Subject Matter and Art Styles

Characteristics of Contemporary Art

• Abstract expressionism developed by American painters Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Willem de Kooning in the 1940s and 1950s.
• Characterized by gestural brush-strokes or mark-making, and the impression of spontaneity.

Kinetic Art

• Art that contains movement perceivable by the viewer or depends on motion for its effect.

Op Art

• A style of visual art that uses optical illusions.
• Works are abstract, created using black and white colors.

Performance Art

• Combines visual art with dramatic performance.

Environmental Art

• Celebrates an artist's connection with nature using natural materials.
• Encompasses "ecological" concerns but is not specific to them.

Feminist Art

• Highlights the societal and political differences women and those of other gender identity experience within their lives.
• Associated with the late 1960s and 1970s feminist movement.

Minimalism

• An art movement that began in post–World War II Western art, most strongly with American visual arts in the 1960s and early 1970s.
• Prominent artists associated with minimalism include Donald Judd, John McCracken, Agnes Martin, Dan Flavin, Robert Morris, Anne Truitt, and Frank Stella.
• Derives from the reductive aspects of modernism and is often interpreted as a reaction against abstract expressionism.

Post-minimalism

• An art term coined by Robert Pincus-Witten in 1971.
• Influenced by, or attempts to develop and go beyond, the aesthetic of minimalism.

Graffiti Art

• Writing or drawings that have been scribbled, scratched, or painted, typically illicitly, on a wall or other surface, often within public view.

Digital Art

• An artistic work or practice that uses digital technology as an essential part of the creative or presentation process.
• Also known as computer art and multimedia art since the 1970s.

Filipino Artists

Victorio Edades

• First to break the rules of art.
• Did not show natural forms nor perspective.
• Used bold strokes and bright colors.

Carlos "Botong" Francisco and Galo Ocampo

• Influenced by Western artists.
• Worked with abstraction, expressionism, and surrealism.

Romeo Tabuena

• Painted a heavy black carabao on thin legs that disappear in a flat background.

Vicente Manansala

• Painted in abstract cubism.