Stylistically, Post-War & Contemporary Art is not a singular genre. Difficult to confine to any particular artistic technique or medium, it is a direct product of the many social, cultural and historical happenings of the Post-War and Contemporary eras, not only in Europe but around the world.
As the work of Post-war & Contemporary artists like Lucian Freud and Gerhard Richter show, some of the category’s major figures have opted for more traditional artistic practices in their work, such as etching and painting. Despite their use of more traditional materials, however, and as iconic works such as David Dawson or the photorealist pieces Kerze and Betty evidence, they are nonetheless testimony to an unconventional and innovative approach to image-making characteristic of Post-War & Contemporary Art as a whole.
Technology has also played a major role in the development of Post-War & Contemporary Art, giving birth to a plethora of new ways of working. David Hockney, for example, has long been concerned with the exploring different ways of ‘looking’ and ‘seeing’ in his work, and this particular pre-occupation has seen him engage in a lengthy artistic dialogue with photography and the camera. The artist’s early experimentations with photography were birthed by the Polaroid camera he first discovered upon his move to the United States in 1964. Early photographic compositions involved taking a number of photographs of a given subject and arranging them in a grid-like pattern. Creating a patchwork of images, the famous white border of the Polaroid photo would disrupt the forms these photos depicted. In later works Hockney moved away from the Polaroid and towards other photographic media, such as the 110, small-format camera, overlapping the edges of his photos so as to create Photo Collages that offer fresh perspectives of his subjects.