Top 20 Most Famous Female Painters Today

Throughout art history, there have been numerous tremendous female painters from the Early Modern era up to this very day—think of Artemisia Gentileschi, Elisabeth Louise Vigée Le Brun, and Angelica Kauffman, to more recently Hilma af Klint, Frida Kahlo, and Helen Frankenthaler. True icons that have defined and influenced art history. However, who are the most famous living female painters, shaping contemporary painting as we know it today?

As a result, we have conducted a complete survey to identify the top twenty most influential—or rather, most pertinent—female painters of the 21st century. And—as always, when assembling these top lists for our articles, we have created a reasoned anthology using objective art scientific data instead of presenting a subjective and personal list. In doing so, the analytical research tool of Artfacts is our starting point, ranking artists by measuring their pertinence in the art world in terms of exhibitions at significant institutions or featuring in renowned art collections.

Please note that the selected artists are also eligible for this list when working in different media. However, we have ensured that with every selected artist, painting plays an essential part in their oeuvre. Therefore, we are pleased to present the top twenty most famous female painters today, from Amy Sherald to Yayoi Kusama.

20. Amy Sherald

Born in 1973 in Colombus, Georgia, the United States of America, and working and residing in New York City, Amy Sherald is a contemporary painter best known for her intimate portraits of African-Americans today. By engaging with the history of both fine art photography and portraiture in painting and beyond, Sherald’s arresting portraits tackle issues of race, discrimination, and representation of Black life in America and American art history. As a result, a complex and subtle debate emerges between the artist and the sitter, the painting and the viewer, and the subject and American society.

First Lady Michelle Obama appointed Amy Sherald to paint her portrait—an official commission for the National Portrait Gallery in Washington D.C. She was also the first female African-American to win the grand prize at the Outwit Boochever Portrait Competition from the same National Portrait Gallery. As a result, she has participated in numerous institutional exhibitions. She is featured in renowned collections such as the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, and many more.[1]

19. Jenny Saville

Born in 1970 in Cambridge, England, residing and working in Oxford, Jenny Saville‘s painterly practice is marked by the body and the perception or experience of the body. Influenced by both classical figuration and modern abstraction, Saville depicts the body in all its beauty and sorrow, shifting its shape to grotesque proportions and sensually painted flesh—reminiscent of Rubens’ voluptuous Baroque nudes. Her distinctive visual language and painterly virtuosity, predominantly working in oil, emphasize her fascination for the imperfections of flesh and its societal connotations and implications, resulting in captivating portraits, most often large in scale.

Jenny Saville is a member of the Young British Artists (YBA). However, instead of a multidisciplinary practice such as Tracey Emin or Damien Hirst, Saville’s artistic practice is characterized by figurative painting in all its purity and glory. She has had institutional solo exhibitions at the Museo di Palazzo Vecchio in Venice, Italy; the Scottish National Gallery in Edinburgh, Scotland; the Norton Museum of Art in Florida, the United States of America; and the Museo d’Arte Contemporanea in Rome, to name just a few. For further reading, please read our artist spotlight on Jenny Saville here.[2]

18. Tala Madani

Born in 1981 in Tehran, Iran, residing and working in Los Angeles, the United States of America, Tala Madani is a contemporary artist occupied with painting, but also animation, or video. One encounters a critical combination of both slapstick humor and a wide range of contemporary critique—reflecting on issues such as political authority, power imbalances, gender and identity, the representation of people in art and life, or everyday topics such as motherhood. Her distinctive figurative language is marked by a radical morphology, depicting people as chubby, bald, naked, or deformed, and an omnipresent affinity for movement, speed, and sequence—hence her use of animation and video in her artistic practice.

The beams of light resonating in her painterly practice and the fluidity of the body have proven to be tremendously successful, resulting in an utterly impressive exhibition history in her early forties. Think of the institutional solo exhibitions at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the United States of America; the Start Museum in Shanghai, China; the Mori Art Museum in Tokyo, Japan; the Moderna Museet in Malmö and the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Sweden. Madani also participated in the 16th Istanbul Biennial, Istanbul, Turkey, and the Whitney Biennial 2017 at the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the United States of America—to name just a few highlights of her illustrious career so far.[3]

17. Dóra Maurer

Born in 1937 in Budapest, Hungary, where the artist continues to work and reside, Dóra Maurer examines notions of change and displacement in her multi-disciplinary conceptual practice—encompassing drawing, printmaking, photography, video, and, of course, painting. Trained as a graphic artist, Maurer’s geometric abstraction of shaped, colorful, abstract pictures examines the interplay between internal and external spatial factors—actively contributing the similar trends in painting at the time, think of the irregularly shaped canvases in post-painterly abstraction with Kenneth Noland or Ellsworth Kelly, or even Lucio Fontana’s Spatialism.

Emphasized by the effects of color to transform the superimposition of the space of her paintings, Maurer’s tableaus have sculptural plasticity to them, in which various forms seem to hover in space, even though they are painted on a single plane. As a result, Dóra Maurer was one of the most influential figures in the Hungarian avant-garde—but was often overlooked in art historiography due to the dominance of American abstraction. However, her illustrious career proves she has earned her place to be among these iconic artists, having exhibited at the most significant institutions across the globe; think of the Tate Modern in London, the United Kingdom; the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the United States of America; or Whitechapel Gallery in London, the United Kingdom, among many others.[4]