The Art In Year · WOLFGANG TILLMANS B. 1968, REMSCHEID, GERMANY • LIVES AND WORKS IN BERLIN AND...

"There would be no art world without artists"

Key issues of our time: political persecution, racism, sexism, and climate change

The Art In Year 2016

Ed Ruscha “You get punched in the stomach, and that’s ‘Oof,’”

The Most Influential Living Artists of 2016 Philippe Parreno Philippe Parreno at Palais de Tokyo Hyundia Commision 2016: Philippe Parreno: Anywhen, at Tate Modern Bus Riders series Cindy Sherman Ai Weiwei Ai Weiwei's Magnificent 'Forever' Installation

Carmen Herrera Carmen Herrera, Black and White, 1987, Acrylic on canvas

Guerrilla Girls Guerrilla Girls "CoHosts:Guerrilla Girls Wolfgang Tillmans Für Immer Burgen. 1997

Olafur Eliasson The Weather Project, 2003, Tate Modern, London Ed Ruscha Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83

Christo and Jeanne-Claude Kerry James Marshall Nude (Spotlight), 2009 Defares Collection, The Netherlands

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The Year In Art 2016 | 1

Carmen Herrera, Origami, 1987, Acrylic on canvas 152.4 x 101.6 cm / 60 x 40 in.


There would be no art world without artists. It’s nearly impossible to whittle down the many thousands if not millions around the world

who have dedicated their lives in some way to an art practice; even in the art world, influence is ever more global and diffuse.

But through combining the insight of Artsy’s editors with data from UBS’s art news app Planet Art and other sources, some trends do

emerge for 2016.

The artists who most captured the public’s—and the media’s—attention were primarily dealing with key issues of our time:

political persecution, racism, sexism, and climate change. And they were privileging and engaging vast audiences with content, not

flash. If this is any indication of the direction that the art world itself is headed in, then art is poised to be more relevant and powerful than ever. Below, in no particular order, are the most influential

living artists of 2016.

The Most Influential Living Artists of 2016



PHILIPPE PARRENOB. 1964, ORAN, ALGERIA • LIVES AND WORKS IN PARIS

Parreno is one of a tight-knit group of artists who in the ’90s became associated with “relational aesthetics,” an approach to artmaking that emphasizes the evolving experience of a work more so than any physical artwork itself. His best-known pieces range from pulsating marquees of light bulbs, which graced Palais de Tokyo in 2013 and the Park Avenue Armory in 2015; to the 2006 feature-length film he created with Douglas Gordon following French footballer Zinédine Zidane through the entirety of a single match; to cartoons, animations, and performances of Ann Lee, the manga character he purchased rights to in 1999 with frequent collaborator Pierre Huyghe.

This purposefully broad spectrum leaves many hard-pressed to categorize Parreno’s work. At the time of the artist’s hypnotic show at the Park Avenue Armory in 2015, curator Tom Eccles said, “The wonderful world of Philippe Parreno is made up of many different parts. There isn’t a signature style.”


Philippe Parreno at Palais de Tokyo

Hyundia Commision 2016: Philippe Parreno: Anywhen, at Tate Modern


Bus Riders series


Sherman has created some of contemporary art’s most recognizable and pioneering images. Photographs in which she assumes the personae of film characters, art-historical subjects, or, most recently, aging divas (in a 2016 exhibition of new work at her longtime gallery Metro Pictures), have been celebrated in boundary-pushing exhibitions around the world. These include five Whitney Biennials, two Venice Biennales, and countless solo museum shows. Sherman’s photographs have also fetched some of the highest prices for both the photographic medium and, perhaps most significantly, for work made by living female artists.

