Top 5 favorite NY based artists

Without any doubt: the most popular artistic son of New York is Andy Warhol. But walking through the Museum of Modern Art on Friday (free entrance from 4 p.m. onwards) I thought about who are my top 5 favorite artists based in New York. And I proudly present:

 

Mark Rothko, Untitled (Blue, Yellow, Green on Red), 1954

Whitney Museum of American Art, New York

© 1998 Kate Rothko Prizel & Christopher Rothko / Artists Rights Society

1. Mark Rothko--Rothko (1903 - 1970) emigrated from Latvia and died in New York. Rothko´s style of color field painting was groundbreaking.  His well-known large-scale oil paintings with stacked, blurring, and monochrome color surfaces have a magical attraction for me.
2. Jackson Pollock--His unique style of drip painting made Jackson Pollock (1912 - 1956) famous. This stile is as simple as brilliant: a canvas lying on the floor and paint dropping or pouring out of paint cans. He also sprinkled and flung color by moving, or better say: dancing, around the canvas, which was later called Action Painting. Pollock literally attacked the canvas. By doing this Pollock formed structures, rhythms and patterns of color splashes and color flows. Often his work is completely free and the color structures interwoven  as well as complex.
3. Roy Lichtenstein--Lichtenstein (1923 - 1997) is one of the most prominent exponents of Pop Art. His technique--the so-called Benday Dots--was originally developed for industrial illustrations. Instead of colored areas you often find only dots of color in Lichtenstein's works. Like an industrial printer Lichtenstein tried to use as little paint as possible, not for economic reasons but as an artistic medium. The people depicted by Lichtenstein are free of individuality and usually represent the archetype of the beautiful woman. Liechtenstein took comic books and advertisements and combined them with the art. In doing so he criticized the detachment of art from consum-dominated everyday life. I also like his strong colors.
4. Jeff Koons--In his paintings and sculptures Jeff Koons (born 1955) grabs elements of consumer culture and high culture. Like no other he understands the tension between sublimity and banality. His works cite familiar motifs of every life or advertising. Koons does not know any taboo, he pulls out all the stops--from most childlike motifs to highly pornographic works in which he participated himself and frequently with a good portion of trash. What I like him for most are his sculptures because of their superior technical finesse. The sculpture´s suggestive surfaces promising to be light and fragile, but in reality weighing tons have an impressive effect on the Viewer.
5. Jean-Michel Basquiat--What I like about Basquiat (1960 - 1988) are the layer structures of his paintings. The materials and techniques he used vary as he could use anything for production: words, letters, numerals, pictograms, logos, icons, maps, graphs and more. Basquiat's paintings often look very radical, sometimes injured and partly they reminiscent of black African folk art. He was close to Andy Warhol, they worked together and Warhol's death crashed Basquiat into a severe crisis.

You can find numerous works from all of them all over New York, especially at the Museum of Modern Art.