Ralph Brown (1928 – 2013) was an English sculptor who came to national prominence in the late 1950s with his large-scale bronze Meat Porters, commissioned for Harlow New Town, Essex and is known for his sensual, figurative sculptures.Like Henry Moore who befriended him and encouraged him by buying his work, Brown's art is deeply rooted in the figurative tradition. However, whilst his predecessors focused their energies on carving and maintaining 'truth to materials', Brown concentrated on modelling allowing him to interact with his material on a more intimate level. In the introductory catalogue essay for Brown's major retrospective show at Leeds City Art Gallery in 1988 Dennis Farr commented: «So much of Brown's sculpture is his search for equivalents, in formal terms, for sensual experiences.Brown came to national prominence in the late 1950s with his large-scale bronze group Meat Porters, commissioned for Harlow New Town, Essex. The piece is a tribute to physical labour with two figures hauling an ox carcass, a subject fitting to the busy market square and a form that brings dynamism to the otherwise rigid architecture. The concrete version of the piece won second prize for sculpture at the John Moore's Exhibition, Liverpool in 1959

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«Władysław Hasior was one of the most prolific contemporary Polish artists. He was an extraordinary personality, and a very colourful and magnetic individual. In the West, he was hailed as „the most talented student of Rauschenberg and Warhol“. In Poland, his work is considered as a precursor to pop art and assemblage, despite the artist's obstinate insistence that he had „never suffered from modernity“. Hasior regarded artistic activity as an intellectual and creative provocation, and he perceived modernity as rooted in a culture whose language was universal.
He entered the art world in a manner that immediately drew the attention of the general public, and soon after became a „cult“ artist for the 60s and 70s generations. His work shocked and delighted, aroused extreme emotions and judgement, and his controversial attitude compelled audiences to ask questions about the nature of art, and the artistic license of choosing the language of expression. As one of the few such artists of the time, he gained a level of popularity typically enjoyed by celebrities of film and stage.He was a sculptor, although many of his works are difficult to be categorized precisely in terms just sculpture. He became famous as a total artist, working on the borders between many artistic genres: painting, sculpture, architecture, arts and crafts. In 1958, he abandoned classical sculpture in favour of „something“ which his contemporaries could not yet fully define. In his art practice, he employed a collage technique to create assemblages, namely, semantically rich three-dimensional compositions incorporating various found objects and finished works.Hasior used degraded elements of technological civilization as art materials. He built structures out of everyday objects or fragments thereof, thus restoring their significance. In this fashion, he engaged in a continuous dialogue with Polish reality and mythology, a dialogue leavened with poetry, but also with mockery and irony. The relevance of Hasior’s artistic attitude lies in his authenticity, and in his acute powers of observation which encompassed sociology and culture, combining tradition and modernity, high and low culture.»

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«Lyman Kipp's sculptures, despite the presence of primary colors on rather thin, clean rectangular forms, remind one of ancient megaliths in their primitive organization. Several look like brightly colored, somewhat attenuated versions of Mycenaean arches, with simple lintels supported by unadorned piers — except that Kipp's pieces lack mass, let alone any sense of monumentality, and refer most cogently to painting. Hard Edge conceptions when extended to painted sculpture lose a great deal of transmission, especially of the sculpture does not project any sense of weight, as it certainly doesn't here. One of the central features of Hard Edge painting is its insistence on an effective distinction between interior and exterior space — the edge of the canvas contra the edge of the shape. However simple the elements may be, success requires a precise distribution of weight throughout a surface in order to prevent either extension beyond a pictures borders or incursion into the pictorial area. Lacking exact definition, a painting risks having its forms leave the surface and act as independent objects located in an indeterminate space. Kipp's work can be faulted chiefly on these grounds. His sculptures are simple objects that do not articulate the space they occupy, and his drawings look much like architectural renderings of isolated such as a doorway or window frame. ( Sidney Zimmerman, Arts Magazine, 1966 )

