Artist Profile
Tag: Artist Profile
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The Conceptual Provocateur
Damien Hirst was born in 1965 in Bristol, England. His mother worked for the Citizens Advice Bureau. He never met his biological father; his mother married his stepfather when Hirst was two, and the couple divorced 10 years later. He grew up drawing compulsively, shoplifting art supplies, and visiting morgues as a teenager. The bodies
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The Machine Collaborator
Mario Klingemann (a.k.a. Quasimondo) was born in 1970 in Laatzen, Germany. His father was an engineer who brought home the bleeding edge of 1970s technology: electronic chess computers, programmable calculators, the latest gadgets that blinked and computed. His mother painted. Klingemann existed between these two worlds from the beginning. At his father’s office, he watched
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The Witness Painter
David Kassan was born on February 25, 1977 in Little Rock, Arkansas. He grew up in the Philadelphia area, raised in a family haunted by stories that were never fully told. His grandfather Murray Kassan had escaped ethnic cleansing on the Ukrainian-Romanian border in 1917, fleeing the Cossacks to reach America. But when David’s father
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The Heretic
Odd Nerdrum was born in 1944 in Sweden to Norwegian resistance fighters fleeing German occupation. After the war, they returned to Norway. In 1950, his parents divorced. Decades later, he discovered the man who raised him wasn’t his biological father. He enrolled at Oslo’s National Academy of Art in 1961. The academy taught modernism and
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The Cinematic Architect
Gregory Crewdson was born on September 26, 1962 in Park Slope, Brooklyn. His father was a psychoanalyst who saw patients in their Park Slope home. As a child, Crewdson would lie in bed listening to muffled voices through the walls, imagining what stories were unfolding in his father’s office. He learned early that the most
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The Dream Weaver
James Jean was born in 1979 in Taipei, Taiwan. His family moved to Parsippany, New Jersey when he was three years old, where he grew up between two worlds. As a child, he explored music first, learning piano and trumpet, spending hours practicing scales and melodies. But his hands always wandered back to drawing. Faces
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The Data Sculptor
Refik Anadol was born in 1985 in Istanbul, Turkey. At eight years old, he taught himself to code on a Commodore 64. Computers spoke a language he understood instinctively. He studied photography and video at Istanbul Bilgi University, graduating with highest honors in 2009, then earned his MFA in visual communication design in 2011. As
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The Witness
Steve McCurry was born in 1950 in Philadelphia, but his real life began the day he bought a one-way ticket to India. He was twenty-eight years old. Fresh out of Pennsylvania State University with a theater degree and two years at a local newspaper behind him, he packed film and clothes into a bag and
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The World Builder
James Gurney was born in 1958 in Glendale, California and grew up in Palo Alto. He studied anthropology at the University of California, Berkeley, receiving a bachelor of arts degree with Phi Beta Kappa honors in 1979. The choice to study anthropology might seem disconnected from his later career as a painter, but it shaped
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The Atelier Master
Jacob Collins was born in 1964 in New York City into a family steeped in art and scholarship. As a child, he began copying Old Master paintings at the Metropolitan Museum of Art under the guidance of his grandmother, Alma Schapiro, herself a Paris-trained artist. His great-uncle was Meyer Schapiro, a renowned professor of art