Contemporary art and artists

Installation art fills a whole space, so the viewer is surrounded by it or walks through it.
Land art is made in the landscape, often from natural materials. The British artist Andy Goldsworthy (born 1956) makes works from leaves, stones, ice and twigs, and photographs them.
Street art is made in public spaces.
Performance and video art use time and action.
The Turner Prize, named after the painter J. M. W. Turner and started in 1984, is a famous award for British artists: artists born in Britain or working mainly in Britain.

Yayoi Kusama (Japanese, born 1929) is famous for polka dots and mirrored Infinity Rooms that seem to go on forever.
El Anatsui (Ghanaian, born 1944) makes huge, shimmering hangings from thousands of flattened metal bottle tops joined with copper wire.
Ai Weiwei (Chinese, born 1957) filled Tate Modern's Turbine Hall in 2010 with about 100 million porcelain sunflower seeds, each made by hand by craftspeople in Jingdezhen.
Lubaina Himid (born in Zanzibar in 1954) won the Turner Prize in 2017, the first Black woman to do so.
Anish Kapoor (born in Mumbai in 1954) made Cloud Gate, a huge mirror-like steel sculpture in Chicago.

Contemporary artists often explore ideas and issues: identity, the environment, history, mass production and how we see.
Many use found or recycled materials, like El Anatsui's bottle tops.
When you analyse contemporary art, ask: what is the idea? Why these materials? How does the scale or space affect the viewer?
You can respond to contemporary artists in your own work by borrowing a process or an idea, not just copying how the work looks.