What makes contemporary contemporary? Is the artist who has declared himself contemporary a partner, and if so, in what way? What is different about their art, and where can their identity be found? The question is timeless and the answer is age-specific. One thing is certain: the term contemporary is used in many different senses.
When our children come home from art history lessons at school, they would surely answer that what comes after the age of modernism is contemporary art.
Conventional wisdom, on the other hand, holds that a contemporary is simply someone who is still alive. In fact, the law even says so: within our borders, a contemporary at a given moment is an artist who was still breathing at the beginning of that year. In this reading, the question of what is contemporary becomes a social question.
It would be a shame not to mention that in visual art, as in most art forms, there is an unspoken, unspoken quibble about the term contemporary, or worse, that contemporary today is the misunderstood artist and his or her novel artwork, which cannot be classified elsewhere, that is, in the classical, already understood schools. While we raise our eyebrows, we forget the very simple fact that the chronology of art history is essentially a series of contemporary times and experiences, which have, of course, become classical in hindsight. There has always been and always will be something to deviate from. The contemporary is always a form of art that astonishes, makes you wonder, or even shocks you, in a word, makes you react in a way that is out of the ordinary.
So it's a matter of perspective and interpretation what we mean by contemporary, but we do have some clues. At the end of the last century, the general consensus in the art world was that anything created after the 1960s was contemporary. As time went on, of course, it began to feel strange to treat works from a time long gone as contemporary, so the starting point of the era was pushed back in time until the 1970s became the new dividing line, and so on...
In other words: contemporary art obviously has a quality of being somehow embedded in our current world, of processing it, of reacting to it, of engaging in dialogue with it. This is why we can say that contemporary art is constantly "in motion", the circle is both narrowing and widening. Contemporary art is a bit like infotechnology: the new things we know and are used to today will change tomorrow. The difference is that the world of visual art is restrained by the need for a prolonged artistic experience.
If we look at the question from the perspective of linear art history, it is clear that contemporary is a much more complex concept than the "modern" (in the art historical sense) that preceded it. Contemporary includes all the coexisting artistic trends and styles, and, unlike before, it is not a sharply defined stylistic direction, so there are no fixed stylistic features. All this, of course, underlines the elusiveness of the contemporary.
Can art be contemporary if it produces works in the present that can be linked to a classical school? We can only ask this question because the social (colloquial, if you like) and art-historical meanings of the term contemporary are still not divorced.
It is therefore by no means certain that contemporary works should necessarily be thought of as difficult to understand. It is often contemporary art that we feel very close to because it is so up-to-date. Our gallery explicitly encourages its customers to choose works that suit their tastes and sensibilities. We are sure to live well with what reassures us from the first encounter.
One of the great things about contemporary art is that it can hang on your living room wall, transforming your present into art, so artworks that reflect everyday life can be part of your home. In addition, if we enjoy art while understanding it, we have the opportunity to get to know the artists who live among us. This will be facilitated in the future by our gallery blog, which we intend to publish regularly from now on, and which will include interviews with artists and insights into their creative processes, among many other things.
HU