The Most Influential Living Artists of

2016
Artsy Editorial
https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-the-most-influential-living-artists-of-2016,
accesat: 06. 02. 2017.
There would be no art world without artists. Its 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
Artsys editors with data from UBSs art news app Planet
Artand other sources, some trends do emerge for 2016. The
artists who most captured the publicsand the medias
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.

Philippe Parreno
B. 1964, ORAN, ALGERIA LIVES AND WORKS IN PARIS

Philippe Parreno, October 22, 2008, New York, New York. Portrait by Jason
Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

The art world arrived in droves when Londons Tate

Modern unveiled Parrenos Anywhen in its famed Turbine
Hall at the start of Frieze Week this October. The 52-year-old
French artist has a multifaceted practice, spanning sculpture,
performance, installation, and film. Threaded throughout is
an interest in producing impermanent, multifarious
environments that fluidly change (in this case evolve) over
time based on a provided logic. Philippe Parreno is rigorous,
experimental, free, collaborative, generous, political, says
Andrea Lissoni, senior curator of film and international art at
Tate Modern. His work appears and disappears. Not here nor
there, not sooner or later. Its happening anywhen, he adds,
nodding to the Turbine Hall installations title.
With Anywhen, audiences moved through the space
enveloped in a web of sound, film, lightand mylar balloons
shaped like fish. All aspects of the installation, except for the
fish balloons, were directed not by the artist but instead by
an algorithm, programmed to respond to the growth of
bacteria Parreno had placed in a bioreactor located in an
office above the hall. The fish floated at random, meant
merely to direct viewers gazes and bodies throughout the
space. Parreno mounted another bacteria-driven installation
across two Gladstone Gallery spaces in New York this spring;
it consumed the entryway to the Brooklyn Museum this fall.
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 Zindine
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 Parrenos work. At
the time of the artists 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 isnt a signature style.

Cindy Sherman
B. 1954, GLEN RIDGE, NEW JERSEY LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK

Cindy Sherman, September 16, 2011, New York, New York. Portrait by Jason
Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

Sherman has created some of contemporary arts 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. Shermans
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.
This year, the breadth and influence of her oeuvre was
showcased in the The Broads first exhibition of works outside
its collection, Cindy Sherman: Imitation of Life. The 120
works in the show, representing her 40-year career,
evidenced Shermans ability to capture the overwhelming
influence of stereotypes on our society and on individual
identity alike. Cindy Sherman was ahead of her time, says
curator Eva Respini, who organized Shermans
2012 MoMA retrospective. Since the 1970s, shes recognized
that stereotypes and archetypes are powerful transmitters of
cultural clichs.
Shermans work has remained searingly relevant in todays
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 Shermans cinematic approach to her pulp fiction-
inspired photographs; and Kalup Linzy, whose performances
draw from Shermans chameleon-like ability to assume the
role of sundry characters. In the infinite possibilities of the
mutability of identity, Shermans works stand out for their
ability to be at once provocative, disparaging, mysterious,
and empathetic, adds Respini.

Ai Weiwei
B. 1957, BEIJING LIVES AND WORKS IN BEIJING AND BERLIN

Ai Weiwei, November 4, 2016, with his installation Laundromat, 2016, at
Jeffrey Deitch, New York. Portrait by Jason Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

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 liveslike
in 2009, when 5,000 backpacks at Munichs Haus der Kunst
paid tribute to Chinese schoolchildren who died in the
Sichuan earthquake. Ai Weiweis significance as an artist has
come from his identification with those in our society who he
sees as having no voicewhether 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.
Spurred by his own childhood spent in exile, Ai began his
current research into the Syrian refugee crisis in 2011. At the
time, he was confined to China, having been detained by the
authorities in April of that year, following his increasing
criticism of the government in the Sichuan earthquake works
and others. After 81 days and an international outcry, Ai was
released, but the Chinese government retained his passport,
barring him from leaving his country. Four years later, in July
of last year, Ai finally received his passport and quickly left
for Berlin, where he had built a subterranean studio. As with
much of Western Europe, the city had become a safe haven
for many Syrian refugeesand upon meeting some of them,
Ai committed to doing what he could to bring awareness to
the difficulties and deaths faced by refugees struggling to
enter Europe.
In January, from another studio on the front lines of the crisis
in Lesbos, Greece, Ai provided aid, shared everything he was
seeing on Instagram, and began filming a documentary,
forthcoming in 2017. He later traveled to several camps
along the Greece-Macedonia border. Some have accused the
artist of capitalizing on the crisis; most controversial was
the photowhere he recreated the image of the drowned
Syrian refugee child, Alan Kurdi, whose body was found
washed up on a Turkish shore. Yet Ais sharp criticism has
been unwavering. He denounced the EU as shameful and
withdrew his two Denmark shows upon the passage of a new
Danish law in January that restricts immigration and requires
refugees to forfeit their valuables. He mounted searing new
installations, pulling from the language he developed with the
Sichuan earthquake project, like a giant F made from the
lifejackets of drowned refugees at Viennas Belvedere Palace.
His work filled myriad institutions from Pittsburgh to Prague
to London in 2016. And this fall in New York, he opened four
triumphal gallery shows, including a harrowing installation of
clothing collected from the evacuated Idomeni camp at
Deitch Projects. Where culture and political action converge,
Ai stands as the art worlds strongest exponent of the power
of art to visualize struggle and change hearts and minds.

