Contemporary Artists

Contemporary artists are the artists of the late 20th century and early 21st century. That is it goes about new artistic movements and styles that arose during the 1960s and 70s and had widespread influence: pop art, op art, color-field painting, conceptual art, land art, happening, photorealism, etc. The most prominent representatives of these movements are Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Bridget Riley, Richard Anusziewicz, Ellsworth Kelly and Frank Stella, Sol LeWitt, Richard Estes, Robert Smithson.

Some of these styles are a forms of abstract art, such as color-field painting with the cool abstract images, stark abstraction of conceptual art and one of the most long-lived of these movements – the abstract development known as minimalism, which focused on the least visible variation of technique in painting, sculpture, and other media.

Abstract art, the style that dates back to the ancient times, has been developing along with the human civilization. And we can see the features of this style in a number of works of contemporary painters. Some people consider abstract art to be hard to understand, however it is not just a colorful pictures with meaningless and arbitrary shapes. Probably, the vitality, value and popularity of abstraction lies in the fact that it has a kind of therapeutic effect on the viewer. All the parts of abstract art work are essential: carefully selected colors have beneficial effect on the audience, indefinite shapes show a very positive association.

All the above mentioned artistic styles marked the beginning of a new era in art. This postmodern era' most important hallmark was the very lack of a uniform organizing principle or ideology. The dismissal of modernism by contemporary artists resulted into the development of a new historicism which has originated a number of artistic “neoisms” (e.g. Neoexpressionism).

Both the development of technology and photography has persisted into the art of the new century. The result of such influence were Kiefer's photographic collages, in Kruger's words and photographic images. The 1970s were also marked with the development of digital art which made use of sophisticated computers, software, and video equipment and became prevalent at the beginning of the 21th century.

Valeriy Klinkov is a representative of Ukrainian contemporary artists and the best of his works are exhibited at www.klinkov.com website online art gallery.