What is Contemporary art? And how would you define a contemporary artist?
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The loose, simple definition is: art that has been made in the present day or in the relatively recent past. However, the term contemporary art indicates more than that. Before delving into it, it is necessary to understand the difference between contemporary art and its previous artistic period: Modern art.
The fact that “contemporary” and “modern” in vernacular English are synonyms does not help. In fact, it often leads to confusion and conflation of the terms modern art/artists and contemporary art/artists. In the art world, these two terms refer to two distinct times of creation and to very different scopes and approaches to art production. The term Modern Art describes art made from around the 1860s to the 1970s. In this period, art started breaking rules and traditions as well as embracing experimentation with different materials. Modern artists developed a new way to intend art, moving away from figurative art towards abstraction.
There is no definitive agreement on when contemporary art started. For many, the cut-off period marking the end of Modern Art, and so the beginning of contemporary art, is identified with the birth of Postmodernism in the 1970s. Rejecting a uniform organising principle or label, contemporary art is eclectic and diverse. Contemporary artists usually work with different materials and methods as well as with a variety of concepts and subject matters that challenge the boundaries of what art and an artwork can be. In comparison to Modern Art and other historical art periods, contemporary art lacks a shared idea and vision as well as unified modes of expression: contemporary artists continue to experiment, question and re-evaluate the notion of art itself. Notwithstanding the wide scope of contemporary art, there are some common themes that are typical of contemporary artworks. The topics explored by contemporary artists very often reflect relevant and heated issues that define our society, such as technology and the digital world, identity politics, the body, globalisation and migration, time and memory. Another important element of contemporary art, which really differentiates it from modern art, is the relevance given to the viewer’s experience of the artwork. Contemporary artists often center their works on the effect that they can have on the viewer. Art is not anymore about the “genius” artist behind it, or about the artwork’s beauty and form. Art now has different forms, sometimes ephemeral ones (such as performance art or street art) and lives outside conventional spaces.
41 Influential Contemporary Artists
41. Anselm Kiefer
b. 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany
Anselm Kiefer is a German sculptor and painter, who creates monumental works using unusual materials, such as ash, shellac, lead, straw, and glitter. These pieces often allude to collective memory and controversial facts from our history, such as the Nazi rule, literary works, mythology, as well as historical figures the artist admires. In his work, Kiefer aims at confronting his culture’s dark past.
40. JR
39. Hito Steyerl
38. Njideka Akunyili Crosby
b. 1961 in Los Angeles
Mark Bradford is a contemporary artist working primarily with abstraction. He is known for grid-like, large-scale artworks combining paint with collage, incorporating items of his daily life such as remnants of found posters or business cards. In his work, Bradford explores social and political issues such as marginalisation of communities and of vulnerable populations by those in power. He describes his styles as “social abstraction”. His last series “Quarantine Paintings” reflects on creativity in isolation and on the purpose of art in this complex time of societal indetermination.
b.1967 in Copenhagen, Denmark
The Danish-Icelandic contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson is widely known for large-scale, site-specific art installations that make use of water, light and air temperature to create an immersive viewer’s experience. The major themes of his body of work are our relationship with nature, especially now in the current climate emergency, and human perception. His most famous works are: The Weather Project (2003), a giant artificial sun installed inside the Tate Modern in London; and Ice Watch (2019), huge ice blocks left to melt in major cities, aiming to raise awareness about the climate crisis.
Read more about Eliasson's latest exhibtion at Fondation Beyeler.
33. Shirin Neshat
b. 1957, in Qazvin, Iran
Shirin Neshat is a visual artist, working with photography, video and film. In her artworks, she explores the relationship between women and the Islamic cultural and religious system of values. In particular, her aim is that viewers “take away with them not some heavy political statement, but something that really touches them on the most emotional level”.
32. Banksy
b. 1974 in Bristol, UK
Banksy is the pseudonym of one of the most famous street artists and political activists, whose identity is only known to his family, his closest collaborators and a handful of fellow artists. Banksy’s artistic practice includes urban interventions and illicitly hung artworks in museums. His art is provocative, witty and irreverent. Through his street art and installations, he usually criticises consumerism, capitalism, political authority and the art world. He is also famous for having shredded his artwork “Girl With Balloon” immediately after it was bought at a Sotheby’s auction in 2018. The shredded artwork, now “Love Is in the Bin”, has been re-sold for $25.4 million.
Read more about Banksy
31. Ana Mendieta
b. 1948 in Havana, Cuba. Died in 1985
"Through my earth/body sculptures, I become one with the earth ... I become an extension of nature and nature becomes an extension of my body." This is how Ana Mendieta described her own art. She worked with photographs and video footage of her body immersed and camouflaged in a natural environment. Her works offer an interesting look on the relationship between the female body and landscape.