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Eduardo Úrculo (21 September 1938 – 31 March 2003), was a Spanish pop artist who also worked in other art movements, including Expressionism and Neo-Cubism. Both painter and sculptor, he is notable for his portrayals of luggage, the gentleman's hat, and the female bottom. With El Equipo Crónica (“Chronicle Team”), formed by the artists Manolo Valdés and Rafael Solbes, Úrculo is considered one of the drivers of pop art in Spain.
Born in Santurtzi, in Spain's Basque Country, Úrculo had at least two siblings, brothers Jose Maria Úrculo and Maria del Mar Úrculo. The family moved to the mining village of Langreo, Asturias in 1941 because of the hardships imposed on them after the Spanish Civil War. With a childhood marked by famine, he joined the Instituto de Enseñanza Media in 1948. His interest in drawing began here after Úrculo discovered the art of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Vincent van Gogh. and Amedeo Modigliani in picture books.Úrculo's first solo exhibition occurred in 1957 in La Felguera. In the same year, he became a cartoonist, drawing gangster comics illustrations in Oviedo. The following year, he received a grant from the Langreo City Council to study at Madrid's Círculo de Bellas Artes and at the Escuela Nacional de Artes Gráficas. Here, his spiky socialist realism was characterized by «lots of clenched fists and Guernica-style Picassoism». His drawings of factories have been described as «social painting» or «social expressionism». Úrculo's early black and white drawings were influenced by Francisco Goya. In 1958, he went to Paris and studied at the Académie de la Grande Chaumiere

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Franz Kline (May 23, 1910 – May 13, 1962) was an American painter. He is associated with the Abstract Expressionist movement of the 1940s and 1950s. Kline, along with other action painters like Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, Robert Motherwell and Lee Krasner, as well as local poets, dancers, and musicians came to be known as the informal group, the New York School. Although he explored the same innovations to painting as the other artists in this group, Kline's work is distinct in itself and has been revered since the 1950s

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Kiki Kogelnik (1935–1997) was an Austrian painter, sculptor and printmaker. Born in southern Austria, she studied at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts and moved to New York City in 1961. Kogelnik is considered Austria’s most important pop-related artist, despite having been known to take issue with being considered part of the pop art movement.Kogelnik began her career at the Galerie Nächst St. Stephan in Vienna in 1961, showing abstract works. At the time she was influenced by Serge Poliakoff of the École de Paris, but later found her own unique genre while surrounded by the pop art movement in New York. At one point she was engaged to Austrian abstract expressionist artist Arnulf Rainer.Kogelnik was close to another abstract expressionist, the American artist Sam Francis, and spent time with him in 1961 in New York and Santa Monica, California. Kogelnik then moved to New York in 1962 where she joined a close-knit group of artists that included Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Andy Warhol, Larry Rivers, Tom Wesselmann, Joan Mitchell, Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, among others. Pop was a way of life, and with Kogelnik extravagant hats and outfits Kogelnik became a captivating happening wherever she went.Her work during that time was strongly influenced by the pop art colors and materials of the time, producing numerous brightly colored euphoric space-themed paintings.Unlike pop artists, she avoided the celebration of commerce or quotidian objects, although she was known to foreground plastics and the artificial over nature.During the early 1960s Kogelnik began to use life-size cutout paper stencils of her friends to produce her paintings. In 1965 these prototype cut-outs became vinyl hangings, presented on the same clothing racks that she saw pushed down the streets in the vicinity of her studio in New York’s garment district.In the 1970s Kogelnik’s focus shifted to what later became known as her Women works, specifically addressing the female role portrayed in commercial advertising. Broaching feminist issues indirectly with irony, humor and a cool pop aesthetic was unique to Kogelnik’s work during this time. In 1974 she also began to work occasionally with ceramics, employing sculptural form as an extension of painting.

