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John Lennon called her "the most famous of unknown artists," fans of The Beatles claimed that she ruined the band, and Andy Warhol considered her banal - all this about one of the most famous avant-garde artists Yoko Ono. During her 60-year career, she went from an unknown artist to an icon of conceptualism. The debate about her works' artistic value and influence on American avant-gardism continues to this day.
For thousands of years, the magical combination of clay, water, fire, and human imagination gave life to unique decorative and applied artworks. Traveling across continents and absorbing the national specifics of local cultures, ceramics constantly found new artistic forms. Despite its popularity, it has not been able to fully exhaust its potential, leaving ceramic masters the opportunity to tell the world something fresh, and unsaid in previous eras. At the beginning of the XXI century, ceramics continued to attract the audience's attention, communicating with them in the ancient language of plastic forms. The sources of inspiration for the masters of the new generation are philosophical ideas, ethnic motifs, landscapes of modern cities, the sophistication of technical devices, fantastic panoramas of starry worlds, and the rhythm of life constantly accelerating.
The history of fine art knows many paintings honored to be called masterpieces. They are exhibited in museums, carefully studied, and sold at auctions for hundreds of millions of dollars. But only some of them manage to acquire a remarkable influence on culture and become a symbol of the era in the minds of many generations. The popularity of such masterpieces goes beyond the narrow circles of art history experts and actively conquers the space of mass culture. You can see references to them in films, performances, works of art, architecture, memes, and just on the street.
For more than 40 years of history, representatives of surrealism have created thousands of magnificent paintings that are more like a journey through the looking glass. At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries, fundamental discoveries in psychology radically influenced morality and the idea of what a person is. Not surprisingly, such changes in the mentality of Western European society found their expression in new aesthetic concepts. In the early 20s of the twentieth century, a group of young artists completed the initial stage of their creative research and declared the creation of a new direction of fine art. The poet Guillaume Apollinaire coined the very name surrealism (from the French surréalisme, lit. "superrealism") a few years before. Thus, one of the twentieth century's most influential and exciting avant-garde trends was born.
The future postmodernist artist was born in Odessa on October 14, 1961. His family had nothing to do with the world of art, so his father wanted his son to choose a career as an architect. Fortunately, this did not happen, and creative experiments in adolescence became a prelude to an eventful creative path. The desire for complete personal self-realization constantly pushed Roitburd to actively participate in public and political life.
Conceptualism is a direction of contemporary art in which the creative idea is considered more important than the physical form of its expression. The projection of the concept can be an object, sketch, or description. Conceptualism destroys the basic patterns of our thinking, blurring the boundaries between art and everyday life. This direction does not lose its relevance 60 years after its emergence and has every chance to maintain its influence in the XXI century.
In September this year, the media reported implementing an unusual art project. According to the last will of the conceptual artist Christo Javacheff, the Arc de Triomphe in Paris was to be wrapped in cloth and tied with ropes. Outwardly, all this resembled the packaging of an architectural monument with an unclear purpose. The network even suggested that in this way, the memorial of the French capital is planned to be closed for restoration or to prevent the destruction of sculptures and bas-reliefs located on the facade. As it turned out later, all these versions were far from the truth, and the project itself resulted from a long creative search and negotiations with the municipal authorities. The installation "Wrapped Arc de Triomphe" was created decades after the first sketches were made. The appearance of such an unusual art object became possible after a long creative search and implementation of similar projects worldwide.
The tradition of indirect indication of authorship is as old as fine art. In all eras, painters and sculptors left various hints of their identity in their works. It could be not only a signature but also a favorite animal species, flower, or symbol. The main motive was the desire, inherent in all creative people, to indicate their connection with the work on the subject level and, thus, perhaps, to find immortality.
Today abstraction still gives way in the modern interior of Ukrainian homes to such traditional genres of fine art as landscape and still life. But every year, avant-garde paintings find more and more fans. The reasons for the gradual change in trends are apparent - the modern rhythm of life radically changes our view of the world and our understanding of beauty.