Fides Becker On Sale

Fides Becker developed and pursued her picturesque strategies in the illusionistic pictorial space. Her practice explores intimate worlds through objects and materials we associate with the private sphere in everyday life. Sofas, beds, curtains, mirrors and sheets are reconstituted in her paintings as fragments, details or dissolving surfaces that engage with the ambiguities between presence and absence, past and present and personal and collective images. Fides Becker studied at the Städelschule in Frankfurt a.M., at the Koninklijke Academie van Beeldende Kunsten in Rotterdam and the Hochschule der Künste in Berlin. Her works can be found in numerous national and international collections, such as the National Collection of Rhineland-Palatinate, the Art Collection of the German Bank or the Stichting Beeldende Art Amsterdam. Fides Becker lives in Frankfurt and Berlin. She develops and pursues her painterly strategies in the large-format illusionistic picture space with a subversive play of light and color. In her pure painting on canvas, she reflects everyday objects, places or rooms from other epochs with a mysterious patina, which are culturally connected in our society. She inhales them with emotions and lends these dead objects an independent life. In this way, they receive something essential, and at the same time, morbid ambivalence, which makes the penetration of space and time experience in our present-day reality. Thus, Fides Becker inspired the old Jewish cemetery at the Börneplatz in Frankfurt and the Jewish cemetery in Berlin Weißensee, where the eternal peace of the dead can not be disturbed and nature protects itself over the graves, to their large format golem landscapes. The figure of the Jewish legend spreads in Central Europe. While the variants of the Berlin Spiegelsaal in Clara’s Ballhaus or the Loge evoke glamor and glory of former times, it moves with the almost romantic midnight blue Rhineland-Palatinate dacha under trees and the two leather canapés in the Contre Jour of an English gentility club in private spheres. Certainly, man plays a central role with his feelings in the oeuvre of Fides Becker. Even though, in her recent works, she is more concerned with the recording of human traces, following her studio scholarship at the Cité International des Arts Paris, that decisive transformation in her artistic work from 2010 to today has been accomplished: for she turned from the collage technique and pure painting, and since then renounced the human figure entirely in her pictures. Nevertheless, she is still concerned with human sensations such as longing, desire, fear, but also lust and passion, which she wants to make sensual in her pictures. In doing so, she does not pursue any new themes, but she is seeking a new approach to her well-known motifs - the beds, landscapes and interiors.

Used to refer to a time rather than an aesthetic, Contemporary art generally describes pieces created after 1970 or being made by living artists anywhere in the world. This immediacy means it encompasses art responding to the present moment through diverse subjects, media and themes. Contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, performance, digital art, video and more frequently includes work that is attempting to reshape current ideas about what art can be, from Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s use of candy to memorialize a lover he lost to AIDS-related complications to Jenny Holzer’s ongoing “Truisms,” a Conceptual series that sees provocative messages printed on billboards, T-shirts, benches and other public places that exist outside of formal exhibitions and the conventional “white cube” of galleries.

Contemporary art has been pushing the boundaries of creative expression for years. Its disruption of the traditional concepts of art are often aiming to engage viewers in complex questions about identity, society and culture. In the latter part of the 20th century, contemporary movements included Land art, in which artists like Robert Smithson and Michael Heizer create large-scale, site-specific sculptures, installations and other works in soil and bodies of water; Sound art, with artists such as Christian Marclay and Susan Philipsz centering art on sonic experiences; and New Media art, in which mass media and digital culture inform the work of artists such as Nam June Paik and Rafaël Rozendaal.

The first decades of the 21st century have seen the growth of Contemporary African art, the revival of figurative painting, the emergence of street art and the rise of NFTs, unique digital artworks that are powered by blockchain technology.

Major Contemporary artists practicing now include Ai Weiwei, Cecily Brown, David Hockney, Yayoi Kusama, Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami and Kara Walker.

Find a collection of Contemporary prints, photography, paintings, sculptures and other art on 1stDibs.

Still-life paintings work as part of the decor in nearly every type of space.

Still-life art, which includes work produced in media such as painting, photography, video and more, is a popular genre in Western art. However, the depiction of still life in color goes back to Ancient Egypt, where paintings on the interior walls of tombs portrayed the objects — such as food — that a person would take into the afterlife. Ancient Greek and Roman mosaics and pottery also often depicted food. Indeed, still-life paintings frequently feature food, flowers or man-made objects. By definition, still-life art represents anything that is considered inanimate.

During the Middle Ages, the still life genre was adapted by artists who illustrated religious manuscripts. A common theme of these paintings is the reminder that life is fleeting. This is especially true of vanitas, a kind of still life with roots in the Netherlands during the 17th century, which was built on themes such as death and decay and featured skulls and objects such as rotten fruit. In northern Europe during the 1600s, painters consulted botanical texts to accurately depict the flowers and plants that were the subject of their work.

Leonardo da Vinci’s penchant for observing phenomena in nature and filling notebooks with drawings and notes helped him improve as an artist of still-life paintings. Vincent van Gogh, an artist who made a couple of the most expensive paintings ever sold, carried out rich experiments with color over the course of painting hundreds of still lifes, and we can argue that Campbell’s Soup Cans (1961–62) by Andy Warhol counts as still-life art.

While early examples were primarily figurative, you can find still lifes that belong to different schools and styles of painting, such as Cubism, Impressionism and contemporary art.

As part of the wall decor in your living room, dining room or elsewhere, a still-life painting can look sophisticated alongside your well-curated decorative objects and can help set the mood in a space.

When shopping for a still-life painting, think about how it makes you feel and how the artist chose to represent its subject. When buying any art for your home, choose pieces that you connect with. If you’re shopping online, read the description of the work to learn about the artist and check the price and shipping information. Make sure that the works you choose complement or relate to your overall theme and furniture style. Artwork can either fit into your room’s color scheme or serve as an accent piece. Introduce new textures to a space by choosing an oil still-life painting.

On 1stDibs, find a collection of still-life paintings in a wide range of styles and subject matter.