Sherman’s work has remained searingly relevant in today’s culture of Facebook- and Instagram-fueled self-documentation and curation. Contemporary creatives of all stripes have taken note. “Her work has been enormously influential to scores of artists, filmmakers, writers, and musicians in identifying the rich arena for experimentation of identity,” says Respini. Those include Ryan Trecartin, whose psychedelic videos explore how humans are rapidly changing as culture is consumed by the internet; Alex Prager, who has applied Sherman’s cinematic approach to her pulp fiction-inspired photographs; and Kalup Linzy, whose performances draw from Sherman’s chameleon-like ability to assume the role of sundry characters. “In the infinite possibilities of the mutability of identity, Sherman’s works stand out for their ability to be at once provocative, disparaging, mysterious, and empathetic,” adds Respini.

CINDY SHERMANB. 1954, GLEN RIDGE, NEW JERSEY • LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK

AI WEI WEIB. 1957, BEIJING • LIVES AND WORKS IN BEIJING AND BERLIN


In 2016, Ai focused his fierce, activist practice on a single, major issue: The refugee crisis. In conceptual installations that lambaste threats to humanity, the Chinese artist often amasses thousands of objects to represent human lives—like in 2009, when 5,000 backpacks at Munich’s Haus der Kunst paid tribute to Chinese schoolchildren who died in the Sichuan earthquake.

“Ai Weiwei’s significance as an artist has come from his identification with those in our society who he sees as having no voice—whether it was the children killed in the Sichuan earthquake or, more recently, refugees fleeing from unrest in the Middle East,” says Melissa Chiu, director of the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden. “His interest in making art about these issues puts him at the center of global conversations on a number of vital topics.”


Where culture and political action converge, Ai stands as the art world’s strongest exponent of the power of art to visualize struggle and change hearts and minds.

Ai Weiwei's Magnificent 'Forever' Installation

CARMEN HERRERAB. 1915, HAVANA • LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK

This year, at the age of 101, Herrera finally received recognition as a pioneer of 20th-century abstract painting. The Cuban-born, New York-based artist was celebrated in a major survey exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art this fall; a show of her new paintings christened Lisson Gallery’s New York space in the spring; and she featured in a full-length documentary released on Netflix in September—all of which served to land her name in the press and in the canon like never before.

At the Whitney, “Carmen Herrera: Lines of Sight” exposed the art world to her formative years, the period of 1948–1978, including many works that had never been on public view. Over these three decades she worked prolifically and ran among prominent artist circles in New York and Paris, with the likes of Josef Albers and Barnett Newman. And she honed her signature style—canvases filled with striking geometric shapes characterized by crisp lines, sharp angles, and bold shocks of color.

While the artist has been active in New York since 1954, and has been exhibited across the world since the 1930s, it was not until 2004 that she sold a work. She has been counted among key forces behind Latin America’s rich history of geometric abstraction, yet not until now has Herrera been properly lauded on the international art-world stage. As Miller put it, “Herrera was, and still is, an artist and a woman ahead of her time, and we are all just beginning to catch up to her.”


Carmen Herrera, Black and White, 1987, Acrylic on canvas 182.9 x 152.4 cm / 72 x 60 in


Guerrilla Girls



GUERRILLA GIRLSGROUP FORMED IN 1985 IN NEW YORK

For three decades the Guerrilla Girls have rebuked the art world for its lack of diversity. An egalitarian, all-female collective, they research and publicize the racism, sexism, and corruption that exists in the art world and in popular culture, through lectures, posters, stickers, billboards, books, and, over the past few years, exhibitions. Adding to the allure of their valiant mission, the collective’s numerous members have remained anonymous, donning gorilla masks in public and working under pseudonyms of deceased female artists like Frida Kahlo and Käthe Kollwitz, as they attack inequalities. The group’s most powerful works have identified the overwhelming number of art galleries and museums that have done little to support and exhibit artists who are not white males. And over the past two years, they’ve finally been given their due attention in museums.

