One of the most popular formats at Contemporary Art Issue—both in article form and on YouTube—is top lists that present relevant selections of the most prominent artists today. These lists approach contemporary art from a specific angle—in this case, the most famous living artists working in painting. When creating such selections, I deliberately refrain from acting as a judge. The goal is not to impose a personal vision, but rather to embark on a journey of discovery and arrive at new insights. To facilitate this process, we turn to the analytical research tools and databases of ArtFacts. This platform attempts to measure cultural recognition through objective career data, which is processed both quantitatively and qualitatively using machine learning. The algorithm considers the type and prestige of exhibitions, the locations and institutions involved, an artist’s global presence, as well as their professional network—who represents them, who they exhibit with, and who collects their work. In short, it generates a ranking based on the strength of an artist’s curriculum vitae.

Of course, relying on an algorithm has its limitations as well as advantages. Yet this data-driven approach offers a consistent and factual foundation for mapping today’s art world. The result is a selection that reflects a relevant cross-section of contemporary artistic influence. The conclusions and interpretations, however, remain entirely up to the reader. Since the 1960s and 70s, the traditional categories in art have been cleared and rewritten more than once, to say the least. So, how do we define a painter? When going through the top hundred living artists, we have come across several artists who are occupied with painting but from a multidisciplinary artistic practice, such as Francis Alÿs (b. 1959) or Günther Brus (b. 1938). As a result, we have chosen artists with painting as one of their primary activities. Furthermore, the selected artists are predominantly part of an older generation of artists, as their historical significance and career longevity have enabled them to surpass their younger peers. In this case, if you would like to discover the most important painters born after 1975, make sure to read our article on the Top 10 Young Contemporary Artists You Need To Know next. Other lists that might interest you are our selection of the most famous female painters today or the top 20 abstract painters today. Feel free to discover those next. Or, if you are a painter yourself, feel free to discover our tools and services with industry-approved advice for artists here.

20. Nicole Eisenman

Nicole Eisenman (born 1965 in Verdun, France; raised in Long Island, New York) is celebrated for expansive, emotionally charged paintings, drawings, and prints that balance tenderness with biting wit. Drawing on art-historical touchstones from Impressionism and Expressionism to Picasso and underground comics, the canvases are populated with exaggerated, often androgynous figures—friends, self-portraits, and invented personalities—who smoke, embrace, brawl, daydream, or nurse beers at crowded tables. Eisenman’s bold colour, loose brushwork, and quick changes of scale lend these scenes an urgent, contemporary energy while quietly voicing questions about community, labour, desire, and the everyday anxieties of modern life.

Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 1987, Eisenman has steadily reframed what figurative painting can do, pairing art-historical reverence with a distinctly queer, satirical gaze. Their work is now held in major collections including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; and the Art Institute of Chicago, and it frequently appears in landmark surveys—the Whitney Biennial and the Venice Biennale both featured Eisenman in 2019. Recognition has followed: a MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship in 2015, election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2018, and recent travelling retrospectives What Happened (Museum Brandhorst, Whitechapel Gallery, MCA Chicago) and Heads, Kisses, Battles (Kunsthalle Bielefeld and venues across Europe).¹

19. Julie Mehretu

Julie Mehretu (born 1970 in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia) makes sweeping paintings and works on paper that feel like maps of a world in constant motion. Raised in Michigan and now based in New York, she layers airbrushed photographs of news events—protests, wildfires, ruined buildings—with transparent veils of paint and thousands of pencilled or brushed marks that dart, swirl and collide across the surface. The resulting images look both cosmic and cartographic, evoking city grids, weather systems and the charged energy of crowds while never settling into a single reading. Each layer records a different moment in time, so the finished work becomes a kind of palimpsest that holds memory, conflict and possibility all at once.

Drawing sits at the core of Mehretu’s practice: every slash, dot, or haze of color is a deliberate gesture that reflects her belief in mark-making as an act of agency. Early pieces borrowed the precise lines of architectural blueprints; more recent canvases begin with blurred media photographs that she calls “melted” images, almost erased yet still ghosting beneath frenetic networks of ink and acrylic. Often working on a monumental scale, printmaking and intaglio techniques feed the complexity of her mark language. At the same time, groupings of smaller etchings and drawings reveal the same restless energy in more intimate form.

