THE 15 MOST PROMINENT AVANT-GARDE REPRESENTATIVES - ART - 2024

Among the representatives of the avant-garde we can find such notable figures as the painters Pablo Picasso or Salvador Dalí, musicians like Stravinsky or visual artists like the Allora & Calzadilla couple.

Avant-garde refers to a group of innovative artists in any field, especially in the visual, literary or musical arts, whose works are mainly characterized by unorthodox and experimental methods.

As a collective and collaborative practice, it is strongly characterized by innovation, and because it takes influences from everywhere without making distinctions between high and low forms of art and culture. In addition, it radically breaks with tradition, seeking to challenge the limits and the role of art.

The most influential avant-garde representatives

1- Salvador Dalí

Salvador Dalí was born on May 11, 1904 in Figueres, Spain. From a very young age he was encouraged to practice art, so he finally went to study in Madrid. In the 1920s, he moved to Paris and began interacting with artists such as Picasso, Magritte, and Miró.

Dalí is perhaps best known for his 1931 painting "The Persistence of Memory," which shows melted clocks in a landscape setting. The rise of fascist leader Francisco Franco in Spain led to the artist's expulsion from the surrealist movement, but that did not stop him from continuing to create. He died in his hometown in 1989.

2- Pablo Picasso

Pablo was born on October 25, 1881 in Malaga, Spain. He was a Spanish painter, sculptor, ceramist, printmaker, and set designer. He is recognized as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century and the creator of Cubism along with Georges Braque.

His unusual ability to draw began to manifest itself around the age of 10, when he became a student of his father, whom he managed to surpass in skills. At age 13, the painter held his first exhibition with the support of his father.

For almost 80 years, Picasso devoted himself to an artistic production that contributed significantly and in parallel to the entire development of modern art in the 20th century. Picasso passed away on April 8, 1973 in Mougins, France.

You may be interested in this link to his best phrases.

3- Pierre Alechinsky

He was born in Brussels, where he received training in book illustration and typography at the École Nationale Supérieure d'Architecture et des Arts Décoratifs. She worked in various media, from painting to poetry and film.

He was an original member of COBRA, an international group of Danish, Dutch and Belgian artists that developed between 1948 and 1952. In camaraderie with other artists, he had high expectations of a new postwar society and a new art school.

In the mid-1950s, Alechinsky studied the art of calligraphy in Japan, adopting some of its techniques for his own work, as well as brush and ink on paper materials.

In his paintings and prints, he developed a personal and accessible pictorial vocabulary of ways that suggest animals, birds, volcanoes, waterfalls, plants, and human bodies.

One of his works is "Gong", which is populated by biomorphic shapes that flow into each other, and written with gestural lines of ink and stripes of color using a monochromatic palette of various blues.

4- Wolf Vostell

He was born in 1932 in Leverkusen, Germany. She studied at the National Supérieur School of Fine Arts in Paris.

Since the early 1960s, Vostell has used a variety of media and materials in his events, actions and installations without being a media artist in the strict sense. Her concept of Dé-collage differs from “collage” in that it highlights the aggressive and destructive aspect of the visual and found structures.

Starting in 1963, he used televisions in his art and published seven issues of the magazine "Dé-collage / Boletín aktueller Ideen" from 1962 to 1967, an important forum at the time. He died in Berlin in 1953.

5- Igor Stravinsky

Igor Fedorovich Stravinsky was born on June 17, 1882, in Oranienbaum near Saint Petersburg, Russia.

His father was a star singer at the Imperial Opera, hoping that his son would become a bureaucrat, so Igor took a university law course before making the decision to become a musician.

He was a good amateur pianist, a keen reader of avant-garde (non-traditional) scores from France and Germany, and a fond of languages ​​(he knew Italian, French, and Russian).

His approach to musical composition was one of constant renewal, the rhythm being the most striking ingredient. His instrumentation and his ways of writing for the voices were also distinctive and influential.

Their harmonies and forms were more elusive and difficult to understand. He recognized the melody as the "most essential" element. Stravinsky died on April 6, 1971, in New York City and was buried in Venice.

6- Luigi Russolo

He was born in Portogruaro (Veneto) in 1885. After joining his family in Milan in 1901, he decided to go into painting. In 1909 he showed a group of prints at the Famiglia Artistica in Milan, where he met Umberto Boccioni and Carlo Carrà.

His divisive journalistic works were influenced by Previati and particularly by Boccioni. After his meeting with Marinetti, Russolo signed both the "Manifesto of Futurist Painters" and the "Technical Manifesto of Futurist Painting." Subsequently, he participated in all the futuristic evenings and exhibitions.

His mature futuristic canvases are open to cubist influence and were based primarily on the examples of photo-dynamism by Anton Giulio Bragaglia and chrono-photography by Etienne-Jules Marey.

He made his last concert in 1929 with the opening of a futuristic show in Paris at Gallery 23. After a period in Spain, where he studied occult philosophy, he returned to Italy in 1933, settling in Cerro di Lavenio on Lake Maggiore. Russolo died in Cerro di Lavenio in 1947.

You may be interested in a complete article on the artistic trend of Futurism.

7- Will Alsop

Will Alsop is a prominent architect and artist born in 1947 in Northampton, England. He has been awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize from the Peckham Library in London and the first RIBA World Prize by the Sharp Center for Design (OCAD) in Toronto.

