About the artist
Carine Neutjens was born in 1956 and was predominantly inspired creatively by the 1970s. The art sphere of the 1970s was epitomized by a wish to grow and strengthen itself, as a reaction to the many conflicts of the previous decade. One of the most central movement of the 1970s was Conceptualism, which appeared as an offshoot of Minimalism, while the experimental, creative journey of Process art emerged by combining essential features of Conceptualism with further considerations on art itself. The earliest ideas of environmentalism bounced from Land Art, which took art into earth itself, carving the land and bringing art to the outdoors. For the first time since the regression of Abstract Expressionism, Expressive figure painting slowly re-emerged and regained its status, especially in Germany through the works of world renowned figures Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer and Georg Baselitz. Most of the leading artistic figures of the 1960s remained highly influential and admired throughout the 1970s. Andy Warhol, for example, secured his status as a legendary artist, by branching out into film and magazine publishing, thus introducing a ground-breaking concept of cross-cultural activity for a visual artist of such popularity The city of New York persisted as the most prominent artistic hub of the decade, with international artists wandering through the downtown scene, frequenting bars and art galleries, strengthening the idea of New York City as a cosmopolitan and sophisticated cultural capital. A few significant global movements that sharpened the decade include photorealism, which was firstly introduced in the 1960s and reached commercial and critical success in the 1970s, as well as feminism which deeply influenced the visual culture. Artists such as Jannis Kounnelis, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto attained international success, as they were widely acknowledged as renowned members of the Italian movement Arte Povera, much-admired in the 1970s. Reaching the end of the 1970s, street art, developing from graffiti, was starting to truly captivate the fine art community. Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat helped legitimize spray painting and tagging, demonstrating that their artworks could exist at the same time in art galleries and on city walls. Following, the global reach of street art would become extremely influential, representing an extraordinary form of artistic expression. In the eastern part of the globe, Japanese and Korean artists who held a strong interest in the European ideologies of phenomenology, allied with the Mono-Ha movement, exploring and shifting the boundaries between natural and industrial materials. Using stone, glass, cotton, sponge, wood, oil and water, they intended to create life to artworks that would accentuate the ephemeral state of these various elements and their surroundings, playing with their interdependency.