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Robert Waldmire (April 19, 1945–December 16, 2009) was an American artist and cartographer who is well known for his artwork of U.S. Route 66, including whimsical maps of the Mother Road and its human and natural ecology. Being the son of Ed Waldmire Jr., he is often associated with the Cozy Dog Drive In restaurant in Springfield, Illinois (on U.S. Route 66), the elder Waldmire (along with his friend Don Strand) having created the Cozy Dog.Bob drawing a campus map for Bradley University at the AEPi fraternity house.His career as a professional artist began during his student days at Southern Illinois University. He returned home to draft a «bird's-eye-view» poster of his hometown; merchants paid to include their businesses in the posters, which he could then sell in the merchant's place of business at a profit. He extended the idea to 34 cities, then turned his attentions to the promotion of historic U.S. Route 66.In 1992, Bob Waldmire re-opened the Hackberry General Store in the ghost town of Hackberry, Arizona as a Route 66 tourism information post and souvenir shop. The 1934 store, originally the Northside Grocery and Conoco station, had been closed and vacant since 1978 after Interstate 40 in Arizona bypassed the town (on 66) and left it stranded fifteen miles away from the very different route taken by I-40.Waldmire sold the store to John and Kerry Pritchard in 1998 due to local disputes regarding the environmental and aesthetic impact of quarries removing local stone for use in landscaping.In 2004, Bob Waldmire earned the National Historic Route 66 Federation's John Steinbeck Award for his contributions to the preservation of Route 66.One of Waldmire's modified vehicles, an orange 1972 Volkswagen Microbus, was the inspiration for the character «Fillmore» from the 2006 animated motion picture Cars. Pixar abandoned a proposal to name the character «Waldmire» as Bob was unwilling to sell marketing rights to Disney for a series of toys which would appear in McDonald's Happy Meals.On November 22, 2009 «Bob’s Last Art Show» was held at the Cozy Dog Drive-In.

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Yves Klein 1928-1962 «French artist chiefly noted for his blue monochrome paintings and for his audacious experiments with new techniques and new attitudes to art. Born in Nice; both his parents were painters. Began to paint in the late 1940s and formulated his first monochrome theories. Lived in Japan 1952-3. Became expert at judo, which he later taught in Spain and in Paris, where he lived from 1955. First public one-man exhibition at the Galerie des Solitaires, Paris, 1955. Early monochrome pictures in orange, yellow, pink, red and green, but from 1957 worked mainly in blue; also made from 1960 a number of monogolds, with gold leaf. Murals for the opera house at Gelsenkirchen 1957-9. Began in 1957 to experiment with fire paintings and 'immaterial zones of sensibility', and in 1958 with 'Anthropométries' made by a nude model pressing herself against the canvas under his direction. Member of the group Nouveaux Réalistes with Arman, Raysse, Spoerri, Tinguely, Pierre Restany and others 1960. Died in Paris of a heart attack, at the age of 34.»

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Ren Hang (March 30, 1987 – February 24, 2017) was a Chinese photographer and poet. He was born in 1987, in a suburb of Changchun, Jilin province, in northeastern China.During Ren's incipient career, he was known mostly for nude photographic portraits of his friends. His work is significant for its representation of Chinese sexuality within a heavily censored society. For these erotic undertones, he was arrested by PRC authorities several times. He received the backing of the Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who included Ren in his 2013 Netherlands show, Fuck Off 2 The Sequel, and curated the photographer's 2014 exhibition in Paris, France. Ren's erotic, playful and casual yet provocative expression gained him worldwide notoriety

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Clara Ledesma Terrazas (5 March 1924 – 25 May 1999)was an artist from the Dominican Republic.In 1949, Ledesma had her first solo exhibition and in 1951 she opened a studio/gallery, where she displayed her works as well as those of other artists. With the proceeds from a very successful solo exhibition in 1952, Ledesma traveled to Europe to further her education. She studied painting in Barcelona and Madrid, and exhibited her works in galleries in Spain. Ledesma also traveled to Lisbon and Paris to visit important museums. She was particularly influenced by the works of Marc Chagall, Joan Miró and Paul Klee. During her stay in Europe, Ledesma met Bolivian artist Walter Terrazas, who returned to Santo Domingo with her in 1954.«She studied painting at prestigious academies abroad and then returned to the country where she presented works that she had conducted in Europe under the influence of Miro, Chagall and Paul Klee, among others.In Santo Domingo, she worked closely with other important Dominican artists, including Gilberto Hernández Ortega, Josep Gausachs and Jaime Colson. In 1955, she was named vice director of the National School of Fine Arts.In 1961, Ledesma and her husband moved to New York City, New York, where she opened another gallery. She lived and worked in New York City the rest of her life.Ledesma had numerous international solo exhibitions, including events in Madrid, Mexico City and New York City, and participated in group exhibitions in Brazil, Spain, Cuba, Haiti, Venezuela, Argentina and Puerto Rico.

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