artists

Banksy (born 1974, Bristol, England) is an anonymous British graffiti artist known for his acerbic and antiauthoritarian art, often done in public places. Although he is particularly known for his stenciled art featuring policemen and rats, over the years he has extended his practice to include installation and performance. Banksy’s art often appears unexpectedly, and it typically causes a flurry of media attention. He generally claims the work on social media after it has been spotted.

Cindy Sherman made a name for herself with her “Untitled Film Stills” (1977-1980), a series of self-portrait photographs of her acting out 20th-century pop culture female clichés. Her work examines women’s roles throughout history and in contemporary society and can be related to other modern artists and their abstract paintings of faces. Like some other popular artists today, she leaves her work open to interpretation. However, it is generally perceived as a feminist symbol.

Among the best contemporary artists, London-born painter Cecily Brown is often compared to popular artists of today like Willem de Kooning and Francis Bacon, and comparisons are also made between her large-scale modern art paintings of faces and bold brushwork and the works of Abstract Expressionists. Brown is credited as one of the main influences in the resurgence of painting at the turn of the millennium. 

Takashi Murakami, also known as the “Warhol of Japan”, is famous for his merging of fine art and popular culture, often referencing colourful anime and manga cartoons to create abstract paintings of faces. According to Murakami, “Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended.” It is the West that imposes such a severe hierarchy when it comes to art. Despite this, Murakami has been fully embraced in the Western art world as well, and his work is extremely in demand in the art world today.

The universe Nigerian-American Njideka Akunyili Crosby depicts in her work is, according to her, neither Nigeria nor America, but some other space, the space that every immigrant occupies. Akunyili Crosby creates colourful collage paintings which weave together intimate moments with commercial images from Nigeria, and reference Nigeria’s history and postcolonial present. The paintings live and breathe her trans- and multicultural fine arts fascination and identity. 

In his abstract paintings of faces and bodies, George Condo plays with the human form. Unique among modern artists, his paintings are graced with absurd, cut-up, often carnivalesque characters. Though references to the likes of Picasso, Matisse, Cy Twombly, Goya, and Velazquez are evident in his aforementioned abstract paintings of faces, there is no doubt that Condo has developed his own very significant style. 

Yoshitomo Nara is one of the central figures of the Japanese neo-Pop movement, creating paintings, drawings, and sculptures of child-like characters. These characters are deeply inspired by popular culture such as anime, manga, Disney, and punk rock. This influence results in images that are cute, yet also unsettling and sinister. His contemporary fine art concerns itself with finding an identity in today’s rapidly modernizing, violent world with its constant visual inputs.

Richard Prince is one of the modern artists infamous for appropriation. Prince reuses mass-media images in order to question and redefine notions of authorship and ownership. In his 1980’s “Cowboys” series, he re-photographed Marlboro ads in order to create close-ups of these mythical cowboys. In 2005, his Untitled (Cowboy) became the first re-photograph to be sold for more than $1 million at auction. More recently, he has become occupied with Instagram, stealing Instagram posts from several young women and selling them for vast sums. The controversy and lawsuits that ensue are, in a sense, part of Prince’s artworks.

Mark Grotjahn is an American artist best known for his abstract paintings of faces and geometric depictions. His contemporary painting style is said to strike a complex dialogue with the works of Kazimir Malevich, Barnett Newman, and Bridget Riley. Grotjahn often explores the vanishing point of perspective and works with bright colours. Demand for Grotjahn’s work has risen steadily in the past years.

Rudolf Stingel is an Italian artist based in New York. Since the ‘80s, Stingel’s contemporary art is concerned with interrogating his chosen medium of painting and subverting notions of authenticity, hierarchy, meaning, and context. He is interested in engaging the audience in a dialogue about their perception of contemporary art and including them in the process. After his 2007 show at the Whitney Museum in New York, Stingel’s prices went through the roof.

Christopher Wool first made a name for himself in the New York contemporary fine arts scene in the 1980’s. He is best known for his modern art paintings of words, his trademark white canvases with large black stencilled letters. Works like Apocalypse Now (“Sell the house sell the car sell the kids”) and If You (“If you can’t take a joke you can get the fuck out of my house”) made between $15 and 30 million at Christie’s auction house.

Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the most famous contemporary artists and American painters of all time, emerged from the early ‘80s American Punk scene in New York and swiftly became recognised in the international art circuit for work such as his abstract paintings of faces. His “naïf” art skilfully merged styles and traditions, creating collage-type works of contemporary art which often referred to his urban and African-Caribbean heritage. Basquiat’s modern art paintings are an example of how counter-cultural art practice can become a completely recognised, embraced, and celebrated form of art by the commercial masses. His abstract paintings of faces sell for the highest prices on the art market today.

John Currin, one of several famous American painters on this list, and photographed above while working on a portrait of his wife, is known for his seductive yet also repelling paintings of lustful women. He combines the beautiful and the grotesque, and influences ranging from Renaissance paintings to magazine ads from the ‘50s can be found in his often erotically charged works. It could be precisely his ability to create contemporary art that defies taste, that makes you both hate and love it, which has helped make Currin one of the most popular artists today, and maybe one of the greatest painters of all time.

One of many contemporary artists from China, Zhang Xiaogang’s haunting paintings engage with the notion of identity within the Chinese culture of collectivism. His work centres around the concept of family, taking inspiration from family photos from the Cultural Revolution period. It is as though through memory, Zhang is creating an extremely personal version of China’s history.

Jeff Koons is one of the most famous contemporary artists for turning banal objects into fine arts icons by utilizing concepts like celebrity, media, and commerce. In doing so, he holds up a mirror to society and reveals it in all its grotesque contradictions. His fascination with these subjects is also reflected in the commercial materials he uses. Whether you love him or hate him, he succeeded in taking the art world by storm and securing a permanent spot for himself as one of today’s most popular artists.

Damien Hirst is the most prominent member of a group of modern artists, the Young British Artists, which dominated the UK contemporary art scene in the ‘90s. Hirst is the UK’s richest living artist, and also broke the record for a one-artist auction in 2008 when he sold a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, for $198 million. He is most well known for his series of famous modern art depicting dead animals preserved in formaldehyde, and for his diamond skull, For the Love of God.

Zeng Fanzhi grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, an experience that marked him as an artist. His work points to his concern with modernity’s problematic history and the isolation and instability of contemporary life. He achieved recognition in the ‘90s for his Hospital and Meat contemporary painting series. His works can be recognised by his signature expressionistic style, figures with large heads and exaggerated features, and at times abstract paintings of faces. In 2013, Fanzhi’s 

Keith Haring’s pop art and graffiti-like work emerged from the New York City street culture of the ‘80s. He found himself in the thriving alternative art community outside of the galleries and museum institutions. His contemporary art came to life on the streets, in the subways, and in clubs. Haring wanted to devote his career to creating a truly public art. In the subway stations, on unused advertising panels, he found his medium to experiment and to communicate with the wider audience. Haring’s works remain extremely popular to this day, selling for up to approximately $6 million at auctions.