CategoriesStyles and Movements
Conceptual Art and Contemporary Conceptualism
Idea-led art from its 1960s beginnings to the present, where concepts, instructions and context shape work in any medium.
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About
The first Conceptual artists of the 1960s and 1970s reduced art to propositions, instructions and documents. Later generations kept the priority of the idea but brought back objects, images, humour and emotion, so that conceptual thinking now runs through every medium.
Felix Gonzalez-Torres gave it deep feeling in the early 1990s. His “Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) is a pile of wrapped sweets matching the ideal body weight of his partner, who died of AIDS-related illness; visitors take pieces, and the pile is replenished. Ai Weiwei's photographs Dropping a Han Dynasty Urn (1995) turn the destruction of an ancient vessel into a question about value and heritage. Maurizio Cattelan uses taxidermy, wax figures and a banana taped to a wall. Cerith Wyn Evans turns quoted texts into neon and light. In each case the form matters, but the work depends on what it proposes.