Mehretu’s art has been shown around the globe, with a career survey travelling from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art to the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Walker Art Center (2019–21). In 2024 the Palazzo Grassi in Venice dedicated its galleries to Ensemble, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Australia will present her first Asia-Pacific exhibition. A MacArthur Fellow and outspoken advocate for social justice, she co-founded the Denniston Hill residency in upstate New York and supports initiatives to end mass incarceration. Whether on canvas, paper or in the public sphere, Mehretu’s layered abstractions invite us to navigate the overlapping forces—political, environmental, personal—that shape our shared landscape.²

18. Katharina Grosse

Katharina Grosse (born 1961 in Freiburg im Breisgau, Germany) transforms the very idea of painting by treating color as a force that can occupy almost any surface. Since the late 1990s, she has wielded an industrial spray gun to propel vivid pigments across walls, floors, ceilings, façades, earth, draped fabric, and everyday objects, turning entire buildings and landscapes into immersive chromatic fields. These in-situ works—such as her red-and-magenta intervention at MoMA PS1’s Rockaway! (2016), the 27,000-square-foot fabric environment The Horse Trotted Another Couple of Metres, Then It Stopped at Carriageworks, Sydney (2018), and the sweeping cloth installation Wunderbild at the National Gallery in Prague (2018)—disband the boundaries between painting, sculpture and architecture, allowing viewers to walk inside a painting that seems to bypass gravity and perspectival limits.

Parallel to these site-responsive projects, Grosse maintains a studio practice in Berlin. On canvases and free-hanging fabrics, she compresses the same velocity into smaller arenas, layering loops, mists, and stencilled negatives of blazing oranges, emeralds, and violets so that colour appears to hover three-dimensionally over white grounds. Spray painting lets her distance the gesture from the hand, embrace accident, and reach places a brush cannot, turning each picture into what she calls “a screen where thought becomes visible.” Educated at the Kunsthochschule Berlin-Weissensee and later a professor at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf (2010–18), Grosse continues to push the medium’s limits, showing that paint can be at once a material fact, an optical event, and an expansive way of thinking in color.³

17. Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin (born in 1963 in London, the United Kingdom) first became famous in the 1990s for installations and neons that turned her private life into public testimony—works such as My Bed and the tent Everyone I Have Ever Slept With made her a leading voice of the Young British Artists and a touch-stone of feminist art. For three decades she explored intimacy and memory through sculpture, video, text, embroidery, and autobiographical performance. Over the past ten years, however, Emin has shifted the centre of her practice back to the studio easel. Painting—briefly abandoned in 1990 because the smell of oil made her ill during pregnancy—has re-emerged as her primary language. Large, loose canvases and quick ink studies now dominate her output, placing her in direct conversation with the expressionist nudes of Edvard Munch, whom she has long admired. Urgent, fluid lines and bruised pinks, reds, and greys describe solitary female figures that hover between vulnerability and defiance; drips and erasures let the raw linen breathe like exposed skin. After life-saving cancer surgery in 2020, these self-portraits have taken on even greater physical and emotional intensity, confronting mortality while affirming the body’s resilience.

Major solo exhibitions—A Fortnight of Tears at the Royal Academy (2019), The Loneliness of the Soul at London’s Royal Academy and Oslo’s Munchmuseet (2020-21), and Like a Cloud of Blood at Carl Friedman Gallery, Margate (2022)—have centred almost entirely on this new painterly production. Critics now speak of Emin as “one of Britain’s most urgent figurative painters,” a role underscored by her appointment as Professor of Drawing at the Royal Academy (2011) and her commission The Doors (2023) for the National Portrait Gallery: forty-five bronze panels modelled from swiftly painted female heads. Emin works between London, Margate and the South of France, where she founded TKE Studios and an artist-residency school to support younger painters. Honoured as a Royal Academician, a CBE (2012), and most recently a Dame (2024), she continues to mine personal experience—love, loss, illness, desire—yet the vehicle is now overwhelmingly paint, deployed with the same candour and immediacy that once electrified her sculpture. Today Emin stands less as a former conceptual provocateur and more as a painter of visceral, eloquent images that speak to the universal fragility and tenacity of life.⁴

16. Albert Oehlen

Born in Krefeld, Germany, in 1954 and first noticed in the unruly Cologne–Berlin scene of the early 1980s, Albert Oehlen has made a career of keeping painting off balance. After studying at the Hamburg Academy of Fine Arts, he joined friends such as Martin Kippenberger among the “Junge Wilde,” young artists who rejected tidy categories and polite technique. From that starting point he has turned the canvas into a testing ground where elegance and awkwardness, slick technology and raw gesture, color harmonies and visual noise collide. Oehlen works by setting himself rules—then gleefully breaking them. One series may restrict the palette to acidic reds and greens; another begins with billboard-scale inkjet prints that he smothers in spray paint; his famed Tree paintings weave meandering black branches through vaporous zones of blended color. He has mixed abstraction with cartoon fragments, slapped computer-generated grids next to shaky brushwork, and embraced what he calls “bad” painting: drips, smears, garish hues, and purposely clumsy figures that keep the eye alert and the medium alive.

