Events from the year 1983 in art.

• Galería OMR commercial contemporary art gallery founded in Mexico City.
• High Museum of Art, designed by Richard Meier, opened in Atlanta, Georgia.
• Australian painter Sidney Nolan settles in Britain at Rodd Court in Herefordshire on the Welsh border near Presteigne.^[1]

• Archibald Prize: Nigel Thomson – Chandler Coventry

• Richard Beyer's Charles Frederic Swigert Jr. Memorial Fountain installed in Oregon Zoo, Portland.
• Completion of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude environmental artwork, Surrounded Islands, involving eleven islands in Biscayne Bay off Miami being surrounded by 6,500,000 square feet (600,000 m²) of pink fabric.^[2]
• Lucian Freud - Large Interior W11 (After Watteau)^[3]
• Completion of Richard Hamilton's diptych The Citizen.
• Cast of John Seward Johnson II's painted bronze Allow Me installed in Portland, Oregon.
• Marta Minujin - The Parthenon of Books.^[4][5]
• Jean Tinguely and Niki de Saint Phalle's kinetic artwork, the Stravinsky Fountain near the Centre Pompidou, Paris.

• Al-Mayassa bint Hamad Al Thani, Qatari chairperson of the Qatar Museums Authority
• Jérémie Iordanoff, French abstract artist
• Milo Moiré, Swiss performance artist

• 24 February – Roy Krenkel, American illustrator (b.1918).
• 3 March – Hergé, Belgian comics writer and artist (b.1907).^[6]
• 21 May – Kenneth Clark, English author, museum director, broadcaster and art historians (b.1903).
• 11 May – Ernst Thoms, German painter (b. 1896).
• 8 June – Rachel Baes, Belgian painter (b.1912).
• 28 June – Dorothy Annan, English painter, potter, and muralist (b. 1900)

• 14 July – Philip Zec, British editorial cartoonist (b. 1909).
• 12 August – Franz Radziwill, German painter (b. 1895).
• 18 August – Nikolaus Pevsner, German-born British art historian (b.1902).
• 28 October – Otto Messmer, American animator (b.1892).
• 5 November – Jean-Marc Reiser, French comics creator (b.1941).
• 17 November – John Russell Harper, Canadian art historian (b.1914).
• 2 December – Aart van den IJssel, Dutch sculptor (b.1922).
• 20 December – Bill Brandt, German-born British photographer and photojournalist (b.1904).
• 23 December – Colin Middleton, Irish artist (b.1910).
• 25 December – Joan Miró, Spanish painter, sculptor and ceramicist (b.1893).^[7]

• Michael Cardew, English studio potter (b.1901).
• Bernard Lamotte, French illustrator, painter and muralist (b.1903).
• Edward Wesson, English watercolour artist (b.1910).

• 1982 in fine arts of the Soviet Union
• 1983 in fine arts of the Soviet Union