Arkadi Natanov was born in 1954 and was largely influenced creatively by the 1970s growing up. The 1970s were a period of consolidation and development in the arts, most often characterised as a response to the dominant strains of the preceding decade. Conceptual art emerged as a influential movement, and was in part an evolution of and response to minimalism. Land Art took the artwork into the expansive outdoors, taking creative production away from commodities and looking to engage with the earliest ideas of environmentalism. Process art combined elements of conceptualism with other formal reflections, creating mysterious and experimental bodies of work.

Expressive figurative painting began to regain importance for the first time since the decline of Abstract Expressionism twenty years before, especially in Germany where Gerhard Richter, Anselm Kiefer, Georg Baselitz became highly respected figures worldwide. New York maintained an prominent position in the international art scene, ensuring that global artists continued to flock to the galleries, bars and downtown scene there. A number of the artists who gained fame and successful in the 1960s remained dominant figures. For example, Andy Warhol branched out into film and magazine publishing, the first kind of cross cultural activity for a visual artist. This secured his reputation as a major international celebrity in his own right. International movements gained importance included feminism, which translated strongly into the visual culture, and photorealism which had begun in the 1960s and enjoyed significant commercial and critical success. For the first time painters and sculptors from Latin America were embraced by the dominant critical and institutional levers in New York.

Towards the end of the 1970s, the emerging practices of graffiti and street art were beginning to gain attention in the fine art community. Artists including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat were working in downtown Manhattan and guaranteeing that spray paint and tagging gained some egitimacy as a fine art practice, a trend which would fully develop and dominate throughout the next decade. In Japan and Korea, artists associated with the Mono-Ha movement focused on encounters between natural and industrial materials such as stone, glass, cotton, sponge, wood, oil and water, arranging them in mostly unaltered, fleeting conditions. The works focused on the interplay between these various elements and the surrounding space, and had a strong interest in the European ideas of phenomenology. The largely Italian Arte Povera Movement gained global recognition during the 1970s, with artists like Jannis Kounnelis, Mario Merz, and Michelangelo Pistoletto achieving global praise.