remembering art world figures who died in 2024

As 2025 dawns, we wish to pay tribute to the artists, curators, writers and sellers who died in 2024. Beneath is a collection of our obituaries for the yr (click on on the particular person’s title to learn the unique obituary).

January

Carl Andre, artist

The US sculptor helped outline the Minimalist motion, his quiet, material-driven work endlessly altering the lexicon of up to date sculpture. His uncooked materials works engaged viewers in an unprecious method not sometimes related to a museum or gallery expertise. However because the mid-Nineteen Eighties, Andre’s legacy as an artist has been sophisticated by accusations that he killed his spouse, the artist Ana Mendieta, who fell to her dying from the window of their Thirty fourth-floor condominium in Greenwich Village in 1985.

Robert Whitman, artist

Whitman was a pioneer of the early efficiency artwork occasions often known as Happenings and collaborated with Robert Rauschenberg and others on technologically bold initiatives. His need to pursue his unconventional inventive visions additionally led him to co-create the collective Experiments in Artwork and Know-how (EAT), which he co-founded with Rauschenberg, with the assistance of Bell Phone Laboratories engineers Fred Waldhauer, Billy Kluver and Julie Martin.

February

Jacob Rothschild, collector and philanthropist

Rothschild was a towering determine within the British artwork world, having a transformational impact on how the nation’s heritage is regarded and sorted, as patron, collector and philanthropist, and as chief of establishments such because the Heritage Lottery Fund, the Nationwide Gallery, Somerset Home, in London, and Waddesdon Manor, in Buckinghamshire. On the British Museum, the Rothschild Basis funded the redisplay in 2015 of the Waddesdon Bequest, the one wunderkammer in Britain.

Fathi Ghaben, artist

Self-taught artist Ghaben, who had been imprisoned by the Israeli authorities on various events, was an emblem of resistance and resilience in Palestine’s cultural scene. “He was the primary to make use of the Palestinian flag in work…I vividly bear in mind posters of his artwork all over the place within the metropolis,” Aser El Saqqa, the Palestinian-born founder and managing director of Arts Canteen, a London-based arts organisation that helps artists from the Arab world and past, informed The Artwork Newspaper.

March

Richard Serra, sculptor

Serra appreciated to “work on the sting of what’s potential”, creating gigantic metal works on the dimensions of historical monuments like Stonehenge or Egyptian tombs. The famed seller Leo Castelli took him on in 1966, although Serra refused to make works that had been simply sellable, as an alternative pushing for ever larger items. “Should you make some contribution in any respect, it’s very, very onerous to foretell, when it comes to perpetuity, what’s going to final and what’s not. Let’s simply say that this sort of work signifies that there’s an opportunity,” Serra mentioned.

Lucas Samaras, artist

Samaras emerged within the downtown New York artwork scene within the Fifties, changing into best-known for creating self-referential works that spanned a large number of media from work, pictures, installations, drawings, sculptures and extra. Samaras as soon as mentioned that, though he by no means felt compelled to stay to a specific format or route, there are delicate correlations in his work which can be rooted in perspective, emotion and selfhood. “There are some individuals who spend years and years engaged on a specific format, and I don’t do this, I can’t do this,” Samaras mentioned in a 1966 interview with Artforum.

April

Religion Ringgold, artist

Ringgold’s strong and unwaveringly political work gave method to subtle visible tales that demonstrated a perception in social change within the transformation of how Black ladies and women noticed themselves. When requested by the artist Kara Walker what exercise or entity saved her feeling optimistic, vigorous and purposeful, Ringgold responded: “Portray. I often love to do a sequence as a result of it’s telling some sort of story. And if it hits me good, it’d take a very long time to inform it, and I’d produce quite a bit out of that one thought.”

Might

Frank Stella, artist

Stella remade Supremacist shapes into hard-edged abstractions within the early Sixties, earlier than reinventing himself as a sculptor of frighteningly tactile and architectonic works that resisted simple classes of definition. He leaves behind a exceptional physique of labor that, within the phrases of the critic Peter Schjeldahl, “stay on as a residual strain, as robust as nails, within the minds of anybody who has cared or will care about artwork” of the previous half-century.

Marc Camille Chaimowicz, artist

Chaimowicz’s multi-faceted follow, spanning over 5 many years and encompassing set up, efficiency, portray, artist books, and furnishings, defies categorisation. “Now—and largely because of the affect of Chaimowicz—it’s commonplace for artists to dissolve boundaries between artwork and design in addition to private and non-private; however he blazed a path together with his erudite embracing of the ornamental and the home,” wrote Louisa Buck.

