Fluxus Art

Fluxus art was born in the 1960s as an international network of artists and composers who chose to break with the past, their main aim being to destabilise the bourgeois routines of art and life. For them, social goals assumed primacy over aesthetic ones. Early Fluxus events – including guerrilla theatre, street spectacles, electronic music concerts – were aggressive demonstrations of the libidinal energy and anarchy generally associated with the 1960s.

Rather than an alliance with popular culture, Fluxus artists sought to create a new culture, one fashioned by avant-garde artists, musicians and poets. Fluxus founder Maciunas said that the purpose of Fluxus was to ‘promote a revolutionary flood and tide in art, promote living art, anti-art’.

Shapero Modern is thrilled to offer prints and multiples by Fluxus artists such as Joseph Beuys and Nam June Paik.

Collecting artworks by Joseph Beuys can be demanding due to their very nature. Some were art installations, others live performances and even open public debates.

Institute for Cosmetic Surgery is a collectable multiple by Joseph Beuys that represents Beuys’ art ideology perfectly, Dr. Eugen Blume (a leading Beuys scholar) commented: "It’s an example of one of his ironic ideas - that we have to leave our fat cells behind. We have to be a little more intelligent".

Nam June Paik’s experimental, innovative, yet playful work has had a profound influence on today’s art and culture. He pioneered the use of TV and video in art and coined the phrase ‘electronic superhighway’ to predict the future of communication in the internet age.

Shapero Modern can offer the Nam June collector - or Fluxus collector in general – a work that captures the oft-returning theme of the artist’s work: Robot. Paik has always been fascinated by The Robot, creating his first radio-controlled robot in 1964. This later piece was created towards the end of his career, shortly before the 1993 Bakelite Robot that would be exhibited at the Tate.

Due to the interdisciplinary course of the Fluxus art movement, many artists also explored and took part in other art styles. For example, both the oeuvre of Italian artists Alberto Burri and Michelangelo Pistoletto developed over time, encompassing both the Fluxus and Arte Povera main ideologies.