Artist 14: Bridget Riley

Bridget Riley is an English painter born in 1931.  Growing up she was educated at Cheltenham Ladies’ College and then studied at Goldsmiths College followed by the Royal College of Art.  Her early art was made up of a figurative, semi-impressionist style.  It wasn’t until around 1960 that Riley really developed her Op Art style.  Her work is characterized by black and white geometric patterns that create a disorienting effect on the eye.  In 1962 she had her first solo show in London in which many of her pieces were felt to be connected to issues of the time; participation by the viewer, separation of mind and body, tension with the scientific community, and the fear of the loss of individualism.  It wasn’t till after her first international show that she began investigating color in Op Art.  Riley was a motivating force in the Op Art movement.  Once her black and white paintings where shown worldwide, her work in color caused her to expand her talents in painting and in design.  During her years of color exploration, Riley actually employed other people to paint her pieces so that she would be able to focus solely on the design of each piece.

Artist 13: Hans Hollein

Hans Hollein was born in 1934 in Austria to a family of mining architects.  He is a world-renowned architect and designer.  However he is better known for his grand architecture.  In 1956 he received a diploma from the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, in 1959 he attended the Illinois Institute of Technology followed by the University of California in 1960.  Upon returning to Austria he founded his own agency in 1964.  From 1963 forward he has been a professor at various Universities and Academies worldwide.  Many of his buildings are visually stunning and provocative. Hollein does not create simple, common, architecture that fits in; he makes everything he works on a statement.  He was a harsh critic of functionalism, which is a large part of modern art.  Although he was not a functionalist, his architectural style is classified as modern.  Hollein often tried to create something new, but that still fit with the surrounding buildings.  His new buildings fit well among the surrounding old buildings of ancient European cities.  Although he traveled all across America and spent time in other countries in Europe, the large majority of Hans Hollein’s work was done in Austria and Germany.  His buildings are a mix of the modern world and architecture style, and the architecture of Europe’s past.

Artist Eight: Anni Albers

Anni Albers was born in Germany in 1899; she was a textile and graphic design artist as well as part of the Bauhuas movement.  Albers was fascinated by art throughout her life and attended Kunstgewerbeschule for two months in 1920, an in 1922 she studied at the Bauhaus.  While at Bauhaus, Anni Albers was not able to get into a glass workshop therefore she took weaving instead and fell in love with weaving and the challenges that it posed.  In 1925 Anni married Josef Albers and the school moved to Dessau, with a new focus on production rather than craft.  This is when Albers began to make textiles that were functionally unique; this led to having her designs published and contracts drawn up.  In 1933 the Alberses were invited to teach at the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina.  During their time at Black Mountain, Anni Albers created, designed and published many works and in 1949 the Museum of Modern Art showed her work, her show then toured the United States from 1951 to1953, making Albers the most well known weaver of her day.  In the 1950s Albers worked on mass-producible fabric patterns, while living in Connecticut.  By the mid 1960s Albers had found a new love for printmaking, especially lithography and screen-printing.  Over all Anni Albers was a major influence on the world of textiles with her numerous wall hangings, curtains, bedspreads, mounted images and mass-produced materials.

Artist 12: Robert Morris

Robert Morris, born in 1931, is seen as one of the central figures of minimalism.  His work is characteristic of simple geometric shapes, he means to strip away all metaphorical association and focus totally on the interaction between the artwork and the viewer.  Morris was at the front of the well know movements, process art and land art.  In 1948 Morris began his education in Kansas then transferred to the California School of Fine Art in 19551.  After only a semester in California he joined the United States Army Corps of Engineers.  In 1953 he then enrolled in school at Reed College in Oregon.  After two years in Oregon studying psychology and philosophy he returned to California to paint.  During his time in school and then after school Morris painted large abstract pieces.  Through his work he developed an interest in the process, but later gave up painting all together because he did not feel the connect between the final work and the process that it took to get there.  In 1960 Morris moved to New York and enrolled at Hunter College where he studied art history.  While there he began to create plywood sculptures, these gave him the satisfaction that he was missing during his years painting.  In 1966 he published many articles in which Morris rejects the uniqueness of the art object and emphasized the artwork’s relationship to the viewer.  He began to work with commonplace materials to deconstruct conventional categories of the art object.  He has left his mark on the art world and will continued to do so as he continues to show his works worldwide.

Artist Eleven: Josef Albers

Josef Albers, born in 1888, was a poet, sculptor, art theorist, educator and most known as a painter.  He is seen as the one responsible for introducing American artists to European modernist concepts of the Bauhaus.  He did many experiments with color interaction and geometric shapes influenced the modern artists of the world.  His work even inspired movements such as Geometric Abstraction, Color Field Painting and Op Art.  After working in living in Germany his whole life, in 1933 he moved to the United States and with his wife worked at the Black Mountain College in North Carolina.  In 1949 he moved to Connecticut to be the chairman of the Design Department at Yale University.  While teaching at Yale, Albers did his series Homage to the Square, these are his most famous works that focus on the optical effects of color within the confines of a uniform square.  Walter Gropius invited Albers to design a mural for the Graduate Center at Harvard University.  This led to many more commissions until his death in 1976.  Even after his death, Albers continued to have an influence on minimalists through his art and color theories.  Joseph Albers considered art to be a process rather than a product, art is meant to open the eyes of the viewer.

Artist Ten: Walter Gropius

German architect, Walter Gropius, was born in Berlin in 1883.  Although a great architect, he could not draw and relied on a team to help him create his works.  In 1908 Gropius was hired at the firm of Peter Behrens, but in 1910 he, with his coworker, Adolf Meyer, left Behrens firm and created their own practice in Berlin.  World War I paused Gropius’s career, he served as a sergeant major and was almost killed.  After the war Gropius was appointed as the master of the Grand-Ducal Saxon School of Arts and Crafts in Weimar in 1919.  It was this school that Water Gropius transformed into the Bauhaus.  Many of the designs he created while at Bauhaus are seen as some of the most influential and iconic.  In 1934 Gropius was able to leave Nazi Germany, and then in 1937 he came to the United States.  His personal house in Massachusetts is seen as the image that brought international modernism to the United States.  He then went on to teach at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and in 1944 he became a citizen on the United States.  A year later he founded The Architects’ Collaborative, it became one of the most well-known architectural firms in the world, but went bankrupt in 1995.

Artist Nine: Dan Flavin

Dan Flavin was born in 1933 in New York and lived there until he joined the Air Force in 1953.  He had started drawing at an early age and had pursued art class, as they were available to him.  After his time in the Air Force he tried his hand at art schools and spent three semesters at Columbia University with the intention of become an art historian, but gave up on that.  Flavin then took odd jobs including working in the mailroom at the Guggenheim and as a guard at The Museum of Modern Art.  He married Sonja Severdija in 1961 and together they worked on the construction of the Icon pieces.  By the mid 1960s Flavin had stopped using canvases in his work and focused solely on the fluorescent lights that he used to create each piece.  His art is classified as minimalist but he preferred to refer to himself as a maximalist.  As he continued his work he began working on large-scale installations that were very site specific, many of these projects were later abandoned.  One that he did see through was an extensive light installation for the opening of the new Guggenheim building in 1992.  Because of his extensive work with light he really paved the way for other light artists yet to come.