Obituaries The Art World Figures Who Died in 2025

Here’s a reminder of the art-world figures who died in 2025. Frank Gehry, Martin Parr, Joel Shapiro, David Lynch, Koyo Kouoh and Alan Yentob were among those who died in 2025.

David Lynch

David Lynch: Influential Director And Artist

David Lynch was not only an Oscar-nominated filmmaker but also a painter, actor, photographer and musician. He cultivated a Surrealist style in his visual media. He is best known for his films, including Eraserhead, Elephant Man, Blue Velvet and Mulholland Drive. Several of his films received Oscar nominations but were never winners. He initially trained in painting at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. His work was heavily influenced by the Anglo/Irish artist Francis Bacon.

Jo Baer Hard-Edge Minimalist Painter

Jo Baer, the celebrated American painter who revolutionised Minimalist abstraction before charting a bold course into figuration, died at 95. Pace Gallery, which has represented the artist since 2019, confirmed Baer’s passing on January 21.

Mel Bochner

Mel Bochner, who died aged 84 in February 2025, was an artist who spent a lifetime dismantling the idea of what art should be. Emerging from New York in the mid-1960s, he was there when repetition replaced gesture as the engine of meaning. Bochner was never interested in purity. Numbers, words, systems, swear words, philosophy—he treated them all as unstable materials, testing how sense collapses under pressure. His early conceptual works, built from measurements, photocopies and deadpan propositions, quietly rewired what art could be; his later paintings, thick with colour and profanity, showed that rigour and pleasure were not opposites. Bochner remained bracingly exacting, an artist who proved that, handled well, concepts, and still hit with the force of lived experience.

Jack Vettriano: Self-Taught Scottish Magic Realist Painter

Jack Vettriano, a popular Scottish painter who created memorable works reproduced by ‘Athena’ as posters in the 1990s, died in France at the Age of 73.

Though initially shunned by the art establishment, Vettriano’s legacy found its place in Scottish cultural history. His self-portrait, The Weight, was displayed at the Scottish National Portrait Gallery following its reopening in 2011. Major retrospectives of his work were held at Glasgow’s Kelvingrove Art Gallery and Museum in 2013 and Kirkcaldy Galleries in 2022, with the former attracting over 136,000 visitors and becoming one of Glasgow’s most successful exhibitions.

Max Kozloff: New York Art Critic And Artist 

Max Kozloff (1933–2025): A Visionary Critic, Artist, and Chronicler of Modernity New York, NY — Max Kozloff, the incisive critic, prolific writer, and quietly brilliant artist, passed away at his New York home on April 6, 2025, at the age of 91.

A towering figure in postwar American art criticism, Kozloff’s penetrating insights and dual life as both observer and creator left a mark on modern and contemporary art discourse.

Val Kilmer ©Artlyst

Val Kilmer: Actor And Artist (1959–2025)

Val Kilmer, a fiercely original actor and visual artist, has died at age 65. He was best known for his electrifying performances in Top Gun, The Doors, and Tombstone. He was a rare Hollywood figure who moved with equal conviction between blockbuster fame and deeply personal artistic exploration.

Zurab Tsereteli: Controversial Russian Artist 

Zurab Tsereteli, the Georgian-born sculptor whose colossal, often contentious works became fixtures of Moscow’s skyline and landmarks worldwide, has died at the age of 91.

A favourite of Soviet and Russian political elites, Tsereteli wielded immense influence as president of the Russian Academy of Arts and a prolific state-sponsored artist—his legacy as polarising as his towering statues.

Dara Birnbaum: Media Art Pioneer And Broadcast Image Deconstructor 

Dara Birnbaum (1946–2025), who passed away last week, spent five decades laying siege to the apparatus of television, rewriting its language from within, and—crucially—holding a mirror up to the coded myths of popular culture.

Koyo Kouoh

Koyo Kouoh, Visionary Curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale, 

Koyo Kouoh, the visionary director and chief curator of Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (Zeitz MOCAA), has died at age 57. Kouoh, recently appointed curator of the 2026 Venice Biennale, was a transformative force in contemporary art, championing African perspectives on the global stage.

Alan Yentob: Arts Broadcaster And BBC 1 Controller 

Alan Yentob, the respected BBC broadcaster, documentary filmmaker, and arts champion, has passed away at the age of 78. Over a career spanning five decades, he became one of British television’s most influential figures, leaving an enormous mark on the British cultural landscape.

Joel Shapiro: Sculptor 

Joel Shapiro (1941–2024), the American sculptor whose deceptively simple wooden figures pulsed with life, tension, and wit, died on Saturday in Manhattan at 83. Shapiro’s work—lean, kinetic, and charged with emotional resonance—stood as a quiet rebellion against the cold rigours of Minimalism. His sculptures, often resembling stick figures caught mid-motion, balanced precariously between grace and collapse, exuberance and despair. They were, in essence, human—achingly so.

