QU XIANGJIAN 1954 China

Qu Xiangjian 1954 Follow Artist biography Qu Xiangjian is an established contemporary artist. Qu Xiangjian was born in 1954. Artists Konstantin Dimopoulos, Věra Mohylová, Joel Coplin, Erick Michaud, and Dimitris Michlis are of the same generation. Further Biographical Context for Qu Xiangjian Qu Xiangjian was born in 1954 and was largely inspired by the 1970s. The 1970s were a period of consolidation and progress in the arts, most often characterised as a response to the central stresses of the previous decade. Conceptual art developed as a influential movement, and was in part an evolution of and response to minimalism. Land Art took the works of art into the spacious outdoors, taking creative production away from commodities and engaging with the earliest ideas of environmentalism. Process art combined elements of conceptualism with other formal considerations, creating esoteric and experimental bodies of work. Expressive figurative painting began to regain prominence for the first time since the decline of Abstract Expressionism twenty years prior, especially in Germany where Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz became highly influential figures worldwide. New York maintained an prominent position in the international art world, ensuring that global artists continued to gravitate to the galleries, bars and downtown scene there. A number of the artists who gained fame and successful in the 1960s remained leading figures. For example, Andy Warhol branched out into film and magazine publishing, the first type of pan cultural activity for a visual artist. This secured his reputation as a globally renowned celebrity in his own right. Towards the end of the decade, the emerging practices of graffiti and street art were beginning to gain attention in the fine art community. Artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were working in downtown Manhattan and ensuring that spray paint and tagging gained some acceptability as a fine art practice, a trend which would fully develop and dominate throughout the following decade. International movements gained popularity included feminism, which translated strongly into the visual culture, and photorealism which had begun in the 1960s and enjoyed substantial commercial and critical achievements. For the first time painters and sculptors from Latin America were embraced by the dominant critical and institutional levers in New York. The largely Italian Arte Povera Movement gained global recognition during the 1970s, with artists like Jannis Kounnelis, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto achieving international praise. In Japan and Korea, artists associated with the Mono-Ha movement focused on encounters between natural and industrial materials such as stone, glass, cotton, sponge, wood, oil and water, arranging them in mostly unchanged, transient states. The works focused on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space, and had a strong interest in the European philosophy of phenomenology. Source Artland

HERMAN BAS 1978 Miami, Florida, US

Hernan Bas (born 1978) is an artist based in Miami, Florida. He graduated in 1996 from the New World School of the Arts in Miami.[1] Bas is known for his depictions of waifs and dandies, who are somewhat based on his own experiences, and his work with the material SlimFast and the paranormal.[2][3] Over time, Bas says, these characters have grown in his paintings and taken on different roles.[2] Bas is gay and queerness often influences his work in the form of waifs and other young men, typically recurrent characters in his work.[4] Bas owns a building in Detroit that was renovated by Nicola Kuperus and Adam Lee Miller, the couple behind Detroit electronic music act Adult. The building is on a block called Service Street noted for the number of diverse and accomplished artists that work there, including techno music pioneer Derrick May.[5] Early life and education Bas was born in 1978, in Miami, Florida and moved upstate to a small town as a young boy.[6][7] Bas has described growing up in the town as "kind of like living in the 'X-Files," and has credited it with his interest in the paranormal.[6] He says he had a "spooky childhood" full of "U.F.O. and Bigfoot sightings mixed with ghosts in the woods and a bunch of other bizarre occurrences."[6] Bas began painting at around three or four years old.[6] He attended the art magnet program in the Miami public school system. Bas said that through the program he effectively began attending art school in seventh grade and by the time he graduated from New World in 1996, he was doing four hours of art every day.[3] Because of his early art education, Bas did not feel that he needed any more formal training and left the Cooper Union after one semester.