ArtCult - Dossiers - Analyses - Marché de l'art-THE BIG NAMES OF CONTEMPORARY ART

There are thousands of contemporary artists throughout the world but only three dozens are today the stars of the art market.

There is therefore no need to be a real connoisseur regarding this domain once most of the names of the big "shots" are known.

Here is the list of some of the most important artists, those who generally fetch incredible prices at auction.

Carl Andre (American) (Born in 1935) who studied briefly at Kenyon College before travelling to Europe. Upon his return he enlisted in the Army as an intelligence analyst between 1955 and 1956. He began his first work on paper in 1958 as well as large geometric wood sculptures. In the mid-Sixties, he began creating his signature Minimalist sculptures composed of flat metal, square tiles that extend in rectangular forms across the floor. He participated in the 1968 Documenta, the 1973 Whitney Biennial and the 1978 Venice Biennale. Andre has been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the Art Institute of Chicago, Whitechapel Gallery, London, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and Krefeld Haus Lange and Haus Esters, Germany. He lives and works in New York. His wood sculptures sell often over $ 100,000.

Janine Antoni (Born in the Bahamas in 1964) who studied at the Rhode Island School of Design. Antoni's feminist concern for the cultural construction of sexuality and gender is combined with highly personal and performative art-making processes. She was recently the subject of solo exhibitions at the High Museum, Atlanta, the Wadsworth Atheneum, Connecticut, the Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. In 1993 she participated in the Whitney Biennial and Venice Biennale. She lives and works in New York and her works are rated between $ 50,000 and 205,000. Her 1992 installation consisting of 600 pounds of chocolate before biting and 600 pounds of lard before biting, 45 heart shaped packages made from chewed chocolate, 400 lipsticks made from pigment, beeswax and chewed lard in a display cabinet sold for a record $ 204,000 at Christie's on May 16th 2000 in New York.

Stephen Balkenhol (German) (Born in 1957) who moved to Luxembourg in 1963 when his father died, and spent his teenage years living in Kassel where "Documenta" was hosted every year. In 1971 he began experimenting with sculpture, making collages and assemblages in the Dadaist tradition, and was especially influenced by figurative work. In 1973 he began to carve wood sculptures of human heads and then made wood sculptures of full-length nude figures and figures depicted in clothes. His first solo exhibition was held in 1993 at Regen projects, Los Angeles. He currently lives in Meisenthal.
His works sell between $ 25,000 and 100,000.

Matthew Barney (American) (Born in 1967) who attended Yale University where he received his B.A in 1989. He is best known for his "Cremaster" film series, which combines meticulous iconography with ornate costumes and settings to create heroic performances. Barney's first exhibition was held at the Paine Whitney Gymnasium at Yale University in 1989, and he has since exhibited and performed at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Tate Gallery in London, the Cartier Foundation for Contemporary Art in Paris and the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen in Rotterdam. Barney was awarded the "Europa 2000" prize at the Venice Biennale in 1993. He currently lives and works in New York. His works are usually rated between $ 40,000 and 100,000.

Georg Baselitz (German) (Born in 1938) who was born in Saxony as Hans-Georg Kern. He changed his name to Georg Baselitz at 20 and studied with Peter Graf and A.R Penck at the Hochschule für bildende und Angewandte Künst in East Berlin before going to West Berlin where he frequented the Hochschule für bildende und Künste. Baselitz has participated in the 1972 and 1982 Documenta and the 1980 and 1993 Venice Biennale. Major retrospectives of his work were recently held at the Kunsthaus Zurich, the Kunsthalle, Dusseldorf, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and the Sculpture garden, Washington D.C, the National Galerie Staatliche Museen zu Berlin. Georg Baselitz lives and works in Derneburg, Germany and Imperia, Italy.
His works are rated between $ 50,000 and $ 1 million.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (Haitian-American) (1960-1988) who attended the City-as-School alternative High School in New York and exhibited publicly for the first time in the acclaimed "Times Square Show" in 1980. Two years later, he was the youngest artist invited to participate in Documenta and in 1983 he took part in the Whitney Biennial. Andy Warhol was particularly influential to the young artist, and by 1985 they had become friends and even collaborators on a number of paintings. A major retrospective of Basquiat's work was organized by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 1992, travelling to the Menil Collection, Houston, the Des Moines Art Center, Iowa, and the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Alabama. He died of a drug overdose at 28.
His works are rated between $ 200,000 and 1,3 million.

