CategoriesStyles and Movements
Neo-Expressionism
Painting of the late 1970s and 1980s that returned to the figure, myth and history with large canvases, heavy paint and raw handling.
No works indexed yet · 10 related artists
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About
After a decade dominated by Minimalism and Conceptual art, painting came back with force around 1980, in Germany, Italy and the United States almost at once. Canvases are big, paint is thick or loosely brushed, and imagery is figurative and often charged with history, sexuality or violence.
In Germany Georg Baselitz had begun painting his figures upside down in 1969, to force attention onto paint rather than subject. Anselm Kiefer confronted the Nazi past in scorched landscapes thick with straw, lead and ash, while A. R. Penck painted stick-figure signs and Markus Lüpertz blunt, heavy motifs. Italy's Transavanguardia, including Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente and Enzo Cucchi, mixed mythic and personal imagery. In New York Julian Schnabel fixed broken plates to his canvases, Eric Fischl painted uneasy suburban scenes, and Jean-Michel Basquiat fused graffiti, text and anatomy. Several artists rejected the label, but it marked painting's return to centre stage.
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