Art Metropole

Installation, Performance, and Conceptual artist Dan Graham (American, b.1942) is best known for his pioneering advances in Video Art as well as his highly-conceptual installations, which facilitate specific interactions between viewers. Born in Urbana, Illinois, he moved to New Jersey as a young man and in 1962 opened the John Daniels Gallery in New York, his first official foray into the art world. There he showed the work of Conceptual and Minimalist artists, such as Sol LeWitt (American, 1928–2007) and Donald Judd (American, 1928–1994), and began creating works himself during this time, influenced by similar reductive aesthetics. Beginning in the late 1960s, he worked with photography, documenting houses in both urban and suburban areas, which he later published in a magazine format, accompanied by texts in his Homes for America series. In the 1970s, he was a leading proponent of Performance and Video Art, before turning to an installation format to create architectural sites provoking interactions between viewers and public spaces. He often also used video, mirrors, and other materials in innovative ways to explore the relationship formed between the audience and the artwork. Retrospectives of his work have been held at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles,the Kunsthalle Bern in Switzerland, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany, the Museu Serralves in Portugal, and the Museum of Modern Art in Oxford. He has also exhibited his work in several Documenta exhibitions in Kassel. In addition to his work as an artist, Graham is also an acclaimed cultural critic and theorist, and has published several significant books over the past three decades. He currently lives and works in New York City.

Martin Creed is a sculptor, installation artist and conceptual artist. He studied in London at the Slade School of Fine Art, graduating in 1990. His work plays on definitions of art, using techniques reminiscent of those employed by Marcel Duchamp in his presentation of objects and ideas. Work #11 (1989; AC England Col.), consisting of two bronze objects, served as the basis for photographs of these objects in various situations: on a bar, in a dentist’s surgery, amongst Christmas decorations and in a dishwasher (Work #43, 1990–96; see 2000 exh. cat.). It is the placement of the objects, rather than their intrinsic qualities, that qualifies their meaning. In Work #79 (1993; see 2000 exh. cat.), a piece of Blu-Tack is rolled into a ball and depressed against a wall: the slightness of the gesture and its humorous inadequacy as a constructed object calls into question the nature of sculpture. In 1994 Creed formed a band called Owada, which he used as a parallel forum to his visual art practice. One of his best-known visual works, Work #200–202 (exh. New York, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, 1998), known as Half the Air in a Given Space, consists of a gallery half-filled with balloons, creating a physical experience for the visitor of what that volume of air actually feels like. Creed also displayed slogans in the form of neon signs; the phrase ‘the whole world + the work = the whole world’, was emblazoned on the fac`ade of Tate Britain in 2000.

(from Tate website)