1980s
Art and design made in the 1980s: graffiti and Neo-Expressionist painting, appropriation, Memphis design and art shaped by the AIDS crisis.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for 1980s are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
After the cool restraint of the 1970s, the 1980s were loud, image-hungry and eclectic. Keith Haring drew chalk figures on blank advertising panels in the New York subway, and Jean-Michel Basquiat, first noticed for graffiti signed SAMO, filled canvases with crowned heads, anatomy and crossed-out words. Italian painters of the Transavanguardia and German artists such as Georg Baselitz returned to large, expressive figurative painting.
Another strand questioned originality and mass media. Sherrie Levine rephotographed Walker Evans's pictures, Richard Prince rephotographed cigarette advertisements, and Barbara Kruger laid bold red-and-white slogans over found photographs. In Britain, Anish Kapoor coated sculptural forms in pure powdered pigment. In Milan, the Memphis group led by Ettore Sottsass launched furniture in clashing laminate colours in 1981. The AIDS crisis devastated the art community and gave rise to activist graphics, and by the decade's end Robert Mapplethorpe's photographs were at the centre of fierce arguments over public funding.
