Top 50 · Contemporary figuration
The figure always comes back
Fifty painters who have renewed the portrait, the body, the story and the visible world since the post-war period.
Contemporary figurative painting designates neither a unique style nor a simple return to realism. After 1945, it developed in London around Bacon, Freud, Auerbach and Kossoff, was renewed in the United States with Neel, Katz or Marshall, then spread to homes as different as Leipzig, Madrid, Beijing, Lagos, Antwerp or Vienna. Some artists start from the living model, others from photographs, archives, myths or media images. This classification evaluates historical importance, pictorial invention, influence over several generations and the capacity of each work to give a new form to human experience.
The contemporary figure does not copy the visible: it questions the way in which images, bodies and memories are constructed.
An open family
What is contemporary figuration?
It brings together practices that maintain a recognizable link with the body, portrait, landscape, object or scene. This link can be precise, distorted, fragmentary or almost dissolved. The challenge is not to faithfully imitate the world, but to use painting to reveal its physical, social and psychological tensions.
Multiple homes
London, New York, Leipzig, Madrid, Beijing and the diasporic scenes
The London School gave decisive importance to the living model and the material. New York developed social portraiture, postmodern editing and a new history painting. Leipzig reinvested the political imagination of East Germany, while Spain, China and the African or diasporic scenes expanded the subjects, memories and traditions mobilized.
Classification method
Influence, invention, outlook and historical significance
The ranks combine four criteria: importance in the history of painting since 1945, originality of pictorial language, influence on other artists and the work's ability to renew our understanding of the body or story. Notoriety alone is not enough, any more than technical virtuosity isolated from any project.
The major figures
Top 10 - The painters who redefined the figure
From Bacon to Doig, these ten artists maintained or reinvented the presence of the body and the visible world when abstraction, photography and conceptual art seemed to move the painting.
#1
Francis Bacon
Bacon locks his figures in cages, flat areas and almost clinical spaces. Her deformed bodies never give up human presence: they make her more vulnerable, more physical and more difficult to forget.
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#2
Lucian Freud
Freud transforms the posing session into a long-term experience. Its dense paste describes the skin, fatigue and weight of bodies without flattery, but with such sustained attention that each model acquires monumental dignity.
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#3
David Hockney
Hockney connects the graphic clarity of pop art to a very personal observation of loved ones, swimming pools and landscapes. His work proves that figuration can integrate photography, collage, video and digital drawing without losing its sensuality.
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#4
Gerhard Richter
Richter blurs family, historical or media photographs to question the trust placed in images. Between optical precision and erasure, his figurative paintings make memory an unstable territory.
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#5
Jenny Saville
Saville enlarges the body until it fills the canvas and refuses the canons of beauty which have long disciplined him. Compressed flesh, plunging views and carnal painting give his models a power that goes beyond the frame.
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#6
Marlene Dumas
Dumas paints from photographs that she slows down, dilutes and charges with ambiguity. Faces of children, celebrities, dead or desired bodies become liquid presences where the intimate meets the politics of the gaze.
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#7
Alice Neel
Neel observes his neighbors, friends, activists, families and artists with warm frankness. Its nervous contours and bare spaces record both the social position of the model and its mood at the time of pose.
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#8
Paula Rego
Rego depicts tales, memories, domination and resistance in images with almost theatrical tension. Its heroines are never decorative: they occupy space, conspire, suffer and fight back.
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#9
Georg Baselitz
Baselitz reversed his figures at the end of the 1960s to prevent the subject from becoming a simple story. The body remains recognizable, but the inversion requires you to first look at the color, touch and construction of the painting.
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#10
Peter Finger
Doig starts from ordinary photographs to construct mental landscapes crossed by strangeness. Canoes, houses and silhouettes seem suspended between memory, cinema and dreams, in a slow painting with very elaborate surfaces.
Read the Wikipedia entryLink to the French Wikipedia articlePortrait, realism and the London School
Ranks 11 to 20 - Watch reality for a long time
The portrait, the nude, the city and photographic memory become laboratories: resemblance is no longer enough, we must also render time, matter and the tension of a presence.
#11
Balthus
Balthus maintains a classic composition in the heart of the 20th century while establishing silent and disturbing situations. Its interiors, streets and adolescent figures give everyday life the enigmatic density of a fixed scene.
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#12
Alex Katz
Katz simplifies faces, clothes and landscapes into large, bright areas. This economy, close to posters and cinema, captures modern sociability without renouncing the precision of a long-exercised look.
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#13
Fernando Botero
Botero expands bodies, objects and architecture to create an instantly recognizable world. Beneath the apparent good nature of the volumes, he also approaches political violence, religious power and Colombian memory with serious irony.
