Top 10 Self-Taught Artists of the Contemporary Era

10. Dan Graham

Born in 1942 in Urbana, Illinois, the United States of America, and passed away in New York in 2022—Dan Graham contributed to the development of Minimal and Conceptual Art with his multidisciplinary activities encompassing performance, installation, video, photography, but also architecture, curating, and writing.

Even though being a highly influential literary personality in the art world, Graham did not receive any formal education after high school. His self-education involved reading structuralist thinkers and literary critics, and writers. As a result, Graham considers himself in the first place a writer-artist, contributing to various periodicals and reference publications.

Graham was intrigued by the symbiosis between architectural environments and their inhabitants. He is best known for his glass and mirrored pavilions, hovering between sculpture, installation, and architecture. He emerged in the 1960s alongside the likes of Sol Le Witt, Donald Judd, and Robert Smithson with his manifestations of geometric forms with the objective of inhabiting them with the viewer’s presence.[1]

9. Sophie Calle

Born in 1953 in Paris, where the artist continues to work and reside, Sophie Calle is a conceptual artist, photographer, movie director, and even a detective—with the latter having a prominent role in her artistic practice. She is best known for her recognizable visual narratives, using photography, installation, and video in various combinations with text—weaving narratives of private experiences, both her own and of others.

Calle never attended art school and sometimes even distances herself from the label of being an artist. Instead, she describes her artistic ventures as private games. And at first, she did not consider her private games as art.

Think of following strangers in the streets of Paris or inviting them to spend a couple of hours in her bed. As a result, her work is marked by voyeurism and the public exposure of private experiences, resulting in an intriguing and impressive body of work in which the boundaries between the intimate and the public, fiction and reality, her art and her personal life, dissolve evermore.[2]

8. Jean-Michel Basquiat

Born in 1960 in New York City, where the artist continued to work and reside until his untimely death in 1988, Jean-Michel Basquiat is arguably the most famous self-taught artist. He is best known for his iconic Neo-Expressionist paintings, depicting skulls, masks, Basquiat’s trademark crown and expressive interventions.

The American artist embraced graffiti before moving towards a more traditional studio practice which is strongly reflected in his visual language. Basquiat left school at 17 years old and opted to educate himself in art history—with New York City’s institutions as his tutors.

As a result, Basquiat developed a visual language filled with symbols and art historical references. Please think of the references to his Caribbean heritage, but also classical themes, and popular culture, providing tremendous intellectual depth in his dramatic works resulting in international recognition.[3]

7. Yves Klein

Yves Klein—born in 1928 in Nice, France, and passed away in 1964 in Paris—is best known for his iconic ultramarine, bluer-than-blue hue known as International Klein Blue, or IKB. From painting IKB monochromes to developing a multidisciplinary practice encompassing sculpture and performance, Klein approached art as a trace of communication in which invisible truths are made visible.

His adventure into the monochrome aiming to “liberate color from the prison that is line,” the French artist was on a quest for absolute truths in art and to communicate them. This would not only result in monochromes but also voids as immaterial art and performance in the form of using human brushes or implementing anthropometry.

The artist only committed himself fully to art in 1954 after pursuing a career as a judoka, traveling the world with interest in art, culture, and above all, beauty. Klein’s career as an artist would only encompass ten years until his untimely death, but he would leave a permanent and predominantly blue mark on the art world.[4]

6. François Morellet

Born in 1926 in Cholet, France—where the artist passed away in 2016—François Morellet was a painter, sculptor, and installation artist occupied with geometric abstraction. His works include object-based paintings, Op Art, neon art, architectural installations, site-specific installation, and kinetic systems.

The French artist challenges our understanding and perception of the physical picture plane, eventually going beyond its traditional two dimensions. Using geometric forms as a starting point, the artist would create playful and often humorous works.

Morellet was a self-taught artist pur sang. He turned to abstraction after a trip to Brazil, where he discovered the Concrete Art of Max Bill, followed by European influence by the likes of Jean Arp and Theo van Doesburg. Morellet developed a system to remove the subjectivity of the artist while remaining adventurous and frivolous—an uncanny play of balance, dismantling traditional hierarchies and celebrating chance and randomness.[5]

5. Yoko Ono

Born in 1933 in Tokyo, Japan, residing and working in New York City, Yoko Ono is a multidisciplinary artist challenging our understanding of art and the world. Her conceptual practice encompasses performance, installation, video, music, and writing.