Whether using traditional oils, collage from advertising, or pixels plotted in design software, he treats every tool as a way to ask what a painting can still be—and how ugly, unruly, or hysterical it must sometimes get to stay free. Over four decades his work has appeared in major exhibitions worldwide, including surveys at the New Museum in New York, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, and a critically acclaimed presentation at the 2019 Venice Biennale. Oehlen lives and works in Switzerland and the German Alps, continuing to hammer away at painting’s limits so that, as he puts it, “delicacy and coarseness, color and vagueness, and a base note of hysteria” can occupy the same restless surface.⁵

15. Marlene Dumas

Marlene Dumas (born in Cape Town, South Africa, in 1953 and based in Amsterdam since 1976) has spent more than forty years rethinking what a painted portrait can be. Starting with photographs clipped from newspapers, art-history books, film stills, or her own snapshots of friends and family, she translates ready-made images into loose, fluid figures that hover between the public persona and the private self. Faces blur, bodies fade in and out of focus, and thin veils of grey, brown, blue, or bruised pink stain the canvas or paper like memories that will not settle. Dumas’s subjects range from political icons and movie stars to newborn babies, war victims, and lovers caught mid-embrace. Rather than providing likenesses, she uses paint’s liquidity to ask how identity is formed, exposed, or concealed—questions first sharpened by her experience of apartheid-era South Africa and later broadened to global debates on race, sexuality, and power. The result is an art of empathy and unease: spectral images that feel at once intimate and disturbingly universal.

Major museums have traced this evolution in large retrospectives—The Image as Burden (Stedelijk Museum, Tate Modern, Fondation Beyeler, 2014-15) and Measuring Your Own Grave (MOCA Los Angeles, MoMA New York, 2008-09) among them—while more focused projects have paired her work with Edvard Munch, responded to Charles Baudelaire’s poetry, or installed a permanent altarpiece in Dresden’s Annenkirche. She represented the Netherlands at the 1995 Venice Biennale and returned to the Biennale’s central pavilion in 2015. Honours include the Düsseldorf Art Prize (2007), the Rolf Schock Prize (2011), the Johannes Vermeer Award (2012) and the Hans Theo Richter Prize for Drawing (2017). Her paintings and drawings now reside in collections such as the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Tate, London; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam. Despite this international acclaim, Dumas continues to paint on an intimate scale—each work a fresh negotiation between image and emotion, history and personal memory.⁶

14. Heimo Zobernig

Heimo Zobernig (born 1958, Mauthen, Austria) has spent four decades testing the rules of art—and showing how easily they bend. Trained at both the Academy of Fine Arts and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna, he moves fluently between painting, sculpture, video, performance, set design, architecture, graphic layout and the printed book. Minimalism, Constructivism, monochromes, grids and other pillars of 20th-century abstraction supply much of his raw material, but Zobernig treats them with a mix of rigor and play: colors slip from canvas to theatre-style curtains, hard-edge geometry reappears as lighting rigs or stage flats, and catalogues are re-edited until the usual hierarchy between artwork, text and design collapses.

Exhibitions chart this restless method. Early appearances at documenta 9 (1992) and X (1997) set the tone; since then solo surveys have filled venues such as Kunsthaus Bregenz, Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid, Kunsthalle Zürich, Museum Ludwig in Cologne and MIT’s List Visual Arts Center, while in 2015 he transformed the Austrian Pavilion at the Venice Biennale into a walk-in colour field. Group shows range from the Centre Pompidou and Stedelijk Museum to the Whitney Museum and New Museum. Zobernig has been honoured with the Otto Mauer Prize (1993), the City of Vienna Prize for Fine Art (1997), the Frederick Kiesler Prize for Art and Architecture (2010) and the Roswitha Haftmann Prize (2016). Works by him belong to public collections including MAK Vienna, MAMCO Geneva, Kunsthaus Bregenz and Museum der Moderne Salzburg. Whether on canvas, in print or across an entire gallery, his practice keeps asking how art’s conventions are built—and how they might be rebuilt, one sly shift at a time.⁷

13. Miriam Cahn

Miriam Cahn (born in 1949 in Basel, Switzerland) first gained notice in late-1970s Switzerland with charcoal murals drawn directly onto motorway pillars—an early sign of the physical, performance-inflected approach that still shapes her practice. Trained as a graphic artist at Basel’s Gewerbeschule, she came of age amid the feminist and performance movements of the 1960s–70s and soon began using her own body as both subject and tool: painting on the studio floor, sometimes nude or blindfolded, to short-circuit conscious control and let instinct guide the mark. Throughout the 1980s Cahn filled vast sheets of black paper with warships, fighter jets, televisions, and other icons of conflict and male-dominated power, wielding charcoal and soot in gestural actions that fused drawing and performance. International invitations followed in quick succession—Documenta 7 (1982), a breakthrough solo at Kunsthalle Basel (1983), and the Swiss Pavilion at the 41st Venice Biennale (1984).

