Art Terms Art encyclopedia

THE INTERNATIONAL ARCHITECTURE EXHIBITION IN VENICE

Every two years, architecture fans from all over the world make a pilgrimage to the Architecture Biennale in Venice: the most important international exhibition for architecture and urban development.

THE ART OF PERFORMANCE

In the sixties and seventies of the 20th century, performance was the art genre of the hour, it promised nothing less than the encounter with naked life.

FROM WORD TO IMAGE: THE POET AS VISUAL ARTIST

Many poets and thinkers - of all epochs and colors - took up the pen with just as much passion as they did the brush or drawing pencil. As artistic double talents, they moved gropingly or confidently in two worlds that enlivened each other.

1914 - ARTISTS AT WAR

The First World War left its mark on the work of numerous artists; the shock before the trembling of the world led them to poignant new themes and radically new artistic concepts.

BERLIN BIENNALE

New, specially produced works by contemporary artists from all over the world, renowned curators: as an exhibition with international appeal, the Berlin Biennale has secured its firm place in the global round of biennials.

THE ART MARKET

Confusing and uncertain: the art market is foreign even to many people interested in art, but at the same time it exerts a great fascination. It is a network of numerous players - artists, galleries, auction houses, fairs, museums, art critics, collectors.

MINIMAL ART

Elementary forms, serial arrangements, industrial materials and production methods are the hallmarks of Minimal Art, which developed in the 1960s as a counter-movement to Abstract Expressionism and Pop Art.

NEW OBJECTIVITY

With their paintings, they reacted to the traumatic experience of the First World War and a world that had come apart at the seams: the artists of New Objectivity.

PHOTOREALISM

In the late 1960s, several young artists in the U.S. began to capture mostly everyday motifs of their immediate surroundings that expressed the "American way of life" with meticulous attention to detail in large-format paintings. Photographs served them as models.

POLAROID

The Polaroid is unique, as unique as every moment. Invented as early as 1947 and temporarily declared dead, the instant picture is experiencing an unexpected renaissance today.

ARS ELECTRONICA FESTIVAL

Ars Electronica, located on the frontier of art and technology, is a globally important media art festival - a platform that focuses on the future as it is currently being realized.

NEW LEIPZIG SCHOOL

"Leipzig is coming" was the confident slogan in the 2003 catalog for the exhibition sieben mal malerei (seven times painting) - and the seven painting graduates of the Leipzig Academy of Visual Arts were to be proven right.

SCANDINAVIAN ART AROUND 1900

It was not until the 19th century that an independent art scene developed in the northern European countries. Edvard Munch is Scandinavia's best-known artist. Many of his contemporaries have been rediscovered only in recent years.

STREET PHOTOGRAPHY

Street photography operates mainly at eye level - at street level - and shows situations and people in (mostly) urban space. The rhythms of the city are translated into a celebration of the momentary.

ART BASEL

Described as the "Olympus of the art market" and the "queen among art fairs", Art Basel is considered the world's best and most important fair for art from classical modernism to the present.

DOCUMENTA

If one wants to reduce the more than fifty-year history of Documenta to a common denominator, then one can probably say that - like no other major exhibition - it has repeatedly intervened in the respective current art discussion, adopted one or the other attitude and thus triggered controversies.

COLOR PHOTOGRAPHY

If photography had been invented as color photography - who would ever have missed black and white? Since the 1980s, the medium has been booming, which just a decade earlier was largely denied recognition as an art form.

BODY ART

Body art emerged at a time when the youth of the Western world was rebelling. The avant-garde actions were often intended to trigger a shockingly liberating effect on the audience and break social and political constraints.

EXPRESSIONISM

Expressionism as an art of mental expression: images of reality represented as abstraction with strong colors. However, the Expressionists were not overthrowers of the social system, their revolution was mainly the formal means of art, the free play of colors and shapes.

RENAISSANCE PAINTING

Starting in Italy, the Renaissance saw the development of a new world view and a new art whose influence on later generations was overwhelming. However, "Renaissance" did not become an epochal term until the 19th century.

BAUHAUS

The Bauhaus was founded in Weimar in 1919. Despite its short existence, it still proves to be the most important school of art, design and architecture.

ROMANTICISM

Romanticism can be understood as a basic spiritual attitude centered on human sensitivity and sentimentality and a longing for a lost harmonious world structure.

CUBISM

The art movement that develops at the beginning of the 20th century, especially in France, marks the beginning of abstract and non-objective art: cubism.

STILL LIFES

For centuries they have fascinated painters and viewers alike: carefully arranged still lifes.