In the stream of announcements of museum exhibitions, articles of auction houses and messages from galleries, names of the most influential contemporary artists appear. There are 10 masters at the zenith of their fame.

The Banksy's graffiti. Photo by Niv Singer on Unsplash

1.Banksy

Banksy is one of the most famous and mysterious graffiti artists. His work began to appear on city streets in the early 1990s. They are valued in millions of dollars. According to one version, his real name is Robert or Robin Banks. According to another – Robert Del Naya, British musician (group Massive Attack), singer and graffiti artist. Born in 1974 in Bristol, he lives and works in London. The most enigmatic figure in modern art and the most expensive artist among street artists. In the spring of 2017, the Banksy Hotel opened in Bethlehem, on the border of Israel and Palestine. The Walled Off Hotel has 10 rooms that face a concrete wall. The walls of some of them are decorated with Banksy’s graffiti.

2.Pierre Huyge

The French artist Pierre Huyge (b.1962, Paris) lives and works in Paris and New York. Conceptualist, one of the key figures in the ‘Relational Aesthetics’ direction of contemporary art, a favorite of French intellectuals. He received wide recognition as the author of multi-channel art videos and video installations. In the 90s he was engaged in post-production (reuse of films and images from magazines and newspapers). In 2017, it featured a project exhibited at the Venice Art Biennale – the installation ‘The Uncultivated’ and the film ‘The Host and the Cloud’, filmed in an abandoned Parisian Museum of Popular Traditions with the participation of museum workers, as well as the fantastic installation ‘After A Life Ahead’, shown in Münster. Huyge excavated the floor of an old abandoned ice rink and installed panels on the roof that opened and closed according to the musical score. The construction of this installation was preceded by many years of work: experiments and preparatory studies. In addition, Huyge won the Nasher Prize in 2017, a young but already prestigious award in the field of contemporary sculpture.

3.Ai Weiwei

Photo from www.aiweiwei.com

Chinese artist Ai Weiwei (b. 1957, Beijing) lives and works in Berlin. He focuses on the global problems of migration and attitudes towards migrants. In 2017, Weiwei presented the ‘Law of the Journey’ installation in Prague: a 70-meter inflatable boat with 258 inflatable figures, denouncing the policies of countries that ignore the plight of refugees who swim to safety. He also directed the film ‘Human Stream’, which debuted at the Venice Film Festival. The documentary is a very emotional story about the movement of millions of people around the world. With his camera, Ai Weiwei visited the Gaza Strip (Palestine), Turkey, Bangladesh, Jordan, and the US-Mexico border. The film is shortlisted for Oscar nominee documentaries. Ai Weiwei sent 300 exhibits to New York for the contemporary art exhibition Good Fences Make Good Neighbors. Until February 2018, refugee banners were posted at bus stops in Harlem, Brooklyn, and the Bronx. The most important part of the project was a huge steel cage built under the arch in Washington Square.

4.Wolfgang Tillmans

The German photographer (b. 1968, Remscheid) lives and works in Berlin and London. He is the winner of the prestigious Hasselblad Award. He was the first non-British winner of the prestigious Turner Prize (2000). All facets of Tillmans' work were reflected in a large-scale personal exhibition of the master, organized by the Fondation Beyeler. There were masterpieces completed between 1986 and 2017, including still lifes and candid portraits, Xerox images, cameraless photographs and state-of-the-art audiovisual installations.

5.JR (Jean Resnais)

JR (b. 1983, Paris) lives and works in Paris and New York. JR are the initials of Jean Resnais, he was born in the Parisian suburbs and started his road to art  with graffiti on walls and roofs. At the age of 18, he found a camera forgotten by a tourist in the subway, and this decided his fate. He is often referred to as the French Banksy. Among the most famous projects are Women Heroes (2008) and Wrinkles of the City (2012). In 2017, JR directed the film Faces/Places with 89-year-old director Agnès Varda. The film-journey through the French outskirts tells about the beauty of the surrounding world, about random and unexpected meetings, and also about friendship that grew out of the collaboration of two completely different people: director Agnès Varda and artist JR. In 2017, the film received a prize at Cannes, and Agnès Varda received an honorary Oscar for his merit in cinematography.

