// 3 Living Artists//

Catherine Opie

            Catherin Opie is a documentary­ photographer and a Professor of Photography at the University of California at Los Angeles.  She was born in Sandusky, Ohio in 1961. Opie graduated from the California Institute of the Arts. Her work is represented by the Stephen Friedmen Gallery, London and Mitchell-Innes & Nash, New York.  Opie’s work has been shown in galleries and museums around the world including a mid career survey at the Guggenheim.

            When people think of Catherine Opie most think of the work she’s done documenting the LGBT community as well as S&M culture. However she has a wide variety of works. Including a series on icehouses and most recently a series on High School football players. It seems to me that her early work was shocking and at times brutal but that these feelings were not the point. Her work seems to take those things dismissed by society and highlight them as important parts of our culture.

Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson is known for making sculptures and large scale installations. He was born in Copenhagen Denmark in 1967. Eliasson studied at the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts. In 1990 he was awarded a travel budget by the Royal Danish Academy of Fine Arts and traveled to New York. Since becoming a professor at the Universitat der Kunste Berlin Eliasson founded the Institute for Spatial Experiments.

Eliassons work seems to be based mostly around the ideas of space, experience and movement. Many of his pieces, such as Your Rainbow Panorama and Serpentine Gallery Pavillion, are meant to be viewed through the viewer moving around or through the piece. Your Rainbow Panorama and Din Blinde Passager both point towards the viewer environment. Giving ordinary space a presence and feeling.

Manfred Kielnhofer

            Manfred Kielnhofer was born in Haslach an der Muhl in 1967. Kielnhofer is known as a dutch painter, sculpture, photographer. Since 2000 he has lived as a free artist in Linz. In 2005 he launched Gallery Artpark . He studied in both New York and Miamias well as receiving a stipend from Egon Schliele Art Center Krumlov.

            Kielnhofer has gotten a great deal of publicity for his Time Guardians. These wandering hooded figures remind us of the mysteries of life and mysticism. Also they seem to have an ominous feeling of remorse about them. Kielnhofer created a mythos for these figure that goes along with this feeling. He says these figure are the watchers of humanity, traveling through time to periods of great conflicts or periods of danger to warn those who live in them.