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DICTIONARY 

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Action panting
Action painting is a method of painting in which the paint shows the traces of a performed action. Characteristic of action painting is that the paint is often dripped, smeared or thrown onto the canvas.

Action painting was a widespread way of painting from the 1940s until the 1960s. This technique is evident in the American artist Jackson Pollock’s paintings from 1947 to 1950. Pollock’s technique was to place the canvas on the floor and move dancing around it while he dripped and threw the paint down onto the canvas.

Katharina Grosse

Allegory
In literature and art, an allegory is a constructed representation and thus only to be understood in a figurative sense.

Elina Brotherus

Appropriation art
Art movement emerging in New York in the early 1980s. The term describes artists who manifestly incorporate images (e.g. advertisements, art historical pictures, etc) or other objects into their own works. By placing other pictures in a new (art) context, the original meaning is altered and the advertising image's underlying principles and intentions are made clear to the onlooker. Appropriation art is characterised by an analytic and critical commitment to the contemporary culture and society.

Lars Arrhenius, Peter Holst Henckel, Jeff Koons

Avant-garde
From the French avant garde: vanguard, originally military troops paving the way for other groups of soldiers. The military terminology has been adopted by the art world.

The term is applied to a number of disparate significant and radical currents in art that emerged in the early twentieth century. It includes pictorial art, theatre, film, poetry, dance, etc. Common to the avant-garde art was an attack on the prevalent art which was criticised of being reactionary and bourgeois. The avant-garde, on the other hand, was deliberately shocking and challenging. Despite an intellectual and elitist form the intention was for the avant-garde's goals and ambitions to gain a foothold and reach the masses.

Subsequently post- and neo-avant-gardes have emerged, reusing the idiom of the avant-garde and continuing the criticism of existing art. However the original (historical) avant-garde's utopian visions of a new society have been played down.

Claus Carstensen/Superflex, Jean Arp, Clay Ketter, Damien Hirst