Edward & Nancy Kienholz American

Edward Ralph Kienholz (b. 1927 Washington, USA – d. 1994 Idaho, USA) in close collaboration with his artistic partner and wife Nancy Reddin Kienholz (b. 1943 California, USA – d. 2019 Texas, USA) were American installation artists and assemblage sculptors whose work was highly critical of aspects of modern life. Throughout much of their career, the work of the Kienholzes was more appreciated in Europe than in their native United States, though American museums have featured their art more prominently since the 1990s.

Art critic Brian Sewell called Edward Kienholz "the least known, most neglected and forgotten American artist of Jack Kerouac's Beat Generation of the 1950s, a contemporary of the writers Allen Ginsberg, William Burroughs and Norman Mailer, his visual imagery at least as grim, gritty, sordid and depressing as their literary vocabulary".