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Who are your favorite artist(s)? What are your favorite works?
I'll get the discussion started -- I'm somewhat into contemporary art, recently Can't Help Myself by Sun Yuan and Peng Yu.
Mark Rothko is another favorite of mine, hopefully some day I can make it down to the Rothko Chapel.
There was a phenomenal piece by Rémy Zaugg at the ArtIC that I fell in love with. Kinda thing I'd have leaning on a wall in my house if I was in some evil kombucha supervillain mansion. It was called "About Blindness 2" and it was so striking and so... demanding of attention that I fell in love.
But my favorite piece has to go to the deceptively simple "Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.)" from Felix Gonzalez-Torres. There's a brief description under the piece itself, I highly recommend you give it a look.
That Gonzalez-Torres piece is really heavy, thanks for sharing.
I'll limit myself to two (I could go on for a while...):
Denis Forkas does these astounding, occult paintings. Sometimes more representational, sometimes more abstract. Somehow he straddles the divide. I find myself looking at his paintings and just looking and looking and finding more and more unfolding the more I study.
Rone is a local street artist with some serious scale. I've had the chance to see a few of his pieces; the Omega Project has been my favourite so far. I just find his work so beautiful and introspective.
jean-michel basquiat has always been weirdly captivating to me, probably because on a purely technical level a lot of his works (but not all of them) seem to have the competence of a scribbling 6 or 7 year old, and yet they still carry tons of symbolism and social commentary and are cohesive pieces of art. (it probably helps that he had the life of a mythical big-city artist, going from dropping out and being homeless to having riches before dying of an overdose at 27.)