Contemporary art is a very hard movement to define but has been categorized as any art made in our lifetime, in the late 20th and early 21st century, following the modern and postmodern art movements.
Artwork from this category spans all genres, from painting and film to sculpture and everything in between. These works of art also span a wide range of mediums and include numerous subcategories. Contemporary art is as much an experiment in processes as it is type of art.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Yayoi Kusama (1929 – present):

The nine decades of Yayoi Kusama’s life have taken her from rural Japan to the New York art scene to contemporary Tokyo, in a career in which she has continuously innovated and re-invented her style. Well-known for her repeating dot patterns, her art encompasses an astonishing variety of media, including painting, drawing, sculpture, film, performance and immersive installation.
It ranges from works on paper featuring intense semi-abstract imagery, to soft sculpture known as ‘Accumulations’, to her ‘Infinity Net’ paintings, made up of carefully repeated arcs of paint built up into large patterns. Since 1977, Kusama has lived voluntarily in a psychiatric institution, and much of her work has been marked with obsessiveness and a desire to escape from psychological trauma. In an attempt to share her experiences, she creates installations that immerse the viewer in her obsessive vision of endless dots and nets or infinitely mirrored space.

Pop art is an art movement that emerged in the 1950’s and flourished in the 1960’s in America and Britain, drawing inspiration from sources in popular and commercial culture. Different cultures and countries contributed to the movement during the 1960’s and 70’s.
Young artists felt that what they were taught at art school and what they saw in museums did not have anything to do with their lives or the things they saw around them every day. Instead they turned to sources such as Hollywood movies, advertising, product packaging, pop music and comic books for their imagery.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Andy Warhol (1928 – 1987):

Warhol was an American artist, director and producer who was a leading figure in the visual art movement known as pop art.
His works explore the relationship between artistic expression, celebrity culture, and advertising that flourished by the 1960’s, and span a variety of media, including painting, silk-screening, photography, film, and sculpture.

A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary. Surrealism aimed to revolutionize human experience, rejecting a rational vision of life in favor of one that asserted the value of the unconscious and dreams.
The movement’s poets and artists found magic and strange beauty in the unexpected and the uncanny, the disregarded and the unconventional.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Salvador Dali (1904 – 1989):

Dali was a prominent Spanish surrealist born in Figueres, Catalonia, Spain. Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters.
Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, at times in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Futurism was an Italian art movement, launched by the Italian poet Filippo Tommaso Marinetti in 1909, of the early twentieth century that aimed to capture in art the dynamism and energy of the modern world.
Futurist painting used elements of neo-impressionism and cubism to create compositions that expressed the idea of the dynamism, the energy and movement, of modern life.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Filippo Tommaso Marinetti (1876 – 1944):

Marinetti was an Italian poet, editor, art theorist and founder of the Futurist movement. He was associated with the utopian and symbolist artists and literary community Abbaye de Créteil between 1907 and 1908.
He is mostly known as the author of the first ever Futurist Manifesto (1909) and also the Fascism Manifesto.

Giacomo Balla (1871 – 1958):

Balla was an Italian painter, art teacher and poet best known as a key influencer of Futurism. In his painting he depicted light, movement and speed.
As a member of the Italian Futurist movement, Balla was passionately invested in making art that reflected “the future” that is the increasingly industrialized and technological world of the early twentieth century.

Cubism was a revolutionary new approach to representing reality invented in around 1907–08 by artists Pablo Picasso and Georges Braque. They brought different views of subjects (usually objects or figures) together in the same picture, resulting in paintings that appear fragmented and abstracted.
Cubism opened almost infinite new possibilities for the treatment of visual reality in art and was the starting point for many later abstract styles including constructivism and neo-plasticism.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Pablo Picasso (1881 – 1973):

Picasso was a Spanish painter, sculptor, print-maker, ceramicist, stage designer, poet and playwright who spent most of his adult life in France.
Regarded as one of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.

Expressionism is a modernist movement, initially in poetry and painting, originating in Germany at the beginning of the 20th century. Its typical trait is to present the world solely from a subjective perspective, distorting it radically for emotional effect in order to evoke moods or ideas. Expressionist artists have sought to express the meaning of emotional experience rather than physical reality.
Expressionism developed as an avant-garde style before the First World War. It remained popular during the Weimar Republic, particularly in Berlin. The style extended to a wide range of the arts, including expressionist architecture, painting, literature, theater, dance, film and music.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Edvard Munch (1863 – 1944):

Munch was a Norwegian painter, whose best-known work, The Scream, has become one of the most iconic images of world art.
Throughout his artistic career, Munch focused on scenes of death, agony, and anxiety in distorted and emotionally charged portraits, all themes and styles that would be adopted by the Expressionists.

Impressionism developed in France in the nineteenth century and is based on the practice of painting out of doors and spontaneously ‘on the spot’ rather than in a studio from sketches. Main impressionist subjects were landscapes and scenes of everyday life.
Impressionism originated with a group of Paris-based artists whose independent exhibitions brought them to prominence during the 1870’s and 1880’s.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Claude Monet (1840 -1926):

Monet was a French painter, a founder of French Impressionist painting and the most consistent and prolific practitioner of the movement’s philosophy of expressing one’s perceptions before nature, especially as applied to plain air landscape painting.
The term “Impressionism” is derived from the title of his painting Impression, soleil levant (Impression, Sunrise), which was exhibited in 1874 in the first of the independent exhibitions mounted by Monet and his associates as an alternative to the Salon de Paris.

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical and intellectual movement and was characterized by its emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of all the past and nature, preferring the medieval rather than the classical.
It was partially a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the aristocratic social and political norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components of modernity.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Caspar David Friedrich (1774 – 1830):

Friedrich was a German Romantic landscape painter, generally considered the most important German artist of his generation.
He is best known for his mid-period allegorical landscapes which typically feature contemplative figures silhouetted against night skies, morning mists, barren trees or Gothic or megalithic ruins.

Neoclassicism is the name given to Western movements in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theater, music, and architecture that draw inspiration from the “classical” art and culture of classical antiquity.
Its popularity spread all over Europe as a generation of European art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to their home countries with newly rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals.
The main Neoclassical movement coincided with the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, and continued into the early 19th century, laterally competing with Romanticism

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717 – 1768):

Winckelmann was a German art historian and archaeologist. He was a pioneering Hellenist who first articulated the difference between Greek, Greco-Roman and Roman art. Neoclassicism was born largely thanks to the writings of Winckelmann, at the time of the rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum.

Roccoco, or also known as “Late Baroque”, is a movement that falls along the same lines as the Baroque movement but this time in the interior design and furnishing rather than the architecture.
It combines asymmetry, scrolling curves, gilding, white and pastel colors, sculpted molding to create the illusions of surprise, motion and drama.

Prominent Figures of the Time Period:

Jean-Honore Fragonard (1732 – 1806):

Fragonard was a French painter and print-maker whose late Rococo manner was distinguished by remarkable facility, exuberance, and hedonism. One of the most prolific artists active in the last decades of the Ancien Régime, Fragonard produced more than 550 paintings (not counting drawings and etchings).
Among his most popular works are genre paintings conveying an atmosphere of intimacy and veiled eroticism.