Dame Vivienne Isabel Westwood was an English fashion designer and businesswoman, largely responsible for bringing modern punk and new wave fashions into the mainstream. In 2022, Sky Arts rated her the 4th most influential artist in Britain of the last 50 years.
Piccadilly Circus is a road junction and public space of London's West End in the City of Westminster. It was built in 1819 to connect Regent Street with Piccadilly. In this context, a circus, from the Latin word meaning "circle", is a round open space at a street junction.
David Hockney is an English painter, draftsman, printmaker, stage designer, and photographer. As an important contributor to the pop art movement of the 1960s, he is considered one of the most influential British artists of the 20th century.
The Universität der Künste Berlin, situated in Berlin, Germany, is the largest art school in Europe. It is a public art and design school, and one of the four research universities in the city.
The Serpentine Galleries are two contemporary art galleries in Kensington Gardens, Hyde Park, Central London. Recently rebranded to just Serpentine, the organisation is split across Serpentine South, previously known as the Serpentine Gallery, and Serpentine North, previously known as the Sackler Gallery. The gallery spaces are within five minutes' walk of each other, linked by the bridge over the Serpentine Lake from which the galleries get their names. Their exhibitions, architecture, education and public programmes attract up to 1.2 million visitors a year. Admission to both galleries is free. The CEO is Bettina Korek, and the artistic director Hans Ulrich Obrist.
Juergen Teller is a German fine-art and fashion photographer. He was awarded the Citibank Prize for Photography in 2003 and received the Special Presentation International Center of Photography Infinity Award in 2018.
Sir Norman Rosenthal is a British independent curator and art historian. From 1970 to 1974 he was Exhibitions Officer at Brighton Museum and Art Gallery. In 1974 he became a curator at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, leaving in 1976. The following year, in 1977, he joined the Royal Academy in London as Exhibitions Secretary where he remained until his resignation in 2008. Rosenthal has been a trustee of numerous different national and international cultural organisations since the 1980s; he is currently on the board of English National Ballet. In 2007, he was awarded a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours List. Rosenthal is well known for his support of contemporary art, and is particularly associated with the German artists Joseph Beuys, Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer and Julian Schnabel, the Italian painter Francesco Clemente, and the generation of British artists that came to prominence in the early 1990s known as the YBAs.
Lisson Gallery is a contemporary art gallery with locations in London and New York, founded by Nicholas Logsdail in 1967. The gallery represents over 50 artists such as Art & Language, Ryan Gander, Carmen Herrera, Richard Long, John Latham, Sol LeWitt, Robert Mangold, Jonathan Monk, Julian Opie, Richard Wentworth, Anish Kapoor, Richard Deacon and Ai Weiwei.
Cornelia Ann Parker is an English visual artist, best known for her sculpture and installation art.
Benedict Wong is a British actor. He is known for his roles as Kublai Khan in Netflix's Marco Polo (2014–2016), Bruce Ng in The Martian (2015), and Wong in the Marvel Cinematic Universe since Doctor Strange (2016).
Ai Weiwei is a Chinese contemporary artist, documentarian, and activist. Ai grew up in the far northwest of China, where he lived under harsh conditions due to his father's exile. As an activist, he has been openly critical of the Chinese Government's stance on democracy and human rights. He investigated government corruption and cover-ups, in particular the Sichuan schools corruption scandal following the collapse of "tofu-dreg schools" in the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. In 2011, Ai Weiwei was arrested at Beijing Capital International Airport on 3 April, for "economic crimes". He was detained for 81 days without charge. Ai Weiwei emerged as a vital instigator in Chinese cultural development, an architect of Chinese modernism, and one of the nation's most vocal political commentators.
Excessivism is an art movement. In 2015 American artist and curator Kaloust Guedel introduced it to the world with an exhibition titled Excessivist Initiative. The review of the exhibition written by art critic and curator Shana Nys Dambrot, titled "Excessivism: Irony, Imbalance and a New Rococo" was published in the Huffington Post. Its early adopters go back to late 20th century.
Cauleen Smith is an American born filmmaker and multimedia artist. She is best known for her experimental works that address the African-American identity, specifically the issues facing black women today. Smith is best known for her feature film Drylongso. Smith currently teaches in the School of Art at the California Institute of the Arts.
The Free Ai Weiwei street art campaign was a series of protests during the PRC government's secret detention of Chinese artist Ai Weiwei for 81 days in 2011, organised by Hong Kong artists and art supporters. Various slogans calling for the immediate release of the artist such as "Free Ai Weiwei", and "Who's afraid of Ai Weiwei" accompany stencilled images of Ai were applied onto pavements, pedestrian overpass, and building walls all over Hong Kong, and similar posters and signs were displayed worldwide.
Gangnam for Freedom is a 2012 video clip produced by the British sculptor Anish Kapoor. It is a parody of the international K-pop hit single Gangnam Style, and it was created to advocate the freedom of expression as well as to support the Chinese dissident Ai Weiwei, whose parody of "Gangnam Style" was blocked by Chinese authorities immediately after it was uploaded. The video features appearances by the staff of numerous contemporary art museums as well as human rights activists from Liberty, Index on Censorship, The Helen Bamber Foundation, and Amnesty International.
Louisiana Channel is a non-profit web-TV channel based at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebaek, Denmark.
Michael Hue-Williams is a British art dealer and gallery director. He currently lives and works in London, and owns Albion Barn gallery in Oxfordshire.
The year 2017 in art involves various significant events.
Ian Cheng is an American artist known for his live simulations that explore the capacity of living agents to deal with change. His simulations, commonly understood as "virtual ecosystems" are "less about the wonders of new technologies than about the potential for these tools to realize ways of relating to a chaotic existence." His work has been widely exhibited internationally, including MoMA PS1, Serpentine Galleries, Whitney Museum of American Art, Hirshhorn Museum, Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo, Migros Museum, and other institutions.
Josef O'Connor is a British-Irish artist and curator. His multi-disciplinary works include interactive media and digital content. He is the founder and artistic director of CIRCA.
