Sex, intimacy, and the nude have always occupied a central place in art history. From the voluptuously shaped fruits in Renaissance frescoes—subtle allusions to human desire—to the unabashed directness of Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde, artists have long used imagery to probe the complexities of the erotic and the intimate. Today, this tradition continues, but in ways that reflect our shifting cultural landscapes, anxieties, and freedoms. In this article, I focus on contemporary painters who have, in recent years, engaged directly with themes of sex, intimacy, and nudity. Their works do not merely reproduce art historical tropes, but rather challenge, subvert, and expand them—often blending tenderness with provocation, vulnerability with boldness. By spotlighting these voices, we see how contemporary painting continues to wrestle with one of art’s oldest subjects, bringing it into dialogue with the urgent questions of our time.
1. Helen Beard
Helen Beard (b. 1971, Birmingham, the United Kingdom) studied at Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design before working for fifteen years as an assistant art director in the film industry. Alongside this, she developed a practice in painting, collage, and needlepoint, creating works that explore the erotic through bold colour, shifting perspectives, and flat brushwork. Explicit erotic and pornographic images are visualized in bodily shapes of vivid color, creating radiant pictures in an unseenly bold manner.1
2. John Currin
John Currin (b. 1962, Boulder, Colorado, the United States of America) is known for paintings that merge classical techniques with provocative explorations of social and sexual taboos. Drawing on Old Master portraiture, pinups, pornography, and B movies, his work balances beauty and grotesque exaggeration, often depicting women in ways that are at once alluring, satirical, and unsettling. Currin studied at Carnegie Mellon University and later received his MFA from Yale University, where he shifted from abstract expressionist nudes toward figurative compositions infused with humor, irony, and eroticism. His practice has ranged from caricatured portraits and stylized figures to explicit depictions of sex acts combined with traditional still-life elements. Since the 2010s, his focus has turned to mannerist-inspired female nudes, often modeled on his wife, artist Rachel Feinstein, in which subtle distortions and elongations redefine classical forms.2
3. Oh de Laval
Oh de Laval (b. 1990, London, the United Kingdom) is a painter of Polish and Thai descent whose figurative compositions explore hedonism, human behaviour, and the psychological forces that drive desire. Influenced by film noir, French New Wave cinema, and the lives rather than the techniques of past artists, her work channels erotic expressionism through raw, unsettling imagery that captures licentious emotional undercurrents. De Laval cites Francis Bacon as an important influence, not for his style but for his embrace of risk and excess, and her self-declared manifesto emphasizes instinct, independence, and refusal of external validation. Her paintings serve as windows into pleasure, imagination, and selfhood, rendered in a vivid, divisive style that aligns with her belief in art as an uncompromising extension of the painter’s own life.3
4. Tracey Emin
Tracey Emin (b. 1963, London, the United Kingdom) has developed a multifaceted practice since the early 1990s, working across painting, drawing, printmaking, film, photography, installation, appliqué, sculpture, and neon. Known for her confessional style, Emin transforms personal experiences, memories, and emotions into works that are at once intimate and universal, often engaging with sexuality and feminist discourse. In recent years, her paintings have become the center of her artistic practice, in which her unfiltered attitude towards sex—think of seminal works such as the installation Everyone I Have Ever Slept With 1963–1995 (1995) up to her neon works such as Because I’m So Fucking Sexy, I Was Born Sexy, And I Will Die Sexy (2022)—and intimacy is presented in a powerful and direct manner through text and figure drawings on canvas.4
5. Jenna Gribbon
Jenna Gribbon’s (b. 1978, Knoxville, Tennessee, the United States of America) paintings explore the dynamics of seeing and being seen through intimate portraits of friends, family, fellow painters, and her wife. Often painted from her own perspective, these works invite the viewer to assume the artist’s position, experiencing both the act of looking and the intimacy of her subjects—sharing the most intimate and sexual moments of her personal life in a very direct and raw manner through paint.5
6. Doron Langberg