Their acclaimed show at Whitechapel Gallery in London this fall, “Is It Even Worse in Europe?,” presented shocking data from a survey sent to 383 European museum directors, of which only a quarter returned responses. Among other disturbing stats, the findings revealed that only 14 of those museums have more than 20 artists from outside Europe or the U.S. in their collections, and that only two have collections with more than 40% women artists. “Since they were formed in 1985 the Guerrilla Girls have shown the artistic community how to be effective campaigners and protesters,” says Whitechapel curator Nayia Yiakoumaki. “The issues they criticise and campaign against are ongoing in spite of the fact that museums have embraced diversity in their programs and collections.”


Guerrilla Girls Twin Cities Takeover The Year In Art 2016 | 14

This year the Guerrilla Girls also staged a public work at Tate Modern, which was featured in an exhibition there alongside the works of Andy Warhol; they put on shows, public works, and talks at more than 20 art institutions across Minneapolis and St. Paul; and they issued a new banner, “The Advantages of Owning Your Own Art Museum,” on the facade of the Museum Ludwig for its 40th birthday exhibition.

"CoHosts:Guerrilla Girls

WOLFGANG TILLMANSB. 1968, REMSCHEID, GERMANY • LIVES AND WORKS IN BERLIN AND LONDON

Political and social activism, if indirect, have long been inherent in Tillmans’s work. In the ’80s and ’90s, he captured raw images of youth and club subcultures—from gay rights demonstrations to the acid-house scene—giving voice to a generation for which he believed hedonism could be a form of activism.

2016 also marks the year Tillmans, whose f irst piece for i -D magazine in 1991 spanned Europe’s various techno scenes, made his own musical debut. In July, he released his first record, an EP he began as a teenager in 1986. The following month, an unreleased track by Tillmans bookended Frank Ocean’s visual album Endless, the cover of which the artist also shot. He strolled the catwalk for cult menswear label Hood By Air during New York Fashion Week, leaving us to wonder what—besides major solo exhibitions at Tate Modern and Fondation Beyeler in 2017—the talented polymath will bring us next.



He’s harnessed the power of images to empower individuals living with HIV to become informed about their treatment, to garner aid for reconstruction efforts in earthquake-torn Haiti, and since 2005, to examine perception and opposing truths (like the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq) through his multi-part tabletop installation of news clippings and found ephemera, the Truth Study Center. Throughout these years, Tillmans has redefined how photographs are both made and presented, from abstract camera-less photography to his signature style of taping his photographs to the wall unframed and paired with clippings from magazines to flatten hierarchies of value.

Für Immer Burgen. 1997

OLAFUR ELIASSONB. 1967, COPENHAGEN • LIVES AND WORKS IN COPENHAGEN AND BERLIN

Since the mid-1990s, Eliasson has harnessed the power of nature into artworks both unparalleled in scale and heart-rending in their message. “Over the past 25 years, Olafur has created a sculptural and photographic oeuvre where issues of perception, movement, and our apprehension of reality through optical means come face-to-face with a sensitive, ecology-driven approach to nature,” says curator and former Centre Pompidou director Alfred Pacquement, who organized Eliasson’s Versailles show. “That polarity was masterfully expressed at Versailles,” he adds.

For one work, titled Glacial rock flour garden (2016), the artist imported 150 tons of granite dust—the result of glacial erosion—from Greenland. Eliasson further mobilized his practice to address social change this year with “Green Light, an Artistic Workshop,” a project in collaboration with Vienna’s TBA21 that invited refugees to build modular lights designed by Eliasson and take language classes. The lights have been used to create communal spaces where all humans—regardless of race, religion, or immigration status—can safely gather. They can also be purchased for a €300 donation.



In 2003, when he was in his mid-thirties, the Icelandic and Danish artist represented Denmark at the Venice Biennale with The Bl ind Pavi l ion, a prismatic space that brought the outdoors ins ide t hrough face ted surfaces and reflections. That same year, he also realized The Weather Project, a now-seminal installation which transported a glowing, sun-like orb into Tate’s Turbine Hall, filling the massive space with transcendent light.

