20 Artists Who Were Ahead of Their Time

Medium: Installation, Sculpture, Video, Photography

Hometown: New York

Informed by his study of architecture, Gordon Matta-Clark uniquely subverted the urban landscape with what he coined “Anarchitecture.” Yielding a chainsaw, the artist sliced and carved geometric forms into buildings, displacing sections of walls and creating circular voids. Matta-Clark enlarged sculptural techniques to the scale of the city.

Medium: Sculpture, Drawing

Hometown: Providence, R.I.

Lee Bontecou's work joined together the qualities of painting, sculpture, and textiles. With interests in the cosmos and science, she made work that could evoke introspection and curiosity for the world in which we live. Exploded geometric forms that hark back to industrial machinery and the organic quality of flowers evoke both destruction and beauty. Her prolific practice gained her notoriety and attention during the male-dominated 1960s.

Medium: Performance, Painting, Sculpture

Hometown: Nice, France

Obsessed with fire, the disciplined practice of judo, and with the flare of a circus ring master, the French artist Yves Klein helped fuel the emergence of performance art. He staged presentations in which naked women were dragged through paint and used as mark-making tools, and held an exhibition of a pure empty space and used a blowtorch to singe canvases. Klein also created beautiful monochromatic paintings of gold leaf, fuchsia, and his patented International Klein Blue, the elemental colors he found in fire.

Medium: Text, Sculpture, Public Art

Hometown: Gallipolis, W. Va.

Jenny Holzer uses poetic verse, challenging phrases, and mottos to make stern social commentary. Capitalizing on the oversaturation and sprawl of advertising in daily life, her texts have been projected across buildings, electric scrolling signs, etched into marble benches, printed posters, and even condom wrappers. Her texts are often motivated by the injustice of war, complications of love, and bitterness of money. They have taken the form of twisted political slogans, but they are always biting and poignant.

Medium: Sculpture, Fiber Art

Hometown: Cincinnati, Ohio

Claire Zeisler was both an artist and art collector, notable for her contributions to the fiber arts movement. With the accumulation of slender threads, tightly bound wrappings, and knots, she constructed large sculptural forms. Though utilizing materials that were deemed feminine and soft, she constructed objects that are phallic, architectural, and emblazoned with a color palette of combative strength.

Medium: Performance, Sculpture

Hometown:Krefeld, Germany

Motivated to transform the world of art formed through everyday objects and fueled by personal experience, Joseph Beuys created sculptures and installations drenched in mystery and storytelling. He prompted the notion of social sculpture; that the very act of how we live our life and our daily actions could be the highest art form itself. He found performance to be an active form of self-healing and used objects of potent association to explore and make political and social commentary.

Medium: Sculpture, Installation

Hometown: Bad Oldesloe, Germany

A prolific and continually experimental artist, Isa Genzken has dabbled in seemingly every medium and process. The evolution of her work can be looked at as a series of obsessions and self-constructed equations for sorting. She has used computers to assist in the creation of large sculptures, incased audio equipment is concrete, taken x-rays of her own skull while smoking, and recently has taken to room-sized assemblages inspired by contemporary themes. Her work is consistently critical of the cultural realms she participates in.

Medium: Sculpture, Drawing, Installation

Hometown: Brooklyn

His sculptures, installations, and paintings were urged by an understanding of the transience of life and the fragility of the body. Paul Thek created realistic flesh and human forms, embellished with painterly notes of the psychedelic '60s and officiated with the sleek plexiglass vitrines of the minimalists. He often worked with ephemeral, non-archival materials that allowed for the life-like quality of his works and imparted them the notion of impermanence that he found so intriguing.

Medium: Land Art, Environmental Art

Hometown: Worcester, Mass.

The famous Sun Tunnels function as part land art, part viewing devices for the landscape and shifting sun. Concerned with the qualities that form perception, Nancy Holt’s large-scale works often act as framing devices or lenses with which to view an existing part of sky or horizon—a tool with which to see time. Her large-scale works transformed what artistic collaboration could be. She worked alongside astrophysicists, construction foreman, concrete mixers, and engineers to realize her projects. The constellations of pieces across the world that she created pushed forth the notion of an artwork as a destination.

Medium: Land Art, Environmental Art, Sculpture, Writing

Hometown: Passaic, N.J.

Part excavator, part land surveyor, part critic and essayist, Robert Smithson is often considered to be the defining figure of the land art movement. Not only are his contributed works like Spiral Jetty visual monuments to the notion of art made with the landscape, but his writings provided the language with which other artists and audiences could grapple the new sculptural form. He promoted the quality of site—that earthworks are pieces that must be viewed in person. Their very essence can only be experienced in that way.

