Rebecca Horn was born in Germany in the last years of World War II. Like Kiefer she was influenced by Joseph Beuys but it is Marcel Duchamp who seems to be most present in her machines and fabulous erotic installations, even in her strange and magical feature-length films. It was Duchamp who once said it is better to invent machines and do things to them than to do them to people. He also invented that great erotic machine-like masterpiece ‘The large glass’, also known as ‘The bride stripped...

Carl Andre nearly always works in a grid, with the dimensions of his finished works determined by multiples of a basic module – such as a brick, metal plate or house beam. The shape of each work depends entirely on the number and configuration of modules. The works are often laid out on the floor like carpet and can in fact be walked on. Although not site-specific, the works emphasise and respond to the planes of the space they occupy. While the minimalist use of industrial materials on a...

The son of artists Fred Klein and Marie Raymond, Yves Klein was baptised a Catholic and dedicated to Saint Rita, patron saint of lost causes, in the same year that Kasimir Malevich wrote ‘The painter is no longer bound to canvas, but can transfer his composition to space’.1 These coincidences seem to set the scene for Klein’s heroic and sometimes tragicomic life and work. Malevich, who was one of the few art historical figures Klein profoundly admired, described himself as an aviator taking...

Encountering Ron Mueck’s sculptures is like suddenly being in a contemporary version of ‘Gulliver’s travels’: everything looks real and familiar but the scale is wrong. Giant boys and pregnant women tower over us, small men row boats and lie dead, a swaddled baby is shrunk to miniature size. In ‘Untitled (old woman in bed)’ a frail elderly woman lies under a blanket on a gallery plinth, her small scale increasing her vulnerability as we loom over her. This is one of Mueck’s most poignant...

First drawn by: Kazuko Miyamoto First installation: Panza di Biumo residence, Varese, Italy, June 1980      Sol LeWitt’s wall drawings are executed by professional draughtspeople from sets of instructions generated by the artist. LeWitt emphasised the idea or concept of an artwork over its visual realisation, hence his assertion that his instructions are themselves the work of art. ‘Wall drawing #337’ and ‘Wall drawing #338’ exemplify this process: both works are drawn by professional...

Like many minimalist artists Donald Judd worked in a modular way. ‘Untitled’, for example, is a series of horizontal rectangular units. The proportions of the module start with a ‘given’ – in this case, the size and thickness of the plywood that determines all other proportions in the work. Sometimes the boxes appear irregular, but this is an illusion of perspective and of the light falling into and around each box. The way an object contains space or casts shadow is part of Judd’s work....

Spanning a broad array of material practices and media, Ugo Rondinone’s works are often unsettling and deal with themes of isolation and disenchantment. At once distinct and interrelated, the works installed in this room cross-pollinate, shaping a single narrative. The looped conversation of the wall and sound installation ‘what do you want?’ suggests a relationship permeated with miscommunication, doubt and loneliness. Coupled with this soundtrack, the reclining clown in ‘if there were...

‘In the 1950s and 60s Frank Stella was a leading advocate for American artists who were attempting to break with the tradition of European painting that made reference to the world of visual effects beyond the canvas beyond art. Stella wanted to make an art form that was complete in itself, with as little internal division of its form as possible. His early paintings were determined by certain givens, such as the width of the canvas or paintbrush, or the nature of the paint itself. Stella...

Francis Alÿs’ idiosyncratic work resists classification. Encompassing lists, plans, and drawings, performances (including public parades and solitary walks) and collections of objects sourced from flea markets, his work is inclusive and plural and is often inspired by and located in the streets of Mexico City, where the artist lives and works. ‘Sleepers II’ is formed out of the colourful ecology of these streets documenting people and dogs asleep on streets, benches and bus stops. While the...

During the 1980s Anish Kapoor, along with his British counterparts Richard Deacon, Tony Cragg, Antony Gormley and others, significantly challenged prevailing sculptural practices. Referred to as New British Sculpture, their respective work (although largely unrelated) shifted away from the purely conceptual or minimal art that had dominated the previous decades to embrace lyricism and metaphor, and to reconfigure the relationship between subject, object and viewer. Kapoor was an influential...

When he arrived in New York in 1965, Joseph Kosuth was a 20-year-old recent graduate from art school, yet he quickly established himself as a founding member of the conceptual art movement in the United States. At this time Kosuth was inspired by philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s investigations of language. Wittgenstein’s posthumously published book ‘Philosophical investigations’ was a radical departure from previous philosophical texts, presented as a series of aphorisms that proposed...

'Cash Crop' consists of a vitrine filled with little sculptures of fruit and vegetables carved from a variety of natural soaps. These pieces of 'fruit' are accompanied by labels and painted bank notes. The terms appearing on the labels are taken from the language of economic activity. The juxtapositions are both amusing and sharply critical: 'liquid asset' is a grape; 'share market float' is a lotus; 'tax return' is a peanut; 'global liquidity' is a cola nut. In 'Cash Crop', Fiona Hall...

Like many of his generation, Richard Deacon adopted Marcel Duchamp’s proposition that titles were an extra colour on the artist’s palette. In using language in this way the younger artists of the 1970s put distance between themselves and the abstract artists who came before them (who often labelled everything ‘Untitled’). ‘Listening to reason’ is a case in point.1 The shape of the work describes five double loosely ear-shaped curves, connected by twisting pieces of laminated wood to make one...

Richard Serra is a New York Minimalist who emerged in the late 1960s and 1970s. Typical of that movement he uses industrial materials in simple unmodified modules as does Carl Andre. Contrary to the commonly held view that Minimalism is without emotion or feeling it is the physical properties of the object that affect the viewer. The emotion expressed is not that of the artist but that of the viewer encountering the object. The sheer massiveness of the steel that leans heavily against the...