The 25 most important European Contemporary artists

It is time again for an interesting list and this time it is the 25 most important European Contemporary artists! We have combined a number of sources (Artnet, Contemporary Art Monitor, Saatchi) to complete out list.

Banksy (UK)

Banksy is the pseudonym of a British artist. Although there is little certainty about the true identity of Banksy and most sources indicate that his real name is "Robert" or "Robert Banks," he is probably called Robert Gunningham. He was supposed to be born in 1974 in Bristol.

His artworks are often political and humorous. In his street art he combines graffiti with a characteristic template technique. His street work can be found in various European cities but also outside Europe such as the Palestinian territories and the United States.

Antony Gormley (UK)

During the last 25 years, Antony Gormley has given a new meaning to the human figure in sculpture, taking the proportions of his own body as a starting point. Since 1990 he has worked on large-scale projects such as Allotment, Critical Mass, Another Place, Domain Field, Inside Australia and the most recent Blind Light. His most famous works are: Angel of the North, a huge sculpture intended for public space, as a landmark in Gateshead, commissioned in 1995 and placed in 1998 and Another Time and Another Place (1997), consisting of several figures, for example on Crosby Beach near Liverpool.

Andy Goldsworthy (UK)

After his studies Goldsworthy lived in Yorkshire, Lancashire and Cumbria. In 1985 he moved to Langholm in Dumfries and Galloway, Scotland and a year later to Penpont, a little further north. It is said that his slow journey to the north was due to a search for a different way of life, which took place outside of his control, but that the opportunity always arose and the desire to work in these regions was also an economic background.

He still lives in Scotland and creates site-specific sculptures and land art objects that are embedded in a landscape setting. He makes his art using natural and locally available materials. Both temporary and permanent sculptures that emphasize the character of their environment. Goldsworthy was awarded an Officer in the Order of the British Empire in 2000.

Isa Genzken (Germany)

From 1969 to 1977 she studied sculpture in Hamburg, Düsseldorf and in her current hometown of Berlin. Genzken has been working for more than thirty years on a multifaceted and complex oeuvre that consists of images, installations, films, videos, paintings, works on paper, photos and artist's books. Genzken works with many different materials such as wood, plaster, epoxy resin, concrete and especially also plastics and plastics, but also with everyday utensils and products from the consumer society. With her work, the artist subtly reflects contemporary reality on society.

Sean Scully (Ireland)

Born in Dublin, Sean Scully grew up in a working-class neighborhood in South London. The paintings that he discovered in a local Catholic church, along with rhythm & blues music, determined his future life. Scully settled in New York in the 1970s and became an American citizen in 1983, the same year that his 19-year-old son Paul died.

Events in his private life, along with historical and cultural influences, return to his work. Scully feels strongly connected with current political and social developments. Sean Scully was twice nominated for the Turner Prize in 1989 and 1993 and is represented in the collection of renowned museums such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the MoMA in New York and Tate Modern in London.

Neo Rauch (Germany)

Neo Rauch (Leipzig, 1960) is one of the most important artists of the moment. His work, which so rapidly stormed the art world, completely escapes the predictable rhythm in which the arts seem to have developed in recent decades. Neo Rauch studied at the famous Hochschule für Grafik und Buchkunst in Leipzig with Arno Rink in the days when Germany and Europe were still shared. The concentration in Leipzig on painting placed the art that originated there outside the fashions of the international art world. The work of Neo Rauch broke through this isolation and was praised worldwide since the nineties.

Pierre Huyghe (France)

Pierre Huyghe is an artist who for decades has been investigating the tense relationship between nature and culture. He experiments with various media such as objects, films, photos and drawings, but also works with a large assortment of living animals, plants and other natural elements that act as performers in his work.

He often works in various locations outside the world of museums and galleries. The best known is the work he made for Documenta 13 entitled Untilled (referring to uncultivated land) in which, among other things, a dog with a dyed bone, a sculpture with a beehive head, poisonous fruit, ants and other natural organisms were displayed around a compost hope in the Karlsaue Park in Kassel.

Chris Ofili (UK)

Ofili, winner of the Turner Prize in 1998, is one of the great talents of his generation. Ofili is known for the noise around his Holy Virgin Mary (1996) on which Ofili encircled the holy virgin with cunts cut out of porn magazines. The Holy Virgin Mary shows a lovely black Madonna, with a lump of elephant shit as a right breast. Maria is wearing a blue-gray dress that is draped like a flower on a shiny golden background. As colorful putti, clippings from porn magazines are stuck around Maria. The work seems inspired by Gustav Klimt and the Op-art movement.