Kerry James Marshall

B. 1955, BIRMINGHAM, ALABAMA LIVES AND WORKS IN CHICAGO

ENTER SLIDESHOW

For nearly four decades, Marshall has painted powerful,

intricate portraits that seek to reclaim the black
subjects place in the art-historical canon. By depicting his
sitters in everyday scenariospicnicking in a local park,
posing with a paintbrush, or gathered in a barbershophis
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 wasnt until this year that
Marshall finally received the career-cementing retrospective
hes deserved. The show, titled Mastry, has already
touched down in two of the countrys 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.
Conventionally, the large-scale survey exhibition or
retrospective was mounted after a significant body of work
had been amassed. Marshall has been at work for over 30
years, meaning that in many ways, this exhibition was
actually about 10 years overdue, says Helen Molesworth,
MOCA L.A.s chief curator and co-organizer of Marshalls
retrospective. 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, said
Molesworth. His pictures are, simply put, ravishing. Theyre
formally, psychologically, historically, and politically
complicated, dense, nuanced, and beautiful. Marshalls
canon-shaping work also began to get its due in Europe this
year, with inclusions in group shows at Pariss Muse du quai
Branly and the Netherlands Museum de Fundatie in Zwolle.

Wolfgang Tillmans
B. 1968, REMSCHEID, GERMANY LIVES AND WORKS IN BERLIN AND LONDON

Wolfgang Tillmans, March 14, 2006, London, U.K. Portrait by Jason Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

On April 23rd, Tillmans released a powerful series of open-

source, anti-Brexit posters to encourage the United Kingdom
to vote to remain in the European Union. (The German-born
photographer, the first non-Brit to take home the Turner Prize,
has lived in London for some 25 years and was inducted into
the Royal Academy of Arts in 2013.) He later produced a
series of t-shirts that were donned by the likes of Vivienne
Westwoodand Daniel Craig. But while the June 23rd
referendum ended unfavorably for Tillmanss camp, the viral
campaign brought about a renewed surge of recognition for
the artist, who also opened solo shows with Maureen
Paley, Galerie Buchholz, and Regen Projects this year. He
introduced us to a new perspective of the normal. He
showed us the beauty of everyday life, says Karen and
Christian Boros, who have been collecting Tillmans work
since the 90s. Recently, he has engaged once again with
normalcy. Namely that it should be normal that in Europe
people live with each other respectfully and tolerantly.
Political and social activism, if indirect, have long been
inherent in Tillmanss work. In the 80s and 90s, he captured
raw images of youth and club subculturesfrom gay rights
demonstrations to the acid-house scenegiving voice to a
generation for which he believed hedonism could be a form of
activism. In following years, hes 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.

2016 also marks the year Tillmans, whose first piece for i-
D magazine in 1991 spanned Europes 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
Oceans 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 whatbesides major solo exhibitions at Tate
Modern and Fondation Beyeler in 2017the talented
polymath will bring us next.

Ed Ruscha
B. 1937, OMAHA, NEBRASKA LIVES AND WORKS IN LOS ANGELES

Ed Ruscha, November 8, 2003, West Hollywood, California. Portrait by Jason
Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

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 paintinga graphic composition, borrowed from the eras
advertising aestheticswas 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 thats 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 MoMAs walls as a testament to Ruschas
unique, gut-punching ability to pack cultural commentary into
a single word.
This year, Ruschas trailblazing oeuvre was celebrated in a
99-work, career-spanning exhibition at San Franciscos de
Young Museum. The show, titled Ed Ruscha and the Great
American West, foregrounded the artists ability to capture
the imperfections and desires of Americans through paintings
and photographs of the roadside billboards, gas stations,
swimming pools, and palm trees that surrounded him in Los
Angeles, where hes lived since 1956. 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 Youngs 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 Americas past in his striking and at times deeply,
darkly funny paintings, but continues to incorporate the
countrys characteristics (both the good and the ugly) into his
work.

