Antoni Tapies (13 December 1923 – 6 February 2012) was a Catalan painter, sculptor and art theorist.

​

After studying law for three years, he devoted himself from 1943 onwards only to his painting. In 1945 Tapies began experimenting with materials. At this time he also became increasingly interested in philosophy. He became known as one of Spain's most renowned artists in the second half of the 20th century. His abstract art and other avant-garde works were displayed in many major museums all over the world.

​

Antoni Tàpies created the Fundació Antoni Tàpies in 1984 with the aim of promoting the study and knowledge of contemporary art, paying special attention to the analysis of its role in shaping the consciousness of modern man.

Pablo Picasso (25 October 1881 – 8 April 1973) was a Spanish painter, sculptor, printmaker, ceramicist and theatre designer who spent most of his adult life in France. One of the most influential artists of the 20th century, he is known for co-founding the Cubist movement, the invention of constructed sculpture, the co-invention of collage, and for the wide variety of styles that he helped develop and explore.

​

The medium in which Picasso made his most important contribution was painting. In his paintings, Picasso used colour as an expressive element, but relied on drawing rather than subtleties of colour to create form and space. Although his Cubist works approach abstraction, Picasso never relinquished the objects of the real world as subject matter.

​

Exceptionally prolific throughout the course of his long life, Picasso achieved universal re-known and immense fortune for his revolutionary artistic accomplishments, and became one of the best-known figures in 20th-century art.

Leonardo da Vinci (15 April 1452 – 2 May 1519) was an Italian polymath of the High Renaissance who was active as a painter, draughtsman, engineer, scientist, theorist, sculptor, and architect. While his fame initially rested on his achievements as a painter, he also became known for his notebooks, in which he made drawings and notes on a variety of subjects, including anatomy, astronomy, botany, cartography, painting, and paleontology. Leonardo is widely regarded to have been a genius who epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal.

​

René Magritte (21 November 1898 – 15 August 1967) was a Belgian surrealist artist known for his depictions of familiar objects in unfamiliar, unexpected contexts, which often provoked questions about the nature and boundaries of reality and representation. His imagery has influenced pop art, minimalist art, and conceptual art.

Gerhard Richter (born 9 February 1932) is a German visual artist. Richter has produced abstract as well as photorealistic paintings, and also photographs and glass pieces. He is widely regarded as one of the most important contemporary German artists and several of his works have set record prices at auction.

​

Richter's abstract work and its illusion of space developed out of his incidental process: an accumulation of spontaneous, reactive gestures of adding, moving, and subtracting paint. Despite unnatural palettes, spaceless sheets of colour, and obvious trails of the artist's tools, the abstract pictures often act like windows through which we see the landscape outside. As in his representational paintings, there is an equalization of illusion and paint. In those paintings, he reduces worldly images to mere incidents of Art. Similarly, in his abstract pictures, Richter exalts spontaneous, intuitive mark-making to a level of spatial logic and believability.

Mark Rothko (September 25, 1903 – February 25, 1970), was American abstract painter. He is best known for his colour field paintings that depicted irregular and painterly rectangular regions of colour, which he produced from 1949 to 1970.

​

Fearing that modern American painting had reached a conceptual dead end, Rothko was intent on exploring subjects other than urban and nature scenes. He sought subjects that would complement his growing interest in form, space, and colour.

Anselm Kiefer (born 8 March 1945) is a German painter and sculptor. His works incorporate materials such as straw, ash, clay, lead, and shellac. In his entire body of work, Kiefer argues with the past and addresses taboo and controversial issues from recent history.

​

Generally, Kiefer attributes traditional mythology, books, and libraries as his main subjects and sources of inspiration. In his middle years, his inspiration came from literary figures, namely Paul Celan and Ingeborg Bachmann. His later works incorporate themes from Judeo-Christian, ancient Egyptian, and Oriental cultures, which he combines with other motifs. Cosmogony is also a large focus in his works. In all, Kiefer searches for the meaning of existence and "representation of the incomprehensible and the non-representational."

​

Kiefer values a "spiritual connection" with the materials he works with, "extracting the spirit that already lives within [them].” In doing so, he transforms his materials with acid baths and physical blows with sticks and axes, among other processes. He often chooses materials for their alchemical properties—lead in particular, later he came to admire its physical and sensory qualities and began to discover more about its connection to alchemy.

Edvard Munch (12 December 1863 – 23 January 1944) was a Norwegian painter. His 1893 work, The Scream, has become one of Western art's most acclaimed images.

The Scream was conceived in Kristiania. According to Munch, he was out walking at sunset, when he 'heard the enormous, infinite scream of nature'. The painting's agonized face is widely identified with the angst of the modern person. Between 1893 and 1910, he made two painted versions and two in pastels, as well as a number of prints. One of the pastels would eventually command the fourth highest nominal price paid for a painting at auction.

​

When Munch died, his remaining works were bequeathed to the city of Oslo, which built the Munch Museum at Tøyen (it opened in 1963). The museum holds a collection of approximately 1,100 paintings, 4,500 drawings, and 18,000 prints, the broadest collection of his works in the world.