remembering art world figures who died in 2024

As 2025 dawns, we need to pay tribute to the artists, curators, writers and sellers who died in 2024. Under is a collection of our obituaries for the yr (click on on the individual’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 latest sculpture. His uncooked materials works engaged viewers in an unprecious method not usually related to a museum or gallery expertise. However for the reason that mid-Nineteen Eighties, Andre’s legacy as an artist has been difficult by accusations that he killed his spouse, the artist Ana Mendieta, who fell to her demise from the window of their Thirty fourth-floor house 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 formidable initiatives. His want 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 quite a lot of events, was a logo 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, advised The Artwork Newspaper.

March

Richard Serra, sculptor

Serra preferred to “work on the sting of what’s doable”, creating gigantic metal works on the dimensions of historic monuments like Stonehenge or Egyptian tombs. The famed seller Leo Castelli took him on in 1966, although Serra refused to make works that have been simply sellable, as an alternative pushing for ever larger items. “For those who 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 implies that there’s an opportunity,” Serra mentioned.

Lucas Samaras, artist

Samaras emerged within the downtown New York artwork scene within the Nineteen Fifties, changing into best-known for creating self-referential works that spanned a mess of media from work, images, installations, drawings, sculptures and extra. Samaras as soon as mentioned that, though he by no means felt compelled to stay to a selected format or route, there are delicate correlations in his work which are rooted in perspective, emotion and selfhood. “There are some individuals who spend years and years engaged on a selected 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 sturdy and unwaveringly political work gave technique to refined visible tales that demonstrated a perception in social change within the transformation of how Black girls and ladies 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 collection 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 concept.”

Might

Frank Stella, artist

Stella remade Supremacist shapes into hard-edged abstractions within the early Nineteen Sixties, earlier than reinventing himself as a sculptor of frighteningly tactile and architectonic works that resisted simple classes of definition. He leaves behind a outstanding physique of labor that, within the phrases of the critic Peter Schjeldahl, “stay on as a residual stress, as powerful 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 apply, 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 along with his erudite embracing of the ornamental and the home,” wrote Louisa Buck.

June

Barbara Gladstone, gallerist

Gladstone represents most of the largest names in up to date artwork together with Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe and Shirin Neshat. “I get to talk to the artist when the thought is a germ,” Gladstone advised 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 type and you then see it change type and you then see them adapt and you then see the ultimate outcome and it is a wonderful 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 doable.”

Audrey Flack, artist

Through the Nineteen Sixties, Flack’s improvement of a definite Photorealist language all her personal constituted a visible sea change each within the style and within the evolution of her apply, guiding her hand away from the masculine bravura of Summary Expressionism and right into a extra weak, 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 vital sphere.

July

Invoice Viola, artist

Over the previous 45 years Invoice Viola, along with his spouse and shut collaborator Kira Perov, turned video right into a questing, highly effective artwork type. 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 will likely 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 some of the influential up to date artwork exhibition-makers of his period. In 1968, he based an artwork publishing firm along with his brother. Walther König’s agency immediately 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 collection turned 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)—virtually a decade within the writing—to his vital work on the Clyfford Nonetheless Museum, each previous to and after its opening in 2011, cemented his fame as a necessary determine within the discipline,” she provides.

September

Elizabeth Esteve-Coll, former museum director

Esteve-Coll is finest 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 also needs to be remembered as an expert 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 akin to David Bowie and The Conflict, however throughout a stressed profession that continued till the time of his demise he moved between portray, drawing, images, movie and video, assemblage and set up. Just like the work of the marginally older British Pop artist, Richard Hamilton, Boshier’s early work have been satiric and checked out US navy energy and client tradition.

Rebecca Horn, artist

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

November

Frank Auerbach, artist

Auerbach, one of many main artists of his era, who died aged 93, produced a few 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 will likely 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 identification 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. Every one carried their very own body, holding them up in entrance of spectators lining the parade route. Photographs from that mission, Artwork Is… (1983), entered the broader lexicon of visible tradition as O’Grady’s profession gained momentum in current many years.