Contemporary art is the art of the late 20th and early 21st century.

As the force and vigor of abstract expressionism diminished, new artistic movements and styles arose during the 1960s and 70s to challenge and displace modernism in painting, sculpture, and other media. Improvisational and Dada-like styles employed in the early 1960s and thereafter by Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns had widespread influence, as did the styles of many other artists. Some of the most significant of the often loosely defined movements of early contemporary art included pop art, the op art movement, conceptual art and photorealism. One of the most long-lived of these movements was the abstract development known as minimalism, which emphasized the least discernible variation of technique in painting, sculpture, and other media.

Taken together, these many approaches to art represented a wholesale rejection of the tenets of modernism and have come to be grouped under the umbrella term of postmodernism. The very lack of a uniform organizing principle or ideology is one of the most important hallmarks of postmodern art.

Arising from the multimedia experiments of the 1970s, the widespread use of a variety of technology-based media has persisted into the art of the new century. Often included are elements of film, video, sound, performance, and architecture (principally in installation art). Another trend that has widened the definition and scope of contemporary art has been the conceptually driven use of both photography and language as the substance of numerous works of art. Another contemporary art movement, digital art, was pioneered in the 1970s but did not become prevalent until the beginning of the 21st century. Digital artists make use of sophisticated computers, software, and video equipment to create an extremely varied body of works.

Postmodern art has also blurred the distinctions between painting and sculpture (and sometimes architecture), with artists often including in their works a host of wildly nontraditional materials. Moreover, a wide variety of spaces and places, both private and public, have become arenas for displaying work of many contemporary artists.

Click Here to browse Julia's portfolio