30. Ai Weiwei
b.1957 in Beijing, China
Considered “China’s dissident artist”, Ai Weiwei has gotten in trouble multiple times for being openly critical towards his country’s government. His studio has been destroyed, his passport confiscated, and he himself was also arrested. Yet, that never stopped him from making meaningful artworks commenting on human rights and democracy as well as openly criticising the Chinese Government. Ai Weiwei’s oeuvre is provocative and controversial. His brilliant artwork, “Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn”, where the artist smashed two precious artifacts from the Han Dynasty, shocked the art world.
Read more about Ai Weiwei
29. Tracey Emin
b. 1963 in Croydon, UK
Tracey Emin’s works are deeply autobiographical and confessional. Her practice includes drawing, paintings, film, photography, sculpture and sewn appliqué. Emin expresses timeless themes such as love, loss and grief in an intimate, visceral and honest way. “The most beautiful thing is honesty, even if it’s really painful to look at”, Emin remarked. In her famous artwork “My Bed”, the artist displays a bed with bodily secretions stain and messy bedroom objects such as condoms, underweres, that were inspired by Emin depressive yet sexual phase when she remained in bed for four consecutive days drinking only alcohol. The installation gained a lot of media attention, causing a furore.
28. Liu Xiaodong
b. 1963 in Jinzhou, China
Liu Xiaodong can be described as the chronicler of modern life. One of the most prominent figures within the Chinese Neo-Realist group in the early 1990s, he often paints en plein air, exploring and documenting the developing economy of China. His style is characterised by loose, thick brushstrokes that, on the one hand, maintain a high degree of realism, and, on the other, emphasise the abstract nature of the medium. Xiaodong depicts scenes of everyday life. In particular, as the artist said: “When I paint someone, I want to capture their environment, their living state. I want to show the personal story behind the image of the person.”
27. Takashi Murakami
b. 1962 in, Itabashi City, Tokyo, Japan
Takashi Murakami’s “superflat” aesthetic is widely recognised. The artist has drawn from traditional Japanese painting and pop culture to create a distinctive colourful and bi-dimensional style. His oeuvre comprises paintings, sculptures, prints and even merchandise and collectibles. These include repeated motifs such as smiling flowers, cartoon characters (Mr. DOB), and animals.
26. Sean Scully
b. 1945 in Dublin, Ireland
One of the most influential abstract artists of his generation, Sean Scully is famous for his grid-like paintings, consisting of brushy layers of brightly coloured stripes and squares. Scully’s artworks are inspired by the artist’s memories of objects and places. Yet, his work is non-figurative. Explaining his works displayed in the 2015 exhibition “Land Sea”, he affirmed: “In making these paintings I was preoccupied with my memories of Venice, the movement of the water, how it heaves against the brick and stone of the city”.
b. 1960 in Padua, Italy
If Marcel Duchamp were alive today, he would probably have loved Maurizio Cattelan and the kind of satire he uses to shock the world of art. An Italian contemporary artist, he is best known for hyperrealistic sculptures of people such as the Pope (killed by a meteor) and Hitler (begging for mercy on his knees), but also artworks like the golden toilet he installed at the Guggenheim in 2016, which he provocatively titled “America”.
24. Edward Ruscha
b. 1937 in Omaha, Nebraska
Ed Ruscha combines words and images in collages, using everyday objects as art materials. In his work, Ed Ruscha is able to transform the ordinary in extraordinary. For his artworks, he takes inspiration from the imagery and techniques of commercial art and advertising, in a way that resembles the approach of Pop artists. His rich body of work is characterised by the use of words and phrases, playing with language and figures of speech such as puns, onomatopoeia, alliteration, and contrasting meanings. The result is a varied oeuvre infused with dry humor and coolness.
23.Nan Goldin
b. 1950 in Gallipolis, Ohio
Over the past few decades, many public spaces have often been taken over by one of Jenny Holzer’s works. Holzer is a feminist Neo-conceptual artist, who produces large-scale installations, such as billboards, projections on buildings and illuminated electronic displays. LED signs of provocative and powerful statements are her distinctive and most visible medium. Holzer’s choice of incorporating words in her artworks is motivated by the desire to “offer content that people – not necessarily art people – could understand”, as she explained.
Read more about one of the most known and provocative female artists on Kooness
b. 1969 in Stockton, California.
