KEY ARTISTS:
Boltanski, Gursky, Hirst
KEY MEANINGS:
Reality
Identity
Narrative
Popular culture, commodification
Ideas about art, media, and culture
KEY CONTEXTS:
Globalisation, Commoditication
The digital environment
Challenging power and hierarchies (e.g. postcolonialism, populist movements)
Environmental & cultural interactions
Gursky's photographs work as the blueprint of our globalised world. His work also highlights that the context of globalisation has made capitalism and commodification widely applicable just about everywhere too. Gursky and Hirst's highly priced art works reveal that art is also a part of that globalised context of commodification, as the contemporary humankind now commodifies everything in the world, including nature.
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The digital environment context is particularly relevant for Gursky as his photographs are digitally manipulated so that they look more real than the actual reality. The 'tweaking' of the components in his compositions, featuring public spaces, cityscapes, everyday sites and nature - reflect our desire to control absolutely everything to the level of superficial perfection through the development of digital technology.
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These artists explore various environmental and cultural interactions we experience in the contemporary world. This may be an exploration of how we behave and engage in certain surroundings, and how we process ourselves with cultural information and contexts. Boltanski and Hirst often provide very physical experiences for their viewers, which may be seen as being environmental, but all artists attempt to examine how we interact and understand our world.
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"ART-MAKING IS NOT ABOUT TELLING THE TRUTH, BUT MAKING THE TRUTH FELT."Christian Boltanski (1945-2021)Christian Boltanski is one of the most internationally acclaimed artists of our time. His artistic work revolves around the themes of memory, death and loss. Relics are no longer those of saints, but vestiges of anonymous people, traces of strangers, with which it seems to be a question of communicating. Since the 1960s, he has worked with the ephemera of the human experience, from obituary photographs to rusted biscuit tins. Several of Boltanski's projects have used actual lost property from public spaces, such as railway stations, creating collections which memorialize the unknown owners in the cacophony of personal effects.
Boltanski is best known for his photographic installations. The artist explores life, death, and memory in his practice, often focusing on the Holocaust as he blurs the boundaries between truth and fiction. “You can tell the truth more truthfully than with the truth itself,” he once quipped. Born on September 6, 1944 in Paris, France to a Jewish father, the impact of World War II loomed throughout the artist's life. Boltanski often has objects stand in for absent subjects, bringing spirituality and meditation to his practice and following in the footsteps of Conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s. His work can be found in the permanent collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris. Boltanski currently lives and works in Malakoff, France. ocula.com/artists/christian-boltanski/ www.artnet.com/artists/christian-boltanski/ |
ART WORKS BY BOLTANSKI
Artist Interview |
Théâtre d'ombres |
Personnes (No man's land), 2010
Chance, 2014
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"I PURSUE ONE GOAL - THE ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF LIFE."Andreas Gursky (b.1955)Emerging from the renowned Düsseldorf School in the late 1980s, Andreas Gursky was pivotal in creating a new standard in contemporary photography, a pioneer who furthered the possibilities of scale and ambition.
His massive, clinical, and distanced surveys of public spaces, landscapes, and structures contributed to a new art of picture taking in contrast to the Minimalism and Conceptualism of the 1970s. His use of large-format cameras, scanning, digital manipulation, the layering of multiple pictures to create a cohesive image, and technical postproduction positioned him as an important bridge between the old ways of shooting and presenting pictures and the current highly, technologically advanced era of photography.
www.theartstory.org/artist/gursky-andreas/#nav |
ART WORKS BY GURSKY
✨CLICK✨ on the art works for more information.
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"AS SOON AS SOMETHING BECOMES ART, I THINK YOU GET OVER THE FEAR."Damien Hirst (b.1965)Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol and grew up in Leeds. In 1984 he moved to London, where he worked in construction before studying for a BA in Fine Art at Goldsmiths college from 1986 to 1989. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1995.
Since the late 1980’s, Hirst has used a varied practice of installation, sculpture, painting and drawing to explore the complex relationship between art, life and death. Explaining: “Art’s about life and it can’t really be about anything else … there isn’t anything else,” Hirst’s work investigates and challenges contemporary belief systems, and dissects the tensions and uncertainties at the heart of human experience. Hirst developed his interest in exploring the “unacceptable idea” of death as a teenager in Leeds. From the age of sixteen, he made regular visits to the anatomy department of Leeds Medical School in order to make life drawings (‘With Dead Head’ (1991)). The experiences served to establish the difficulties he perceived in reconciling the idea of death in life. Of the prominence of death in his work (‘A Thousand Years’ (1990)) he has explained: “You can frighten people with death or an idea of their own mortality, or it can actually give them vigour.” At Goldsmiths, Hirst’s understanding of the distinction between painting and sculpture changed significantly, and he began work on some of his most important series. The ‘Medicine Cabinets’ created in his second year combined the aesthetics of minimalism with Hirst’s observation that, “science is the new religion for many people. It’s as simple and as complicated as that really.” This is one of his most enduring themes, and was most powerfully manifested in the installation work, ‘Pharmacy’ (1992). Whilst in his second year, Hirst conceived and curated ‘Freeze’ – a group exhibition in three phases. The exhibition of Goldsmiths students is commonly acknowledged to have been the launching point not only for Hirst, but for a generation of British artists. For its final phase he painted two series of coloured spots on to the warehouse walls. Hirst describes the spot paintings as a means of “pinning down the joy of colour”, and explains they provided a solution to all problems he’d previously had with colour. It has become one of the artist’s most prolific and recognisable series. In 1991 Hirst began work on ‘Natural History’, arguably his most famous series. Through preserving creatures in minimalist steel and glass tanks filled with formaldehyde solution, he intended to create a “zoo of dead animals”. In 1992, the shark piece, ‘The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living’ (1991) was unveiled at the Saatchi Gallery’s ‘Young British Artists I’ exhibition. The shark, described by the artist as a “thing to describe a feeling”, remains one of the most iconic symbols of modern British art and popular culture in the 90’s. The series typifies Hirst’s interest in display mechanisms. The glass boxes he employs act to define the artwork’s space, whilst simultaneously commenting on the “fragility of existence”. Stating: “I am absolutely not interested in tying things down”, Hirst has continued over the last decade to explore the “big issues” of “death, life, religion, beauty, science.” In 2007, he unveiled the spectacular, ‘For the Love of God’ (2007): a platinum cast of a skull set with 8,601 flawless pavé-set diamonds, at the White Cube exhibition ‘Beyond Belief’. The following year, he took the unprecedented step of bypassing gallery involvement in selling 244 new works at Sotheby’s auction house in London. Describing the sale as a means of democratizing the art market, the ‘Beautiful Inside My Head Forever’ auction followed Hirst’s Sotheby’s event in 2004, in which the entire contents of the artist’s restaurant venture, Pharmacy, were sold. His contribution to British art over the last two and a half decades was recognised in 2012 with a major retrospective of his work staged at Tate Modern. Hirst lives and works in London, Gloucestershire and Devon. damienhirst.com/biography/damien-hirst |
For the Love of God, 2007 |
Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable, 2017
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