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Art Terms

Find definitions of over 400 terms, including art movements, styles and techniques

Zero Relational aesthetics Engraving Surrealism Bauhaus Sculpture Fairy painting Fin de Siècle Format Stars group Expressionism Hyper-realism
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Heinz Mack, ‘Light Dynamo’ 1963

Zero

Group of artists who practised a form of kinetic art using light and motion

Gillian Wearing CBE, ‘‘I’m desperate’’ 1992–3

Relational aesthetics

Term created by curator Nicholas Bourriaud in the 1990s to describe the tendency he noticed in fine art practice to make art based on, or inspired by, human relations and their social context

William Hogarth, ‘The Enraged Musician’ 1741

Engraving

Engraving is a printmaking technique that involves making incisions into a metal plate which retain the ink and form the printed image

Salvador Dalí, ‘Lobster Telephone’ 1936

Surrealism

Surrealism was a movement which began in the 1920s of writers and artists (including Salvador Dalí and René Magritte), who experimented with ways of unleashing the subconscious

Lucia Moholy, ‘Bauhaus Building, Dessau’ 1925–6

Bauhaus

Bauhaus was a revolutionary school of art, architecture and design established by Walter Gropius at Weimar in Germany in 1919

Henry Moore OM, CH, ‘Recumbent Figure’ 1938

Sculpture

Three-dimensional art made by one of four basic processes: carving, modelling, casting, constructing

William Blake, ‘Oberon, Titania and Puck with Fairies Dancing’ c.1786

Fairy painting

Fairy painting is particularly associated with the Victorian period, art that depicts fairies and other subjects from the supernatural

Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, ‘The Two Friends’ 1894

Fin de Siècle

Fin de Siècle is a French phrase meaning 'end of century' and is applied specifically as a historical term to the end of the nineteenth century and even more specifically to decade of 1890s

Ellsworth Kelly, ‘White Curve’ 1974

Format

Format is traditionally used to describe the shape or proportions of the support, for example the canvas, of a painting or other essentially flat work of art such as a relief

Stars group

Stars group were a short-lived avant-garde group of self-taught artists operating in Beijing between 1979 and 1983, staging outdoor exhibitions, street demonstrations and public readings

Expressionism

Expressionism refers to art in which the image of reality is distorted in order to make it expressive of the artist’s inner feelings or ideas

Ron Mueck, ‘Spooning Couple’ 2005

Hyper-realism

The term hyper-realism appeared in the early 1970s to describe a resurgence of particularly high fidelity realism in sculpture and painting at that time

Art In The Collection

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  • Duncan Grant, ‘Bathing’ 1911

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  • Lubaina Himid, ‘Between the Two my Heart is Balanced’ 1991

    Women and Art

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  • Vija Celmins, ‘Ocean’ 1975

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    Weather and Art

    See how artists respond to the seasons and our changing environment

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