Who Is.. Cindy Sherman

Cynthia Morris Sherman was born in New Jersey on January 19, 1954 and is one of the contemporary art world’s most influential and consequential living female photographers. More widely known as Cindy Sherman, her career as an artist has spanned nearly 40 years and throughout she has exclusively created photographic self-portraits that explore, with a strong streak of feminist  messages, the construction of modern day life, drawing on social role-playing and sexual stereotypes. Socially critical and amusing, her work is never far from the truth; mirroring the realities of our time with a sustained and precise fabrication that forces the viewer to take a deep breath in personal recognition or perhaps a wider, more general appreciation of it’s greater meaning.

Sherman is an interesting and interested character. Upon graduating from the State University of New York in 1976 she moved away from painting and began what would become her life’s work beginning with Complete Untitled Film Stills (1977-1978) which would remain one of her most seminal series and consisted of 69 black-and-white images. In the 1980’s she moved on to colour film and larger more mammoth productions focusing slightly more on the use of lighting and facial expression. She has since, at different times, focused on directing motion film between her famous photographic series. But her photography remains her most celebrated and revered work. 

In every series of creations, Sherman works as her own subject while capturing herself in an endless range of pretences and guises. In the creation of one or any of her photographs, she is everything all at once, from makeup-artist and hair-stylist to creative stylist, creative director and of course, photographer. All of this means she stands alone in the industry, in which she is typically grouped within the era of the Pictures Generation, through her distinctive mix of performance and photography. Drawing upon film, fashion and a lot of influential and commercial advertisements, she ironically plays into with the cultural stereotypes that are massively supported and encouraged by such media portals and draws upon her belief that we must challenge them with a sense of sharpness and dark humour. In her processes, she uses wigs, prosthetics accessories, liberal amounts of makeup and set designs that all enable her visions to come to life. 

Sherman has been the subject of many major museum exhibitions, most recently at MoMA in 2019 and again at the National Portrait Gallery, in London which also showed this year. She lives in New York City where she also works in solitary in her Manhattan studio. 

Who Is.. KAWS

KAWS, the subversive artist considered one of the most relevant artists of his generation has found himself as one of the industries most talked about creators in recent times. Something of a worldwide phenomenon, and a noted disruptor in an industry that typically has rules expected to be obeyed, he stands somewhere between the high-brow world of fine art and the very real temptations of international commerce as he plays to his own directives, sidetracking all the industries traditional hierarchies. His creations are exhibited in museums and galleries from New York to Tokyo and literally everywhere in between. 

Born in Jersey City, NJ as Brian Donnelly in 1974, the distinguished artist spent his teenage years graffiti-bombing trains, buildings, phone booths, advertisements and billboards around his neighbourhood. He graduated from the School of Visual Arts in New York City with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in illustration. It was before college though that his career began when he moved to New York City in 1996 and started by changing the images found on bus shelters, phone booths and billboards, tagging them with his signature KAWS. His graffiti tags garnered huge popularity and become progressively desired by the public. After graduating in 1996 he worked for a time at Disney as a freeman animator where he was part of the team that painted backgrounds that contributed to movies such as 101 Dalmations and Daria. 

Taking inspiration from art history and popular culture he has become famous most notably for his larger-than-life sculptures and their amazingly clever placement in a variety of different settings around the world, all of which have come together so successfully with added thanks to the power of social media and the influence of younger generations instrumental mastery of the ‘gram’. Possessing a sophisticated humour along with his incredible ability to deconstruct iconic characters he represents a whole new era in contemporary art and a luxury market that worships the pop in popular. 

His work influences a multitude of industries while he uses a myriad of mediums including painting, printmaking, sculpture, fashion, toy production and merchandise to reach his fixated audiences. Over the past two decades, his paintings and cartoon characters have garnered a cult following, including major collectors and celebrities such as Kayne West and Travis Scott - something the art world can’t ignore despite those at the top of the pecking order’s desperate attempt to dismiss his career as empty and his famed creations illogical. Engaging audiences far beyond the museums and collectors homes though he reaches us via his continuing collaboration with major brands such as Comme des Garcons, Original Fake, Dior, Supreme, A Bathing Ape, Uniqlo, Hennessy, Undercover, Kung Faux, Nike and Vans. In 2018 KAWS pieces generated a total of $33.8 million at auction and the average for each piece doubled from the previous year, proof of his pull when it comes to the devoted nature of those investing in art as a global market. 