6.Barbara Kruger

The American artist Barbara Kruger (b. 1945, Newark) lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. Kruger has already made history in contemporary art with her spectacular work with typography and fonts, as well as her explosive socio-political temperament. In 2017, a Barbara Kruger retrospective was held at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. In the Berlin space of the Sprüth Magers gallery, she presented the ‘Forever’ installation, a room with black-and-white inscriptions of phrases from Virginia Woolf's novels. In New York, at the Performa 17 Biennale, Kruger covered a school bus, an ice skating rink and subway cards in red and white. The central part of the project was the software work ‘Unitled (Ignorance is bliss)’.

7.Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (b. 1929, Matsumoto) lives and works in Tokyo. Kusama's career has been developing for 70 years. Today, the 88-year-old Japanese artist is a real pop star. There are huge queues for her exhibitions in America, Europe and Asia. In many ways, the success of her art, effectively combining minimalism and pop art, was ensured by social networks. The Kusama's installations, charged with an unrealistic drive, have long become the most fashionable backdrop for selfies. Kusama is not only loved by the general public, but also commercially successful. One of her works was sold at Christie's for about $7 million. In 2017, her museum in Tokyo was opened. The five-storey building is located not far from the artist's workshop and the psychiatric hospital, where Kusama has been living voluntarily since 1977. In addition, a children's book dedicated to Kusama's work was released in 2017. 

8.Damien Hirst

British artist Damien Hirst (b. 1965, Bristol) lives and works in London. “Undoubtedly one of the worst exhibitions of the last decade,” wrote art critic Andrew Russet of Hirst’s massive project shown at the 2017 Art Biennale. “The Treasures of the Sunken Incredible” is a grandiose installation that occupied both exhibition areas of the collector François Pinault in Venice: a bronze Mickey Mouse overgrown with corals, a jade head of the Gorgon Medusa, Egyptian statues, Greek armor, Chinese bells, gods and heroes ... According to Hirst himself, the cost of the exhibition "Treasures from the Wreck of the Unbelievable" was more than 50 million pounds. This is contemporary art: prices for certainl items range from a few hundred to millions. Sculptures at the exhibition alternated with glass cabinets, which illustrated the oldest of Hirst's ideas – things are exhibited in a window, we give a sacred meaning to the act of collecting. “It's all about what you want to believe,” Hurst said in an interview with the New York Times.

9.Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (real name Hans-Georg Kern) was born in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Germany. He lives and works in Salzburg, Austria. Artist, graphic artist and sculptor, rightfully called one of the main figures of German neo-expressionism. In 2018, the artist's 80th birthday was celebrated with a grandiose exhibition at the Swiss Fondation Beyeler. Baselitz appeared in the fullness of his work as a painter, sculptor and fantastic master of printed graphics. The exhibition, organized in close collaboration with the artist, was as close as possible in genre to a retrospective, bringing together many of the most important paintings and sculptures created by Baselitz over the past six decades. Powerful, large-format canvases, showing each stage of the artist's career, reveal the vast range of his creative imagination. The critic of abstraction Baselitz throughout his life strove to develop the traditions of subject painting and in every decade somehow surprisingly found himself among the most advanced avant-garde artists.

10.Ilya and Emilia Kabakov

Photo from www.kabakov.net

Ilya Kabakov, (b. 1933 in Dnepropetrovsk). Recently, he has been working in collaboration with his wife, Emilia Kabakova (b. 1945 in Dnepropetrovsk). The Kabakovs live in New York. In the 1960s, Kabakov became a co-founder and leader of the artistic movement "Moscow Conceptualism" that had formed by the end of the decade. In 1987, he emigrated to the United States, working in collaboration with his wife Emilia. During these years, the Kabakovs were engaged in a new form of fine art – a total installation, which is distinguished by the complete immersion of the viewer in the space invented and built by the artist. “Not Everyone Will Be Taken into the Future” is the name of a large exhibition by Ilya and Emilia Kabakov, which was shown in 2017 by the curators of London’s Tate Modern. The exposition includes works that are in the collection of the Tate Modern itself, as well as from the State Tretyakov Gallery and the State Hermitage Museum.