Medium: Environmental Art, Public Art

Hometown: Gabrovo, Bulgaria; Casablanca, Morocco

Christo and Jeanne-Claude stand out for the sheer scale of their projects and their freedom to act as global artists. An early focus on the wrapping of objects to negate their functionality became a signature gesture that would lead to the wrapping of coastlines and surrounding of islands. They are unique in that their projects are entirely self-funded, and all their money is earned through the sale of preparatory drawings and visualized models of the site. They accept no donations, sponsorship, or help from volunteers.

Medium: Performance, Photography

Hometown: Havana, Cuba

Ana Mendieta injected a sensual, provocative spark into the expanding investigation of working outside the gallery. As she traveled across the countryside she chose different sites and available materials to accentuate the depiction of the female form into nature. She dared to use her body as her work demanded, whether coated in mud, dappled with flower, or delicately glued with the trimmed mustache hair of a friend.

Medium: Land Art, Sculpture, Installation

Hometown: Albany, Calif.

Walter De Maria looked out into a desert storm and found a way to make art. He is best known for his Lightning Field, a grid formation of planted stainless steal poles in New Mexico. His work often took a scale and simplicity that invited viewers to experience an artwork in duration. It was the slow inquiry and fascination of his works that brought true meaning. Another piece still on view in NYC is the Earth Room, a loft filled entirely with soil.

Medium: Sculpture

Hometown: Norwalk, Calif.

Working with the commonplace metal wire, Ruth Asawa formed intricate and masterful forms with a simple crochet technique. Her sculptures are like drawings in space; swiveling, looping lines form voluminous disks and spheres. Each hanging piece engages in a kinetic dance that ties it to the cast shadow.

Medium: Sculpture

Hometown: Guáimaro, Cuba

Félix González-Torres chose to make art that could exist as a form of social activism. His pieces often challenged a viewer’s relationship to a gallery or museum, creating take-away posters or sculptural piles of candy meant for people to eat and enjoy. Not only is the notion of gifting subversive, but more so the invitation to partake in a somatic, bodily act of sucking on a candy with strangers. Torres focused his work on themes of sexuality, gun violence, and the mocking of minimalist cannons.

Medium: Sculpture, Performance, Sound Art

Hometown: Seoul, South Korea

A seated contemplative Buddha stares into the live feed image of himself in the act of viewing—an incredibly forth-telling view of culture’s movement towards surveillance and media obsession. Nam Jun Paik installations, sculptures, and performances served as both a celebration of the electronics and a warning against the ever-growing power they played in daily life. A trained pianist, he chose to highlight the intersection of the human hand, music, and growing digital technology.

Medium: Painting, Sculpture, Installation

Hometown: Matsumoto, Nagano Prefecture, Japan

Yayoi Kusama has spent of her life’s work creating installations, sculptures, and performance that reach towards creating an experience of the infinite, a limitless space of freedom and exuberance. Through color and her loyal dot patterning she has made a memorable body of work and stirred a fascination with her neurotic consistency. The simple dot repeated beyond limit is madness in reiteration but also pure brilliance in simplicity.

Medium: Sculpture, Installation

Hometown: New York City

Dan Flavin created sculptures and installations solely with fluorescent light. Through simply executed geometry and bold color intersections he created works that shift the viewer’s perceptions of space and dimension. His commitment to push a single material to its end and restrict the boundaries of his creativity allowed for uniquely disciplined works.

Medium: Performance, Sculpture, Painting

Hometown: Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

Niki de Saint Phalle found energy in the possible participation of an audience in her art works and was fascinated by the proposition that an artwork could come into being through a public activity. This led to her fantastically dramatic series of "Shoot Paintings," in which she embedded objects and vessels into plaster canvases. Then, with a 22-caliber rifle, she repeatedly shot the canvases to evoke explosive, battle-like color sprays. The final painting is truly nothing without the performance and vice versa. The strength lies in the aggressive, empowering action into an object of beauty.

Medium: Performance

Hometown: Winschoten, Netherlands

Bas Jan Ader gave the world a very brief but poignant body of work, or better yet a series of gestures accentuating the exerting force of gravity. He enacted simple situations in which he would fall into the Amsterdam River while riding a bike, tumbling off the roof of a house. In his works there is a playful exuberance—a freedom to let your body be over taken. His final work was an attempt to sail a 12-foot sailboat across the Atlantic. He was never seen again.