Late 20th Century & Contemporary

American

From graffiti to gallery in two years. Fused street art, anatomy, African diaspora, jazz, and art history.

Oil stick, acrylic, spray paint, collage on massive canvases. Raw, urgent, deliberately unfinished.

Further reading: Basquiat (Taschen Basic Art) — Leonhard Emmerling

German

Painter between photography and abstraction. Photo-paintings blur the image; abstract works are pure squeegeed color.

Photo-paintings: oil blurred with dry brush. Abstractions: layers of paint dragged with giant squeegee revealing colors beneath.

Further reading: Richter (Taschen Basic Art) — Klaus Honnef

British

Painter of flesh at monumental scale — the body under pressure, surgery, gravity, transformation.

Enormous canvases (up to 10 feet). Thick impasto flesh built up with palette knife. Medical photography as reference.

Further reading: Jenny Saville — Richard Calvocoressi, Mark Stevens

British

Abstract-figurative painter — bodies dissolving into landscapes of paint. De Kooning's heir with old-master references.

Rapid, gestural oil painting. Figures emerge and disappear in swirls of color. References Rubens, de Kooning, Degas.

Further reading: Cecily Brown (Phaidon Contemporary Artists Series) — Courtney J. Martin, Jason Rosenfeld, Francine Prose

British-Ghanaian

Painter of imagined Black subjects — not portraits but fictions. Completed in a single day, each painting.

Works alla prima — each painting finished in one session. Muted, old-master-referencing palette applied with liquid fluency.

Further reading: Lynette Yiadom-Boakye: Fly In League With The Night — Isabella Maidment, Andrea Schlieker (Tate Britain)