Artist Profile
Tag: Artist Profile
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Jenny Saville: The Skin Cartographer
Jenny Saville was born on May 7, 1970, in Cambridge, into a family of educators who moved frequently as her father pursued a career in school administration. She was eight years old when she first got hooked on painting, and her mother, recognizing something real in that, cleared out a broom closet at home to
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The Urban Chronicler
Sebas Velasco was born in 1988 in Burgos, a city in northern Spain. He has drawn since he was a small child, but his artistic journey truly began in 2004 when he started painting graffiti on the walls of his hometown at fifteen or sixteen years old, fascinated by the album covers of metal bands
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The Metaphor Builder
Bára Prášilová was born in 1979 in Cheb, Czech Republic, at a time when communism still shaped every horizon. At thirteen, like every Czech child of that era, she was asked to decide her profession for life, and though she wanted to be a fashion designer, her parents steered her toward something more practical, paying
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The Borderless Collective
TeamLab was founded in 2001 by Toshiyuki Inoko and four friends from the University of Tokyo. Inoko was born in 1977 in Tokushima, Japan, and studied Mathematical Engineering and Information Physics. The founding members included Shunsuke Aoki, Sakai Daisuke, Tamura Tetsuya, and Yoshimura Joe, all with engineering backgrounds. They officially incorporated when Inoko graduated in
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The Meme Classicist
Ksenia Buridanova enrolled at art school in Rostov-on-Don in 2001. She spent years copying works by classical masters from nature, training her hand and eye in the techniques of Vermeer, Bosch, and the Dutch Golden Age. In 2014, she graduated with honors from the Art College of M.B. Grekov, then continued her education at the
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The Time Archaeologist
Hiroshi Sugimoto was born in Tokyo in 1948. An elementary school teacher showed him how to make photograms using photosensitive paper and light. In high school, he photographed Audrey Hepburn’s face flickering on a movie screen, trying to capture light that was already disappearing. He studied politics and sociology at Rikkyo University, traveled through communist
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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