Top 10 Most Iconic Paintings of the 21st Century

What are the most iconic paintings of the 21st century so far? It is not an easy question, especially as painting today no longer relies on pictorial or material innovation alone as a ticket to art historical legacy. Instead, it meanders in many directions, between the figurative and the abstract, the photographic and the naïve, the painterly and the sculptural, the intimate and the monumentally immersive. Some paintings became iconic because they offered a poignant response to a historical moment, others because of their sheer scale. Some are seen as the icing on the cake in the oeuvre of a living icon, while others circulate widely because they emerged as groundbreaking commissions. Either way, we can safely conclude that painting did not die in the second half of the 20th century—as the following ten works illustrate so vividly.

1. Luc Tuymans — Still Life (2002)

Luc Tuymans’s (b. 1958, Belgian) Still Life (2002) is, at first glance, disarmingly modest in everything but its scale: a fruit still life with a carafe of water in the background, based on a Cézanne watercolor. In the aftermath of 9/11, and in the context of Documenta 11, where the work was shown for the first time, one might have expected a violently dramatic picture from Tuymans, who was already known and lauded for his sharp political paintings. Think, for instance, of iconic works such as Mwana Kitoko (Beautiful White Man) (2000), depicting a contested royal arrival during Belgium’s colonial demise in Congo, or The Secretary of State (2005), reducing Condoleezza Rice as his subject to her social role. Instead, Tuymans fled toward the idyll with the calmest and most serene image imaginable, yet one imbued with trauma, disbelief, and alienation.

The scale of the painting is no coincidence, nor is it a hollow attempt to impress simply by painting on a monumental scale. Through that scale, Tuymans makes clear that Still Life is not merely a still life, but a history painting whose true subject remains veiled behind pale tones and hovering brushwork. As a result, he offers an image of stillness that feels all the more unsettling for its refusal to dramatize. Today, Still Life stands as a central work in Tuymans’s oeuvre. It belongs to the renowned Pinault Collection and has been exhibited several times since its debut at Documenta, including in his major solo exhibition La Pelle at Palazzo Grassi in Venice.

2. Julie Mehretu — Stadia II (2004)

In my humble opinion, Julie Mehretu (b. 1970, Ethiopian-American) has painted more than one great painting this century. However, Stadia II (2004) has arguably become one of her best-known works to date. Part of a series of three Stadia paintings dealing with mass spectacle, the work is built around a centrifugal structure of black lines that evokes an undefined yet recognizable architectural form—similar to a sports arena, an amphitheater, an opera house, or even a political chamber. For Mehretu, such spaces are never neutral. They are places where people gather, protest, pray, celebrate, or even riot, in large numbers.

Across this architectural skeleton, shards of color, dots, circles, and floating geometric forms seem to swirl through the composition like confetti, flags, slogans, or fragments of collective emotion. Some marks recall national symbols, corporate logos, or religious signs, while grey painterly gestures rise like plumes of smoke, suggesting that spaces of triumph and spectacle can just as easily become sites of unrest, violence, and ideological fervor. Mehretu has described her paintings as systems, even as “a whole cosmos,” in which the small marks function like characters or individual stories, each with its own agency. That tension between the collective and the individual is central to her practice, and is built up through multiple layers of maps, diagrams, traces, and gestures. By doing so, Stadia II is a dense and unstable image of contemporary life, in which power, movement, nationalism, and global interconnectedness all seem to unfold at once.

3. Cy Twombly — Untitled (2005)

Cy Twombly’s (1928–2011, American) Untitled (2005), from his legendary Bacchus series, is the largest work in that series and one of the most monumental paintings of the 21st century. Executed between 2003 and 2008, the Bacchus paintings are widely regarded as the culmination of Twombly’s fifty-year painterly practice. Named after the Roman god of winemaking, fertility, madness, and religious ecstasy, the series unfolds across three distinct sets, with Untitled (2005) belonging to the second and largest group. The painting was executed using a pole with a brush attached to it, drenched in rich vermilion paint. Its bright red spirals seem to climb and fall at the same time, while the paint runs down the canvas, suggesting the dripping of wine—or blood, especially considering that Twombly began the series shortly after the US invasion of Iraq in 2003, once again responding to contemporary political violence through references to classical history and literature, as he had done earlier with works related to the Vietnam War. 