Leonard A. Lauder: Visionary Art Patron 

Leonard A. Lauder (1933–2025): the venerable collector, philanthropist, and driving force behind the Estée Lauder empire, has died at 92. A titan of industry and a custodian of modernism, Lauder’s legacy extends far beyond the boardroom, leaving his mark on museums, artists, and the very fabric of cultural philanthropy.

Arnaldo Pomodoro: The Alchemist of Bronze 

The Italian sculptor Arnaldo Pomodoro has passed away at the age of 98. Pomodoro died at home in Milan on Sunday, the eve of his 99th birthday. Born in 1926 in Morciano di Romagna, Italy, Pomodoro emerged as one of the most innovative sculptors of the 20th century, transforming metal into poetic meditations on time, decay, and human endeavour. His work—marked by intricate, fractured surfaces that reveal hidden geometries—bridges the ancient and the avant-garde, earning him a place among the greats of modernist sculpture.

Sir Brian Clarke: Visionary of Contemporary Stained Glass

Sir Brian Clarke, whose restless experimentation and driving ambition updated stained glass from an ecclesiastical craft into a powerful contemporary art form. Described early in his career as the “rock star of stained glass,” Clarke combined the theatricality of 1970s London with a deep and scholarly engagement with craft, architecture, and cultural memory. His death marks the end of a career that bridged the sacred and the secular, the monumental and the intimate, spanning more than five decades of restless innovation.

Peter Phillips, British Pop Art Trailblazer, 

Peter Phillips, a founding figure of British Pop Art whose vibrant, iconoclastic canvases helped define a new visual language for Post-War Britain, has died at the age of 86. Born in Birmingham in 1939, Phillips emerged from the Royal College of Art in the early 1960s alongside peers such as David Hockney, Allen Jones, and R.B. Kitaj. It was there, amid a rapidly shifting cultural landscape, that Phillips began constructing the bold, fractured idioms that would become the hallmark of British Pop. While others flirted with figuration or abstraction, Phillips dove headlong into the glossy vernacular of mass media—borrowing, distilling, and recomposing it into collages of machine parts, pin-ups, and commercial signage.

Doris Saatchi: The Silent Force Behind Britain’s Art Revolution

To speak of British art’s transformation in the 1980s without acknowledging Doris Saatchi is to tell half the story. Born Doris Lockhart in 1937, the Glasgow-raised advertising copywriter would become the less visible but equally formidable half of the Saatchi duo, and the seismic force reshaping contemporary art’s landscape.

Hilary Weston, influential patron of the arts, 

Hilary Weston, whose discerning eye and quiet generosity shaped Canada’s cultural landscape, has died at 83. A business leader, philanthropist and former Lieutenant Governor of Ontario, she was equally revered in the art world for her support of artists and institutions.

Sylvain Amic, Director of the Musée d’Orsay,

Sylvain Amic, recently appointed director of the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, has died suddenly at the age of 58. The news was confirmed on Sunday by France’s Culture Minister, Rachida

Terry Farrell: Architect of Postmodernist Fantasy 

Terry Farrell, who has died aged 87, was one of the most conspicuous figures in British postmodernism – a designer unafraid of spectacle, contradiction and unapologetic play. His architecture, always charged with theatre, remains among the most recognisable…

Milton Esterow, Pioneering Investigative Art Journalist, 

Milton Esterow, the formidable journalist who brought rigour, clarity, and an investigative edge to art reporting, has died in New York at the age of 97. A former New York Times reporter and the force behind the reinvigoration of ARTnews in the 1970s, Esterow

So Catwoman: The Female Face of Punk 

So, Catwoman, a Punk style icon of the 1970s, has died at the age of 70.  With her shaved skull flanked by two sharp black tufts of hair — feline, defiant — she became one of the most recognisable women in British punk. Her look and the attitude that came with it…

Pam Hogg, Scottish Fashion Designer, Artist, and Musician,

Pam Hogg, the Scottish designer, artist, musician and renegade spirit who spent four decades blowing holes in the polite boundaries of British fashion, has died. Her family announced the

Frank Gehry, Architect of the Impossible, 

Frank Gehry, the Canadian-American architect who spent more than half a century bullying gravity into improbable shapes and coaxing cities into believing in spectacle again, has died aged 96. 

Martin Parr ©Artlyst

Martin Parr, British Photographer Of Everyday Life, 

Martin Parr, the photographer who spent more than four decades pointing his lens at Britain’s sunburn, bad sandwiches, bravado, boredom and brittle optimism — often all in the same frame — has died aged 73. His passing closes the shutter on one of the most…

Amos Poe: Punk Chronicler Of The Blank Generation 

The filmmaker Amos Poe has died in New York, aged 76, after a battle with cancer. Poe was never a figure who courted the limelight. His work thrived in between scenes, between movements, between ownership and erasure — and his place in American film history remains oddly provisional for someone who helped define a moment so completely.

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