Tracey Emin (UK)

Emin has been one of the most iconic artists in Brit Art in the visual arts since the 1990s. In the 1960s and 1970s, women from all walks of life fought for more freedom. Now that the struggle for equality has been fought in many respects, a number of female artists believe it is time to explore their own deepest emotions.

Their research focuses on female activities and traditional handicrafts. Tracey Emin lets a large audience enjoy her most intimate female experience and makes the world part of her sexual escapades.

Sterling Ruby (Germany)

Sterling Ruby (1972 U.S.A.) is a multidisciplinary artist who became known for his large glassy ceramic sculptures and his abstract paintings. His paintings are reminiscent of dark interpretations of the Color Field Paintings of the 1960s. His work refers to modern architecture and minimalism, but also to marginality, vandalism and power structures. Because of its exceptional use of materials and its power to develop a special visual language, Sterling Ruby is considered one of the most important artists at the beginning of this twenty-first century.

Albert Oehlen (Germany)

In addition to painting, his interest was in philosophy: Oehlen has been intensively involved with Nietzsche. One of his most interesting paintings is called The appearance of appearance (1983). Oehlen's artistic program includes striking and confusing space, mirror and fashion model images.

The appearance of the appearance, the reinforcement of the appearance, which is precisely a weakening in ironic duplication, makes it possible to destroy the appearance of the aesthetic replacement, which art also stands for. What does the appearance hide? The dirt of life. If the appearance is reduced to appearance, then one comes to the last thing that can be observed, from which there is no way back. More concretely: one comes to the unimaginable, the horrible, the dirt. Nobody talks about it; they have repressed it.

Thomas Schütte (Germany)

Thomas Schütte works with a variety of techniques and has built up a broad but coherent oeuvre: watercolors, drawings, models, models, monumental or small-scale sculptures, installations: he developed in all these directions and preferably mixed the various art forms together. In that case he chooses a theatrical approach, whereby the total space is involved in the mise en scene and the spectator becomes part of the presentation. He often makes differences in size and scale: a sculpture that has an 'ordinary' size suddenly becomes huge in contrast with a miniature figure next to it. A small chair or a ladder, leaning against a house, a bunker on a table, Schütte's forms floating between reality (realized sculpture) and utopia (model for something that can ever be performed). The work is full of layers of meaning and often contains texts.

Thomas Ruff (Germany)

Thomas Ruff studied photography from 1977-1985 at the Art Academy in Düsseldorf with Bernd & Hilla Becher. Fellow students included the photographers Andreas Gursky, Candida Höfer and Thomas Struth.

Ruff started by photographing landscapes, but while he is still studying, he switches to photographing interiors (1979-83) and 'unmoved' portraits of his friends. His early portraits are in black and white, but he soon switches to color, using uniform backgrounds in different colors.

Hito Steyerl (Germany)

Steyerl is seen as one of the most exciting artistic personalities of today. She speculates about the influence of the internet and digitization on the structure of our daily lives. She provides an astute and often humorous analysis of the dizzying speed with which images and information are constantly being adjusted and distributed, whereby the tempo is increased infinitely or until it crashes and falls apart.

Rudolf Stingel (Italia)

Rudolf Stingel is an Italian painter and artist who was born in Merano, Italy and lives in New York City (NYC). This painter stimulates the participation of the public and seeks the viewer's view of art. He also uses conceptual installations and paintings to analyze the creation process.

This gifted craftsman works with "found" and / or easily accessible materials, such as carpet, steam foam, drywall and molded polyurethane. His artwork adheres to an underlying framework and challenges traditional concepts in the world of painting.

Martin Kippeberger (Germany)

Martin Kippenberger attached the same importance to his multiples as to his "unique" works. That was in line with his attitude to life and art: he was able to transform everything into art, from the most banal, in the eyes of the art world, unacceptable object to the most exalted and salonfähige theory. He did not think in terms of hierarchies, nor in terms of subjects, nor in terms of the various media and media he used to express his ideas. However, his work is always characterized by his interest in the human.

Olafur Eliasson (Denmark)

As an artist, Olafur Eliasson is best known for his experiments with water, light, temperature and pressure, with how we experience this and what we see. This related to spaces, and especially how we react to spaces with our senses. Olafur wants to raise questions such as "What is my role in this environment?", "What influence do I have on the environment?" and "How can I influence the environment?" According to Olafur Eliasson, change is possible by constantly asking questions.