John Currin (American) (Born in 1962) who received his BFA from Carnegie Mellon University. With the recent re-emergence of figurative painting, Currin's portraits and nudes have received widespread critical acclaim. He participated in the 1993 Venice Biennale and was included in a 1997 Projects exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. He was the subject of a solo exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and the Fonds Regional d'Art Contemporain in Limousin, France. His work is included in public collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Montreal. John Currin lives and works in New York.
His works are rated between $ 30,000 and 120,000.

Eric Fischl (American) (Born in 1948) who got a job delivering patio furniture in Phoenix and it was a fellow truck driver studying art, who sparked his interest in painting. He studied at Arizona State University and the California Institute of Arts, where he received his BFA in 1972. In the late seventies, his Freudian figurative paintings garnered acclaim with the rise of the Neo-Expressionist movement. His work has been exhibited in the 1983, 1985 and 1991 Whitney Biennial Exhibitions, 1984 Venice Biennale, 1985 Carnegie International and 1987 Documenta, Kassel. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London, Art gallery of Ontario, Toronto, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, and Boston, Whitney Museum of American Art, Kunsthalle Basel and Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven. He works and lives in New York.
His works are rated between $ 100,000 and 720,000.

Barry Flanagan (British) (Born in 1941) who studied art in Birmingham from 1957 to 1958 before moving to London, where he studied for two years at St Martin's School of Art. Flanagan's first "Leaping Hare" was cast in November 1979, a subject which he has continued to evolve ever since. He participated in the 1982-1983 Venice Biennale, 1982 Documenta, Kassel and 1985-1986 Carnegie International. Several of Flanagan's large-scale sculptures were exhibited outdoors on Park Avenue, New York in 1995-96 and in Grant Park, Chicago, in 1996. His work is included in such prestigious collections as the Art Institute of Chicago, Museum of Modern Art, New York, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Tate gallery, London. Flanagan lives in Dublin.
His works are rated between $ 20,000 and 350,000.

Robert Gober (American) (Born in 1954) who attended the Tyler School of Art in Rome from 1973-1974 and received his B.A from Middlebury College in Vermont in 1976. Gober has participated in Documenta Kassel in 1992, the Venice Biennale in 1988 and the Whitney Biennial in 1989, 1991 and 1993. He has had solo exhibitions at the Dia Center for the Arts, Los Angeles. He has been the subject of a travelling exhibition at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, the Rooseum, Malmo, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture garden, Washington DC and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Robert Gober lives and works in New York.
His photographic works sell between $ 5,000 and over 50,000 and his painted assemblages between $ 50,000 and 350,000.

Peter Halley (American) (Born in 1953) who received a B.A from Yale University and an M.F.A from the University of New Orleans. By the mid-1980s, Halley had moved to New York, where he became involved with a group of artists associated with the Neo-Geo movement. Halley's brightly coloured, graphic paintings conceal their handmade process, constructing an urban, technological effect that alludes to the shape of microprocessor chip. He has participated in the 1985 Sao Paulo Biennial, the 1987 Documenta, the 1988 Carnegie International and the 1987 and 1991 Whitney Biennial. Recent solo exhibitions include CACP Musée d'Art Contemporain in Bordeaux, FAE Musée d'Art Contemporain, Pully-Lausanne, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Peter Halley lives and works in New York.
His works are rated between $ 40,000 and 150,000.

Eva Hesse (German) (1936-1970) whose family immigrated to the U.S in 1936 in order to escape Nazi persecution. After taking classes at the Pratt Institute of Design and Arts Students League, she studied at Cooper Union from 1954 to 1957 and Yale University B.F.A from 1957 to 1959. Focusing on her painting and drawing at first, she created her first sculptural works while travelling in Germany in the mid-1960s. In 1968, Hesse suffered symptoms of a serious illness, ultimately signs of a brain tumour that led to her death two years later. Solo exhibitions of Hesse's work have been held at the S. R. Guggenheim Museum, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, Wexner Center for the Arts, Ohio, as well as recent major retrospectives at the Yale University Art Gallery, Hirshhorn Museum
and Sculpture Garden, IVAM Julio Gonzales, Valencia, Spain and Galerie Nationale du Jeu de Paume, Paris.
Her works are now rated between $ 25,000 and 450,000.

