Mixed media art - 31 inspiring examples

Marina Abramović’s manifesto – Rules on life, silence & solitude

It is undisputed that Marina Abramović is one of the most renowned and impactful performance artists of our time. She dabbled in performance and feminist art at a time when the concept of shame and the nature of this type of art was considered radical. Her brand of performance art involved the use of her [...]

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Song Dong’s Waste Not – Why obsessive hoarding lead to this project

Architecture, Installations, Mixed media 3 min read

Song Dong’s Waste Not is an installation with a story behind it. A testament born of the artist’s mother, Zhao Xiangyuan’s hoardings, the installation consists of tools, plant pots, chairs, empty squeezed out tubes of toothpaste, television sets, all collected over a span of five decades. This obsessive hoarding of items resulted in an accumulation [...]

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What is Xu Bing’s impressive Book from the Sky all about?

Installations, Mixed media 3 min read

The Book from the Sky is one of the most intriguing Chinese art installations of the century and the nifty work of none other than the celebrated Chinese artist Xu Bing. This installation comprises a set of 4 hand-printed books, as well as wall and ceiling scrolls printed in the style of a wood letterpress. [...]

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Tomás Saraceno’s In Orbit – A seemingly impossible installation

Installations, Mixed media 3 min read

A massive installation by Tomás Saraceno titled In Orbit has to be one of the artist’s most notable and successful installations. At a height of more than 20 meters, Saraceno suspended a mesh construction within which audiences could move weightlessly on the net. The net construction, accessible on three levels, was designed to resemble a [...]

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Cai Guo-Qiang’s Head On – 99 wolves crash into a glass wall

Installations, Mixed media 6 min read

Berlin, Singapore, New York, Bilbao’s Guggenheim, and Brisbane are just a few of the locations in the world that have had the pleasure of experiencing Cai Guo-Qiang’s installation Head On (2006). For his dramatic and impressive installation, Cai, who resides in New York, chose to fit 99 life-like stuffed wolves into a glass wall. The [...]

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What are Kimsooja’s rainbow rooms all about?

Installations, Light installations, Mixed media 7 min read

Kimsooja is a Korean-born artist that has won recognition around the world. Despite living in New York, her work is exhibited across Europe, Asia and America. Her work includes performances, photographs, installations and videos. Kimsooja’s work involves several subjects like relationships with others, nomadism and the role of women in dealing with challenges that we [...]

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Doug Wheeler’s Synthetic Desert at the Guggenheim

Installations, Mixed media 2 min read

Over 40 years ago, a leading Light and Space artist called Doug Wheeler imagined an art project that resembled the tranquility you would experience if you travelled to an expansive desert such as the one in Arizona. For a long time, the idea only existed on paper due to the amount of resources it required [...]

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Zhang Huan’s Ash Buddha – 20-ton incense sculptures

Mixed media, Sculptures, Statues 2 min read

Zhang Huan, born in 1965, started his career as a painter and then moved to performance art and then resorted back to painting. He is also a sculptor and photographer, but his main focus is on being a performance artist. He has made extensive use of ash throughout his career and even built a few [...]

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Thomas Demand’s Grotto – 52 tons of cardboard cut into 900,000 pieces

Mixed media, Photography, Sculptures 2 min read

Thomas Demand has ignited the imaginations and adventurous sides of viewers with his photography piece, titled Grotto. Pulling viewers into an underground cavern covered in beautiful bright stalactites and stalagmites, art lovers find themselves in the center of the earth. However, if viewers look a little deeper, they will find much more with Grotto than [...]

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Damián Ortega’s Cosmic Thing – Entire Volkswagen Beetle dissected

Mixed media, Sculptures 3 min read

Damián Ortega was born in Mexico City in 1967. He now divides his time between Mexico City and Berlin. He has gained a world-renowned reputation as his works have been exhibited internationally. His art career began as a political cartoonist, which has influenced his more recent work, as is evident in the playful energy often [...]

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Yin Xiuzhen & her 14 meter minibus Collective Unconscious

Installations, Mixed media, Textile art 2 min read

Collective Subconscious is a large-scale interactive installation created by Beijing-based artist Yin Xiuzhen. She has spent the last twenty-five years creating and displaying works that reflect her surrounding environment and her relationship with it. Her works are usually personal and environmentally engaging and typically site-specific. Collective Subconscious, which is composed of a bisected minivan connected [...]

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Pierre Huyghe fills Sydney’s opera house with 1000 real trees

Installations, Mixed media 2 min read

A Forest of Lines by Pierre Huyghe is a space that brings together the sacred and the profane. It blurs boundaries, eliminating the separation between the audience and the art where they can become the performance as they explore the constructed forest in the theatre made of a thousand real trees, inside the concert hall [...]

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Adel Abdessemed’s Hope & Lampedusa

Installations, Mixed media 3 min read

In 2012, Algerian born artist Adel Abdessemed showed Hope as part of his solo exhibition Who’s afraid of the big bad wolf at David Zwirner. The large makeshift boat was found abandoned on a beach in the Florida Keys (US). Typically used to illegally transport immigrants in pursuit of a new life to the United [...]

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