CategoriesStyles and Movements
Contemporary Art
Art of the recent past and present, broadly from the 1970s onward, made worldwide in every medium from painting to digital media.
15 works · 10 related artists
About
Modern art is often told as a sequence of movements; contemporary art has no single direction. From around the 1970s the idea that one style should lead gave way to pluralism: painting, photography, installation, video, performance, sound and digital work coexist.
Several threads run through the period. Cindy Sherman's Untitled Film Stills (1977–80) and Barbara Kruger's photo-text works examined how images shape identity. In the 1980s Jean-Michel Basquiat and Jeff Koons, from opposite directions, brought street culture and consumer objects into art. Louise Bourgeois turned memory into giant spiders and room-sized cells in the 1990s, and Olafur Eliasson filled a vast London hall with an artificial sun in The Weather Project (2003). Meanwhile biennials in Havana, Dakar and Gwangju widened the map, and artists such as El Anatsui, Cai Guo-Qiang and Doris Salcedo reached audiences worldwide. Look for work that questions its viewer and its setting.