Larger than life, in real life he works and lives in Brooklyn, New York where The Brooklyn Museum will open a major retrospective in 2021. His first Middle East museum show, KAWS: He Eats Alone, recently opened at Doha Fire Station (Qatar Museums) and will run until January 2020. 

Who Is.. Jeff Koons

Jeff Koons is a renowned American contemporary artist best known for his transformations of everyday objects such as puppies and inflatable plastic toys to vacuum cleaners and delicate trinkets, turning them into fantastical, larger than life masterpieces, including, most iconically, balloon animals in vibrant, garish colours, produced in stainless steel with mirror-finish surfaces.

Born in York, Pennsylvania, on January 21, 1955, the celebrated artist is something of a living legend. After finishing high school he attended the Maryland Institute College of Art. During his time in Maryland, a school trip to the Whitney Museum in New York to see a Jim Nutt exhibition would prove a major turning point as he was so infatuated with the Chicago artist’s work that he up and left Maryland, leaving to enroll at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, the very establishment that would afford him an honorary doctorate some 30 years later. 

Swiftly making a beeline for New York in 1977, Koons took a job at MoMA in an administrative role. His presence was always noticed due to his brightly coloured and outlandish attire and hair, sometimes he would adorn himself with an inflatable plastic flower and large brash bow-ties - the first signs of his now infamous sculptures. In 1980, he jumped ship and got a job working on Wall Street, selling mutual funds and stocks at First Investors Corporation. This job was a strategic move however as it allowed the young artist fund his creations which would eventually appear in his first solo show, The New series (1980–83) in which he had vacuum cleaners and shampoo polishers displayed in clear Plexigas vitrines.

In the years since his first solo show in 1980 his work has been shown at all the world’s major museums and galleries, in cities around the world, from Berlin to Sydney, New York to Los Angeles, London and Paris, Oslo, Venice, Zurich, Shanghai and beyond. His most recognisable pieces are of course his larger-than-life balloon animals but beyond his Neo-kitsch materialisations is his artistic love of a variety of other art forms including human sculptures and paintings, all born of his eclectic portrayal of his misunderstood vision. 

Astute and media-savvy, the self-proclaimed crowd-pleaser is not one to shy away from applause or acclaim. In 2014, the self-assured and extrovert artist posed naked in his gym for a major Vanity Fair profile, shot by Annie Leibovitz, which was published to welcome one of the most crucial points in his career, a retrospective of his entire body of work shown at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. This is one of many solo exhibitions the artist has enjoyed internationally. Not only is his work enjoyed by millions, the world over, he has influenced many other artists over the past few decades, most notably perhaps, Damien Hirst, another of the 21st century’s most prolific contemporaries. Of his hero’s work, Hirst has said “The first time I saw his work, in the late 1980s, it just blew me away”.

Commanding a team of over 100 in his New York City studio, in the Chelsea neighbourhood, Jeff Koons continues to test the boundaries between high-brow art and the pull of mass culture, not to mention the potential as an artist found in the mass market following he has cultivated. In his long standing career to date, he has created something very unique: the combining of the art world and celebrity, his status as both artist and celebrity firmly rooted in our innate interest in both his art and him as a person. Koons has noted that there are no hidden meanings in his art and he leaves the world deeply divided, some think his work is innovative and holds a major place in art-history, while others feel it is vacuous, tacky and full of self-importance, some even referring to him as the “king of kitsch”. However despite the critical divide, Koons continues to have the last laugh - as do those who invest in his work; he is the most lucrative living artist, his famous Rabbit fetched the highest price ever for a piece by a living artist in May 2019, selling for $91 million. The epitome of Neo-Pop, investing in a Jeff Koons is definitely worth the hype whether you’re after high art or something more culturally popular.