Robert Rauschenberg

Robert Rauschenberg (born Milton Ernst Rauschenberg; October 22, 1925 – May 12, 2008) was an American artist who came to prominence in the 1950s transition from Abstract Expressionism to Pop Art.
Rauschenberg is perhaps most famous for his "Combines" of the 1950s, in which non-traditional materials and objects were employed in innovative combinations. While the Combines are both painting and sculpture, Rauschenberg has also worked with photography, printmaking, papermaking, and performance. Rauschenberg had a tendency to pick up the trash that interested him on the streets of New York City and bringing it back to his studio to use it in his works. He claimed he "wanted something other than what I could make myself and I wanted to use the surprise and the collectiveness and the generosity of finding surprises. And if it wasn't a surprise at first, by the time I got through with it, it was. So the object itself was changed by its context and therefore it became a new thing."
In 1953, Rauschenberg famously erased a drawing by de Kooning. In 1964 Rauschenberg was the first American artist to win the Grand Prize at the Venice Biennale (Mark Tobey and James Whistler had previously won the Painting Prize). Since then he enjoyed a rare degree of institutional support. Rauschenberg lived and worked in New York City and on Captiva Island, Florida until his death on May 12, 2008, from heart failure.

www.guggenheimcollection.org/site/artist_bio_133.html

Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, born Marcus Rothkowitz (Latvian: Marks Rotko; September 25, 1903–February 25, 1970), was a Latvian-born Jewish American painter and printmaker who is classified as an abstract expressionist, although he rejected not only the label but even being called an abstract painter.

www.nga.gov/feature/rothko

Hiroshi Sugimoto

Hiroshi Sugimoto (杉本博司, Sugimoto Hiroshi), born on February 23, 1948, is a Japanese photographer currently dividing his time between Tokyo, Japan and New York City, USA. His catalog is made up of a number of series, each having a distinct theme and similar attributes.

www.sugimotohiroshi.com

Joshua Davis

Joshua Davis (born June 13, 1971) is an American web designer, author and artist in new media. He was an early pioneer in the use of Macromedia Flash. He is the author of Flash to the Core (2002) and was featured in the seminal book New Masters of Flash (2000).

www.joshuadavis.com
www.once-upon-a-forest.com

Ryoji Ikeda

Ryoji Ikeda (born 1966 in Gifu, Japan) is a Japanese sound artist who lives and works in New York City. Sometimes harsh, sometimes remarkably gentle, Ikeda's music is concerned primarily with sound in a variety of "raw" states, such as sine tones and noise, often using frequencies at the edges of the range of human hearing. The conclusion of his album +/- features just such a tone; of it, Ikeda says "a high frequency sound is used that the listener becomes aware of only upon its disappearance" (from the CD booklet). Rhythmically, Ikeda's music is highly imaginative, exploiting beat patterns and, at times, using a variety of discrete tones and noise to create the semblance of a drum machine. His work also encroaches on the world of ambient music; many tracks on his albums are concerned with slowly evolving soundscapes, with little or no sense of pulse.
In addition to working as a solo artist, he has also collaborated with, among others, Carsten Nicolai (under the name "Cyclo.") and the art collective Dumb Type. His work matrix won the Golden Nica Award in 2001

www.ryojiikeda.com

Jean-Michel Basquiat

Jean-Michel Basquiat (December 22, 1960, Brooklyn - August 12, 1988, New York, New York) was an American artist. He gained popularity, first as a graffiti artist in New York City, and then as a successful 1980s-era Neo-expressionist artist. Basquiat's paintings continue to influence modern day artists and command high prices.

www.basquiat.com

Richard Serra

Richard Serra (born November 29, 1939) is an American minimalist sculptor and video artist known for working with large scale assemblies of sheet metal. Serra was involved in the Process Art Movement.

www.moma.org/exhibitions/2007/serra

Jackson Pollock

Paul Jackson Pollock (January 28, 1912 – August 11, 1956) was an influential American painter and a major force in the abstract expressionist movement. He was married to noted abstract painter Lee Krasner.

Frank Gehry

Frank Owen Gehry, CC (born Ephraim Owen Goldberg, February 28, 1929) is a Pritzker Prize winning architect based in Los Angeles.
His buildings, including his private residence, have become tourist attractions. Many museums, companies, and cities seek Gehry's services as a badge of distinction, beyond the product he delivers.
His best known works include the titanium-covered Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, Spain, Walt Disney Concert Hall in downtown Los Angeles, Experience Music Project in Seattle, Weisman Art Museum in Minneapolis, Dancing House in Prague, Czech Republic, and his private residence in Santa Monica, California, which jump-started his career, lifting it from the status of "paper architecture", a phenomenon which many famous architects have experienced in their formative decades through experimentation almost exclusively on paper before receiving their first major commission in later years.

www.foga.com