Socially engaged art Roger Brown

"Roger Brown was an American painter and leading figure of the Chicago Imagist school alongside Barbara Rossi, Jim Nutt, Ed Paschke, and others. Known for his simply composed, vivid paintings featuring bold, often political subject matter, Brown rejected the trends of Minimalism and Conceptualism prevalent in his time. His work instead bears the influence of American Southern culture, especially folk art, machine-age design, and early comic strips. "I try to paint the things that everybody sees, things that are just a part of everybody's experience of life. Then I suppose it goes through a kind of personal transformation,” he observed, “but that is different from being totally involved with one's own internalized fantasies." Born on December 10, 1941 in Hamilton, AL, Brown initially studied to be a preacher at the religious David Lipscomb College in Nashville, but ultimately committed himself to visual arts and received both his BFA and MFA from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago. Today, his can be found in the collections of The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., and the Art Institute of Chicago, among others. The artist died on November 22, 1997 in Atlanta, GA after a long battle with HIV and AIDS."(artnet.com)

 

Pop artist and sculptor Gerald Laing

Gerald Ogilvie Laing (11 February 1936 – 23 November 2011) was a British pop artist and sculptor.He lived in the Scottish Highlands.Wikipedia
As one of the original wave of Pop artists Gerald Laing produced some of the most significant works of the British Pop movement. In London during the early 60s he pioneered the painting of enormous canvases based on newspaper photographs of models, astronauts and film stars. His 1962 portrait of Brigitte Bardot is an iconic work of the period and regularly features in major Pop retrospectives alongside Lincoln Convertible from 1964, a commemoration of the assassination of JFK.

 After a period living and working in New York he returned to the Highlands of Scotland in 1969 to concentrate on sculptural work. Initially exploring abstraction and sculpture in the landscape, he moved on to figurative sculpture with the Galina series. High profile public commissions during this period included the Twickenham Stadium figures and the bronze bas-relief twin dragons at the exits of London's Bank station. His portrait work included heads of Luciano Pavarotti, Paul Getty, Sam Wanamaker (at the Globe Theatre) and Andy Warhol.

 When the Abu Ghraib prison torture photographs began to appear in the press in 2003, Laing, a former British army officer, saw that his 60s starlets and all-American heroes had somehow become the perpetrators of horrific war crimes. This prompted him to return to a version of his early style depicting these one-time heroes of the American Dream in a grimmer contemporary light with the War Paintings series.
His return to painting also saw a return to the contemporary media images that inspired his early work, with new paintings depicting Amy Winehouse, Kate Moss and Victoria Beckham.(geraldlaing.com)