Art History

Over 200,000 pieces. That's the number of contemporary artworks and design objects currently available on Artsper. Every day, new artists and galleries from all over the world join us and trust us to showcase their work. On Artsper, all mediums have a place of choice: painting, drawing, photography, editions and sculpture.

The generic term "contemporary art" refers to all works produced in the recent period, that is to say between the end of the 20th and the beginning of the 21st centuries. However, there is not only one type of contemporary art. It can cover as many forms as there are artists, if not more. Contemporary art, while taking into account the individualities and the cultural specificities, takes life at the world level, in a globalized society and constantly in movement. Thus, the materials used, the processes of creation and the subjects treated by the contemporary art works often reflect these interconnections. But one constant remains, artists perpetually question the established artistic order.

Even if they are often confused, there are many differences between modern and contemporary art, notably the idea that contemporary art works are more conceptual and privilege the creative idea to the support used.

Nevertheless, the distinction between these two movements can also be purely temporal. Any work realized after 1945 can be called "contemporary". At the beginning of the 20th century, the movements followed one another according to the revolutionary reflections of the great masters of Surrealism (Salvador Dalí, René Magritte), Cubism (Pablo Picasso, Fernand Léger) and Dadaism (Marcel Duchamp). From the 1950s and 1960s, artists pushed the reflection on abstraction even further. This is the birth of minimalist art as well as conceptual art. In opposition to the abstract expressionists such as Joan Mitchell, Mark Rothko and Jackson Pollock, the leaders of these movements are notably Frank Stella and Sol Lewitt.

Pop art is one of the first artistic movements to emerge from contemporary art. It was the work of a whole generation caught up in the whirlwind of consumer society. Pop art uses new technologies and very bright colors to portray (sometimes ironically) this globalized world in transition. The precursors of this pictorial technique are Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, whose modern paintings represent icons of the time such as Marilyn Monroe or Elizabeth Taylor.

Born in the 1960s in Philadelphia, street art became popular in the 1980s. Illegal and controversial at first, it now occupies a major place in modern art museums, galleries and private collections. Paintings, stencil drawings, collages, sculpture, tags, graffiti... On Artsper, discover original contemporary artworks as well as prints by the greatest street artists: Shepard Fairey (Obey), JonOne, Aiko, Miss.Tic, Jef Aérosol and many others. But our catalog also highlights young stars and talents of the emerging scene, such as Death NYC or Jérôme Mesnager.

Today, contemporary art exists in many forms, more or less inspired by the movements that have shaped modern history. The beginning of the 21st century is marked by a multidisciplinary creation, an interest for creation coming from the four corners of the world, and the emergence of markets on different continents. Contemporary artworks also denote a meteoric growth in digital art, as evidenced by the recent boom in NFTs and AI (artificial intelligence)-generated art. As with all art forms, we see a globalized interest in innovative and disruptive contemporary artworks as much as in work that aims to revive the more traditional forms of fine art.

Whether you're a budding collector or a seasoned buyer, a home decorator or an art history buff, now is the time to express your personality by exploring the collections of our 1,800 partner galleries, which are constantly being updated with new works of contemporary art. Your perfect piece is waiting for you, now it's up to you to find it!