Guerrilla Girls
GROUP FORMED IN 1985 IN NEW YORK

Guerrilla Girls, June 9, 2005, The Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Portrait by Jason
Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

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 collectives numerous members
have remained anonymous, donning gorilla masks in public
and working under pseudonyms of deceased female artists
like Frida Kahlo and Kthe Kollwitz, as they attack
inequalities. The groups 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, theyve 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.
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.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude

B. 1935, GABROVO, BULGARIA LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK

B. 1935, CASABLANCA, MOROCCO DIED 2009, NEW YORK


Christo, February 10, 2011, New York, New York. Portrait by Jason Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

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 historys 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
Switzerlands Kunsthalle Bern in 26,156 square feet of plastic.
The project left the art world awestruck and set the tone for
the pairs 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.

Though Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009, Christo has

forged on, making it his mission to see through several of
their unrealized dream projects. One, which the duo began
plotting in 1970, became a reality this year. The Floating
Piers (2014-2016), as the work is named, drew over 1.2
million people to Italys remote Lake Iseo, allowing visitors to
walk on water across a saffron orange, three-kilometer-long
floating walkway. The Floating Piers turned a fantasy into
reality, says Public Art Funds director and chief curator,
Nicholas Baume. The richness and expanse of the fabric
color, and the interaction with the light and the water, all
created a remarkable sensory and perceptual experience for
visitors. A birds-eye view of the project, which showed
countless dots moving across the shimmering pathway,
revealed the unique power of Christo and Jeanne-Claudes
workto illuminate the beauty of the artworks natural
setting, and bring people together in the process.

Carmen Herrera
B. 1915, HAVANA LIVES AND WORKS IN NEW YORK

Carmen Herrera, May 21, 2015, New York, New York. Portrait by Jason Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

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
Gallerys New York space in the spring; and she featured in a
full-length documentary released on Netflix in Septemberall
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 19481978,
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 stylecanvases filled with striking geometric
shapes characterized by crisp lines, sharp angles, and bold
shocks of color. We can see in the works in Lines of
Sight that Herrera was thinking about the painting as an
objectusing panel divisions and the sides of canvases, and
incorporating the surrounding environmentin the early
1950s, says Whitney curator Dana Miller, who helmed
Herreras exhibition there. This is at the same time or before
other artists, who have been previously heralded for such
developments, first began to undertake similar experiments,
Miller adds.
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 Americas 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.

Olafur Eliasson
B. 1967, COPENHAGEN LIVES AND WORKS IN COPENHAGEN AND BERLIN

Caption: Olafur Eliasson, June 4, 2003, The Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy. Portrait
by Jason Schmidt.

ENTER SLIDESHOW

Since the mid-1990s, Eliasson has harnessed the power of

nature into artworks both unparalleled in scale and heart-
rending in their message. In 2003, when he was in his mid-
thirties, the Icelandic and Danish artist represented Denmark
at the Venice Biennale with The Blind Pavilion, a prismatic
space that brought the outdoors inside through faceted
surfaces and reflections. That same year, he also
realized The Weather Project, a now-seminal installation
which transported a glowing, sun-like orb into Tates Turbine
Hall, filling the massive space with transcendent light. While
the interaction between natural forces and humans has
always existed at the core of his practice, Eliassons work has
assumed a decidedly more political stance in recent years,
with numerous works overtly addressing climate change. In
2015, he installed a legion of melting ice blocks in central
Paris during the United Nations Climate Change Conference.
And this year, he transformed the grounds of Frances
famed Versailles Palace with a series of visionary
installations driven by his passion for environmental justice.
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 Pompidoudirector
Alfred Pacquement, who organized Eliassons 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 dustthe result of
glacial erosionfrom Greenland. Eliasson further mobilized
his practice to address social change this year with Green
Light, an Artistic Workshop, a project in collaboration with
Viennas 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
humansregardless of race, religion, or immigration status
can safely gather. They can also be purchased for a 300
donation.

Portraits by Jason Schmidt; some originally printed in Artists

II, 2015. Schmidts exhibition Artists is on view at the
Margulies Collection at the Warehouse, Miami, through April
29, 2017.
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