Land art, variously known as Earth art, environmental art, and Earthworks, is an art movement that emerged in the 1960s and 1970s, largely associated with Great Britain and the United States but that also includes examples from many countries. As a trend, "land art" expanded boundaries of art by the materials used and the siting of the works. The materials used were often the materials of the Earth, including the soil, rocks, vegetation, and water found on-site, and the sites of the works were often distant from population centers. Though sometimes fairly inaccessible, photo documentation was commonly brought back to the urban art gallery.
Site-specific art is artwork created to exist in a certain place. Typically, the artist takes the location into account while planning and creating the artwork. Site-specific art is produced both by commercial artists, and independently, and can include some instances of work such as sculpture, stencil graffiti, rock balancing, and other art forms. Installations can be in urban areas, remote natural settings, or underwater.
Sir Anthony Douglas Cragg is an Anglo-German sculptor, resident in Wuppertal, Germany since 1977.
The International Sculpture Symposium movement was spearheaded by Karl Prantl in Austria in 1959. This initiative grew from the need to facilitate communication and exchange between members of the international sculpture community. It was also rooted in Cold War tensions, which lent a particular urgency to the need for cross-cultural dialogue on a person-to-person basis. The first international sculpture symposium took place in an abandoned stone quarry in Sankt Margarethen im Burgenland.
The Biennale of Sydney is an international festival of contemporary art, held every two years in Sydney, Australia. It is a large and well-attended contemporary visual arts event in the country. Alongside the Venice and São Paulo biennales and Documenta, it is one of the longest running exhibitions of its kind and was the first biennale to be established in the Asia-Pacific region.
Brett Murray is a South African artist mostly known for his steel and mixed media wall sculptures. He was born in Pretoria, South Africa. Murray has a master's degree in fine art from the Michaelis School of Fine Art, 1989. Referred to by critic Brenda Atkinson as "the dark prince of South African pop (art)", Murray is one of the country's most popular artists, often using easily recognisable media images with the addition of a subversive and bitterly funny twist. Murray's work addresses the wars of the cultures, the clash between Afrocentrism and Eurocentrism, the old and the new South Africas. "With my work I hope to critically entertain. Through satirical and tragic reflections on South Africa, I hope to shift people's perspectives and change people's minds, indulgent, arrogant and pretentious as this might sound," he says. More recently, his work has explored his own personal experiences and identity. Murray was also the founder of the sculpture department at Stellenbosch University.
Peter Clarke was a South African visual artist working across a broad spectrum of media. He was also a writer and poet.
Neeraj Gupta is an Indian sculptor. He took second prize in the sculpture section of the Florence Biennale in 2017, one of over a hundred winners in eleven sections. Gupta became the first Indian artist to win Florence Biennale Award. In 2018 he was one of the two hundred artists accepted to exhibit at the annual NordArt exhibition in the Carlshütte of Büdelsdorf, in Schleswig-Holstein in northern Germany. Keshav Malik was his guru.
Sculpture and in particular stone sculpture is an art for which Zimbabwe is well known around the world.
Tanya Preminger, is an artist working in various media: environmental art, site-specific art, ephemeral art, sculpture, installation and photography. She is mostly known for her land art projects and large-scale stone sculptures.
Žilvinas Kempinas is a contemporary visual artist. He lives and works in New York City.
The North-West University Gallery is an art gallery part of the North-West University (NWU) in Potchefstroom, South Africa. The gallery has two operating gallery spaces. The main gallery, the NWU Gallery, is situated on the North-West University's Potchefstroom Campus next to the Ferdinand Postma Library, and has hosted a number of exhibitions. Some artists who have exhibited their work during 2011 include Rosemary Marriott, 2010 Standard Bank Young Artist Award winner Michael MacGarry and band photographer Sean Brand.
Israel-Isaac Lipshitz, known as Lippy Lipshitz was a South African sculptor, painter and printmaker. He is considered to be one of the most important South African sculptors, along with Moses Kottler and Anton van Wouw.
Zimoun is a Swiss artist who lives and works in Bern, Switzerland. As self-taught artist, he is most known for his sound sculptures, sound architectures and installation art that combine raw, industrial materials such as cardboard boxes, plastic bags, or old furniture, with mechanical elements such as dc-motors, wires, microphones, speakers and ventilators.
Kimsooja was born in Daegu, South Korea. Kimsooja is a multi-disciplinary conceptual artist who travels between her three homes and places of work in New York City, Paris, and Seoul. In 1980 Kim graduated with a B.F.A in Painting from Hong-Ik University, Seoul and continued to pursue her M.F.A there, obtaining the degree in 1984 at the age of 27. Her origin as a painter was a crucial starting point for the development of her art. That same year, she received a scholarship to study art at Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris, France, where she studied Printmaking. Her first solo exhibition was held in 1988 at Gallery Hyundai, Seoul. Currently, her work is featured in countless international museums and galleries as well as public art fairs and other spaces. Her practice combines performance, film, photo, and site-specific installation using textile, light, and sound. Kimsooja's work investigates questions concerning the conditions of humanity, while engaging issues of aesthetics, culture, politics, and the environment. Her principle of ‘non-doing’ and ‘non-making,’ which follows a conceptual and structural investigation of performance through modes of mobility and immobility, inverts the notion of the artist as the predominant actor.
André van der Merwe is a South African urologist. He is currently head of urology at the University of Stellenbosch and an associate professor at Tygerberg Hospital. He is best known for conducting the world's first successful penis transplant in 2014. He also performed the first laparoscopic kidney removal in South Africa.
Masimba Hwati is an interdisciplinary artist from Zimbabwe, working internationally at the intersections of sculpture, performance, and sound, known for his unconventional three-dimensional mixed media sculptures. Hwati graduated from Harare Polytechnic School of Art and Design in 2003 where he majored in Ceramics and Painting. Hwati taught Visual Arts and 3D Art at Harare Polytechnic School of Art and Design. He is a PhD Candidate at Akademie Der Bildenden Künste Wien ,Österreich,an MFA from Penny W. Stamps School of Art and Design University of Michigan, Ann Arbor He was most recently, included in the Montreal Museum of Fine Art's (MMFA) exhibition, Face To Face: From Yesterday to Today, Non-Western Art and Picasso. In 2015, he was also one of three artists, along with Chikonzero Chazunguza and Gareth Nyandoro, selected for Pixels Of Ubuntu/Unhu for the Zimbabwean Pavilion at the 56th Venice Biennale. He is an honorary research fellow at Rhodes University Fine Arts Department in Grahamstown, South Africa.
Wayne Barker, South African visual artist. Barker is based in Johannesburg. He rose to prominence in the late 80s, at the height of political unrest under the Apartheid regime. His work has featured in several global biennales, art fairs and important retrospective exhibitions. He works in various mediums, including but not limited to painting, printmaking, sculpture, video, performance and installation. In addition to collaborations with other artists, Barker has collaborated with the Qubeka Beadwork Studio based in Cape Town, to realise large scale glass beadworks.
Michael Joo is a contemporary artist known for using a combination of scientific language, processes and complex structures that speak to liminality, access, and transmission. Much like Joseph Beuys, Joo uses various media such as sculpture, photography, printmaking, and painting, further referencing cultural heritage, identity, and natural history. He currently lives and works in New York, New York, as a Senior Critic in Sculpture at Yale University. He also teaches at Columbia University in the MFA program.
Carel van der Merwe is a South African author, historian and businessman who writes in Afrikaans and English. He has been awarded a number of literary prizes for his fiction and non-fiction books.