Ono studied philosophy in Japan before moving to New York in 1953, where she kickstarted her career as a self-taught artist by actively participating in the city’s avant-garde activities. As a result, she rose to fame with her thought-provoking performances and instruction paintings at the start of the 1960s.

Ono combined her visual art with experimental music. She strongly contributed to the development of Fluxus and Conceptual Art, redefining performance and the role of the viewer, shifting from a passive viewer to an active spectator-participant; think of her instruction paintings providing instructions for the visitors or her infamous Cut Piece performance where she invited visitors to cut and remove her clothes on stage.[6]

4. Max Ernst

Born in 1891 in Brühl, Germany, and passed away in 1976 in Paris, France, Max Ernst is arguably the most Modern and least contemporary artist from our selection, having pioneered the Modern Art movements such as Dada and Surrealism Nevertheless, the German artist continued to produce relevant work over half a century until his passing in the mid-1970s.

Ernst is best known for channeling his psychological intricacies and societal anxieties into his artistic practice, working in painting, printmaking, drawing, collage, and sculpture. His visual language is marked by a vast, personal mythology. Throughout his career, Max Ernst explored automatism to include subconscious interventions, resulting in figures hovering between the human, the animal, or the abstract.

The artist studied philosophy, art history, literature, psychology, and psychiatry at the University of Bonn but did not follow formal artistic training. However, due to his experimental attitude and natural interest in art, Ernst allowed himself to be guided by his academic knowledge and various visual influences, such as art of the mentally ill and the emergence of the Avant-Garde art movements during the first two decades of the 20th century.[7]

3. Christian Boltanski

Born in 1944 in Paris, France, and passed away in 2021 in Malakoff near the French capital, Christian Boltanski is a contemporary artist occupied with photography, drawing, sculpture, and installation. Being born during the Second World War, his work—in particular his early years—is strongly marked by the Nazi occupation in his country.

Boltanski left school at just twelve years old as he started to create plasticine sculptures and paintings before dedicating his life to predominantly photography and sculpture, followed by installation.

Boltanski fuses everyday life with high art, dealing with concepts of loss, memory, childhood, and death. His installations function as memorial monuments, and his sculptures as shrines or relics, contemplating lost lives, striking both the lingering effects of war and trauma on a collective societal level and personally.[8]

2. Dieter Roth

Born in 1930 in Hannover, Germany, and passed away in 1998 in Basel, Switzerland, Dieter Roth is one of the most influential and diverse artists of his generation, taking on artist editions in the form of books, printmaking, painting, sculpture, assemblage, installation, video art, films, slides, sound recording, poetry, writing, and music.

Uniquely, Roth collaborated with various artists to subvert the principle of authorship, creating art in collaboration with Richard Hamilton, Arnulf Rainer, and Hermann Nitsch, to name just a few. His artistic practice and life are marked by restlessness, avoiding the mainstream, and circling back and forth between studios, ideas, disciplines, and artworks. Characterized by transience, order, destruction, creativity, humor, and a critical mind, Dieter Roth examines the abject and the beautiful in his most versatile oeuvre.

The German artist was inspired to write poetry and create visual art during the Second World War with his foster parents in Zurich. The artist is self-taught but also had an apprenticeship as a graphic designer, where he learned printing techniques before abandoning those principles to find his position in art and balance in life.[9]

1. Marcel Broodthaers

Born in 1924 in Brussels, Belgium, and passed away in 1976 in Cologne, Marcel Broodthaers is one of the most influential conceptual artists and a truly charismatic figure. Broodthaers was only an artist during the last twelve years of his life, but he made an immediate and vast impact on the art world, influencing future generations of artists up to this very day.

The Belgian artist is best known for his conceptual and experimental multidisciplinary practice in which he explores the nature and meaning of language, using associations derived from words and images as a rhetoric strategy. His work takes form in poetry, film, books, writings, photography, slides, drawing, painting, sculpture, installation, and subtle performances.

Broodthaers studied chemistry at the Liberal University in Brussels but did not complete his studies due to the urge to pursue his literary endeavors. Broodthaers was an introverted, ambitious, quirky, and critical personality who failed in his first life as a poet but succeeded in his second as a self-taught artist.

Broodthaers was a non-conformist and even openly claimed his work was insincere. An attitude and literary foundation destined for greatness, making Broodthaers our number one most important self-taught artist of the contemporary era.