Neo-impressionism - 1970s.

Neo-expressionism is a style of modern painting and sculpture that emerged in the late 1970s and dominated the art market until the mid-1980s. Related to American Lyrical Abstraction of the 60s and 70s, Bay Area Figurative School of the 50s and 60s, the continuation of Abstract Expressionism, New Image Painting and precedents in Pop painting, it developed as a reaction against the conceptual art and minimal art of the 1970s. Neo-expressionists returned to portraying recognizable objects, such as the human body (although sometimes in an abstract manner), in a rough and violently emotional way using vivid colours and banal colour harmonies.

Overtly inspired by the so-called German Expressionist painters--Emil Nolde, Max Beckmann, George Grosz, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner--and other expressionist artists such as James Ensor andEdvard Munch. Neo-expressionists were sometimes called Neue Wilden ('The new wild ones'; 'New Fauves' would better meet the meaning of the term). The style emerged internationally and was viewed by many critics such as Achille Bonito Oliva and Donald Kuspit as a revival of traditional themes of self-expression in European art after decades of American dominance. The social and economic value of the movement was hotly debated.

Critics such as Benjamin Buchloh, Hal Foster, Craig Owens, and Mira Schor were highly critical of its relation to the marketability of painting on the rapidly expanding art market, celebrity, the backlash against feminism, anti-intellectualism, and a return to mythic subjects and individualist methods they deemed outmoded. Women were notoriously marginalized in the movement, and painters such as Elizabeth Murray and Maria Lassnig were omitted from many of its key exhibitions, most notoriously the 1981 "New Spirit in Painting" exhibition in London which included 38 male painters but no female painters.

Representatives: Ida Applebroog, Leonard Baskin, Philip Guston, Michael Hafftka, Ouattara Watts, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Joe Boudreau, A.R. Penck, Markus Lüpertz, Rainer Fetting.

Camden Arts Centre - 1965

Camden Arts Centre

Camden Arts Centre in the London Borough of Camden, England, is a contemporary visual art gallery, dedicated to engaging living artists from across the world. Positioning the artist at the centre of the programme, Camden Arts Centre strives to involve the public in the ideas and work of today's artists.

The exhibition and education programmes are developed with equal importance, and are continually intertwined. The changing programme includes exhibitions, artist residencies, off-site projects and artist-led activities, ensuring Camden Arts Centre remains a lively place for seeing, making and talking about contemporary art.

Activities

Camden Arts Centre aims for its audiences actively to engage with the making and process of art. The free activities represent an innovative and integrated approach to contemporary visual arts and education. The Centre holds exhibitions that feature emerging artists, international artists showing for the first time in London, significant historic figures who inspire contemporary practice, and artist-selected group shows relevant to current debate. Through residencies the Centre develops artists' practices with practical support, resulting in new work and public participation. Off-site artists' projects include new commissions and performance in strategic areas, such as King's Cross, London, and in local schools and community centres. Educational activity includes events that engage audiences in a regular series of talks and discussions, film screenings and live art performances, alongside family activities, schools and widening participation projects led by artists. During 2008/2009, Camden Arts Centre's programme featured a strong selection of artists from Britain and abroad, including specially commissioned work from, among others, Claire Barclay, Anya Gallaccio and Allen Ruppersberg. Over the course of the year Camden Arts Centre runs public events, including talks and debates, live-art performances, film screenings and family open days.

Toyism 1992 - Present

 Toyism is a collaborative movement that began in a basement in Emmen, Holland in 1992.

    Toyist paintings – is a result of the partners’ connection to the manifesto. The paintings are narrative, innovative, and imaginative. A world full of colour, transparency and clarity drawn from reality, the surreal, and fantasy. This isn’t your grandpa’s surrealism though, kiddo. Raised dots resemble Oceanic or aboriginal art while the style of drawing sometimes looks like computer-drawn cartoons. The amoeba-like quality is part Joan Miró, part free-flowing, hipster doodle. The innovation in their work comes from free association between the group, influenced by being human.

   They break rules of color contrasts and form that provoke personal narratives on the part of the viewer. Marking the movement's 10-year anniversary, Toyism revamped itself in 2002. That year, Dejo traveled through Russia, China, and Southeast Asia. Dejo found further inspiration in other artists' work and decided to open membership to artists worldwide. An international collective, men and women, Toyism now includes twenty members from all over the world.

Mas-surrealism early 1990s-Present

    Mas-surrealism is a portmanteau word coined in 1992 by American artist James Seehafer, who described a trend among some postmodern artists that mix the aesthetic styles and themes of surrealism and mass media—including pop art.

    Mas-surrealism is a development of surrealism that emphasizes the effect of technology and mass media on contemporary surrealist imagery.James Seehafer who is credited with coining the term in 1992 said that he was prompted to do so because there was no extant definition to accurately characterize the type of work he was doing, which combined elements of surrealism and mass media, the latter consisting of technology and pop art—"a form of technology art." He had begun his work by using a shopping cart, which "represented American mass-consumerism that fuels mass-media", and then incorporated collages of colour photocopies and spray paint with the artist's traditional medium of oil paint.

    In 1995, he assembled a small group show near New York and found a local cyber-cafe, where he started to post material about massurrealism on internet arts news groups, inspiring some German art students to stage a massurrealist show. The next year he started his own web site, www.massurrealism.com and began to receive work from other artists, both mixed media and digitally-generated, "which is massurrealism because of its origins in strict electronics".He credits the World Wide Web with a major role in communicating massurrealism,which spread interest from artists in Los Angeles, Mexico and then Europe.

Ginnie Gardiner, Cecil Touchon, F. Michael Morris and Alan King are mas-surrealist artists.

                       "The Brick Room" by Alan King

                      "Die Tote Stade" by Melanie Marie