves arose out of the stuff of painting and an intimate relationship with a technique. His deep personal knowledge of poetry and music informed his sense of a painting’s structure. He saw colour in terms of images and images in terms of colour, which constituted, as he saw it, “the natural complexity of painting”.Colour and colour relationships interacted in his paintings with a range of images evoking the blissfully radiant and lyrical to the comic and disturbingly grotesque. ‘Fantasy’ as he saw it ‘was a way of thinking about reality’.

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Wolfgang Lettl (18 December 1919 – 10 February 2008) was a surrealist painter who was born and who died in Augsburg, Germany.In 1939, at the age of 20, Wolfgang joined the German Army and served as a communications officer in occupied Paris from 1940 to 1943, during which time he worked on his watercolours and first became exposed to surrealism.

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«Bernard Schultze was born on 31 May 1915 in Schneidemühl (West Prussia). After his Abitur he studied at the art academies in Berlin and Düsseldorf from 1934 to 1939.His entire work produced before 1945 was destroyed during an air-raid on Berlin in 1945. Schultze moved to Frankfurt two years later where he began making his first informel paintings in 1951.An exhibition of the artist group „Quadriga“ in 1952, of which he was a co-founder, in the „zimmer galerie franck“ in Frankfurt included works by the artist. The group's aim was to move away from figurative and formalistic abstraction towards the international avant-garde movements Action Painting and Tachisme.In 1955 Schultze married the painter Ursula Bluhm and he made his first relief paintings with different materials stuck onto the canvas. The so-called „tabuskris“ (tabulae scriptae), works combining painting and drawing made from 1957, were followed by the „Migofs“ in 1961. This name, invented by Schultze, refers to constructions and creatures, which, in his eyes, exist among the creatures of nature.He travelled regularly to Paris and New York during this period, before moving from Frankfurt to Cologne in 1968. He travelled to Russia, the USA and Asia. He was elected a member of the „Akademie der Künste“ in Berlin in 1972. Schultze achieved an important late woke, on which he worked intensively until his death on 14 April 2005.His work has been awarded a number of prizes: he was honoured with the title of a „Titularprofessor“ of the state of North-Rhine Westphalia in 1981; he was awarded the „Großer Hessischer Kulturpreis“ in 1984, the Lovis Corinth Prize in 1986 and the Stefan-Lochner-Medal of the City of Cologne in 1990.Important exhibitions have been dedicated to the artist's work since the 1980s, for example the extensive retrospective exhibition in Düsseldorf, Berlin, Frankfurt and Saarbrücken in 1980-81 and the retrospective exhibition of his graphic work in the Albertina in Vienna and other museums in Germany in 1984. A large selection of his works toured to Cologne, Bologna and Budapest between 1994 and 1996.
Berhard Schulze belonged to the last great names and precursors of German postwar-abstraction.»

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Leena Estelle Luostarinen (15 May 1949 – 28 July 2013) was a Finnish painter. Working as an artist for over forty years, she was well known for her colourful and mysterious works. Many of her paintings featured felines, ibises, flowers, and sphinxes.Luostarinen received various awards and grants during her lifetime, including the Pro Finlandia Medal in 1995.

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«John Chamberlain, one of the most influential three-dimensional Abstract Expressionists of the twentieth century, constantly challenged, disrupted, and propelled forward the fields of art and design. Born John Angus Chamberlain on April 16, 1927, in Rochester, Indiana, he served in the United States Navy as seaman first class during World War II. After the war, he enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago on the GI Bill. Later he studied poetry and sculpture at the renowned Black Mountain College, where he developed his ideas around visual language. Reflecting on what he took away from his Black Mountain experience, he once stated: “If I have a room full of parts, they are like a lot of words and I have to take one piece and put it next to another and find out if it really fits. The poet’s influence is there, plus in my titles.” Elements of this would resurface again and again in works he produced throughout his career. Many critics and scholars have focused on Chamberlain’s place in art history as an Abstract Expressionist, Surrealist, or Pop artist, but ultimately his diverse output defies categorization. Above all he strove to make art that would, in his words, “make the viewer’s heart beat.”...Over the last three decades of Chamberlain’s career, the artist pursued ever more diverse variations of his signature “fit” that featured aggressive conjunctions of shape and color. The sculptures have deep folds that many perceive as resembling the folds of Renaissance sculpture, signaling the presence of a figure or void. Toward the end of his life, he was making some of the largest works of his entire career—assemblages of horizontal and vertical crushed metal from 1940s and 1950s automobiles, pursuing his perennial artistic ethos.

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Uri Lifschitz ( 1936 – 28 May 2011) was an Israeli painter.
Uri Lifschitz was born on Kibbutz Givat HaShlosha. He served in the Israel Defense Forces paratrooper Unit 101 under Ariel Sharon. He began painting in the 1950s. In the 1960s and 1970s he was one of the founders of the 10 Plus group which posed an alternative to the lyrical abstract style of the New Horizons movement.Lifschitz won the Eugen Kolb Prize from the Tel Aviv Museum of Art in 1965, the Erasmus Prize in 1966 and the Dizengoff Prize in 1985

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«Felipe Jesus Consalvos (1891 – c. 1960) was a Cuban-American cigar roller and artist, known for his posthumously-discovered body of art work based on the vernacular tradition of cigar band collage.
A large body of Consalvos' art work was discovered in 1983 at a Philadelphia garage sale. The body of work consists of over 800 collages on paper, found photographs, musical instruments, furniture, and other objects. Consalvos' playful and often subversively political work—on which he is thought to have collaborated with his son, Jose Felipe Consalvos — appropriated cigar bands and cigar-box paper, along with magazine images, family photographs, postage stamps, and cut-up money. Following extensive conservation work, Consalvos' work was first exhibited in a solo show in 2004 at Fleisher/Ollman Gallery in Philadelphia. Subsequently, his work has appeared in a number of public exhibitions and collections, including the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the American Folk Art Museum, and the Art Institute of Chicago.»

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«Kazuo Shiraga was a Japanese artist best known for his performative painting practice. Shiraga’s gestural style was influenced by American Abstract Expressionism and indicative of his participation in the Gutai avant-garde movement. The object of Gutai was to allow action and everyday life into the creation of dynamic artworks. The artist would suspend himself over his canvases, swinging back and forth, creating marks with his feet, creating a unique texture and thickness to his abstract swirls and splatters. “I want to paint as though rushing around a battlefield, exerting myself to collapse from exhaustion,” the artist once proclaimed. Born on August 12, 1924 in Amagasaki, Japan, he graduated from the Kyoto Municipal Special School of Painting in 1948, and joined the Gutai group in 1954. In a seminal early work, Challenge to the Mud (1955), the artist explored the gesture of sculpting clay by throwing himself and contorting his semi-naked body in a pit of mud. Through the following decades, Shiraga continued to work on activating art through moving a body in space. He died on April 8, 2008 in Amagasaki, Japan. Today, the artist’s works are included in the collections of the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art in Tokyo, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Hiroshima City Museum of Art, among others.»

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