Pokemon Daniel Arsham

Daniel Arsham lives and works in New York. Arsham has been exhibited worldwide, including at the Moco Museum, Amsterdam; the How Museum, Shanghai; High Museum of Art, Atlanta, GA and the Contemporary Art Center, Cincinnati, OH. His works are included in the permanent collections of the Pérez Art Museum, Miami, FL; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, MN and the Centre Pompidou, Paris. His artistic practice includes several high profile collaborations with choreographer Merce Cunningham, Producer Pharrell Williams and Designer Hedi Slimane and companies such as Dior and Rimowa. Arsham is the co-founder of Snarkitecture, a New York-based collaborative design practice established in 2007 to investigate the boundaries between disciplines of art, architecture and design. A component of Arsham’s iconic and immediately recognizable practice is the conception of his works as fossilized “future” relics that distort the viewer’s perception of space and time.

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.