Artist Showdown

b. 1923, Barcelona

Antoni Tàpies was born December 13, 1923, in Barcelona. His adolescence was disrupted by the Spanish Civil War and a serious illness that lasted two years. Tàpies began to study law in Barcelona in 1944 but decided instead within two years to devote himself exclusively to art. He was essentially self-taught as a painter; the few art classes he attended left little impression on him. Shortly after deciding to become an artist, he began attending clandestine meetings of the Blaus, an iconoclastic group of Catalan artists and writers who produced the review Dau al Set.

Tàpies’s early work was influenced by the art of Max Ernst, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró, and by Eastern philosophy. His art was exhibited for the first time in the controversial Salo d’Octubre in Barcelona in 1948. He soon began to develop a recognizable personal style related to matière painting, or Art Informel, a movement that focused on the materials of art-making. The approach resulted in textural richness, but its more important aim was the exploration of the transformative qualities of matter. Tàpies freely adopted bits of detritus, earth, and stone—mediums that evoke solidity and mass—in his large-scale works.

In 1950, his first solo show was held at the Galeries Laietanes, Barcelona, and he was included in the Carnegie International in Pittsburgh. That same year, the French government awarded Tàpies a scholarship that enabled him to spend a year in Paris. His first solo show in New York was presented in 1953 at the gallery of Martha Jackson, who arranged for his work to be shown the following year in various parts of the United States. During the 1950s and 1960s, Tàpies exhibited in major museums and galleries throughout the United States, Europe, Japan, and South America. In 1966, he began his collection of writings, La practica de l’art. In 1969, he and the poet Joan Brossa published their book, Frègoli; a second collaborative effort, Nocturn Matinal, appeared the following year. Tàpies received the Rubens Prize of Siegen, Germany, in 1972.

Retrospective exhibitions were presented at the Musée National d’Art Moderne, Paris, in 1973 and at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York, in 1977. The following year, he published his prize-winning autobiography, Memòria personal. In the early 1980s, he continued diversifying his mediums, producing his first ceramic sculptures and designing sets for Jacques Dupin’s play L’Eboulement. By 1992, three volumes of the catalogue raisonné of Tàpies’s work had been published. The following year, he and Cristina Iglesias represented Spain at the Venice Biennale, where his installation was awarded the Leone d’Oro. A retrospective exhibition was presented at the Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum SoHo, New York, in 1994–95. Tàpies lives in Barcelona.

Elizabeth Peyton (born 1965) is an American painter who rose to popularity in the mid 1990s.

She is a contemporary artist best known for stylized and ide

alized portraits of people who are in some way close to her – whereby her relationship to her subjects can assume a variety of forms. They might be personal friends, but could equally be historical figures or popstars. The crucial factor is the intensity of the encounter that first inspired the artist to preoccupy herself with these `companions’. Whether a close companion or a worshipped idol, in Peyton’s paintings and drawings the distinctions between friends and stars ultimately become blurred.

Peyton bases her pictures on photos from books, pop magazines or her own snapshots.
The media-based encounter via photography, video clip, book or CD is assimilated into her own world through the painting process.Elizabeth Peyton was first shown in the Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg in 1998 in a solo exhibition organized in cooperation with the Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel.

b. February 12, 1925. Chicago, Illinois. Died October 30, 1992. Paris.

A leading figure of the second generation of Abstract Expressionists in New York City, Joan Mitchell was born in Chicago to a wealthy family. She showed early art talent and attended Smith College from 1942 to 1944 and then transferred to the Chicago Art Institute, earning a B.F.A. in 1948 and an M.F.A. in 1950.

She said that although her paintings seemed total abstractions, they were, in fact, “about a feeling that comes to me from the outside, the landscape.” She distinguished herself from other Abstract Expressionists because she had a pre-established design, a single image, to anchor her painting rather than leaving the result to subconscious, totally emotion-based expression.

From 1948 to 1949, she was in France and then lived in New York City, where she came under the influence of the Abstract Expressionists. She was particularly influenced by the work of Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline and adopted their strong, gestural brushwork and aggressive color. She had her first solo exhibition in 1951 and continued to exhibit after she moved to Paris, France in 1955.

Many of her paintings are based on landscape themes, sometimes the wooded countryside near Vetheuil, France where she moved in 1968. Others are from winter scenes she remembered from her childhood in Chicago.

b. 1940 in Monroe, Washington, USA.

He studied at the University of Washington School of Art, Seattle (1960–2), Yale University (1962–4), and in Vienna, Austria (1964–5). A photo-realist painter of large portraits.
In 1988, in mid-career, Close was paralyzed due to a blood clot in his spinal column. He regained partial use of his arms, and was able to return to painting after developing techniques, using mechanical and electronic aids, which allowed him to work from a wheelchair. Make note of the dimensions of the original works when you view Close’s work on the Internet. His portraits are typically enormous, and immensely powerful in person.

The remarkable career of artist Chuck Close extends beyond his completed works of art. More than just a painter, photographer, and printmaker, Close is a builder who, in his words, builds “painting experiences for the viewer.” Highly renowned as a painter, Close is also a master printmaker, who has, over the course of more than 30 years, pushed the boundaries of traditional printmaking in remarkable ways.

Almost all of Close’s work is based on the use of a grid as an underlying basis for the representation of an image. This simple but surprisingly versatile structure provides the means for “a creative process that could be interrupted repeatedly without…damaging the final product, in which the segmented structure was never intended to be disguised.” It is important to note that none of Close’s images are created digitally or photo-mechanically. While it is tempting to read his gridded details as digital integers, all his work is made the old-fashioned way—by hand.

Close’s paintings are labor intensive and time consuming, and his prints are more so. While a painting can occupy Close for many months, it is not unusual for one print to take upward of two years to complete. Close has complete respect for, and trust in, the technical processes—and the collaboration with master printers—essential to the creation of his prints. The creative process is as important to Close as the finished product. “Process and collaboration” are two words that are essential to any conversation about Close’s prints.