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#14
Wayne Thiebaud
Thiebaud applies generous material to the cakes, windows, people and streets of San Francisco. Its colorful shadows transform the most familiar objects into luminous constructions, both popular and rigorously composed.
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#15
Frank Auerbach
Auerbach painted the same designs and neighborhoods in London for decades. It scratches, starts again and condenses until a few thick lines carry the energy of a presence rather than its mere resemblance.
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#16
Leon Kossoff
Kossoff works the city and the living model in heavy material, often taken up to the point of exhaustion. Its stations, swimming pools, churches and portraits make London feel like a dense, unstable and deeply lived organism.
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#17
Philip Pearlstein
Pearlstein removes his heroic poses and traditional symbols from the nude. The bodies, sometimes cut by framing and surrounded by objects, are observed as complex shapes in a concrete space and without imposed narration.
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#18
Antonio Lopez Garcia
Lopez Garcia returns for years to an interior, a tree or a view of Madrid in order to follow its exact light. Its precision is not photographic: it measures time and the almost imperceptible changes in reality.
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#19
RB Kitaj
Kitaj assembles painting, literature, politics and Jewish memory in compositions close to montage. His expression "London School" also provided a critical framework for post-war British figurative painters.
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#20
Neo Rauch
Rauch combines workers, architecture, uniforms and fragments of propaganda in scenes whose logic remains deliberately incomplete. East German history returns to it like an industrial dream with muted colors.
Read the Wikipedia entryLink to the French Wikipedia articleMontage, history and neo-expressionism
Ranks 21 to 30 - Fragmented stories and active surfaces
These painters reintroduce myths, history, cinema, archives and ample gestures. The figurative painting accepts mental collage, irregular supports and deliberately incomplete stories.
#21
Luc Tuymans
Tuymans paints already high-profile images - cinema, television, archives - in a pale palette and a quick touch. This seemingly cold distance reveals how history and violence fit into mundane images.
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#22
Anselm Kiefer
Kiefer confronts German history with poetry, mythology and materials in transformation. Straw, lead, ash and paint make the figure or landscape a surface of memory, heavy but never closed.
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#23
Eric Fischl
Fischl places unease at the heart of America's middle-class swimming pools, bedrooms and gardens. His characters seem surprised in a moment that the viewer should perhaps not see, between desire, embarrassment and threat.
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#24
David Hall
Salle superimposes images from the history of art, advertising and photography. Instead of resolving their contradictions, he constructs paintings where several visual registers simultaneously compete for meaning.
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#25
Julian Schnabel
Schnabel paints on velvet, tarpaulins, broken plates or found supports so that the surface participates in the subject. His portraits and figures combine gestural breadth, popular culture and an assumed taste for material fragility.
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#26
Francesco Clemente
Clemente circulates the body between Naples, New York and India. Self-portraits, metamorphoses and signs borrowed from several traditions make up a nomadic figuration where identity remains mobile and contradictory.
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#27
Odd Nerdrum
Nerdrum boasts ancient techniques and an imagination located outside the immediate present. Its travelers, shipwrecked and isolated bodies inhabit austere landscapes which contrast artisanal slowness with the rhythms of contemporary art.
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#28
Miquel Barcelo
Barcelo thickens, digs or cracks paint to the point of bringing out animals, markets, seabed and landscapes. His stays in Mali reinforced a practice attentive to the climate, local materials and the transformations of life.
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#29
Yan Pei-Ming
Yan Pei-Ming constructs large portraits with a reduced palette and a very visible touch. Mao, heads of state, strangers and members of his family share the same scale, which confronts public image and intimate memory.
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#30
Liu Xiaodong
Liu paints workers, migrants, friends and displaced communities on site. Its direct realism does not transform the models into symbols: it records their gestures, their environment and the social upheavals that pass through them.
Read the Wikipedia entryLink to the French Wikipedia articleIdentities and global scenes
Ranks 31 to 40 - Represent for several stories
From Beijing to Lagos and from Bogota to New York, the figure becomes a place where collective memory, diaspora, race, gender, power and the right to appear in art history are negotiated.
#31
Zeng Fanzhi
Zeng moves from tense hospital bodies to famous masked figures, then to gestural landscapes. In each period, the elegant surface reveals the anxiety produced by modernization and social roles.
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#32
Zhang Xiaogang
Zhang draws inspiration from family portraits from the Maoist era to paint almost uniform faces. A stain, a look or a subtle difference nevertheless cracks the collective image and makes private memory visible.
