Gerard Polhuis was born in 1952 and grew up during the 1970s and was inspired by the artistic culture of the time. The 1970s were a period of consolidation and growth in the arts, most often characterised as a response to the central tensions of the preceding decade. Conceptual art emerged as a key movement, a partial evolution of and response to minimalism. Land Art took the works of art into the extensive outdoors, taking creative production away from commodities and looking to engage with the earliest ideas of environmentalism. Process art combined elements of conceptualism with other formal considerations, creating esoteric and experimental bodies of work. Expressive figurative painting began to regain importance for the first time since the decline of Abstract Expressionism twenty years before, especially in Germany where Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz became highly renowned figures worldwide. New York maintained an prominent position in the international art world, ensuring that global artists continued to flock to the galleries, bars and downtown scene there. A number of the artists who gained fame and successful in the 1960s remained dominant figures. For example, Andy Warhol branched out into film and magazine publishing, the first type of pan cultural activity for a visual artist. This secured his reputation as a globally renowned celebrity in his own right. International movements began to gain popularity included feminism, which translated strongly into the visual culture, and photorealism which had begun in the 1960s and enjoyed substantial commercial and critical success. For the first time painters and sculptors from Latin America were embraced by the leading critical and institutional levers in New York. Towards the end of the decade, the emerging practices of graffiti and street art were beginning to gain attention in the fine art community. Artists such as Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were working in downtown Manhattan and ensuring that spray paint and tagging gained some validity as a fine art practice, a trend which would fully develop and dominate throughout the next decade. The predominantly Italian Arte Povera Movement gained world-wide recognition during the 1970s, with artists like Jannis Kounnelis, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto achieving global praise. In Japan and Korea, artists associated with the Mono-Ha movement explored on encounters between natural and industrial materials such as stone, glass, cotton, sponge, wood, oil and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, fleeting conditions. The works focused on the interdependency of these various elements and the surrounding space, and had a strong interest in the European ideas of phenomenology.Show less
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