1970s
Art made in the 1970s: performance, land art, feminist art, Photorealism and Pattern and Decoration.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
No open-access works for 1970s are in the index yet. They will appear here as more collections are indexed.
About
In the 1970s many artists turned to the body, the land and the everyday, making work that could not easily hang on a wall. Chris Burden had a friend shoot him in the arm in Shoot (1971), Marina Abramović laid out 72 objects, including a pistol and a bullet, for the audience in Rhythm 0 (1974), and Ana Mendieta pressed her silhouette into earth, grass and fire. Walter De Maria planted 400 steel poles in New Mexico for The Lightning Field (1977), and Gordon Matta-Clark sawed an abandoned house in half.
The women's movement changed who made art and what counted as a serious subject, and the Pattern and Decoration painters defended ornament that modernism had dismissed. Chuck Close painted huge heads from photographs, grid square by grid square. Niki de Saint Phalle began her garden of giant tarot sculptures in Tuscany in 1979, and in Vienna Franz West made plaster Adaptives for viewers to handle.