Luc Tuymans (Belgium)

His paintings are inspired by photos and films. Typical for his recognizable style are the small formats, the pale, monotonous use of color and the at first glance innocent, almost poetic subjects. However, these usually prove to be a misleading cover for the reference to highly charged events, such as child abuse, illness, nationalism, and, among his personal favorites, the Holocaust.

Statements by the artist confirm social and political engagement and his preoccupation with subversive topics such as sexual abuse, aggression and xenophobia. In his work Tuymans investigates the possibilities that painting and representation can still have today. It is therefore not surprising that his name is invariably mentioned in this debate that is so important within the contemporary visual arts.

Marlene Dumas (The Netherlands)

Marlene Dumas exhibited in the major Dutch museums, but also at two Documentas and in cities such as Tokyo, London, New York and Johannesburg. She had solo exhibitions at the Tate Gallery in London (1995), at the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt (1998), at the MUHKA in Antwerp (1999) and in 1995 she participated in the Venice Biennale for the Netherlands.

In 2005 her artworks are displayed in the Saatchi Gallery in London. Charles Saatchi called her one of the most important artists of the moment, so she took a prominent part in the exhibition The Triumph of Painting. In the Netherlands, her work can be seen in De Pont museum in Tilburg, among others.

Peter Doig (UK)

Doig is one of the most important artists who breathe new life into contemporary painting - specifically the classical landscape genre. Everything in Doig's work exudes great confidence in the medium of painting - the more than man-sized formats, the alienating use of color, the worked-through surface, the attention to details and, last but not least, the choice for the landscape genre.

Anselm Kiefer (Germany)

Together with Baselitz, Immendorf, Lüpertz and Penck, Kiefer is one of the most important representatives of the so-called 'Neue Deutsche Malerie', also known as Neo-Expressionism. Kiefer investigates notions such as German national identity and Teutonic history. His monumental and dramatic paintings cause some confusion. Confusion that is never fully cleared up because Kiefer makes no clear statement anywhere. He seems to strive for a subjective processing of the collective memory, whereby painting is seen as a thought process.

Wolfgang Tillmans (Germany)

Tillmans is eminently regarded as a versatile photographer of modern life. In November 2000 he won the Turner Prize. He makes portraits, landscapes, still lifes, cityscapes, self-portraits, and more recently also abstract representations.

Completely different images are combined in wall-filling installations, creating unexpected associations and surprising connections. Tillman's list does not include photos, but hangs them directly on the wall with push pins or paper clips. Especially for De Hallen, the artist will make an installation with photos of landscapes and abstract photo works.

Gerhard Richter (Germany)

Gerhard Richter moved in 1961, from what was then East German Dresden, to Düsseldorf where he went to study at the Staatliche Kunstakademie. In response to the socialist realism of official East German painting, Gerhard Richter propagated here "capitalist realism." Ironically, Richter commented on Western, capitalist mass culture in a way that is related to American pop art. In 1963, Gerhard Richter, together with K. Fischer-Lueg and Sigmar Polke, presented the satirical introduction of capitalist realism in art. From 1964, photographs of everyday subjects served as the basis for his paintings and drawings.

Damien Hirst (UK)

Damien Hirst mainly makes sculptures and installations. He is the driving force among young British artists such as Gary Hume, Sarah Lucas and Georgina Starr who show the gray everyday life of the working class in their work; they all studied at Goldsmith's College in London. Hirst stood out in the controversial exhibition of young British art Freeze in 1988 in the Surrey Docks in London.

Death, transience and hopeless existence form the central theme of his work that can be very shocking. Hirst uses a lot of dead animals. He mercilessly confronts the viewer with death by letting a cow's head rot away surrounded by flies (A thousand years, 1990). He also allowed life-size sharks, cows or calves to "float" in formaldehyde-filled glass trays, sometimes placed on a round rail.

Adreas Gursky (Germany)

The views of Andreas Gursky can best be described as panoramas from their point of view. Distance, order and overview play a major role. His method is that of his teachers, the German photographers Bernd and Hilla Becher, at least if we pay attention to the documentary character and the camera setting. A big difference with the work of these famous predecessors is the use of color, the large size and the presence of people. The relationship between people and the organizational structure of their environment is one of Gursky's central themes. Gursky photos are about buildings, public space (inside and outside), mass culture and nature.