Damien Hirst (British) (Born in 1965) who graduated from Goldsmith's College receiving a B.A with honours in fine arts. Hirst is best known for his animal carcasses preserved in clear formaldehyde and his dot paintings representing chemical compositions. He was on the shortlist for the Turner prize in 1992, and was awarded the prize in 1995. Hirst has had major solo exhibitions at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London, the Dallas Museum of Art and the 1993 Venice Biennale. He lives and works in London and Berlin.
His works are rated between $ 30,000 and 300,000.

Donald Judd (American) (1928-1994) who attended Columbia University where he received an M.A in art history and later studied at the Arts Students League. Judd exemplified the Minimalist art movement with his austere, geometric, box-like sculptures in wood, aluminium, brass and Plexiglas. In 1986 he opened La Fundacion Chinati in Marfa, Texas. Judd received the Skowhegan Medal for Sculpture and participated in the 1982 Documenta, the 1973 and 1985 Whitney Biennial and the 1995-96 Carnegie International. Judd's work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, the Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
His works are rated between $ 20,000 and 400,000.

Mike Kelley (American) (Born in 1954) who studied at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and the California Institute of the Arts. Although he has worked in a range of media, Kelley is best known for his worn and soiled stuffed animals arranged in sexual positions or in coldly clinical settings. His work has been included in such prestigious international exhibitions as the Whitney Biennial, the Carnegie International and Documenta. He has also been the subject of major solo exhibitions at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C. Mike Kelley works and lives in Los Angeles.
His works are rated between $ 10,000 and 100,000.

Martin Kippenberger (German) (1953-1997) who began studying at the Hochschule für bildende Kunst in Hamburg in 1972. He held his first one-man show in 1977. Moving to Berlin the following year, he became the business manager of the legendary S.O 36 bar. Using a wide range of media, his work often mocks both himself and society. His first comprehensive museum exhibition was held at the Hessische Landesmuseum, Darmstadt in 1986, and a retrospective of his work was held in 1997 at the Musée d'Art Moderne et Contemporain in Geneva and the Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Castello di Rivoli in Turin. He has also been the focus of solo exhibitions at the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture garden, Washington D.C, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.
His works are rated between $ 10,000 and 140,000.

Jeff Koons (American) (Born in 1955) who went to study at the Maryland Institute of Art, Baltimore and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Koon's sculptures and paintings often appropriate subjects from mass culture in order to explore the seductive power and erotics of commercial products and images. He has participated in the 1987 and 1989 Whitney Biennial and the 1990 Venice Bienniale. He was the subject of a major comprehensive exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. Jeff Koons lives and works in New York.
His works are rated between $ 100,000 and 1,7 million.

Shiro Kuramata (Japanese) (1934-1991) who studied architecture at the Tokyo technical College in 1956 and began training as a cabinetmaker at the Kuwasawa Institute for Design. Throughout his short but brilliant career, Kuramata focused his energy and seemingly limitless creative imagination onto the design of furniture. The poetic minimalist concepts, which he developed, brought attention to the purity and elegance of Japanese culture and his avant-garde contemporaries in Europe. Kuramata created such innovative pieces as his "furniture in irregular forms Side 2, a set of wooden drawers curved into the shape of an S" and his "Sally 87" side table, which he designed for Memphis, the Italian design group. In his extraordinary armchair and settee "How High the Moon", we see how Kuramata's choice of materials informed his creations. The form of the chair is entirely constructed from a mesh like nickel-plated steel and manages to be both fragile looking and hard-edged at the same time.
His works are rated between $ 30,000 and 100,000.

Louis Lawler (American) (Born in 1947) who earned a B.F.A from Cornell University in 1969. She has been well known since the early 80s for her photographs of artworks shot in museum storage rooms, auction houses, and galleries and in the homes of private collectors. Her work, which is generally regarded ad operating from within the context of intellectual cultural critique, challenges the ways in which we perceive objects and the degree to which value accrues to them as a function of the setting in which they are placed. Lawler has had had several one-person shows at the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. She lives in New York.
Her works are rated between $ 5,000 and 25,000.

