1960s–70s | FOUNDATIONS OF CONCEPTUAL / SYSTEMS ART
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| Stephen Willats ── systems, cybernetics, social mapping
| Bruce Nauman ───── body, language, performance, space
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| —> art becomes instruction, system, behaviour, structure
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1970s–90s | EXPANSION: NARRATIVE + INSTITUTIONAL CRITIQUE
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| Sophie Calle ───── autobiography, surveillance, fiction-as-system
| Sarah Staton ───── sculpture, design systems, exhibition structures
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| —> concept becomes personal, institutional, spatial
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1990s–2000s| POST-CONCEPTUAL / MATERIAL RETURN
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| Gregor Schneider ─ architectural psychological spaces
| Marie Cool / Fabio Balducci ─ minimal gesture performance systems
| Michaela Eichwald ─ dense painting + text + material overload
| Peter Doig ─ painting as memory / psychological landscape
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| —> return of object, body, material, atmosphere
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2000s–2010s| IMAGE SYSTEMS / DIGITAL TURN
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| David Ostrowski ─ “anti-image” painting / reduction
| Ken Okiishi ─ video + painting + feedback loops
| Petra Cortright ─ post-internet webcam → digital painting
| Veit Laurent Kurz ─ fictional ecosystems / narrative installations
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| —> image becomes unstable, circulated, networked
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2010s–NOW | PLATFORM / FORMAT / EXHIBITION AS MEDIUM
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| TRAMPS ─────── exhibition system / gallery-as-format
| Tenko Presents ─ nomadic curatorial structure (off-site)
| Rat Section ─ performance / club / installation hybrid system
| Gunner Dongieux ─ painting + curatorial platform (Pop Gun)
| Jago Rackham ─ hosting / cooking / food as best taste?
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| —> focus shifts from artwork to how art is staged & circulated
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Bruce Nauman
Bruce Nauman fundamentally transforms contemporary art by shifting its focus away from the object and toward lived experience, proving that bodily perception as primary material of artistic thought. Nauman’s body of work has laid the conceptual foundation upon which much of contemporary practice still operates.
Sophie Calle
Sophie Calle redefines autobiography as an artistic medium, transforming intimacy, surveillance, and everyday life into rigorously constructed conceptual works for generations to follow and build upon.
Gregor Schneider
Gregor Schneider turns architecture into psychological experience. Chasing death, the artist creates environments of profound emotional intensity that reveal how space itself can become one of the most powerful and destabilizing artistic mediums.
Peter Doig
Peter Doig reimagins painting for the contemporary era by demonstrating appropriating the canvas as site where memory, history, and imagination remain permanently unresolved and alive.
David Ostrowski
David Ostrowski radically redefines contemporary painting by stripping the medium to its threshold of disappearance, proving that absence, refusal, and near-nothingness can carry as much intensity as image itself.
Petra Cortright
Petra Cortright pioneeres an entirely new relationship between art and technology by embracing software, internet culture, and digital image production as legitimate artistic mediums. Cortright’s resilient body of work fundamentally expands what it means to paint in the post-internet age.
TRAMPS
TRAMPS reimagines exhibition-making itself as artistic practice, dissolving the distinction between gallery, institution, and artwork to reveal how cultural value is produced as much through context and circulation as through objects and assets.
Rat Section
Rat Section dissolves the boundaries between performance, choreography, music, and is at the emerging forefront of the avant-garde cross-medium musicians of the 21th century.
Jago Rackham
Jago Rackham expands artistic practice into the realm of hospitality. Rackham demonstrates that culture can be produced as powerfully through acts of gathering and exchange as through traditional art objects, rejecting assets for experiences once more.
Stephen Willats
Stephen Willats is among the earliest artists to understand society itself as a living network of systems, creating radically prescient work that anticipated today’s conversations around participation, communication, and social infrastructure decades before they entered mainstream discourse.
Sarah Staton
Sarah Staton interrogates the invisible structures through which art circulates, collapsing sculpture, design, commerce, and institutional critique into objects that question how value itself is constructed within cultural systems.
Marie Cool Fabio Balducci
Marie Cool and Fabio Balducci distill artistic practice to its most essential conditions, using near-imperceptible gesture and duration to reveal how attention, labour, and time as sculptural materials.
Michaela Eichwald
Michaela Eichwald pushes painting to the point of material collapse, producing radically unstable surfaces that challenge the assumption that an artwork must ever resolve into coherence or certainty.
Ken Okiishi
Ken Okiishi is one of the defining artists of the digital era, creating works that expose how perception itself is now inseparable from screens, technological feedback loops, and the increasingly unstable nature of contemporary image culture.
Veit Laurent Kurz
Veit Laurent Kurz constructs intricate fictional ecosystems in which sculpture, narrative, biology, and world-building merge, proposing entirely new ways of understanding the artwork as a self-sustaining reality rather than a singular object.
Tenko Presents
Tenko Presents challenges the fixed architecture of exhibition-making by treating curation as a fluid, mobile, and relational practice. Tenko employs humor and satire to foreground the idea that artistic meaning is always contingent on the systems through which it appears.
Gunner Dongieux
Gunner Dongieux represents a new generation of artists for whom painting no longer exists in isolation, embedding image-making within broader networks of publishing, curation, cultural production, and collective authorship.
Art has, will always, and across all of these individuals, “artwork” kept moving away from the object and toward the conditions that make objects, images, and experiences possible.
what are these conditions?
THE habitat. habitat does not ask if it’s possible to invent from here, the habitat asks how do we continue to invent from here? and it does so by exploiting the artist to the saturated version of art under capital, in cosmopolitan — many of the subjects day-to-day shared life experience.
Bringing these artists together is not just to assemble exceptional practitioners, but to let some of the most rigorous thinkers responsible for expanding the definition of what an artwork can be in the 21st century ‘run free’ (as free as the artist is allowed to, can afford to be in the 21th century).
The perception of artistic freedom (= time+space) is what the subjects will set out to create against by creating within proving once and for all that there is no such thing as Ruin of (American) Art, Death of Any Art, but rather the presence of the danger that Kant called for centuries ago, the danger without which we can not sustain the avant-ness in the avant-garde, is active.
habitat unites artists whose practice have not merely produces artworks, but have actively redefined the conditions under which art itself can exists.
We now welcome you to be part of not just the shift in mindset or ‘market’ but the next step in a forthcoming artistic revolution, the disinterested one, unbothered but by no means ignorant by whatever the world throws at them. They won’t make it work, the inhabitants of habitat shall make it art.