Contemporary Art Movements: What Are the 11 Most Notable?

SUMMARY

• Challenging Traditions: Movements like Minimalism and Conceptual Art pushed the boundaries of conventional art and redefined traditional practices.
• Realism and Emotion: Photorealism and Neo-Expressionism evolve realism and introduce expressive intensity, offering new depths in contemporary art.
• Technological Influence: Digital Art and New Media Art reflect the impact of technology and digital innovation on contemporary creativity.
• Cultural and Social Impact: Street Art and Relational Aesthetics showcase how art engages with public spaces and fosters social interactions.

Contemporary Art is a term that is applied to the art of the present day, or the “art of today.” Generally, the term refers to the most daring, innovative, and experimental art that pushes boundaries and asks important questions about our place in the world today. Contemporary art movements reflect a wide spectrum of artistic expression, capturing the essence of the ever-evolving cultural landscape. Here are the major movements that fall under the banner of contemporary art.

While the official start date of contemporary art varies from one source to the next, it is generally agreed that this era came about from roughly the late 1960s to the early 1970s onwards. This was an important moment in art history, which art historians consider to be the end of the modern era, and the beginning of the postmodern, or contemporary era. Contemporary art is a broad umbrella term that encompasses several art movements.

1. Minimalism

Minimalism emerged out of the simplicity and purity of late modernism, which stripped art back to its basic forms and resulted in a utopian form of pure abstraction. However, minimalism took these ideas to new extremes, relying on grids and geometry, along with pared-back color schemes and polished, pristine surfaces. It asked viewers to see art as an object, rather than a representation. While Minimalism was a popular style of contemporary art during the 1960s and 1970s, through artists including Donald Judd, Agnes Martin, and Dan Flavin, it has now been superseded by other styles. However, many artists of today show the influence of minimalism in their art.

2. Conceptual Art

Conceptual art is one of the most important contemporary art movements of contemporary times, and its parameters are broad. Generally, conceptual art is that which is driven by an idea, or concept, rather than by materials or processes. Emerging during the 1970s, conceptualism is a significant characteristic of contemporary art that continues to this day. Some key examples include Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings, in which he wrote instructions for how to make the work and left the actual making to a team of assistants, and Joseph Kosuth’s One and Three Chairs, 1965, in which the artist explores what he calls a visual code, a verbal code, and a code in the language of objects to represent the humble chair, asking us to think about the concepts of value and representation.

Photorealism marked an important transition period in art when artists moved away from representing the real world to incorporating digital effects in their art. A popular movement during the 1970s, photorealism took painting to new heights, as artists deliberately replicated photographs with minute attention to detail, sometimes representing minuscule details like individual hairs and skin pores, as seen in Chuck Close’s masterful self-portraits. Many artists still explore elements of Photorealism today, such as Vija Celmins and Glenn Brown, and it is a key feature of contemporary art.

4. Fluxus

Fluxus was an experimental art movement that spanned the 1970s, encompassing a huge range of media and approaches. Driven by a desire to tear apart convention, Fluxus artists including Joseph Beuys and Yoko Ono played with performances, happenings, and events, along with photography and film, arguing that art should be about experience rather than commercial, bourgeois art objects that were designed to satisfy the art market. We still see the influence of Fluxus across much of today’s contemporary art, such as the freewheeling performances of Marvin Gaye Chetwynd, and the mock-horror performance and film art of Paul McCarthy.

5. Land Art/Earth Art

The art movement Land Art, also known as Earth Art, first emerged during the 1970s, but it continues to prove a popular approach in today’s contemporary art. In this movement, artists engaged directly with the environment through acts of performance, intervention, photography, and film, analyzing our relationship to the natural world during a precarious time of increasing industrialization.

The Pictures Generation was an art movement from the late 1970s and early 1980s in New York, whose artists toyed with photography and digital imagery, asking us to question its dominance over the realms of mass media and advertising through the way it manipulates our vision of ourselves and our place in the world. Leaders of the movement include American photographer Cindy Sherman and the American painter Richard Prince.

7. Neo-Expressionism

The contemporary art movement Neo-Expressionism arose during the 1980s as an antidote to the cool, clean precision of Minimalism and Photorealism. It was an important moment in the development of contemporary art when artists played with how the messy, painterly elements of early 20th-century Expressionism could be incorporated with references to the real world.

8. Text Art

Text art is an important strand of contemporary art. Artists have experimented with how text can be incorporated into works of art since the 1970s, and today many leading examples of contemporary art feature text. These range from Martin Creed’s soothing neon signage to David Shrigley’s sly scribbles and Jenny Holzer’s light art.

9. The Young British Artists

The Young British Artists (YBAs), were a band of British artists from the 1990s who played with shock tactics and attention-grabbing antics to wake up the international art world. Leaders of the movement include Tracey Emin, famous for making her unmade bed into a work of art, and Damien Hirst, who shocked the public with his animals preserved in formaldehyde. Their attitude that art should cause a sensation continues to ripple through contemporary art today.

Street art is found etched across the fabric of the modern cityscape- on walls, doorways, house facades, shutters, and pavement. Often, it incorporates elements of the external environment into its composition, making for a striking blend of imagination and reality. Street art and murals have been most prominently associated with social protest, owing to the form’s radical use of space and ability to portray a message to mass audiences. This tradition was shaped and developed most prominently by 20th-century Los Angeles’ Mexican-American artistic communities.

11. Digital Art

Though the range of forms and expressive varieties encompassed within the corpus of digital art make it tricky to authoritatively define its boundaries, there is no doubt that contemporary artists are creating innovative works using digital methods and/or materials unavailable within traditional categories like painting and sculpture. Pieces may be displayed through digital screens in art galleries, specialized equipment, and lighting facilities, or just simply through a few lines of code available on the internet. This new frontier continues to present as many possibilities as it does controversies as its associated mediums and markets rapidly develop.

Originally published: April 3, 2023. Last update: August 27, 2024 by Elizabeth Berry