The looping motif was already familiar from Twombly’s earlier work, especially the so-called blackboard paintings of the late 1960s, where repetition created the sense of a continuous field of energy. Here, that line returns on an epic scale. In the catalogue essay for the 2005 exhibition, Malcolm Bull described the abiding theme of the Bacchus paintings as a force of madness rising, like “a fire that rises from the depths of the sea.” Towering at more than 10 feet high and over 16 feet wide, this particular painting became one of the most expensive works from Twombly’s late career when it sold at Christie’s New York in 2017 for $46,437,500. Collectively, the series marks the culmination of Twombly’s long career, and in this fiery, physical, and monumental canvas, that culmination becomes especially clear.

4. Gerhard Richter — Cage 1–6 (2006)

It would not feel right to create a list of the most iconic paintings of the 21st century without including Gerhard Richter (b. 1932, German). In the wake of Tuymans’s Still Life, Richter’s September (2005), depicting the Twin Towers in a haze of smoke and rubble, would also have been a strong choice for this list. However, his Cage paintings 1–6 (2006) are arguably more representative of his work since 2000, consisting of a cycle of six monumental abstract paintings that have come to occupy a central place in his late oeuvre. Richter was listening to the music of John Cage while making them and later titled the series after the composer. Although there is no direct link between any individual canvas and a specific work by Cage, Richter had long been interested in Cage’s ideas about ambient sound, silence, and the controlled role of chance in composition. 

Conceived as a coherent group, the Cage paintings are among the most celebrated large-scale abstractions of the early 21st century. Their surfaces are dense, scraped, layered, and repeatedly reworked with large squeegees, as Richter pulls color across the canvas and allows the image to unfold before him. Chance is not avoided but actively folded into the process through successive acts of application, dragging, and removal. In these works, abstraction becomes less a matter of pure gesture than of accumulated decisions, revisions, and erasures. It is perhaps precisely this balance between authority and instability that made the series so memorable. The paintings have since been shown on numerous occasions, from Gagosian in Beverly Hills and New York to Tate Modern, where the full group is on display, and they also generated their own monographic publication, Cage: Six Paintings by Gerhard Richter.

5. David Hockney — Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007)

Another living icon that can’t be omitted from this list is, of course, David Hockney (b. 1937, British). Bigger Trees Near Warter (2007) is his largest work to date, measuring more than four and a half by twelve meters and consisting of fifty panels joined together to form a single painting. The work returns Hockney to his native Yorkshire with a view of a landscape near Warter, just before the arrival of spring, when the trees are beginning to come into leaf. Due to its scale and technical complexity, the painting took Hockney six weeks to complete. 

Working en plein air, he combined direct observation with a carefully structured process involving preliminary drawings, a sketched grid, and a digital photographic mosaic that allowed him to track the composition as a whole while painting its individual sections. In that sense, Bigger Trees Near Warter brings together the tradition of landscape painting and the possibilities of contemporary technology—an exemplary synthesis of Hockney’s ongoing investigation into image-making, observation, and the relationship between painting and other visual media.

6. Marlene Dumas — Dead Marilyn (2008)

Marlene Dumas’s (b. 1953, South African) Dead Marilyn (2008) takes one of the most overexposed faces of the 20th century and returns it to the fact of death. The painting is based on an autopsy photograph of Marilyn Monroe, an image Dumas came across while searching through old materials. In her hands, Monroe is no longer the polished icon of popular culture, courtesy of Andy Warhol, but a spectral and deeply uncomfortable presence. A shift that matters, and characteristic of Dumas’ approach towards second-hand imagery. 

Dumas has long worked with found images, often transforming photographs already burdened by public circulation into paintings of emotional and moral intensity. Here, the mythology of Marilyn is stripped of glamour and forced into another register altogether. Dumas herself connected the painting not only to Monroe, but also to “the end of a certain era,” linking the image to the broader political mood of the late 2000s. In that sense, Dead Marilyn is not a portrait of a dead celebrity, but a painting about disillusionment. It stages uncanny exhaustion, the inevitability of death, and the decay of beauty—or perhaps even the strange beauty of decay itself—within the afterlife of images.

7. Nicole Eisenman — The Triumph of Poverty (2009)

Nicole Eisenman’s (b. 1965, French-American) The Triumph of Poverty (2009) is a complex and allegorical painting made in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, responding to the economic downturn and the fraught political atmosphere in the United States. As is often the case with Eisenman, the work brings together sharp social observation, art historical reference, and a deliberately unruly mode of figuration. Its title is a direct nod to Hans Holbein the Younger’s lost 16th-century painting The Triumph of Poverty, immediately placing the work within a longer tradition of allegory, moral tension, and social critique.