Gordon Matta-Clark (American) (1943-1978) who studied architecture at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York, taking a year to study poetry at the Sorbonne in Paris and graduating in 1968. He moved to New York the following year where he found his chosen subject: the abandoned buildings in and around New York City. Matta-Clark's work combines elements of Minimalism, Earth Art, Conceptual Art, and Performance Art. He participated in the 1972 and 1977 Documenta and received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1977. From 1985 through 1988, he was the subject of a retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago that travelled to a dozen locations including the Brooklyn Museum, the Musée d'Art Contemporain, Montreal and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam.
His works are rated between $ 50,000 and 400,000.

Bruce Nauman (American) (Born in 1941) who studied mathematics and art at the University of Wisconsin. He received an M.F.A from the University of California at Davis. His signature pieces include videos, neon texts and figures, hanging steel and chair sculptures and cast heads that dangle from ceilings. He has had two major retrospectives, the first was organised by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the second by the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and the Hirshhorn Museum And Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C. He has been awarded a number of honours. He lives and works in Galisteo, New Mexico.
His works are rated between $ 15,000 and 500,000.

Mark Newson (Australian) (Born in 1963) who has fast become one of the foremost designers of his generation. After specialising in sculpture and jewellery at the Sydney College of Fine Arts, he embarked on an ambitious career taking on design projects ranging from furniture to wristwatches to perfume bottles, to boutiques, restaurants, a recording studio, the Falcon 900B jet and a concept car. Fascinated with futuristic forms and experimentation with new technologies, Newson has embraced the challenge of moulding metal into improbable shapes and a sleek industrialised look characterises his work. Since his first exhibition in 1986 at the Roslyn Oxley Gallery and the unveiling of his "Lockheed Lounge", Newson has captured the public's imagination. The lounge has reached icon status after being featured in the Madonna video "Rain" (1998) and its deliberate sheeting against a sculptural form blurs the conventional divide between art and design. Whether working in aluminium, wood, wicker, carbon fibre, felt or plastic. Newson creates fresh bold forms that set new standards of design.
His works are rated between $ 15,000 and 105,000.

Tony Oursler (American) (Born in 1957) who attended the California Institute for the Arts, where he received his BFA in 1979. His family background included writers and painters, with a strong belief that content is more important than form, a prominent feature of his own life. His work is featured in many major public and private collections, including Carnegie Museum of Art, Musée d'Art Contemporain de Montreal, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Tate Gallery London, Saatchi Collection London, and the Whitney Museum of American Art New York.
His works are rated between $ 5,000 and 35,000.

Gaetano Pesce (Italian) (Born in 1939) who began his design career in 1962 while simultaneously studying architecture at the University of Vienna and design at the Institute of Industrial Design. He is best described as a revolutionary creator of art. Prolific can most certainly be added to that description. Throughout his illustrious and multi-disciplinary career, Pesce has never limited himself to the creation of three-dimensional forms, the staging of theatre works, or to images only. Using a broad and encompassing approach to design, he has accomplished a freedom of expression. Pesce has been a leading proponent of experimental design since the 1970s.
His works are rated between $ 10,000 and 65,000.

Jack Pierson (American) (Born in 1960) who has been the focus of solo exhibitions at White Cube, London, Regen projects, Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Kunstverein, Frankfurt, among others and group shows in the U.S and Germany. He lives and works in New York and Princetown, Massachusetts.
His works are rated between $ 2,000 and 40,000.

Sigmar Polke (German) (Born in 1941) who moved to Dusseldorf in 1953 and studied at the Staatliche Kunstakademie there with Gerhard Hoehme and Karl Otto Gutz. He founded the Capitalist Realist group with Konrad-Lueg Fischer and Gerhard Richter in 1963. Polke has received the Prize for Art from the Nord LB, North State Bank in 1996, the Carnegie Prize in 1995, the Grand Prize for Painting at the 1986 Venice Biennale and the Prize for painting at the Sao Paulo Biennial in 1975. A major retrospective of his works was organised by the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and travelled to the Hirshhorn Museum And Sculpture Garden, Washington D.C, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Brooklyn Museum and the Kunst-Und Austellungshalle der Bundesrepublik Deutschland in Bonn. He lives and works in Cologne.
His works are rated between $ 100,000 and 1,6 million.