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#33
Kerry James Marshall
Marshall places black figures at the center of formats and genres long dominated by white narratives. Domestic scenes, gardens, workshops and history paintings become the places of a fully constructed presence.
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#34
Kehinde Wiley
Wiley uses poses from court painting to represent black models encountered in the street or chosen by casting. Decorative motifs invade the figure and displace the visual codes of authority.
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#35
Amy Sherald
Sherald paints his models on colored backgrounds and uses a range of grays for the skin. This decision dismisses chromatic realism in order to concentrate the gaze on the pose, the clothing and the social construction of the portrait.
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#36
Njideka Akunyili Crosby
Akunyili Crosby composes interiors where painting, drawing and photographic transfers intertwine Lagos and Los Angeles. Intimate scenes make visible a diasporic identity made of layers, memories and shared references.
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#37
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye
Yiadom-Boakye invents black characters without a direct model or biographical story. Painted quickly in a chosen palette, they seem to belong to a larger story that the painting deliberately leaves open.
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#38
Toyin Ojih Odutola
Ojih Odutola treats the skin as a territory of lines, streaks and light. His portraits and narrative cycles imagine families, classes, and alternate worlds that shift immediate readings of race and power.
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#39
Gérard Garouste
Garouste rereads the Bible, Cervantes, Dante or Rabelais without obediently illustrating their texts. His contorted figures and metamorphoses make painting a tool for interpretation, doubt and critical return to the founding stories.
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#40
Faith Ringgold
Ringgold unites painting, storytelling and quilt to tell the black American experience from a female perspective. Its textile borders and texts give the image the strength of a story transmitted, contested and reinvented.
Read the Wikipedia entryLink to the French Wikipedia articleThe figure today
Ranks 41 to 50 - Body, community and new narratives
The last positions show a fully contemporary figuration: conscious of ancient images, but free to integrate satire, queer identity, bodily autobiography and political memory.
#41
Cecily Brown
Brown makes bodies appear and then disappear in a quick, dense and sensual painting. The figuration is discovered in fragments, between quotes from ancient masters, abstract energy and scenes of desire.
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#42
Elizabeth Peyton
Peyton paints artists, friends, writers and historical figures in small, bright formats. The intimate scale and fluid touch assume admiration while giving the models a fragility far removed from the official portrait.
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#43
Nicole Eisenman
Eisenman mixes scholarly references, humor, queer culture and group scenes. His clumsy or melancholic characters describe contemporary ways of being together without idealizing the community.
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#44
John Currin
Currin adopts the virtuosity and distortions of mannerism to paint contemporary figures. Technical elegance makes his images deliberately uncomfortable, between admiration, caricature and criticism of the conventions of taste.
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#45
George Condo
Condo dismantles the classic portrait by combining several expressions and points of view on the same face. His fictional characters seem familiar, grotesque and deeply human.
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#46
Michael Borremans
Borremans paints with a precision inherited from the old masters of characters engaged in actions impossible to explain. The sober decor and controlled lighting transform each scene into an ambiguous ritual.
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#47
Claire Stool
Tabouret works from photographs of groups, children, couples or herself. Its acidic colors and frontal gazes make the portrait a space where belonging and isolation remain in tension.
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#48
Adrian Ghenie
Ghenie mixes historical figures, archive images and material accidents. The face becomes blurred under scrapings and drips, as if the painting were testing what remains visible after the disasters of the 20th century.
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#49
Maria Lassnig
Lassnig paints not the appearance of the body, but the areas she feels from the inside. Her self-portraits in dissonant colors give direct form to pressure, emptiness, vulnerability and aging.
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#50
Miriam Cahn
Cahn paints frontal bodies, luminous or almost transparent, confronted with war, desire and migration. The apparent simplicity of the gesture gives each figure an urgent, sometimes tender, often disturbing presence.
Read the Wikipedia entryLink to the French Wikipedia articleSources and extensions
See the figure in public collections
Museums allow works, their formats and contexts to be directly compared. These resources complete the classification with notices, exhibitions and reference collections.
Read on Alpha Reproduction
Contemporary figuration is not a step backwards
These fifty journeys show, on the contrary, a painting capable of absorbing photography, cinema, the archive, political struggles and global circulations. The figure remains recognizable, but it is never neutral: it carries a history of the gaze, of social conventions and of the images which preceded it.
From the worked flesh of Freud and Saville to the stories of Rego, Marshall or Ojih Odutola, from the patient realism of Lopez Garcia to the montages of Salle and Rauch, each artist offers a different answer to the same question: how to make a human presence still active in a world saturated with images?
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