The painting is also haunted by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, as a group of figures is lifted directly from The Blind Leading the Blind (1568), turning the scene into an image of a society moving blindly toward disaster. That reference matters, because Eisenman does not present poverty as an abstract condition, but as something lived, visible, and deeply collective. If works such as Beer Garden with AK (2009), Sloppy Bar Room Kiss (2011), or Morning Studio (2016) may feel more refined or visually seductive within her broader oeuvre, The Triumph of Poverty remains one of her most telling paintings of the late 2000s: a bitterly funny, unsettling, and painfully lucid portrait of a world already coming apart.

8. Mickalene Thomas — Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: les trois femmes noires (2010)

Mickalene Thomas’s (b. 1971, American) Le déjeuner sur l’herbe: les trois femmes noires (2010) is both a direct homage to and a pointed revision of Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863). Monumental in scale and composed in Thomas’s signature language of pattern, collage, rhinestones, and painting, the work presents three Black women in an ornate setting with a striking sense of confidence, sensuality, and presence. Originally staged as a photograph in the MoMA sculpture garden, the image was later translated into one of Thomas’s most celebrated paintings. 

The importance of the work lies not only in the art historical reference but in how decisively Thomas shifts its terms. A composition once associated with modern painting’s scandal is here reoccupied by three women who meet the viewer’s gaze with complete self-possession. The painting is theatrical and unapologetically beautiful, but also sharp in what it claims and rewrites. By inserting Black female presence into a canonical image from which it had been excluded, Thomas turns quotation into reassertion. 

9. Dana Schutz — Open Casket (2016)

Dana Schutz’s (b. 1976, American) Open Casket (2016) is one of the most controversial paintings of the 21st century. The work is based on the historic photographs of Emmett Till, the 14-year-old Black boy who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955, after his mother, Mamie Till-Mobley, insisted on an open-casket funeral so that the world would see what had been done to her son. Schutz made the painting in 2016, in a moment shaped by renewed media attention to racial violence in the United States, and first showed it quietly in Berlin before it appeared at the 2017 Whitney Biennial, where a storm broke loose. There, the painting immediately became the center of a fierce public debate and a much larger argument about race, representation, and the limits of empathy in art.

The outrage focused on one central issue: a white artist making an image of Black suffering from one of the most traumatic photographs in American history. Artist Parker Bright protested in front of the painting, wearing a shirt reading “Black Death Spectacle,” accusing Schutz of turning Black trauma into cultural capital, while Hannah Black’s open letter called for the work’s removal and even destruction. Schutz, for her part, insisted that the painting came out of grief and violence, and that she could never render the original photograph directly, neither ethically nor emotionally. For some, the work succeeds in confronting that grief and violence; for others, it should never have been made in the first place; and for others still, that very prohibition is what is most troubling. Either way, even if Open Casket is not Dana Schutz’s strongest painting, in my humble opinion, it remains one of the most charged case studies in recent painting, making its place in the history of 21st-century art difficult, if not impossible, to ignore.

10. Amy Sherald — First Lady Michelle Obama (2018)

Amy Sherald’s (b. 1973, American) portrait of Michelle Obama, originally titled Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama (2018), became iconic almost overnight. Commissioned for the Smithsonian’s National Portrait Gallery alongside Kehinde Wiley’s portrait of Barack Obama, it was historic from the outset: for the first time, an official portrait of a Black First Lady had been painted by a Black artist. Sherald depicts Michelle Obama seated against a pale blue background, her chin resting lightly on her hand, while the vast geometric dress takes over much of the canvas. Rendered in Sherald’s signature grisaille, the portrait feels crisp, self-possessed, and immediately recognizable. 

Sherald resisted the polished realism so often expected from state portraiture and chose a cooler, more distilled visual language, allowing mood, distance, and presence to do the work. Even beside Wiley’s widely discussed portrait of Barack Obama, Sherald’s contribution arguably lingered more powerfully as a painting. It felt fresher, more surprising, and somehow more intimate despite its monumentality. Never before had a First Lady’s portrait traveled quite like this one, circulating far beyond the museum through headlines, social media, and public conversation. People queued up to see it, and for once that response felt entirely justified.

Cover: Installation view of “Cy Twombly: Bacchus” (2005) at Gagosian in New York, US © Cy Twombly Foundation

Last Updated on April 17, 2026