In most creative fields, such as film, theatre, music, and fashion, collaboration is common. However, in the art world, individual artists often take the spotlight. But sometimes artists share a fundamental desire for collaboration, which can open new ways of creativity. ARTNOW draws attention to six of the most intriguing art groups from all over the world.
Guerrilla Girls (USA)
In 1984, a group of radical feminists, united by their outrage over the lack of diversity at MoMA, came together to protest. Historically, institutions like MoMA were predominantly run by men, with a shortage of female artists displayed, despite the abundance of art featuring female nudes. The Guerrilla Girls created iconic posters such as "Do Women Have to be Naked to Get into The Met. Museum?", which are now exhibited in galleries worldwide.They employ various tactics, including posters, books, billboards, lectures, interviews, public appearances, and online interventions, to expose disparities, discrimination, and corruption. Known for their guerrilla-style actions, they hang up posters and organize surprise exhibitions. They also often use humor in their work to make their serious messages engaging. The group's membership has changed over the years from a high of about 30 women to a handful of active members today, all remaining anonymous behind gorilla masks. Eventually, the Guerrilla Girls gained recognition by the establishment they aimed to challenge, and exhibited at Tate Modern, Venice Biennale, Centre Pompidou, and MoMA, thereby reaching a broader audience with their concerns.
AES+F is a collective of four Russian artists: Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, Evgeny Svyatsky, and Vladimir Fridkes. Initially established as AES Group in 1987, it evolved into AES+F when Fridkes joined in 1995. The group works across various artistic mediums, including photography, video, installation, animation, painting, drawing, and sculpture. Well known for their video-art installations often described as "monumental painting set in motion", AES+F creates grand visual narratives that explore contemporary global values, vices, and conflicts. One of their most famous projects, the Islamic Project, serves as an ironic commentary on the prejudice and fear of “Western Man” toward the Islamic world. Artworks show cities and landmarks, convincingly rendered colonized by radical Islam. In 2007, AES+F gained international acclaim in the Russian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale with their provocative, large-scale video installation “Last Riot”. Over the past decade, their creations have been featured in prominent festivals and biennial exhibitions of contemporary art worldwide, and their works are housed in major art collections, including institutions like Moderna Museet, MOCAK, Centre Pompidou, the Louis Vuitton Foundation, Taguchi Art Collection, and many others.
The TWOFOURTWO Art Group was established in Nicosia in 1996 by Costas Mantzalos and Constantinos Kounnis. The two-person group, a designer and an architect, works as a collaborative entity exploring their shared experiences to define their unique communication base. Their works themself don’t pretend to be a traditionally accepted art form but rather seek a place in their own right. They have evolved and matured to examine the concepts of private and public space, personal and common experience, and the domestic and the international. The artists have their independent art space for creating and presenting contemporary art in Nicosia, known as S:2F2.
Artists Anonymous is a five-member collaborative group working in London and Berlin. The collective was founded in 2001, during their studies at the Berlin University of the Arts. In 2007 they established their own exhibition space in London, and in September 2012, they held their first exhibition with Banksy. AA work with painting, sculpture, performance, installation, photography, video, and an unconventional technique of painting photorealistic subjects with inverted colors, photographing the painting, and reproducing it in reverse. Their dark, psychedelic art, filled with disguised characters, appears as if born from hallucinations. As the name suggests, the artists behind the works prefer to keep their identities hidden, not out of personal secrecy, but as an affirmation of anonymity for the artwork itself. This way, viewers can appreciate the artwork for what it is, rather than being influenced by the artist's name or its market.
Gelitin is a group of four creative minds from Vienna: Wolfgang Gantner, Florian Reither, Ali Janka, and Tobias Urban. Their artistic journey began in 1978 when they crossed paths at a summer camp. They joined the international art scene in 1993 and represented Austria at the 2001 Venice Biennale. Art critics often describe their work as a playful and absurd exploration that transforms the art market into a realm of grotesque satire. Perhaps their most famous creation is "The Rabbit," a giant 55-meter-tall pink plush toy they installed in 2005 at Colletto Fava in Piemont, Italy. This example of decay art will stay there until November 2025.
Art collective Collapse features the works of three artists, namely Sasha Slepchuk, Masha Adamova, and Skolzki. What makes this project truly unique is that each artwork was created by all three artists at the same time. They work with paper and canvases, incorporate the elements typical for their art styles, pass the work on to each other, or create it simultaneously by all three of them, uniting individual languages into a common one. The artists came together in 2022 to explore the issues of boundaries, interaction, balance, and emotions. The art of Collapse is primarily expressionistic, a cipher for memories and emotions that can be frank and poetic as well as intimate and universal. Their works visualize experimentation, challenge, and play through semi-figurative images or complete abstraction.
