Marina Abramović – A pioneering performance artist known for testing the limits of physical and mental endurance. Her works often involve direct engagement with the audience, pushing boundaries of trust, vulnerability, and time in art. Abramović’s endurance-based pieces have redefined performance as a legitimate and powerful art form.

Giuseppe Arcimboldo was an Italian painter whose fantastical composite portraits—assembled from fruits, vegetables, books, fish, and other objects—pushed Renaissance imagination into the realm of the surreal. By transforming everyday items into human likenesses, he revealed how identity can be built from symbols, metaphors, and the strange logic of visual play.

Chuck Close was an American painter famous for his massive, photo-realistic portraits made up of tiny, colorful grids or brushstrokes. By breaking down faces into abstract patterns that resolve into striking likenesses from a distance, he challenged how we see identity and representation.

Bernd and Hilla Becher were a German artist couple who meticulously photographed industrial structures—water towers, blast furnaces, grain silos—with strict, consistent framing and overcast light. Their systematic “typologies” transformed functional architecture into a kind of quiet sculpture, influencing generations of photographers and conceptual artists.

Francisco Goya was a Spanish painter and printmaker whose work spans from elegant court portraits to dark, haunting explorations of human cruelty and madness. His bold brushwork and intense imagery captured the turmoil of his era, making him a pioneer of modern art’s emotional and psychological depth.

Do Ho Suh is a Korean artist known for his intricate, large-scale fabric sculptures and installations that explore themes of home, identity, and displacement. By recreating architectural spaces—like apartments and doorways—in translucent textiles, he invites viewers to reflect on memory, personal history, and the fluid nature of belonging.

Katsushika Hokusai was a Japanese ukiyo-e master whose woodblock prints and paintings captured the beauty and drama of nature, urban life, and folklore. Best known for The Great Wave off Kanagawa, he combined bold compositions, rhythmic line work, and innovative perspectives, leaving a lasting influence on both Japanese and Western art.

Jackson Pollock shattered the conventions of painting by turning the canvas into an arena of action. His rhythmic drips and splatters captured the raw pulse of motion and emotion, making process itself the essence of creation — a choreography of chaos that redefined what painting could be.

Johannes Vermeer transformed quiet domestic scenes into moments of timeless contemplation. Through his masterful use of light, he revealed the sacred stillness of everyday life, turning simple gestures and interiors into meditations on perception and serenity.

For the beginning, let's take artists whose last name starts with the letter A and select one painting of each artist (the first one in a Google search). Belonging to time, genre, art school and other color determining features will be completely excluded. The result is a 3600, or 60x60 pixel composition representing artists starting with the letter A. Now let's repeat the same with the letter Z. Here we have 900, or 30x30 pixels. But we see that the overall coloring remains unchanged. You can extrapolate the result and conclude that all other letters will give a similar flavor with a difference only in the number of pixels. Topic closed. Issue resolved. Is not it? 2015, 60x60 and 30x30 inches, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Let's complicate the issue. How to highlight a large amount of work with any features that affect the result? The history itself suggests the principle of dividing artists by style. Let's compare Byzantine art, Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Conceptual art and other movements. The difference is clear and multifaceted. You can draw conclusions and analyze. 2020, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Let's complicate the issue. How to highlight a large amount of work with any features that affect the result? The history itself suggests the principle of dividing artists by style. Let's compare Byzantine art, Renaissance, Baroque, Impressionism, Cubism, Fauvism, Conceptual art and other movements. The difference is clear and multifaceted. You can draw conclusions and analyze. 2020, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

How do wars affect art? Is there something in color that betrays a premonition of war and something that indicates war-weariness at the end of it? For the experiment, I used the years preceding and following the two great wars of the twentieth century: 1913, 1919 and 1938, 1946. Intuition suggested that the difference would be obvious, but the result surprised me. Perhaps the artists of the twentieth century did not reflect on real life as much as belonging to any art movement. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Museums. Do long-term collections, biases of different selection committees and curators affect the color of pixel compositions? For even greater “beauty” of the experiment, I choose 3 museums in New York (Metropolitan, Guggenheim, MOMA) and 3 museums in Paris (Louvre, d’Orsay, Center J. Pompidou). There is a difference. Not so striking. But it gives food for thought. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Working on comparing the most expensive paintings (between $75 and almost $500 millions) and the bad paintings (official movement) in my project, I realized that the history of painting is a billion shades of gray. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

How do political leanings affect art? Politicians classify artists as one group or another. We remember the "degenerate art" during the third Reich and can compare it with the official creations (small but manageable difficulty in finding work) of the same period. A couple of Soviet and nonconformist arts in the USSR is also interesting. Influence and very eloquently. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

We know many examples of the creative longevity of artists. Let's see how youthful enthusiasm is replaced by skill and wisdom. Each of the 100 artists is represented by one of their first and last works. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

Speaking about the influence on color in the history of art, one cannot avoid such an important topic as the material used by artists. In addition to tempera, oil paints, acrylic, we should pay attention to stained glass and mosaics. For an adequate result, I use the works of the classical period for these materials. Also, when working on stained glass windows, I remove the color of lead from the averaging, which almost always looks like black on photographs. 2022, 30x30 inches each, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.

It is not about finding differences, but about identifying commonality of the color pixel, despite ... the differences of nations. In this case, it is necessary to comply a single algorithm for selecting pictures and their color averaging. The first is a selection of 100 countries with a sufficient number of artists in Google search. Second - each country is represented by 35-50 authors, one (the first in the search display) picture from each artist. Third - step by step averaging of each work, transforming into a same size pixel and averaging all 35-50 pixels into one, then placing them in alphabetical order. 100 (10x10) pixel-nations with fairly similar hues. Does this mean that there are national differences in general color? No, a more complete sample is needed for such verification. Perhaps we need all artists of every country and all of their works. Also this result will depend on the changes in color reproduction when working in Photoshop by millions of photographers and a displacement of this mass of photos across the expanses of Google. 2022, 30x30 inches, archival pigment print on Exhibition fiber.