Charles Ray (American) (Born in 1953) who received a B.F.A in 1975 at the University of Iowa and an M.F.A in 1979 from Rutgers University. Ray has participated in important international exhibitions and has had solo exhibitions in Sweden, London, Zurich, Bern, New York, Los Angeles and Chicago. He has received several honours, including two individual Artist's Fellowships from the National Endowment of the Arts and the Larry Aldrich Foundation Award. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
His works are rated between $ 50,000 and 890,000.

Gerhard Richter (German) (Born in 1932) who studied at the Kunstakademie, Dresden, from 1951 to 1956 and the Kunstakademie, Dusseldorf, from 1961 to 1963. Richter has been awarded the Junger Western Art Prize in 1967, the Arnold Bode Prize in 1981 and the Oskar Kokoschka prize in 1985. His work has been regularly featured at the Venice Biennale and Documenta. In 1991, a major museum retrospective of his work was organised by the Tate gallery in London.
In addition he has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Dia Center for the Arts, New York, Moderna Museet, Stockholm, Centro de Arte Reina Sofia, Madrid, Musée d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris and San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. He lives and works in Cologne.
His works are rated between $ 100,000 and 800,000.

Susan Rothenberg (American) (Born in 1945) who studied art at Cornell University. While living in New York City in the seventies, Rothenberg garnered acclaim with her iconic paintings based on the outlines of horses. She has had solo exhibitions in Switzerland, Holland, Los Angeles and Washington D.C. A major retrospective of her work was held in 1992-94 at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, the Saint Louis Art Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, the Seattle Art Museum and the Dallas Museum of Art. She is married to the artist Bruce Nauman and they reside in a ranch in Galisteo, New Mexico.
Her works are rated between $ 30,000 and 300,000.

Robert Ryman (American) (Born in 1930) who attended the Tennessee Polytechnic Institute in 1948 and transferred to the George Peabody College for Teachers the following year to study music. His paintings incorporate the energetic brushstrokes of Abstract Expressionism but focus on refined variations of shades of white. He received the Skowhegan Medal for painting in 1985 and was elected a member of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, New York in 1994. he has been the subject of major solo exhibitions in New York, Paris, Amsterdam and London. He lives and works in New York.
His works are rated between $ 100,000 and 400,000.

Richard Serra (American) (Born in 1939) who studied at the University of Berkeley, California and Santa Barbara. Between 1961 and 1964, he earned a B.F.A and M.F.A from Yale University, where he studied with Joseph Albers and came into contact with artists of the New York School. In 1969, Serra had his first solo show and in 1975, he received the Sculpture award from the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture. Serra has received a number of large-scale, public sculpture commissions and was the subject of a major retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1986. He works and lives in New York.
His works are rated between $ 30,000 and 300,000.

Andres Serrano (American) (Born in 1950) who studied at the Brooklyn Museum of Art School between 1967 and 1969. In the 1980s his photographs were the focus of intense political controversy. He has continued to push the limits of acceptability by choosing his subjects from generally ignored or taboo segments of society, contrasting glossy, seductive techniques with disturbing subject matter.
An extensive one-man show of his work was held in 1995 at the New York Museum of Contemporary Art, Center for the Fine Arts, Miami, Contemporary Art Museum, Houston, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago and Malmo Konsthall, Sweden. He has also received several awards. He lives and works in New York. His works are rated between $ 4,000 and 75,000.

Cindy Sherman (American) (Born in 1954) who attended the State University College in Buffalo. She first came to public attention with her early series the "Untitled Film Stills", which was acquired and exhibited by The Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1997. The same year, a major retrospective of her work was organised by the Museums of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles and Chicago and travelled to numerous venues including the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Sydney. Sherman's work is included in the collections of the Eli Broad Family Foundation, Los Angeles, the Art Institute of Chicago, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the S.R Guggenheim Museum, New York. She lives and works in New York.
Her works are rated between $ 20,000 and $ 200,000.

