Welcome to ArtBusinessDirectory.com - Top 10 Links in Artists - A-list & Popular

Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons was born in 1955 in York, Pennsylvania. He received his B.F.A. at the Maryland Institute College of Art in Baltimore and studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Koons is artist known for making giant replicas of ordinary objects, such as balloon animals. One of his largest works is ?Puppy,? a 43 foot topiary sculpture of a dog made out of flowers. It is currently outside the Guggenheim museum in Bilbao. In 2008, Koons had his first retrospective at the palace of Versailles in France. Then in 2009, he had his first major solo show in London at the Serpentine Gallery, featuring cast aluminum models of children?s toys and paintings of Popeye.

Since his emergence in the 1980s Jeff Koons has blended the concerns and methods of Pop, Conceptual, and appropriation art with craft-making and popular culture to create his own unique iconography, often controversial and always engaging. His work explores contemporary obsessions with sex and desire; race and gender; and celebrity, media, commerce, and fame. A self-proclaimed "idea man," Koons hires artisans and technicians to make the actual works. For him, the hand of the artist is not the important issue: "Art is really just communication of something and the more archetypal it is, the more communicative it is."

Robert Rauschenberg / Foundation

Robert Rauschenberg (1925?2008) Robert Rauschenberg was the defining force in contemporary art for nearly sixty years, creating a plethora of art icluding mixed media, painting, photography, sculpture, performance, and printmaking and was one of the more more influential artists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Robert Rauschenberg is an artist who first became famous in the 1950s. He is most famous for combining nontraditional materials to create sculptures and paintings. Rauschenberg was often labeled a Neo-Dadaist for his questioning of the distinctions between art objects and ordinary objects, and his combining them into his pieces. His later works incorporate found images into the piece along with objects.

Richard Serra

Richard Serra is a minimalist sculpturist and video artist most well known for his large-scale sculture assemblies of sheet metal. He was involved in the Process Art movement, which is concerned more with the process of creation than the final result. While in college, he supported himself by working in steel mills, which became an influence on both his sculptures and his video pieces. In recent years, Serra has done several works of political art in addition to his abstract sculptures

Richard Prince

Richard Prince (born 1949) is an American painter and photographer. Prince began appropriating photographs in 1975. His image, Untitled (Cowboy), a "rephotograph" of a photograph taken originally by Sam Abell and appropriated from a cigarette advertisement, was the first "rephotograph" to raise more than $1 million at auction when it was sold at Christie's New York in 2005.

Richard Prince is a controversial American painter and photographer. Prince is an appropriation artist, pulling from the works of others and from his experiences in the world to create his pieces. He first made a stir with his rephotographs, which generated debate on the nature of authorship, intellectual property, and authenticity of images. In 2008 the painting 'Overseas Nurse' from 2002 fetched a record breaking $8,452,000 at Sotheby's in London. Prince now lives and works in New York City.

Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer (born March 8, 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. He studied with Joseph Beuys and Peter Dreher during the 1970s. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. The poems of Paul Celan have played a role in developing Kiefer's themes of German history

In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history. All of these are encoded sigils through which Kiefer seeks to process the past; this has resulted in his work being linked with a style called New Symbolism. Kiefer has lived and worked in France since 1991. Since 2008, he has lived and worked primarily in Paris and in Alc?cer do Sal, Portugal

Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter a German visual artist was born in Dresden, Saxony, 1932 and grew up in Reichenau, Richter has simultaneously produced abstract and photorealistic painted works, as well as photographs and glass pieces. Photo-paintings and the "blur"

Richter created various painting pictures from black-and-white photographs during the 1960s and early 1970s, basing them on a variety of sources: from newspapers and books. Many of these paintings are made in a multi-step process of representations. He starts with a photograph, which he has found or taken himself, and projects it onto his canvas, where he traces it for exact form. Taking his color palette from the photograph, he paints to replicate the look of the original picture. His hallmark "blur" is achieved sometimes with a light touch of a soft brush, or an aggressive pull with a squeegee.

Color chart paintings - As early as 1966 Richter had made paintings based on colour charts, using the rectangles of colour as found objects in an apparently limitless variety of hue. In 1988 he was given his first North American retrospective organized by the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and The Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. In 2001 the Museum of Modern Art in New York exhibited a retrospective of Richter's paintings called "Forty Years of Painting". Richter is regarded as the top-selling living artist. In October 2012, Richter's Abstraktes Bild set an auction record price for a painting by a living artist at ?21m ($34m).

Jean Michel Basquiat

Jean Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960 ? August 12, 1988) was the first African-American painter to become an international art celebrity. He began as a graffiti artist in the 1980s and evolved to become Neo-Expressionist artist. His works are still widely influential and sought after. Basquiat was the subject of a 1996 bio-film by Julian Schnabel. He began as an obscure graffiti artist in New York City in the late 1970s and evolved into an acclaimed Neo-expressionist and Primitivist painter by the 1980s.

Throughout his career Basquiat focused on "suggestive dichotomies," such as wealth versus poverty, integration versus segregation, and inner versus outer experience. Basquiat's art utilized a synergy of appropriation, poetry, drawing and painting, which married text and image, abstraction and figuration, and historical information mixed with contemporary critique. Utilizing social commentary as a "springboard to deeper truths about the individual", Basquiat's paintings also attacked power structures and systems of racism, while his poetics were acutely political and direct in their criticism of colonialism and support for class struggle.

Major exhibitions include ?Jean-Michel Basquiat: Paintings 1981?1984? at the Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh (1984), which traveled to the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, and Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen, Rotterdam, in 1985); the Kestnergesellschaft, Hannover (1987, 1989). The first retrospective was the "Jean-Michel Basquiat" exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art from October 1992 to February 1993. Another exhibition, ?Basquiat?, was mounted by the Brooklyn Museum, New York, in 2005, and traveled to the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. The years 1984-85 were also the main period of the Basquiat?Warhol collaborations

In 2008, at Christie's, Ulrich sold a 1982 Basquiat piece, Untitled (Boxer), for US$13,522,500 to an anonymous telephone bidder. Another record price for a Basquiat painting was made on in 2007, when an untitled Basquiat work from 1981 sold at Sotheby's in New York for US$14.6 million. In 2012, for the second year running, Basquiat was the most coveted contemporary (i.e. born after 1945) artist at auction, with ?80m in overall sales.That year, his Untitled (1981), a painting of a haloed, black-headed man with a bright red skeletal body, depicted amid the artist?s signature scrawls, was sold by Robert Lehrman for $16.3 million, well above its $12 million high estimate. A similar untitled piece, also undertaken in 1981 and formerly owned by the Israel Museum, sold for ?12.92 million at Christie's London, setting a world auction record for Basquiat?s work.