June

Barbara Gladstone, gallerist

Gladstone represents lots of the greatest names in modern artwork together with Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe and Shirin Neshat. “I get to talk to the artist when the thought is a germ,” Gladstone informed the journalist Charlotte Burns on The Artwork World: What If… podcast earlier this yr. “They [artists] begin speaking about it and you then see it begin to take kind and you then see it change kind and you then see them adapt and you then see the ultimate consequence and it is a lovely course of as a result of I am not an artist. I can not make artwork, however I may very well be as near the method as potential.”

Audrey Flack, artist

Throughout the Sixties, Flack’s growth of a definite Photorealist language all her personal constituted a visible sea change each within the style and within the evolution of her follow, guiding her hand away from the masculine bravura of Summary Expressionism and right into a extra susceptible, explicitly feminist realm. Juxtaposing artwork historic symbols like memento mori skulls with tarot playing cards, jewelry and tubes of lipstick, her self-consciously female compositions ruffled feathers within the artwork crucial sphere.

July

Invoice Viola, artist

Over the previous 45 years Invoice Viola, together with his spouse and shut collaborator Kira Perov, turned video right into a questing, highly effective artwork kind. The New York gallerist James Cohan, who has represented Viola since 1992, mentioned: “Utilizing video and movie—the transferring picture—a medium which all of us take with no consideration, to plumb the depths of human emotion can be Viola’s lasting contribution to artwork historical past.”

August

Kasper König, curator

The German curator Kasper König, was a co-founder of Skulptur Projekte Münster and is described as one of the influential modern artwork exhibition-makers of his period. In 1968, he based an artwork publishing firm together with his brother. Walther König’s agency at this time operates bookstores in most German cities in addition to in museums. The previous director of Cologne’s Museum Ludwig “formed the artwork discourse of the final 5 many years like no different”, the museum mentioned.

David Anfam, artwork historian

Anfam’s e-book on Summary Expressionism for the Thames and Hudson World of Artwork sequence grew to become a staple from its first publication in 1990, wrote the artist Erin Lawlor. “Over the next years, his continued explorations of Twentieth-century American artwork, from his catalogue raisonné of Mark Rothko (1998)—nearly a decade within the writing—to his necessary work on the Clyfford Nonetheless Museum, each previous to and after its opening in 2011, cemented his status as an important determine within the subject,” she provides.

September

Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, former museum director

Esteve-Coll is greatest recognized within the artwork world for having been a charismatic however on the time a lot criticised director of the Victoria and Albert Museum (V&A), in London, from 1988 to 1995, a turbulent interval in its historical past. She must also be remembered as knowledgeable librarian at Kingston College and the College of Surrey, then keeper of the Nationwide Artwork Library from 1985 to 1988, in addition to a briefer interval as vice-chancellor of the College of East Anglia (UEA) from 1995 to 1997.

Derek Boshier, artist

Boshier gained worldwide renown for album cowl designs for musicians corresponding to David Bowie and The Conflict, however throughout a stressed profession that continued till the time of his dying he moved between portray, drawing, pictures, movie and video, assemblage and set up. Just like the work of the marginally older British Pop artist, Richard Hamilton, Boshier’s early work had been satiric and checked out US army energy and shopper tradition.

Rebecca Horn, artist

German-born Rebecca Horn is thought for her revolutionary conceptual exploration of the human physique in sculptures, movies, performances and pictures. A pivotal sequence, Private Artwork (1968-72), included early examples of her body-modification fits product of bandages, belts and feathers which have been described as “wearable sculpture”. Concurrent together with her installations and performances, Horn additionally maintained a wealthy drawing follow.

November

Frank Auerbach, artist

Auerbach, one of many main artists of his technology, who died aged 93, produced a number of the most enduring and perceptive observations of what it meant to be alive throughout his time. Tributes poured in; to Colin Wiggins, who curated Frank Auerbach and the Nationwide Gallery: Working After the Masters (1995), at London’s Nationwide Gallery, Auerbach was an artist whose work can be lifted “into one other dimension” by posterity.

December

Lorraine O’Grady, artist

Lorraine O’Grady, an indefatigable conceptual artist whose work critiqued definitions of id structured round facile boundaries and binaries, died age 90 in New York. In 1983, she entered a float into the annual African American Day Parade in Harlem. It featured a big, gilded and empty body, and was accompanied by a troupe of 15 Black performers employed by O’Grady. Each carried their very own body, holding them up in entrance of spectators lining the parade route. Photographs from that venture, Artwork Is… (1983), entered the broader lexicon of visible tradition as O’Grady’s profession gained momentum in current many years.