Harmonies of Light

#6 Julie Mehretu (b. 1970 -)

I think of my abstract mark-making as a type of sign lexicon, signifier, or language for characters that hold identity and have social agency. The characters in my maps plotted, journeyed, evolved, and built civilisations. I charted, analyzed, and mapped their experience and development: their cities, their suburbs, their conflicts, and their wars. The paintings occurred in an intangible no-place: a blank terrain, an abstracted map space. As I continued to work I needed a context for the marks, the characters. By combining many types of architectural plans and drawings I tried to create a metaphoric, tectonic view of structural history. I wanted to bring my drawing into time and place

These words of the artist herself are perhaps the best description one can make of Mehretu's works. An abstract analysis of globalization and the expanding structures of capitalism. Despite this, she is politically neutral, even going so far as to be commissioned by Goldman Sachs in 2007 to paint a mural for their building. Her opinion of the corporation; “I don’t see it as an evil institution, but as part of the larger system that we all participate in. We’re all a part of it.” And perhaps this is a part of the logic of her art. Clearly fascinated with the abstract landscape of global civilization, she envisions a certain democratic highway of mass interaction.

In her paintings, everything is ordered by a certain chaotic interconnectedness. Like the charts of collisions of subatomic particles, Mehretu maps out a macroscopic vision of the microscopic interactions that make up the mass of interactions called civilization. Perhaps it may be ironic to quote Marx in regards to such a politically-neutral artist, but not only are Mehretu's paintings one of the highest expressions of Late capitalism and postmodern signification, they testify to Marx's declaration that “Society does not consist of individuals, but expresses the sum of interrelations, the relations within which these individuals stand.”

#7 Carrie Mae Weems (b. 1956-)

There's been a concern about a lack of sincerity in the arts. Postmodernism has brought us a new way of looking at and integrating multiple forms of art in a constantly changing world, but with that, under its addiction to irony and cleverness, it has created some works throughout mediums that are empty and cynical.

The works of Carrie Mae Weems are passionate, graceful, sincere and angry.  "Let me say that my primary concern in art, as in politics, is with the status and place of Afro-Americans in our country."  Simply put, her photographs and photographic series concern the culture and struggles of black Americans, both past and present. Though her work also has a feminist interest and her first of two unquestionable masterpieces, Kitchen Table Series (1990) is both an intimate and social portrayal of the life of a black woman, all from a kitchen table. Weems, a master of manners, composes her main subject with a subtle grace, revealing different aspects of the roles given to her, both imposed and natural; either as a mother to her child, a lover (and mother-figure) to her boyfriend, a friend to her girlfriends, a body, a mind, a woman. It throws itself in the face of all of the endless patriarchal and racist portrayals of black women in the media and does so with loving compassion.

Her other masterpiece is also a series, though it uses both words and found photographs, From Here I Saw What Happened and I Cried (1996) depicting an entire history of the painful struggle of black Americans from their initiation into slavery to civil rights struggles. Words are mixed in with the images and are poetic as they are sad. It is perhaps one of the greatest works of African-American art since Burnett's Killer of Sheep.

#8 Sean Scully (b.1945-)

While Scully calls himself a Romantic, I'd more likely call him a spiritualist harking back from the medieval tradition. His repeating textures are highly reminiscent to many of the precursors to abstract expressionism one can find a thousand years back such as the glowing decoration of The Book of Kells or the design of the Durham Cathedral.

Like such passionate believers in the beauty of variation and repetition as Bach or Ozu, Scully makes the carpet-like patterns of carefully organized stripes a religion. His greatest works it seems are the ones that maintain a highly baroque and monotone pattern, with a sudden interruption in order by another order, that is, not a dissent from pattern by chaos, but a digression from dominating order to a minor one. 

#9 Rachel Whiteread (b. 1963- )

Perhaps the greatest living British sculptor, Whiteread's massive works are immersive yet simple. Extracting such elemental beauty from what some have called "anti-monuments" which seem to both exist inside and outside of time. Her best known work House is a primary example of a trend within her work of abstracting the basic infrastructure of objects and spaces as if she had taken a photographic negative made of concrete and placed it in a natural terrain.

In 1997 she did a similar thing when she took the casts of the space beneath chairs and exhibited them lined up in perfect geometric lines. In this regard she is a craftsman of negation for she brings to reality the negative space that exists between things.

She seemed to take an even more elemental and minimalist approach with her exquisitely simple and beautiful Water Tower, which like her Untitled Monument that she made three years later, is a translucent form whose only content is the light it refracts.

