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TOP 200 ARTISTS
OF THE 20TH CENTURY
TO NOW


TIMES READERS AND SAATCHI ONLINE VISITORS VOTE FOR THEIR FAVOURITE ARTISTS

AFTER 1.4 MILLION VOTES WERE CAST, HERE ARE YOUR LEADING 200 ARTISTS:

-Pablo Picasso
-Paul Cezanne
-Gustav Klimt
-Claude Monet
-Marcel Duchamp
-Henri Matisse
-Jackson Pollock
-Andy Warhol
-Willem De Kooning
-Piet Mondrian
-Paul Gauguin
-Francis Bacon
-Robert Rauschenberg
-Georges Braque
-Wassily Kandinsky
-Constantin Brancusi
-Kasimir Malevich
-Jasper Johns
-Frida Kahlo
-Martin Kippenberger
-Paul Klee
-Egon Schiele
-Donald Judd
-Bruce Nauman
-Alberto Giacometti
-Salvador Dalí
-Auguste Rodin
-Mark Rothko
-Edward Hopper
-Lucian Freud
-Richard Serra
-Rene Magritte
-David Hockney
-Philip Guston
-Henri Cartier-Bresson
-Pierre Bonnard
-Jean-Michel Basquiat
-Max Ernst
-Diane Arbus
-Georgia O'Keeffe
-Cy Twombly
-Max Beckmann
-Barnett Newman
-Giorgio De Chirico
-Roy Lichtenstein
-Edvard Munch
-Pierre Auguste Renoir
-Man Ray
-Henry Moore
-Cindy Sherman
-Jeff Koons
-Tracey Emin
-Damien Hirst
-Yves Klein
-Henri Rousseau
-Chaim Soutine
-Arshile Gorky
-Amedeo Modigliani
-Umberto Boccioni
-Jean Dubuffet
-Eva Hesse
-Edouard Vuillard
-Carl Andre
-Juan Gris
-Lucio Fontana
-Franz Kline
-David Smith
-Joseph Beuys
-Alexander Calder
-Louise Bourgeois
-Marc Chagall
-Gerhard Richter
- Balthus
-Joan Miro
-Ernst Ludwig Kirchner
-Frank Stella
-Georg Baselitz
-Francis Picabia
-Jenny Saville
-Dan Flavin
-Alfred Stieglitz
-Anselm Kiefer
-Matthew Barney
-George Grosz
-Bernd And Hilla Becher
-Sigmar Polke
-Brice Marden
-Maurizio Cattelan
-Sol LeWitt
-Chuck Close
-Edward Weston
-Joseph Cornell
-Karel Appel
-Bridget Riley
-Alexander Archipenko
-Anthony Caro
-Richard Hamilton
-Clyfford Still
-Luc Tuymans
-Claes Oldenburg

TO SEE THE FULL 200 CLICK HERE
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Saatchi Gallery
Franz Ackermann at The Saatchi Gallery

FRANZ ACKERMANN


Selected Works by Franz Ackermann

 

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Franz Ackermann

Mental Map: Evasion V

1996, Acylic on Canvas

275 x 305cm

Click on images to enlarge

Franz Ackermann, Mental Map: Evasion V
In Mental Map: Evasion V, Franz Ackermann creates a biotic abstraction, a template for natural phenomena dictated by design. His jumbled composition is harmonious in its turmoil: concentric patterns of colour expose hints of identifiable place (a street map, a building interior, a snippet of landscape) only to dislocate them in a maze of organic generalisations.

Constructed graphics are corroded, integrated as if by evolution, to incorporate somatic qualities: sublime contemplation is achieved only through artificial enhancement.


Franz Ackermann

Mental Map: Evasion VI

1996
Acylic on Canvas

195 x 210 cm


Franz Ackermann, Mental Map: Evasion VI

Mental Map: Evasion VI is less a representation of a specific place than an eruption of global confusion. Wild blasts of colour rip tangled organic masses apart. Amid the wreckage are tiny vignettes of landscape displaced from their natural setting. Ackermann’s painting has an undertone of catastrophe: desert sunsets, rocky coves and industrial parks clash together like tectonic plates in an ethical snafu. Through his unbridled abstraction, Ackermann strives to chart out the physical impossibility of conceptual space. Evasion VI reconstructs our chaotic perception of the world as an apocalyptic image-byte. 

 

Franz Ackermann

New Building

1999
Oil on Canvas

260 x 200 cm


Franz Ackermann, New Building

Ackermann paints New Building as a package holiday resort spiralling out of control. Destination: doesn’t matter. This exact development could be found anywhere. His warped perspective and candy-coloured banners compose an off-kilter composition, both unsettling and jubilant. A triumph of marketing over nature, his hard-edged abstraction springs like Poseidon’s gift from the sea: the new universal symbol for ‘beach’.  

 

Franz Ackermann

The Secret Tunnel

1999
Oil on Canvas

260 x 200 cm


Franz Ackermann, The Secret Tunnel

Ackermann’s cityscape is information overload: a seething metropolis striated in Technicolor glory. Grey modernist architecture looms at an unnatural angle, engulfed in retro-style smog, while an inverted stairway to heaven descends into the open earth below. Ackermann paints his underworld as a spacey utopia: fiery blobs of magma swell with hypnotic seduction, revealing a virgin landscape at their core. The Secret Tunnel is not a paradise, but an upper and middle earth equally and oppositely attractive. 

 

Franz Ackermann

Zooropa

2001
Oil on Canvas

200 x 250 cm


Franz Ackermann, Zooropa

Ackermann is a perpetual tourist: his paintings are like large trippy postcards from the edge. Dealing with globalisation and the commodification of cultural landscape, his work is representative of an ever-shrinking world. Referring to his images as ‘mental maps’, Ackermann readily digests the subtle nuances of popular destinations and regurgitates them as international signifiers: brightly coloured shapes, high-impact graphics and pop iconography.

 

Franz Ackermann

Helicopter XVI (On the balcony)

2001, Oil on Canvas

287 x 278cm

Franz Ackermann, Helicopter XVI (On the balcony)
In Helicopter, Franz Ackermann presents a gyrating distortion. Glimpsed from above, his ‘map’ is more graphic than topographical: any sense of real space has been compressed to the flatness of a logo. Among the steely refined greys of a mountainside reclusion are the stripy steppes of a vineyard and a plastic sunset. It’s only the ‘flat-pack’ patio furniture that suggests a luxury villa and not just the abstraction of affluence.


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