Kara Walker is a conceptual artist best-known for her vignettes of big cut paper silhouettes portraying images of racial stereotypes, such as mammies and pick ninnies. In her work, she explores the themes of race, gender, sexuality and identity, powerfully representing the origins of the systemic injustices and racial inequalities that are embedded in our cultural mores, in our history and in our myths.
Marina Abramović, considered “the grandmother of performance art” is an influential conceptual and performance artist. She is a pioneer of body art, endurance art and feminist art. In her works, she explores the notion of identity, the limits of the body, the possibility of the mind. One of her most iconic performances is “The Artist is Present'' held at MoMa in 2010. Abramović sat immbile for eight hours a day for nearly three month in the museum’s atrium while visitors were invited to take turns sitting opposite her. She met the gaze of over 1000 sitters. Spectators described the experience as very powerful, intense and emotional.
Read more about Marina Abramović
19. Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Born on the same day, Christo and Jeanne-Claude worked together for decades until she died in 2009. He then continued their adventure alone. Their environmental artworks, which usually involve wrapping architectural objects in recyclable plastic or surrounding islands with it, are visually impressive and controversial. The preparation of these site-specific environmental installations usually took years, even decades.
Their works could be enjoyed by audiences in cities like Miami, New York, Paris, and Basel. The most recent ones include Floating Piers in Italy and the wrapping of L’Arc du Triomphe in Paris in 2021.
18. Kehinde Wiley
b. 1977 in Los Angeles
Kehinde Wiley is best-known for his depiction of black subjects in traditional settings found in Old Masters’ paintings. In early 2018, he became the first Black and openly gay artist to paint the potrait of an American President, Barack Obama. Wiley adopts the visual vocabulary of glorification, heroism and familiar iconography to give his contemporary, “urban” Black figures the same power that was long detained only by white subjects.
b. 1954 in Mumbai, India
Anish Kapoor is an influential and controversial conceptual artist, specialising in sculpture and art installations. He creates elegant sculptures with organic forms that are also challenging engineering works. He deals with mirrors, convex and concave surfaces, creating optical illusions. One of his most famous artworks is “Cloud Gate” (2006), a reflective stainless steel sculpture commissioned by the city of Chicago.
14. Louise Bourgeois
b. 1911 in Paris, France. Died in 2010
Throughout her long and prolific artistic career, Louise Bourgeois has been creating a visual profile of her life through numerous artworks, many of which produced on a grand scale. Her childhood traumas and relationships with her parents are portrayed in such a delicate, yet haunting way. “I need to make things. The physical interaction with the medium has a curative effect. I need the physical acting out. I need to have these objects exist in relation to my body.”
13. Kerry James Marshall
Depicting subjects that are “unequivocally black, emphatically black”, Kerry James Marshall explores the idea of black identity in the US as well as in Western Art. He works with a wide array of pictorial traditions. His work portrays richly-textured narrative scenes inspired from his personal life or historical events, exploring the effects of the Civil Rights movement on the life of African Americans. His painting “Past Times” (1997), sold for $21.1 million in 2018, becoming the most expensive painting of a contemporary Black artist ever sold in an auction.
12. Cindy Sherman
b. 1954 in Glen Ridge, New Jersey
Cindy Sherman is one of the most influential living photographers and filmmakers. Her work offers a sharp critique of gender norms and identity. Sherman uses her own body to create roles and personas. Her groundbreaking series, “Untitled Film Stills”, consists of seventy black-and-white pictures of herself, portraying female stereotypes found in television, advertising and film. In her artworks, she explores the idea of femininity as a social construct, distorting it. As the artist explained: “It seems boring to me to pursue the typical idea of beauty, because that is the easiest and the most obvious way to see the world. It's more challenging to look at the other side.”
Read more about Cindy Sherman and Women in Contemporary Art
Judy Chicago is a feminist artist, known for her large collaborative art installations in which she explores the role of women in culture and history. Her installation artwork “Dinner Party” (1974-79) is considered one of the pivotal artworks of the 20th century and the first epic feminist artwork. The artist, with the help of numerous volunteers, has installed a table with 39 place settings for 39 important historical and mythical women. Each table setting consisted of a table runner embroidered with the name and symbols relating to the woman’s applishments, together with utensils, a napkin, a globet and a ceramic plate hand-painted by Chicago. Dinner Party’s aim is to "end the ongoing cycle of omission in which women were written out of the historical record”.
10. Damien Hirst
b. 1965, in Bristol, UK
The “enfant terrible” of contemporary art, Damien Hirst is the richest British living artist. His practice explores themes such as religion, science, and death. The latter is a central topic of Hirst’s work; he, in fact, became famous for a series of controversial artworks in which he immersed dead animals, sometimes dissected, in formaldehyde in clear display cases. For instance, in the “Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” (1991), he put a 4.3 m tiger shark in a clear tank.