Lucian Freud (8 December 1922 – 20 July 2011)

#10 Michael Lewis (b. 1941-)

Perhaps it is too early to determine the greatness a painter who's just starting to get noticed. Noticed or unnoticed, I think his paintings reveal evidence of a modern master in the tradition of Edward Hopper.

There is much the two have in common: their dark humor, their fascination with alienation, with the effects of modernity. The defining difference is perhaps that Lewis refuses any kind of liberating romanticism, showing that only grim humor is the reliable alternative to despair.

For Hopper, alienation occurs when you're alone, for Lewis, the greatest alienation seems to be when one is around people. His paintings refuse individuality by painting black marks over all of his subjects eyes and yet they are all individually separated from each other.

His cynical portrayals of the modern business world is keenly appropriate and poignant for the times we live in. They are surreally humorous, the way a New Yorker cartoon is. Lewis reveals the abyss of emptiness beneath the culture of late capitalism the same way Fellini did with the Italian bourgeoisie. 

But above all, Michael Lewis is a painter of our times. With an intelligent detachment, he depicts the ironical cynicism of the last decade and the spectre that the events of 9/11 and the 2008 crash holds over Americans today

Honorable Mention: Ahmed Alsoudani (b.1975-)

A synthesis of Picasso's La Guernica and abstract expressionism, Alsoudani holds a special cultural perspective in being an Iraqi who immigrated to America during the Gulf War. Alsoudani pays his respects to all painters since Goya who documented the horrors of war with such immediacy, it seemed that the paint splashed onto the canvas as it happened.

Like Goya and Picasso, there is a horrifying sense of total destruction. His paintings are quite truly the explosions of modern warfare. Abstract pieces of matter emerge from the chaos from which we wonder what they once were. Haunting bits of arms and eyes fly about at times, as if this destruction had formed some kind of shapeless monster.

The Sistine Chapel, no question about it. The only other work existing in the world that I would probably more want to see in person is Bosch's Garden of Earthly Delights. But then again I'm sure the experience of seeing that ceiling and the altar wall is beyond anything that any art on canvas (or any material for that matter) can offer.

Honorable Mention: Richard Serra (b.1939-)

One of the greatest sculptures to work in the minimalist tradition, Serra creates large-scale metallic pieces with often repeating themes (wall, curve) thus creating a certain dialogue between object and environment.

By placing some of his gigantic monolithic rectangles in nature, Serra does the same thing Kubrick did in 2001: A Space Odyssey in contrasting the unique uncanniness of Euclidean shapes with undefined shapes of nature. 

He places gigantic pieces of scrap metal, perhaps in the shape of a wall or a cube, sometimes in urban settings, sometimes in natural ones, and a certain disunity is created. What does it mean really to but a monument, sculpture or artistic object in a natural environment? A repeating structure of his is that of a long extended wall. It brings into question, what is this wall for? What purpose does this construction serve? What purpose does any wall serve? By isolating the practicality of everyday constructions, Serra reveals their uncanniness. 

Correction: If we are to consider Magritte's The Treachery of Images (1929) as an early work of conceptual art (and I would) then I would declare it the definitive masterpiece of the movement (though One and Three Chairs is a close second).

Honorable Mention: Jeff Wall (b. 1946-)

Between his "documentary" images of unstaged improvised moments and his meticulously crafted "cinematographic" images such as his photographic homage to Hokusai, A Sudden Gust of Wind, which took over a year to produce, Wall has for thirty years been a championing artist of photographic composition.

Honorable Mentions: Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964-)

Honorable Mention: Cindy Sherman (b. 1954-)

Honorable Mention: Joseph Kosuth (b. 1945-)

A few exclusions:

No filmmakers/video artists/video installation artists, just because I typically would group artists such as Matthew Barney, Francis Alys or Christian MarClay in the same category as Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr or Stan Brakhage, who I in turn would regard (the latter three) as among the greatest film artists who have ever lived and thus group them alongside the greatest "narrative filmmakers", thus to get straight to the point: I regard all of these artists as filmmakers and thus in a category separate from painting, photography, sculpture and architecture, which is what I want to consider here.

No performance artists. Why? Because while I consider someone like Gregor Schneider a great artist, I've never experienced any of his installations or performances, thus I couldn't honestly say that officially. I must regretfully admit that the same goes for Carolee Schneemann, even though I've seen some of her recorded performances.