In the mid-1990s she made a decisive shift from monumental monochrome drawings to equally intuitive painting. Color, inspired in part by Michelangelo Antonioni’s film Red Desert, became a carrier of psychological charge: luminous reds, pinks, and violets pick out breasts, lips, eyes, or wounds, imbuing her figures—human, animal, hybrid—with tenderness and vulnerability. Bodies, war, home, landscape, and the porous border between dream and waking recur across paintings, pastels, watercolours, photographs, and installations; each image is less a literal depiction than a “mind-picture” that transforms media images into personal testimony.

Major retrospectives have traced this evolution: I AS HUMAN (Kunstmuseum Bern/Haus der Kunst Munich/Museum of Modern Art Warsaw, 2019); ME AS HAPPENING (Kunsthal Charlottenborg, 2020; The Power Plant, Toronto, 2021); Ma pensée sérielle (Palais de Tokyo, Paris, 2023); and READING DUST (Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam, 2024–25). She has also appeared in Documenta 14 (Kassel and Athens, 2017), the 21st Biennale of Sydney (2018), and the 59th Venice Biennale (2022). Honours include the Käthe Kollwitz Prize, the Oberrheinischer Kunstpreis, the Rubens Prize of the City of Siegen (2022), and the Kaiserring of Goslar (2024). Works by Cahn belong to Tate Modern, MoMA New York, Museo Reina Sofía Madrid, Kunstmuseum Basel, and the Pinault Collection, among many others. Across five decades she has maintained a singular, corporeal language—one that confronts violence and vulnerability while insisting on the raw, emotive power of drawing and paint.⁸

12. Sean Scully

Sean Scully (born 1945, Dublin; raised in South London) is a leading voice in contemporary abstraction whose art merges the emotional force of European painting with the physical presence of American Minimalism. Best known for large canvases built from horizontal and vertical bands, stacked blocks, and shimmering stripes, he treats color as a living substance, layering rich earth tones or luminous hues until they pulse with light and feeling. Although painting is central, Scully also works in watercolour, pastel, printmaking, and increasingly in monumental steel and stone sculpture that translates his colour-driven structures into three-dimensional form.

Scully studied at Croydon College of Art, earned a BA from Newcastle University in 1972, and held Harvard fellowships before settling permanently in New York in 1975. Early travels—to Morocco in 1969 and repeatedly to Mexico from the 1980s—sharpened his palette and inspired the celebrated Wall of Light series, whose stacked rectangles echo sun-soaked masonry. Throughout five decades he has shifted abstract painting away from the cool detachment of Minimalism toward a language of human relationships: rectangles abut, touch, or pull apart like bodies in dialogue, conveying harmony, tension, memory, and loss.

Major retrospectives and touring exhibitions have appeared at institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Phillips Collection, Washington, DC; National Gallery, London; Albertina, Vienna; and, notably, the first career-length survey by a Western artist in China (Shanghai Himalayas Museum and CAFA Beijing, 2014). Recent solo shows have ranged from the Philadelphia Museum of Art (2022) to Houghton Hall in Norfolk (2023). His works belong to museum collections worldwide, including MoMA, Tate, Guggenheim, Hirshhorn, Walker Art Center, and the Irish Museum of Modern Art. A Royal Academician and multiple honorary-degree recipient, Scully now divides his time between New York and London, continuing to explore what he calls “intimacy and monumentality” through colour, structure, and the shifting rhythms of human connection.⁹

11. Arnulf Rainer

Arnulf Rainer (born 1929 in Baden, Austria) is a key figure of post-war European abstraction and a pioneer of Art Informel, the movement that introduced spontaneous, lyrical gesture into non-representational painting. Early contact with Surrealism sparked his lifelong interest in dreams and the subconscious, ideas he channels through a distinctive practice he calls “overpainting.” Beginning in 1952, Rainer started laying dense, rhythmic strokes over his own canvases—and soon over the work of other artists or found photographs—allowing fragments of the underlying image to flicker through successive layers. The resulting tension between concealment and revelation turns each picture into a record of both destruction and homage, a silent extension of what he describes as an inner monologue.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s Rainer pushed this method into new territory: “blind drawings” made with closed eyes; frenetically overworked self-portrait photos titled Face Farces and Body Poses; and meditative Proportion Studies that reflect the geometric rigor of Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers. From the 1980s onward he increasingly incorporated Christian symbols—crosses, crucifixions, illuminated manuscripts—using their associations with suffering, death, and transcendence to deepen the spiritual undercurrent of his art. For Rainer, the slow accretion of paint is itself a contemplative act, one he likens to religious practice in its gradual return to “peace and invisibility.”

