Benjamin Jaffe Gallery
Chicago, IL
benjamin
Art that is intended to convey an idea or a concept to the perceiver, is known as Conceptual Art. It is art in which the idea involved in the work takes precedence over traditional aesthetic and material concerns. The genre often rejects the creation or appreciation of a traditional art object such as a painting or a sculpture as a precious commodity.
The notion that art should examine its own nature became prominent with the emergence of an exclusively language-based art in the 1960s, however, conceptual artists began a far more radical interrogation of art than was previously possible. One of the first and most important things they questioned was the common assumption that the role of the artist was to create special kinds of material objects. Conceptual art came to denote all contemporary art that does not practice the traditional skills of painting and sculpture. It could be said that one of the reasons why the term "conceptual art" has come to be associated with various contemporary practices far removed from its original aims and forms lies in the problem of defining the term itself.
'Cloudgate' Polished Stainless Steel Sculpture by Anish Kappur 2006
Many works of conceptual art, sometimes called installations, may be constructed by anyone simply by following a set of written instructions. Installation art describes an artistic genre of three-dimensional works that are often site-specific and designed to transform the perception of a space. Generally, the term is applied to interior spaces, whereas exterior interventions are often called Land art; however, the boundaries between these terms overlap.
Henrique Oliveira
Marcel Duchamp was a French-American painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Dadaism. Dada was born out of negative reaction to the horrors of World War I. This international movement was begun by a group of artist and poets associated with the Cabaret Voltaire in Zurich. Dada rejected reason and logic, prizing nonsense, irrationality and intuition. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso, as one of the artists who helped to define the revolutionary developments in Modern Art in the opening decades of the twentieth century, responsible for significant developments in painting and sculpture. Duchamp has had an immense impact on twentieth-century and twenty first-century art. By World War I, he had rejected the work of many of his fellow artists (like Henri Matisse) as "retinal" art, intended only to please the eye. Instead, Duchamp wanted to put art back in the service of the mind. His seminal piece titled fountain consisted of a urinal simply hung on the wall at the 1913 Armory show in New York. Though the work was panned by most critics, it was the center of all conversation in the art world for years to come.
Robert Smithson was a pioneer of conceptual art. In the early sixties he began creating art installations outside that he called 'Earthworks'. He is most famous for his peice entitled 'Spiral Jetty', which he created by moving large quantities of rock and dirt with a dump truck.
Cai Guo-Qiang is a Chinese artist who creates conceptual pieces that speak to contemporary social issues.
Performance Art is a performance presented to an audience, traditionally interdisciplinary. The performance can be live or via media; the performer can be present or absent. It can be any situation that involves four basic elements: time, space, the performer's body, or presence in a medium, and a relationship between performer and audience.
Chris Burden is a California based artist who began to work in performance art in the early 1970s, he made a series of controversial performances in which the idea of personal danger as artistic expression was central. His most well-known act from that time is perhaps the 1971 performance piece Shoot, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters with a .22 rifle. One of Burden’s most reproduced and cited pieces, Trans-Fixed took place on April 23, 1974 at Speedway Avenue in Venice, California. For this performance, Burden lay face up on a Volkswagen Beetle and had nails hammered into both of his hands, as if he were being crucified on the car. The car was pushed out of the garage and the engine revved for two minutes before being pushed back into the garage.
Christo has worked for decades creating giant large scale installations such as the one above called 'Curtain'
Insa is a grafitti artist who creates gif animations of his work over time. Below are a few examples of his work
Benjamin Jaffe Gallery
Chicago, IL
benjamin