Francis Picabia (1879-1953)

From: MoMa - The Museum of Modern Art

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In 1922, Francis Picabia wrote, "If you want to have clean ideas, change them like shirts".

Throughout his audacious and inventive career, which spanned almost 50 years and encompassed painting, performance, poetry, publishing, and film, Picabia lived out that prescription.

Although he remains best known as a Dadaist, his work ranged from Impressionist painting to radical abstraction, from iconoclastic provocation to pseudo-classicism, and from photo-based painting to Art Informel.

He relished courting controversy, making regular engagements with the press a part of the construction of his artistic persona.

Cecelia Webber, 1984 | Surrealist art

Webber was born in a forest town of only 1.500 people and spent much of her childhood in fields catching orange salamanders.

She was a shy, socially awkward child who enjoyed reading and spent hours searching for small fairy creatures in abandoned maple sugar huts and dilapidated stonewalls.

Oddly enough, as she grew older the world grew stranger and stranger.

Questions revolved about in her head, knocking down reality’s framework with the force of bowling balls: Why are we made to feel so ashamed of the human body in Western culture and so much of the rest of the world?

Jules-Alexis Muenier (1863-1942) | Genre painter

Jules-Alexis Muenier was a French painter🎨 and photographer.

In 1880, Jules-Alexis Muenier entered the École nationale supérieure des Beaux-Arts where he studied under Jean-Léon Gérôme🎨, now considered one of the most important academic painters of his age.

In the latter half of that same decade Muenier began exhibiting his work, first at the Paris Salon🎨 with the painting "Le Bréviaire", which brought him much acclaim.

Gianni Strino (1953-2023) | Figurative painter

Italian painter Gianni Strino studied fine art at the acclaimed Naples Art Institute winning the medal for the best graduate artist in 1970.

He taught art and art history until the demand for his work allowed him to become a full time artist.

In his striking portraits Strino not only captures the beauty of his sitters but also the reality of the everyday. He does not restrict his models to beautiful young women as many portraitists do.

Francesca Strino, 1979 | Figurative painter

Francesca Strino was born in Naples, Italy. Francesca Strino’s powerful paintings reflect the influence of her father, Maestro Gianni Strino🎨.

She graduated from the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli with specialisation in sculpture and portraiture.

She was a pupil of the great master G. Di Fiore. Her potential as an artist was soon recognised and she was invited to submit her work for an exhibition held in 2002 celebrating the two hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Accademia di Belle Arti di Napoli.