Rainer has exhibited widely for more than six decades. He represented Austria at the 1978 Venice Biennale, showed in Documenta 5, 6, and 7, and has been honored with major retrospectives at the Centre Pompidou (1984), Guggenheim Museum New York (1989), Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam (2000), Albertina Vienna (2014), and Lentos Kunstmuseum Linz (2017). A dedicated Arnulf Rainer Museum opened in his hometown of Baden in 2009, and a permanent room of his work has been on view at Munich’s Pinakothek der Moderne since 2002. Now dividing his time between Vienna, Bavaria, and Tenerife, Rainer continues to explore the possibilities of overpainting as a visual meditation on memory, erasure, and the unseen.¹⁰

10. Ugo Rondinone

Ugo Rondinone (born 1964, Brunnen, Switzerland) is an internationally acclaimed artist who lives and works in New York. Trained at Vienna’s Hochschule für Angewandte Kunst, he has spent three decades shaping a highly personal vocabulary that blends painting, sculpture, video, performance, and large-scale installations. Borrowing imagery from both ancient myth and contemporary pop culture, Rondinone pairs humor with poetic reflection to explore nature, time, and the cycles of human emotion. His practice ranges from monumental stone “mountains” stacked in rainbow colors to quietly glowing suns, rough-hewn bronze moons, trance-like sound pieces, and life-size cast-wax figures lost in daydream. Whether bathed in vivid fluorescence or rendered in weathered earth tones, these works invite viewers to slow down and contemplate interior states as well as the wider environment.

His painterly practice is marked by minimal horizon landscapes, circle targets, and cloud gradients. Rondinone represented Switzerland at the 52nd Venice Biennale (2007) and has since held solo exhibitions at institutions such as the Schirn Kunsthalle (Frankfurt), Storm King Art Center (New York), Petit Palais (Paris), Belvedere 21 (Vienna), Dia Beacon (New York), Museum Boijmans van Beuningen (Rotterdam), and Museo Tamayo (Mexico City). His art is included in major public collections, among them the Centre Pompidou, Paris; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa; and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney.¹¹

9. Leiko Ikemura

Leiko Ikemura (born 1951 in Tsu, Mie Prefecture, Japan) is a Berlin-based artist whose paintings, drawings, watercolours, sculptures, and glass works move fluidly between Eastern and Western traditions. Across four decades, Ikemura has explored ideas of transition, cultural crossing, childhood innocence, and the liberation of the female body. Her imagery often features dream-like landscapes where human, animal, and plant forms merge, along with recurring hybrid figures—most notably the “usagi,” a girl-rabbit spirit introduced after the 2011 Tōhoku earthquake and Fukushima disaster. Rendered in luminous colour or tender clay, these beings convey both fragility and resilience while echoing influences that range from East Asian sansuiga painting and Japanese folklore to Surrealism and post-war European abstraction.

Ikemura’s work has been shown in major solo exhibitions worldwide, including retrospectives at the National Art Center, Tokyo; Kunstmuseum Basel; Sainsbury Centre for Visual Arts, Norwich; Georg Kolbe Museum, Berlin; and Museo de Arte de Zapopan, Mexico. Recent projects include the traveling show HEREDIUM (South Korea, 2024) and large-scale installations at the Museum für Asiatische Kunst, Berlin. Her art is held by institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Albertina, Vienna; Kunstmuseum Bonn; Museum of Contemporary Art Tokyo; and the National Museum of Modern Art, Osaka.¹²

8. Anselm Kiefer

Anselm Kiefer (born 1945 in Donaueschingen, Germany) is renowned for monumental paintings, sculptures, installations, and artist’s books that probe the weight of history, myth, and collective memory. After early studies in law, literature, and linguistics, he attended art academies in Karlsruhe and Düsseldorf—forming an important connection with Joseph Beuys—before beginning a career devoted to the tangled legacies of post-war Germany and the universal cycles of destruction and renewal. From the Old and New Testaments, Kabbalah, Norse mythology, and Wagner’s Ring cycle to the poetry of Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan, Kiefer layers diverse cultural references into dense, atmospheric works that refuse a single narrative and instead evoke the sedimented passage of time.

