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30 Under 30: The Bright Young Stars of Art and Style

by Susan Adams

Artie Vierkant

Forbes Magazine

12/17/2012

Artie Vierkant, Digital Artist, 26

Trained in photography, Vierkant makes one-of-a-kind, abstract pieces suffused with light and bright colors, using Photoshop, a large-scale printer and pieces of layered plastic. He also works in video. He has had one-man shows in Los Angeles, New York and Richmond, Va., and has participated in some 20 group shows, including in London, Berlin, Amsterdam and Glasgow.

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For our second annual 30 Under 30 list, Forbes decided to tweak one of the categories. Last year’s “Art & Design” became this year’s “Art & Style.” For my colleague Hannah Elliott and me, this presented a fun, creative challenge. Which of our selections from last year deserved to remain, with the list’s emphasis on style? We looked for young people who were accomplished in the arts but who were also setting trends, especially in fashion design.

In the realm of art, we’ve included painters, sculptors, photographers, curators, dealers and bloggers. Several of our picks from last year, including Sam Falls and Adam Pendleton, have found even more success in 2012. Pendleton had his first solo show in the U.K. and was featured in museum exhibitions including a show at MoMA in New York City and at the prestigious La Triennale, held once every three years at the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. We also discovered some new names, like Nigerian-born portraitist Toyin Odutola, 27, painter and sculptor Lucien Smith, 23, and Artie Vierkant, 26, a digital artist who makes abstract pieces suffused with light and bright colors, using Photoshop, a large-scale printer and pieces of layered plastic.

For help, we turned to three judges. Jeffrey Deitch, the director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary art and a longtime curator, dealer and advisor who previously founded Citibank’s art advisory and finance service, was on our panel last year. This year we added a fashion designer, Bibhu Mohapatra, and an artist, Richard Phillips, who had a show of colorful, realistic large-scale oils of Lindsay Lohan in a bikini and roiling surf at Gagosian Gallery in New York this fall. Our judges made suggestions and vetted our lists, though inevitably, they weren’t familiar with all of our picks.

 

More information available at: http://www.forbes.com/pictures/mkl45jfhj/artie-vierkant-digital-artist-26-4/