Contemporary Figurative Painting

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For several decades after 1950 critics often treated painting the human figure as old-fashioned. It never disappeared: in London Lucian Freud and Paula Rego kept painting bodies and stories, and by the early 1980s a wave of large, expressive figurative canvases had put the image back at the centre.

Since then it has divided into many approaches. Kerry James Marshall places Black figures in the grand formats of history painting, as in Past Times (1997). Luc Tuymans paints pale, washed-out images from photographs and film stills, often touching on violent histories. Jenny Saville paints enormous, heavily worked nudes, and Neo Rauch assembles dreamlike scenes from East German illustration styles. Zeng Fanzhi's Mask series of the 1990s showed masked, grinning figures with oversized red hands. Lynette Yiadom-Boakye invents portraits of people who do not exist. Look for how handling, source images and scale shape each figure.