Material is as eloquent as imagery in Kiefer’s art. Lead, concrete, charred wood, ash, sand, straw, broken glass, and even scorched books appear on canvases that he often leaves to weather in rain or treats with acid, allowing nature and entropy to become collaborators. Lead recurs as what the artist calls “the only material heavy enough to carry the weight of human history,” while flashes of gold leaf or sprouting seeds hint at metamorphosis and hope. These richly textured surfaces, coupled with inscriptions in his distinctive script, transform myth, literature, and personal memory into layered visual meditations.

Since the late 1970s Kiefer’s work has been shown widely, including retrospectives at the Art Institute of Chicago and three other U.S. museums (1987–89), the Royal Academy of Arts in London (2014), and the Centre Pompidou in Paris (2015–16). Now based between Paris and his sprawling former studio estate, La Ribaute, in Barjac, France—opened to the public in 2022—Kiefer continues to revisit and transform his motifs: scorched landscapes, cosmic maps, towers of scorched books, and alchemical symbols. By allowing materials to age and narratives to overlap, he creates works that confront the trauma and grandeur of human history while insisting on the possibility of renewal.¹³

7. Imi Knoebel

Imi Knoebel (born Klaus Wolf Knoebel in 1940, Dessau, Germany) is a key figure in post-war abstraction whose work probes painting and sculpture down to their basic building blocks of form, color, and material. Trained under Joseph Beuys at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf, Knoebel found early inspiration in Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square, which convinced him he could “start at nothing.” His breakthrough piece Raum 19 (1968) is a mutable collection of 184 unpainted wood and fiberboard shapes—frames, cubes, stretchers—that can be reconfigured each time it is shown, exposing the raw components of artistic construction. Through the late 1960s he produced vast series of pencil-line drawings, projected geometric outlines onto walls, and created stark black-and-white canvases that reduced painting to simple vertical bars.

After the mid-1970s, prompted in part by the death of close friend Blinky Palermo, Knoebel embraced color in works such as the 24-panel suite 24 Farben – für Blinky (1977). He has since explored color’s possibilities on plywood “sandwich” paintings, scarcely visible white Drachen pieces that seem to hover on the wall, and large cut-out shapes painted on aluminium or joined into room-like installations. Knoebel has exhibited in three editions of Documenta (1972, 1977, 1982) and in major solo surveys at Dia Beacon, Neue Nationalgalerie Berlin, Kunstmuseum Wolfsburg, and Museum Haus Konstruktiv Zürich, among many others. Still based in Düsseldorf, he continues to “do something radical,” distilling art to its essentials while finding fresh ways to engage space, light, color, and surface.¹⁴

6. Alex Katz

Alex Katz (born 1927, Brooklyn) is an American painter famed for his sleek portraits, bold landscapes, and unwavering focus on the “here and now.” Training at New York’s Cooper Union and Maine’s Skowhegan School in the 1940s, he forged a flat, sharply cropped style just as Abstract Expressionism dominated the art scene. Katz’s cool surfaces and pared-down lines—later seen as foreshadowing Pop Art—cast everyday subjects in high-definition color. Best known for large-scale images of friends, poets, dancers, and especially his wife Ada (a recurring muse since 1958), Katz paints primarily from life, distilling figures or blossoms against monochrome or softly graded backdrops.

Starting in the 1960s he expanded his canvases to billboard scale, devised freestanding “cut-out” portraits, and, in later decades, created panoramic Maine landscapes he calls “environmental” paintings. Recent work sequences multiple close-ups across a single canvas, evoking film strips and the tempo of contemporary media. Katz has completed public art projects from Times Square billboards to glass murals for the New York subway and has produced an extensive body of prints. With more than 200 solo exhibitions worldwide—including retrospectives at the Whitney Museum, Tate Liverpool, and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum—he remains a defining voice in contemporary representational painting. Katz lives and works between New York City and Lincolnville, Maine, still pursuing his goal of “painting the immediate present.”¹⁵

5. Ed Ruscha

Ed Ruscha (born 1937, Omaha and raised in Oklahoma City) is a leading figure of American Pop and Conceptual Art whose six-decade career spans painting, drawing, photography, film, and more than a dozen influential artist’s books. After studying at Los Angeles’s Chouinard Art Institute in the late 1950s, he traded Abstract Expressionist brushwork for the crisp graphics of billboards, movie logos, and road signs. Ruscha’s early canvases set isolated words or commercial emblems against radiant color fields, turning everyday language into enigmatic images.