The Weather Project, 2003, Tate Modern, London

ED RUSCHAB. 1937, OMAHA, NEBRASKA • LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES

There are few artists who have captured American culture with as much ingenuity and deadpan humor as Ruscha. As early as 1962, when Abstract Expressionism was still in vogue, the 25-year-old artist (a recent graduate of CalArts) broke away from painterly conventions and rendered the word “OOF” in big, block yellow letters on a blue backdrop. The painting—a graphic composition, borrowed from the era’s advertising aesthetics—was the epitome of Pop Art, a movement which Ruscha would go on to pioneer, along with Warhol, his East Coast foil.

“You get punched in the stomach, and that’s ‘Oof,’” the now 78-year-old artist subsequently said of the work. “It was so obvious, and so much a part of my growing up in the U.S.A. I felt like it was almost a patriotic word.” The painting now hangs permanently on MoMA’s walls as a testament to Ruscha’s unique, gut-punching ability to pack cultural commentary into a single word.

OOF, 1962



“His work represents contemporary history and landscape painting at its best, but also presents an entirely personal narrative, which is fascinating,” explains Max Hollein, the de Young’s director. “He interprets, preserves, and challenges our understanding of American culture and the condition of the individual. This seems to be utterly relevant.” Indeed, Ruscha has not only suspended America’s past in his striking and at times deeply, darkly funny paintings, but continues to incorporate the country’s characteristics (both the good and the ugly) into his work.

Standard Station, Amarillo, Texas

Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1980-83



CHRISTO AND JEANNE-CLAUDEB. 1935, GABROVO, BULGARIA • LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORKB. 1935, CASABLANCA, MOROCCO • DIED 2009, NEW YORK

Together, artist duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude revolutionized the scale and scope of public art. Born Christo Javacheff and Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, they dreamt big and realized a number of art history’s largest and most audacious works. As early as 1968, when they were in their mid-thirties, the two artists began to carve a place for themselves in the canon when they wrapped the entire building that housed Switzerland’s Kunsthalle Bern in 26,156 square feet of plastic. The project left the art world awestruck and set the tone for the pair’s ambitious career to follow.

Highlights have included Surrounded Islands (1980-1983), for which they encircled 11 islands off the coast of Miami with 6.5 million square feet of pink polypropylene, and Running Fence (1972-1976), a 24.5-mile-long installation of white nylon that stretched across a swathe of Northern California. Like most of their work, these projects not only represented a stunning marriage of art and the environment, but also complex logistical and community-building feats. Running Fence, for instance, was the result of 42 months of work that included conversations with ranchers who owned Northern California land, 18 public hearings, and three sessions at the Superior Courts of California.


His work “shows us the ongoing vitality and necessity of representational painting as a mobilizing political and aesthetic force in Western culture” and “makes it clear that blackness is central to the story of modernity.”

Kerry James Marshall, Nude (Spotlight), 2009 Defares Collection, The Netherlands

KERRY JAMES MARSHALLB. 1955, BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA • LIVES AND WORKS IN CHICAGO

For nearly four decades, Marshall has painted powerful, intricate portraits that seek to reclaim the black subject’s place in the art-historical canon. By depicting his sitters in everyday scenarios—picnicking in a local park, posing with a paintbrush, or gathered in a barbershop—his canvases also challenge the negative stereotypes that homogenize black Americans.

His style draws from Renaissance portraiture, history painting, and the African-American experience alike. But it wasn’t until this year that Marshall finally received the career-cementing retrospective he’s deserved. The show, titled “Mastry,” has already touched down in two of the country’s most revered institutions, Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and The Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the spring of 2017, it will travel to The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles.


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The Art In Year · WOLFGANG TILLMANS B. 1968, REMSCHEID, GERMANY • LIVES AND WORKS IN BERLIN AND...

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