Gallery: Giants of Modernist Art

From top:

Take Your Time, an exhibition by Olafur Eliasson in 2008 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Eliasson changed the gallery lights, mirrored the ceilings, filled a room with a pool of water and a fog bank, and turned a skywalk into a kaleidoscope, all in an effort to tinker with the way we experience space and light.

A painting by Aboriginal artist Emily Kame Kngwarreye, exhibited in the National Center for Modern Art in Roppongi, Australia. Kngwarreye, who died in 1996 started to paint in her late 70s, after living her entire life in Utopia, an outpost in the blistering Western deserts. Her abstract, colorful works broke all sales records, and she became the first Aboriginal artist to sell a painting for over a million US dollars.

Richard Serra sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, 2008. Serra’s early work focused on the industrial materials that he had worked with as a youth in West Coast steel mills and shipyards, but in his maturity, his work became famous for coupling that physicality with breathtaking size and weight.

Jack Bush, December (C65), 1961. Bush was part of the group Painters Eleven, which was founded by William Ronald in 1954 to promote abstract painting in Canada. Starting as an Abstract Expressionist, Bush simplified his composition by using an all-over coverage of thinly applied bright colours inspired by his watercolour sketches. Bush was thus an early proponent of Color Field Painting and Lyrical Abstraction.

Emily Carr, In the Forest, 1935. Fascinated by the strength of the natural world of her native British Columbia, and deeply inspired by the culture and art of the indigenous people of the Pacific North East coast, she expresses Nature with transcendental qualities. Air, trees, leaves and soil are intensely reproduced in open brush strokes and rendered from particular viewpoints that conceive an idea of intense immersion in the mystery and soul of the silent forests.