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Designwire Online Exclusive: Rebel Yells

These forward-thinking artists run the gamut in installation art, costume design, found objects on canvas, and papier-mache.

Annie Block, Mark McMenamin, and Meghan Edwards -- Interior Design, 11/1/2008 12:00:00 AM

George Bernard Shaw got it wrong—youth isn’t always wasted on the young. At least it’s not with this quartet of under-40 forward-thinkers. They’re wasting no time putting their marks on the international art scene.

Socialism, feminism, and modernism melt like chocolate in the hands of Swiss sculptor Mai-Thu Perret. The San Francisco Museum of Modern Art goes behind the 32-year-old’s isms with “New Work: Mai-Thu Perret,” her first major solo exhibition in the U.S. , running November 21 to March 1, 2009 . Visitors should expect to rub shoulders with faceless papier-mâché mannequins, Perret’s handcrafted signature, including 2006’s Sylvania .

Marc Seguin has been called provocative, even subversive. Judge for yourself during Art Basel Miami Beach as Charest-Weinberg Gallery kicks off the 38-year-old painter’s show on December 5. The evidence: “Roadkill,” a series of drawings and paintings affixed with salvaged taxidermic animals, and “Popes,” his paintings (such as Infallibility-Benedictus XVI) based on official Vatican portraits, but rendered mainly in tar and feathers.

Tinged with surrealism and driven by diversity, 34-year-old Houston artist Trenton Doyle Hancock is equally at home designing stylized contemporary costumes and sets for the ballet as he is creating multilayered paintings from collaged paper, plastic, felt, fur, and paint. Catch his latest during his fourth outing at New York’s James Cohan Gallery from November 20 through January 3, 2009.

Light bulbs and electrical wires droop precariously into water-filled glass vases in Flood, one of the preconception-challenging, expectation-confounding works of British installationist Michael Cross. It’s among the highlights of “Resting Places Living Things: Designs By Michael Cross,” the 28-year-old’s first solo exhibition in the states, running until February 1, 2009 at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri.

To see works by each artist, click the link to the slideshow at the top of the page.