Throughout the 1960s and ’70s he pushed the boundaries of art and design: photographing Twentysix Gasoline Stationsalong Route 66, turning Hollywood’s skyline into a single word, and experimenting with unconventional materials like gunpowder, hot sauce, and even Pepto-Bismol in his drawings. His later paintings fuse terse phrases, often in his own “Boy Scout Utility Modern” typeface, with hazy vistas of deserts, night streets, or mountain peaks—scenes that feel simultaneously majestic and deadpan. Ruscha has exhibited widely, from his landmark 1963 solo debut in Los Angeles to ED RUSCHA / NOW THEN, the 2023–24 retrospective at New York’s Museum of Modern Art and LACMA. His works reside in major collections worldwide, and his playful re-framing of words and images continues to influence artists, designers, and writers who seek poetry in the everyday.¹⁶

4. David Hockney

David Hockney (born 1937, Bradford, UK) is a pivotal figure in post-war art whose brightly colored images of swimming pools, California light, and intimate portraits have become icons of recent art history. After winning the Royal College of Art’s Gold Medal in 1962, he emerged as a key voice in British Pop Art and held his first solo exhibition the following year. Relocating to Los Angeles in the late 1960s, Hockney developed the flat, sun-soaked style that distinguishes his large canvases of domestic life and open landscapes. In November 2018, Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with two figures) was sold at Christie’s in New York City for a whopping 90 million dollars, temporarily dethroning Jeff Koons as the most expensive artwork by a living artist sold at an auction.

Restless experimentation runs through his six-decade career. He has explored media ranging from acrylics, drawing, printmaking, and photographic “joiners” to fax and iPad drawings, stage sets for opera, and research into the optical tools used by Old Master painters. This constant curiosity underpins his belief that “there is no such thing as failure—you just learn and go on.” Hockney’s work is held by major museums worldwide, including MoMA and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, Tate and the National Portrait Gallery in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris. Honored with nine honorary degrees and numerous awards—including Britain’s Companion of Honour—he continues to paint from his studio in Normandy, France.¹⁷

3. Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama (born 1929, Matsumoto, Japan) is a pioneering artist whose seven-decade career ranges across painting, sculpture, immersive installations, performance, film, design, and writing. Kusama is best known for her unique and colorful paintings—but also immersive installations and sculptures—of pumpkins and polka dots. She rose to prominence in the 1960s with her paintings depicting ongoing loops and polka dots she called “infinity nets,” dazzling the viewer and combining figurative imagery with minimal abstraction in these mesmerizing organic patterns. Kusama suffers from hallucinations and aims to examine psychological aspects and autobiographical elements in her works. After training in the rigorous Nihonga style, she moved to New York in 1958 and quickly became part of the city’s avant-garde scene with her vast Infinity Net canvases—endless lattices of painted loops inspired by childhood hallucinations—and provocative body-painting “happenings.”

Repeated dots, pumpkins, and soft-sculpture forms run through all of her work, expressing both personal obsession and a broader fascination with boundless space. Kusama represented Japan at the 1993 Venice Biennale and has since been the subject of major retrospectives at institutions such as Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, the Museum of Modern Art, and the Hirshhorn Museum. The Yayoi Kusama Museum opened in Tokyo in 2017, and large surveys—most recently Infinite Love at SFMOMA (2023–24) and 1945 to Now at M+ Hong Kong, Guggenheim Bilbao, and Serralves Museum—continue to travel globally. Honored with Japan’s Order of Culture (2016) and named one of TIME magazine’s most influential people, Kusama lives and works in Tokyo, where she continues to produce new series up to this very day.¹⁸

2. Georg Baselitz

Georg Baselitz (born Hans-Georg Kern in 1938 in Deutschbaselitz, Saxony) is a German painter, printmaker, and sculptor whose work has shaped post-war art since the early 1960s. Trained first in East Berlin, he was expelled in 1957 for “political immaturity,” moved to West Berlin’s Academy of Art, and adopted the name Baselitz after his home village. Rejecting both Socialist Realism and post-war abstraction, he developed a raw figurative style that draws on German Expressionism, Art Brut, and Surrealism, pioneering Neo-Expressionism in Germany, also known as the Neue Wilde. In 1969, Baselitz began painting motifs upside down, a method that preserves recognizable subjects while emphasizing their abstract qualities. From the late 1970s, he expanded his practice to monumental, rough-hewn painted wood sculptures, first shown at the 1980 Venice Biennale.

