5 Artists to Follow if You Like Cy Twombly
In this monthly series, Artsy’s Curatorial team features a group of five emerging and noteworthy artists who are working in a similar style or spirit as a well-known or established artist. This month, we focus on Cy Twombly, the late American painter best known for his large-scale abstract paintings filled with energetic and gestural marks and scribbles.
Olav Christopher Jenssen
B. 1954, Sortland, Norway. Lives and works in Berlin and Lya, Sweden.
Renowned Norwegian artist Olav Christopher Jenssen is best recognized for his large-scale, free-form paintings of sinuous lines weaving together to create delicate tangles. Within his diverse practice that includes painting, drawing, and sculpture, the artist often works on multiple series simultaneously, fluctuating between mediums and techniques. A prolific drawer, Jenssen creates sketches of enigmatic forms; such works act as a kind of visual diary that, when exhibited together, seem to depict a vocabulary of symbols.
Jenssen began to garner more international attention in 1992, when he was included in Documenta 9 and exhibited in Germany and Denmark. Now one of Norway’s most celebrated contemporary artists, he has exhibited his work at institutions internationally, and is represented in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, the Centre Pompidou in Paris, and the National Museum of Art, Architecture and Design in Oslo.
Joanne Greenbaum
B. 1953, New York. Lives and works in New York.
Joanne Greenbaum begins each new work with the intention of setting it apart from the last. She uses a variety of artistic materials, conventional and not, refusing to confine her practice to one medium. While Greenbaum does not subscribe to a singular or traditional practice, there is a distinctive spirit that unifies her oeuvre. In her most recent solo exhibition, “I’m Doing My Face in Magic Marker,”presented at Rachel Uffner Gallery in New York, Greenbaum exhibited a new series of kiln-formed glass works and abstract paintings full of neon colors and dynamic forms that convey her playful and restless energy.
After graduating from Bard College in 1975, for decades Greenbaum worked day jobs to support her artistic endeavors. Now a recognized artist, she has exhibited her work internationally at venues such as MoMA PS1 in New York; the Kusthalle Düsseldorf; the Nerman Museum of Contemporary Art in Overland Park, Kansas; and the Haus Konstruktiv in Zürich, among others. She has been the recipient of prestigious artistic awards such as the Gwendolyn Knight Lawrence Award, the Pollock-Krasner Foundation Grant, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Grant. Her work resides in major public and private collections including the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Haus Konstruktiv Museum in Zürich, and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.
Brian Rattiner
B. 1982, Brooklyn. Lives and works in Brooklyn.
Brian Rattiner creates abstract paintings that depict the memories and sensations of a place. To free himself from concepts and preconceived ideas, Rattiner drips paint onto the canvas to determine the composition of a painting. He then works quickly, often completing a work in a single sitting. The finished works are gestural landscapes that convey the visceral experience of a place, rather than describing its likeness.
The son of an art teacher, Rattiner grew up with an emphasis on creativity. He pursued a degree in illustration with a focus in painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, where he graduated with his BFA in 2004.
Rattiner’s work has been shown in gallery spaces internationally, most recently in a two-person exhibition with Carvalho Park that opened this September, titled “I Heard a Wild Flower.” For the exhibition, Rattiner showed a recent body of work inspired by Skopelos Island in Greece, where he completed an artist residency in 2019, as well his recent travels to the Catskills in upstate New York.
Arturo Herrera
B. 1959, Caracas, Venezuela. Lives and works in Berlin.
Artist Arturo Herrera obscures fragments of popular imagery––such as cartoon characters––among abstract forms, creating images that are simultaneously familiar and enigmatic. The sinuous lines in his work weave together to build shapes that border figuration and abstraction. The experience of viewing one of Herrera’s paintings is like that of a Rorschach test or finding shapes in the clouds—your brain searches for patterns and meaning to make sense of the image.
After growing up in Venezuela, Herrera moved to the United States to attend the University of Tulsa in Oklahoma, where he received his BA, before going on to pursue his MFA at the University of Illinois in Chicago. The fragmented forms present in Herrera’s work reflect his multicultural identity and education, combining inspiration from his native Venezuela with American pop cultural imagery and art historical references.
Herrera’s work has been exhibited widely throughout the United States and Europe at institutions including the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles, the Dia Center for the Arts in New York, and the Centre d’Art Contemporain in Geneva. His eighth solo exhibition with the gallery Sikkema Jenkins & Co. will open on November 21, 2020.
Ina Gerken
B. 1987, Speyer, Germany. Lives and works in Düsseldorf.
German artist Ina Gerken is a choreographer of line, shape, and color. Her gestural paintings lead the viewer across the canvas in a dance of vibrant hues and undulating forms. Often working at a large scale, Gerken treats the canvas as a field, walking across the top of her works as she intuitively applies paint to the surface.
Gerken graduated from Kunsthochschule Mainz in 2013 with a degree in fine art, then went on to pursue an MFA from Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. At the latter school, she studied under Katharina Grosse and developed an immersive process and style of painting. Referred to as one of Germany’s most promising talents, Gerken was recently included in a group exhibition with König Galerie during Berlin Gallery Weekend this past September, and was selected for the three-person exhibition “Hangover Boogie” at Leeahn Gallery in South Korea, which was curated in collaboration with Gregor Jansen, director of the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf.