Doron Langberg (b. 1985, Yokneam Moshava, Israel) is a New York–based painter whose luminous, large-scale works explore intimacy, touch, and the complexity of relationships. His subjects range from queer love and sexuality to family, landscapes, and nature, unified by a sensuous use of paint that seeks to embody the presence of a “living person.” Langberg often begins by working directly from life, producing small studies that inform mood, palette, and composition. From these, he develops expansive paintings where figures emerge from or dissolve into textiles, interiors, or natural surroundings. Areas of bold detail coexist with passages of abstraction and indeterminacy, creating a dynamic interplay between subject and environment. This dissolving of boundaries reflects both psychological depth and a porous relationship between artist, subject, and viewer, offering what he describes as “a more empathic relationship.”6
7. Larry Madrigal
Larry Madrigal (b. 1986, Los Angeles, the United States of America) has developed a figurative practice that reflects on the precariousness of everyday rituals. His paintings balance humor, vulnerability, and chaos, capturing intimate moments where sex, struggle, beauty, and absurdity intersect. Drawing inspiration from artists such as Jan Steen, Madrigal describes his work as striving to create “a Madrigal moment”—snapshots of domestic life marked by tragic humor, earnest reflection, and raw honesty.7
8. Betty Tompkins
Betty Tompkins (b. 1945, Washington, D.C., the United States of America) is recognized for her uncompromising depictions of the female body and sexuality. Since the late 1960s, she has challenged taboos through her Fuck Paintings series, appropriating imagery produced for male consumption and reframing it within critical debates on representation, style, and scale. Describing herself as an “accidental dissident,” Tompkins has spent five decades confronting censorship while redefining how women’s bodies and sexual desire can be portrayed in art.8
9. Salman Toor
Salman Toor (b. 1983, Lahore, Pakistan) is known for figurative paintings that depict intimate, everyday scenes of imagined young, brown, queer men within contemporary urban life. His canvases balance tenderness and unease, portraying domestic spaces of safety and comfort alongside allegorical settings marked by anticipation, apprehension, and the tension of belonging. Central to Toor’s practice are themes of identity, vulnerability, and community within queer and diasporic experience. By both employing and destabilizing art historical and cultural tropes, he reflects on how difference is perceived, while revealing the anxieties and comedies that shape public and private life. Through these depictions of the ordinary and the memorable, Toor offers viewers a deeply relatable perspective that invites empathy through painting.9
10. Lisa Yuskavage
Lisa Yuskavage (b. 1962, Philadelphia, the United States of America) is widely recognized as one of the most original figurative painters of the past three decades. Combining representational and abstract elements, her work features a cast of characters rendered through color as the primary vehicle of meaning, creating paintings that are at once exhibitionist and introspective while challenging conventions of genre and viewership through intimate scenes and sexually-charged depictions of portraits of female figures.10
Notes:
- Helen Beard, About consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
- Gagosian, John Currin consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
- Unit London, Oh de Laval consulted August 21, 2025 ↩︎
- Xavier Hufkens, Tracey Emin consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
- Massimo De Carlo, Jenna Gribbon consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
- Victoria Miro, Doron Langberg consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
- Nicodim Gallery, Larry Madrigal consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
- PPOW Gallery, Betty Tompkins consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
- Luhring Augustine, Salman Toor consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
- David Zwirner, Lisa Yuskavage consulted August 21, 2025. ↩︎
Cover image: Installation view of “Jenna Gribbon: Light Holding” (2022) at Massimo De Carlo in London, the United Kingdom.
Last Updated on September 23, 2025
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About the author:
Sylvia Walker (b. 1986, US) is an art historian, essayist, art critic, and curator. After contributing to numerous publications, and curating exhibitions in the United States of America and beyond, she currently works as the assistant director of Contemporary Art Issue (CAI).
