ARTCO DE CAFE

Period: 9/19 - 12/31

Anish Kapoor is a leading contemporary British-Indian artist working in large-scale abstract public sculpture. Among his best-known works is the popular Cloud Gate (2006), otherwise known as “the Bean,” featured in Chicago’s Millennium Park. Throughout his career, Kapoor has worked on a variety of scales and with diverse materials—mirrors, stone, wax, and PVC—exploring both biomorphic and geometric forms with a particular interest in negative space. “That's what I am interested in: the void, the moment when it isn't a hole,” he explained. “It is a space full of what isn't there.” Born on March 12, 1954 in Bombay, India, Kapoor moved to London in the late 1970s, studying at both the Hornsey College of Art and Chelsea College of Arts. He first gained critical recognition for his work in the 1980s, with his metaphysical site-specific works in which he manipulates form and the perception of space. Kapoor was awarded the Turner Prize in 1991, and named a Commander of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire in 2003, and Knighthood in 2013 for services to the visual arts. In 2016, Mexico City’s Museo Universiatrio Arte Contemporáneo held a major retrospective of his work. The artist currently lives in London, United Kingdom. Kapoor’s works are held in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., Fondazione Prada in Milan, and the Tate Gallery in London, among others.

Frank Stella is an American artist best known for his use of geometric patterns and shapes in creating both paintings and sculptures. Arguably one of the most influential living American artists, Stella’s works utilize the formal properties of shape, color, and composition to explore non-literary narratives, as seen in his work Harrar II (1967) from the Protractor series. “Abstraction didn't have to be limited to a kind of rectilinear geometry or even a simple curve geometry. It could have a geometry that had a narrative impact. In other words, you could tell a story with the shapes,” he explained. “It wouldn't be a literal story, but the shapes and the interaction of the shapes and colors would give you a narrative sense. You could have a sense of an abstract piece flowing along and being part of an action or activity.” Born on May 12, 1936 in Malden, MA, Stella went on to study history at Princeton University before moving to New York in 1958. Having moved to the city, Stella was immersed in the heyday Abstract Expressionism, but it was the work of Jasper Johns that inspired Stella’s Black Paintings of 1958-1960. These flatly painted, austere works, helped open up the doors to Minimalism. Through the following decades, Stella gained traction in the art world and in 1970 he became the youngest artist ever to be granted a solo exhibition at The Museum of Modern Art. He continued to work in New York, NY and commuted to his studio in Rock Tavern, New York. Today, Stella’s works are held in the collections of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Kunstmuseum Basel, the Art Institute of Chicago, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., and the Tate Gallery in London, among others. Frank Stella passed on May 4, 2024.

Anselm Kiefer is a German artist who has explored his country’s postwar identity, history, and mythology throughout his career. A painter, sculptor, and installation artist, materiality figures heavily into Kiefer’s practice. His large-scale paintings achieve their characteristic texture through his liberal application of pigments combined with found organic matter, metal, and lead, resulting in stark, haunting images with an imposing physicality. “Ruins, for me, are the beginning,” he mused. “With the debris, you can construct new ideas. They are symbols of a beginning.” Born on March 8, 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany, Kiefer grew up in the aftermath of bombed houses, something which made a profound impact on him. The artist went on to study under the influential Conceptual artist Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. While in Düsseldorf during the 1970s, he developed an interest in working with diverse materials and was influenced by the Neo-Expressionist painters Georg Baselitz and Jörg Immendorf. In 2016, the artist’s exhibition “Walhalla”—which takes its name from the warrior’s heaven of Norse mythology—opened at White Cube gallery in London to critical acclaim. Kiefer currently lives and works in Paris, France. His works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Stedelijk Museum of Modern Art in Amsterdam, among others.

Michaël Borremans is a contemporary Belgian artist whose photo-based paintings are characterized by their unsettlingly surreal imagery. His work has drawn comparisons to both Edouard Manet due to the artist's fluid brushwork and choice of unnerving subject matter. “I do not work thematically. But ultimately, works from a certain period have always an element that connects them together,” he has explained. “For example there was a time when I painted sleeping girls, or girls who seemed to be dead. That’s probably a way to express something that you’re subconsciously dealing with.” Born in 1963 in Gerardsbergen, Belgium, he received his MFA in 1996 from Hogeschool voor Wetenschap en Kunst in Ghent, and went on to work for several years as a teacher at the Secondary Municipal Art Institute of Ghent. In 2014, he was the subject of the mid-career retrospective “Michaël Borremans: As Sweet as it Gets” at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Brussels. Borremans' paintings can be found in institutions around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York. He currently lives and works in Ghent, Belgium.