His work spans all sectors of architecture, including urban design and planning. His studio practice also incorporates painting and product design, and he is also a professor of architecture at the University of Vienna and the Canterbury School of Architecture, UCA.

He has been charged with the regeneration of the London Borough of Hounslow. Developing schemes for Vauxhall regeneration and working internationally in China, Canada and Europe.

Alsop's iconic designs such as the Glenwood Power Plant in Yonkers, New York and the Sharp Center for Design for the Ontario College of Art and Design in Toronto have established him as a visionary in the field of architecture.

8- Allora & Calzadilla

Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla are known as Allora & Calzadilla, a collaborative duo of visual artists from San Juan, Puerto Rico.

They have produced a wide range of sculptures, photographs, performance art, sound and video. Her artistic practice is related to history and politics, addressing sociocultural and territorial issues, emphasizing the fractures of the line in society.

They met as students while studying abroad in Florence and have been living and working together ever since.

They represented the US at the 54th Venice Biennale in 2011 with an eye-catching exhibition organized by the Indianapolisa Museum of Art which they titled "Gloria." The exhibition included performances by athletes, gymnasts, and Olympic medalists.

9- Martin Boyce

He was born in 1967 in Hamilton, Scotland, and currently lives and works in Glasgow. She attended the Glasgow School of Art, where she received a BA in Environmental Art in 1990 and an MFA in 1997. In 1996, she also studied at the California Institute for the Arts in Valencia, CA.. He is a 2011 Tate Turner Prize winner, Boyce.

Since the beginning of his career, he has incorporated a palette of shapes that are frequently reminiscent of the familiar structures of the built environment: a phone booth, a ventilation grill, a chain-linked fence, in a whole new way.

In 2009, Boyce represented Scotland at the 53rd Venice Biennale with a solo pavilion presentation entitled 'No Reflections', which traveled to Dundee Contemporary Arts in Scotland from 2009 to 2010.

His work is represented in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate in London, Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt, Germany, among other institutions around the world.

10- Martin Creed

Martin Creed was born in Wakefield, England, in 1968 and attended the Slade School of Art in London. He has had numerous solo exhibitions and projects around the world.

Words and music have always been an integral part of this artist's practice. The simplicity with the use of few notes and words, demonstrate a simple but intellectual approach.

Creed wrote a four-minute piece, "Work No. 955" for the Birmingham City Symphony Orchestra, being a companion piece for a solo show at the Ikon Gallery in Birmingham. This work was repeated in a concert given in Japan for the Hiroshima Symphony Orchestra.

Today, as a curious man who combines different forms of art, Creed continues to create works with great ingenuity.

11- Mike Kelley

Mike Kelley was born in 1954 in Detroit, Michigan, and died in 2012 in Los Angeles. He had early aspirations to be a novelist, but doubted his talents as a writer and found writing too difficult, so he turned his energies to art through painting and music, later spreading to other areas..

He began creating multimedia installations that synthesized large-scale drawings and paintings, often incorporating his own writing, along with sculptures, videos, and performances.

By the mid-1980s, it was already gaining national and international attention. His career took off earlier in Europe than in the United States.

In 2005, he had his first solo exhibition at the Gagosian Gallery in New York. Kelley's works include important public and private collections, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon Guggenheim Museum in New York.

12- Beatriz Milhazes

She is a Brazilian artist who was born in 1960 in Rio de Janeiro. Milhazes predominantly uses the principle of collage, combining drawing with her knowledge of the traditions of Latin America and Europe. Her influences come from her own fascination with the decorative arts, fashion, and geometry.

Milhazes has described his own work as geometric, but without putting everything in a square or a circle. It uses bright colors that also encompass a feminine style of the work.

He has had solo and group exhibitions in some museums, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Museum of Modern Art in Paris.

13- Giuseppe Penone

He is an Italian artist who was born in 1947. He began working professionally in 1968, being the youngest of the Italian movement known as "poor art" (arte povera), since at just 21 years of age he held his first exhibition.

In his works he uses unconventional materials, the tree being a central element in Penone's work.

The artist has a paradoxical and empathetic vision of the visible world. It does not try to show pleasant or beautiful works, although its touch and elegant aesthetics reveal the inner beauty of the environment.

14- Anri Sala

He was born in Albania in 1974. His work is mainly based on video and sound with intimate and intertwined stories.

In a short time, his work became one of the most important expressions of the avant-garde, with exhibitions all over the world. Thus, in 2001 she received the Young Artist Award at the Venice Biennale.

15- Tino Sehgal

He was born in 1976 in London, England, but he also has German nationality. His work exists only at the moment of its realization, because the artist is not interested in producing material objects. His work is not documented in any way, they are "constructed situations" for him.

He is the youngest artist to have represented Germany at the Venice Biennale. His exhibitions have visited the most important places and museums in the world.

References

1. Peggy Guggenheim (2015). Luigi Russolo. Peggy Guggenheim Collection. Recovered from: guggenheim-venice.it.
2. All Design Team (2014). Will Alsop. All Desing World Wide. Recovered from: all-worldwide.com.
3. Tanya Bonakdar (2013). Artist Collections. Tanya Bonakdar Gallery. Recovered from: tanyabonakdargallery.com.
4. Novello (2014). Martin Creed. Music Sales Group. Recovered from: musicsalesclassical.com.
5. The Artist Staff (2016). Artist. The Artist Organization. Recovered from: the-artists.org.