Discover more artworks by Damien Hirst on Kooness
b. 1958 in Reading, Pennsylvania. Died in 1990.
Keith Haring’s pop art and graffiti-like work emerged from the legendary New York subculture of the 1980s. His animated playful imagery, such as the barking dog or the radiant baby, has become an iconic, recognisable and distinctive visual language. Haring’s body of work responded to political and social issues. In particular, he fought to raise awareness about the AIDS epidemic, to end Apartheid and to promote LGBTQ+ rights. He drew in the subway station, in empty poster spaces, with the aim of making art as accessible as possible, interacting with a diverse audience. As the artist himself commented: “All kinds of people would stop and look at the huge drawing and many were eager to comment on their feelings toward it. [...] These were not the people I saw in the museums or in the galleries but a cross-section of humanity that cut across all boundaries.”
Discover here Keith Haring’s artworks on Kooness or read more about his career.
7. Barbara Kruger
b. 1937 in Bradford, UK
David Hockney is one of the most recognisable and influential contemporary artists. Hockney is best-known for his vividly colored, large-scale portrays of domestic life and evocative images of Southern California lifestyles. Throughout his prolific career, he has worked with different mediums, including contemporary technology such as laser photocopies, and even iPad and iPhones. His painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) was sold at Christie’s in New York in 2018 for $90.3 million, remaining the second most expensive work sold by a living artist at auction.
5. Jeff Koons
b. 1955 in York, Pennsylvania
Jeff Koons is one of the richest living contemporary artists. He is widely known for his sculptures that depict everyday objects, such as vacuum cleaners and basketballs. By introducing these mass-produced, overlooked objects in his art, he elevates them from banal and ordinary to iconic. He draws inspiration from advertising, commerce and celebrity culture. Koons’ artworks are considered subversive and controversial, especially since they are created not by him, but by his large staff, raising questions about authenticity and authorship. One of his most iconic works is “Rabbit” (1986). In 2019, the sculpture became the most expensive artwork sold by a living artist at an auction. It was sold for $91.1 million.
Discover all Jeff Koons’ artworks available on Kooness
4. Diane Arbus
3. Jean-Michel Basquiat
b. 1960 in New York. Died in 1988
A young prodigy gone too soon, at the age of 27, Jean-Michel Basquiat left a deep mark on contemporary art, but also the streets of 1980s New York, which he marked with his moniker SAMO. Basquiat’s art is political, attacking structures of power and systemic racism. In his paintings, he explores his identity and his experiences as a member of the Black community.
How Basquiat Became the Top-Selling American Artist?
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This list of forty-one influential contemporary artists has shown a glimpse of the variety and richness of contemporary art.
Thus, what is a contemporary artist? A contemporary artist is an artist that, through their work, represents our time and reflects on the complex issues that shape our society. A lot of contemporary artists play with the boundaries of what defines an artwork; others explore political themes such as racism, sexism and power structures; many artists reflect on technology.
What mediums do contemporary artists use? Contemporary art has challenged the definition of artwork by adopting a variety of mediums. Often, these go beyond paintings and sculpture to include the artist’s body, large scale installations, collage and new technologies.
How do contemporary artists use text in their work? Texts are usually incorporated in political artworks, expressing aphorisms (for instance in the cases of Barbara Kruger and Jean-Michel Basquiat) and forceful statements that strike the viewer with their wit. Artists also use language in their work to exploit the immediacy of words that make an artwork accessible to people not in the art world, for instance in the works of Jenny Holzer and Edward Ruscha.
Nicasio Fernandez’s vibrant figurative works emerge from intuitive marks on the surface into developed paintings intertwined with the embodiment of human emotion and personal life experiences. The surreal-like oil paintings become considered displays of poetic absurdity, anxiety, melancholy, manual labor, pressures of life, and feelings of not belonging. Fernandez’s expressive cast of stylized figures with exaggerated features and unnatural flesh tones are proxies for the viewer to connect their own present circumstances. Fusing a variety of art historical references from Expressionism to Peter Saul to Chicago Imagists, the work engages visual metaphors, hypothetical situations, social commentary, and humor to explore the psychological and physical endurance submerged within our contemporary life. Fernandez studied at the School of Visual Arts in New York and has exhibited in New York, Los Angeles, Hong Kong, Seoul, Philadelphia, Austin, and Seattle. His works are in the collections of the Hall Art Foundation and the Beth Rudin DeWoody Collection.
Cover image: Jean-Michel Basquiat, Victor 25448 (1987). Courtesy Phillips