The Situationist International (SI) was a revolutionary postwar group, founded in 1957 by French Marxist philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord and Danish artist Asger Jorn. Operating primarily in Paris, the SI was a truly international organization within the scope of Europe and North Africa, which developed a critique of late…

The Swiss sculptor Alberto Giacometti has entered the art historical canon as one of the most significant artists of the twentieth century. Primarily active in Paris, Giacometti’s early work was conceived under the sign of Surrealism. It centred on the repressed subconscious, enigmatic subject matter, sexuality and aggression. Nevertheless, the…

Leon Ferrari is the only twentieth century artist who dedicated a major part of his artistic oeuvre to deconstructing the relationship between the Christian notion of Hell and human violence. His work opposes the tendency of understanding the post-war era as a period of desacralisation and predominant secularism. Examining the…

‘Light is the life of everything it touches’. These words were the guiding principle of the oeuvre of the Spanish luminist painter Joaquín Sorolla y Bastida (1863–1923), whose prolific artistic output is paradigmatic of the varying modernist tendencies of fin-de-siecle Europe. Luminism in itself, a term often criticized by art…

Proclaimed by Pablo Neruda ‘perhaps the greatest of all Mexican painters’, María Izquierdo was born in 1902 in San Juan de los Lagos, Jalisco. She was active at a time when Muralists such as Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and José Clemente Orozco (also known as ‘los tres grandes’ or…

Remedios Varo (1908–1963) was a Spanish-born Surrealist painter who, similarly to a number of twentieth century artists, did not abandon the search for spirituality at a time of immense theological crisis. Her most famous works were created during the 50s and 60s — after she moved to Mexico — resulting…

The politics of performance art in Bulgaria 1987–1997 Performance art and its use of the body may have been a well-known artistic medium and a cornerstone of Postmodernism in the West ever since the 1960s. However, it was thirty years later, during the Bulgarian transition to democracy, when it originated…