Throughout his career, Baselitz has continually re-examined his imagery. Major retrospectives have been held at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York (1995), Royal Academy of Arts, London (2007), Fondation Beyeler, Basel (2018), Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC (2018), Centre Pompidou, Paris (2021), and Museo di Palazzo Grimani, Venice (2022). Baselitz has represented Germany at the Venice Biennale (1980) and appeared in multiple editions of Documenta. Among numerous honors, he received the Golden Lion at the 1997 Venice Biennale and became the first living artist to exhibit at the Gallerie dell’Accademia, Venice, in 2019. Baselitz works between Lake Ammersee (Germany), Salzburg (Austria), and Imperia (Italy), maintaining a practice that persistently probes the tension between abstraction and representation while reflecting on history, memory, and the act of painting itself.¹⁹

1. Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter (born 1932 in Dresden, Germany) is widely regarded as one of the most influential painters of the last six decades. Trained first at the Dresden Academy of Fine Arts in East Germany, he left for West Germany in 1961—just before the Berlin Wall was built—and continued his studies at the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. There he joined fellow students Sigmar Polke, Konrad Lueg, and Manfred Kuttner in forming the short-lived “capitalist realism” group, which questioned both Socialist Realism and Western Pop Art. Since the early 1960s, Richter has explored the boundary between photography and painting. He began by translating newspaper clippings and family snapshots into canvases whose softly blurred surfaces suggest both memory and uncertainty. Over time he developed an unusually broad range of series and techniques—from the gray monochromes and color-chart grids of the late 1960s to his squeegee-dragged abstractions and monumental glass works.

Throughout, he has revisited personal and historical subjects: family photographs touched by the trauma of Nazi Germany, the Red Army Faction, the destruction of New York’s World Trade Center, and the Holocaust-related Birkenau cycle. Richter’s art has been the focus of major retrospectives at institutions such as the Centre Pompidou, Paris; Tate, London; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; and the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, which now houses a long-term display of 100 works on permanent loan from the Gerhard Richter Foundation. He has exhibited at Documenta more often than any other artist and represented Germany at the 1972 Venice Biennale. Among his many honors are the Golden Lion (Venice, 1997) and Japan’s Praemium Imperiale (1997).²⁰

Notes:

1. Hauser & Wirth, Nicole Eisenman consulted May 30, 2025. Anton Kern Gallery, Nicole Eisenman consulted May 30, 2025. ↩︎
2. Marian Goodman Gallery, Julie Mehretu consulted May 30, 2025. White Cube, Julie Mehretu consulted May 30, 2025. ↩︎
3. Gagosian, Katharina Grosse consulted May 30, 2025. Galerie Max Hetzler, Katharina Grosse consulted May 30, 2025. ↩︎
4. Xavier Hufkens, Tracey Emin consulted May 30, 2025. White Cube, Tracey Emin consulted May 30, 2025. ↩︎
5. Gagosian, Albert Oehlen consulted May 30, 2025. Galerie Max Hetzler, Albert Oehlen consulted May 30, 2025. ↩︎
6. David Zwirner, Marlene Dumas consulted May 30, 2025. ↩︎
7. Petzelf, Heimo Zobernig consulted May 30, 2025. Galerie Chantal Crousel, Heimo Zobernig consulted May 30, 2025. ↩︎
8. Meyer Riegger, Miriam Cahn consulted May 30, 2025. Galerie Wolff, Miriam Cahn consulted May 30, 2025. ↩︎
9. Lisson Gallery, Sean Scully consulted May 29, 2025. Thaddaeus Ropac, Sean Scully consulted May 29, 2025. Cheim & Read, Sean Scully consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
10. Thaddaeus Ropac, Arnulf Rainer consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
11. Esther Schipper, Ugo Rondinone consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
12. Lisson Gallery, Leiko Ikemura consulted May 29, 2025. Galerie Peter Kilchamnn, Leiko Ikemura consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
13. Gagosian, Anselm Kiefer consulted May 29, 2025. Thaddaeus Ropac, Anselm Kiefer consulted May 29, 2025. White Cube, Anselm Kiefer consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
14. White Cube, Imi Knoebel consulted May 29, 2025. Thaddaeus Ropac, Imi Knoebel consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
15. Thaddaeus Ropac, Alex Katz consulted May 29, 2025. Timothy Taylor, Alex Katz consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
16. Gagosian, Ed Ruscha consulted May 29, 2025. Sprüth Magers, Ed Ruscha consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
17. Pace Gallery, David Hockney consulted May 29, 2025. Richard Gray Gallery, David Hockney consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
18. Victoria Miro, Yayoi Kusama consulted May 29, 2025. David Zwirner, Yayoi Kusama consulted May 29, 2025. Gagosian, Yayoi Kusama consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
19. Gagosian, Georg Baselitz consulted May 29, 2025. Thaddaeus Ropac, Georg Baselitz consulted May 29, 2025. White Cube, Georg Baselitz consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎
20. David Zwirner, Gerhard Richter consulted May 29, 2025. Gagosian, Gerhard Richter consulted May 29, 2025. ↩︎

Last Updated on June 7, 2025