Ettore Sottsass (Italian) (Born in 1917) who was born of Italian parents in Innsbruck, Austria. Considered to be one of the most important designers of the 20th century, he studied architecture at the Polytechnic of Turin. After World War Two he began to challenge the status quo. Using plywood and plastic, metal sheet and rod, he broke from functionalism and began to work with organic Design styles more typically associated with the Art Nouveau period. The early years were those of artistic experimentation and laid the groundwork for Sottsass' move into product design. The search for a way to create a new relationship between objects and their users led him to George Nelson. Mass consumption and the idea of instant value along with Pop Art and Abstract Expressionism reinforced his interest in the immediacy of design. The late 1950s saw the beginning of his work with Olivetti. His famous red "valentine" typewriter typifies the fruit of that collaboration. Sottsass was a leader of Post-Modernism, but he also moved easily between art, craft and design, which made him a forerunner of Anti-Design. In 1981, along with a group of other cutting edge designers, he formed the highly influential avant-garde design group called Memphis. His works are rated between $ 10,000 and 50,000.

Thomas Struth (German) (Born in 1954) who attended the Kunstakademie Dusseldorf, studying with Gerhard Richter, Peter Kleeman, Peter Kleeman and
Bernhard Becher. Struth's detached photographs of families, urban architecture and museum visitors are coolly analytical in their constructed objectivity and photographic precision. He has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions. He lives and works in Dusseldorf. His works are rated between $ 10,000 and 100,000.

James Turrell (American) (Born in 1943) who attended the Pomona College at Clairmont, California where he majored in psychology, mathematics and art history. Completing his studies of fine arts, he graduated from the University of California in 1965-66 and from Clairmont graduate school in 1973. His family background provided him with first insights into the technologies involved in aircraft construction, flight navigation and photogrammetry. His work has been exhibited in many major institutions including the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, ARC, Musée d'Art Moderne in Paris and the Nagashima Contemporary Art Museum in Japan. He lives in Flagstaff, Arizona.
His works are rated between $ 8,000 and 80,000.

Luc Tuymans (Belgian) (Born in 1958) who studied painting at the Sint-Lukainstituut, Brussels, the Hoger Instituut and the Koninkiijke Academie voor Schone Kunsten Antwerpen. He then attended the Vrije Universiteit in Brussels where he studied art history. Tuymans' subtle yet violent paintings of domestic objects, nationalistic icons and political personages reveal a post-modern sensibility in their fusion of Spanish and Northern Renaissance painting with the medium of film, television and photography. He has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, Museum van Hedendaagse Kunst, Ghent, Kunsthalle Bern, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld and the Musée des Beaux-Arts, Nantes. He lives and works in Antwerp.
His works are rated between $ 4,000 and 10,000.

Andy Warhol (American) (1928-1987) who received his B.F.A from the Carnegie Institute of Technology, Pittsburgh. He then moved to New York where he worked as an illustrator and a commercial artist. Warhol gained acclaim in the 1960s with his images derived from American popular and consumer culture: Brillo boxes, Campbell's soup cans and Marilyn Monroe. He has been featured in numerous solo exhibitions round the world and was recently the subject of a major retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York.
His works are rated between $ 100,000 and 5 million.

Christopher Williams (American) (Born in 1955) who graduated with a B.F.A and M.F.A in 1981 from the California Institute of the Arts, Valencia. His work has been included in exhibitions at Person's Weekend Museum, Tokyo, Kunstverein, Munich, Wexner Center for the Arts, The Ohio State University, Columbus, and the Museum of Modern Art, Syros, Greece. He lives and works in Los Angeles.
His photographic works are rated between $ 2,000 and 10,000.

Christopher Wool (American) (Born in 1955) who was born in Chicago and moved to New York following his formal education. Early on, he was influenced by the all over composition and gesture painting of the Abstract Expressionists. After seeing the graffiti words "Sex" and "Luv" in the late eighties, he developed his bold text paintings with expressions and terms often drawn from popular culture. In 1989, a solo exhibition of his work was held at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and that same year; he took part in the Whitney Biennial even designing the catalogue's front and back covers. He participated in the 1991 Carnegie International and in 1992 Documenta. Recent solo exhibitions include the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, the Museum Boymans-van Beuningen, Rotterdam and the Carnegie Museum of Art, Pittsburgh. He lives and works in New York. His works are rated between $ 15,000 and 90,000.

(Christie's sources)