Famous artists

Ghenie smears twentieth-century history — Darwin, dictators, himself — into viscerally beautiful paintings that command record prices.

Artist and dissident: Ai turns sunflower seeds, Han urns and refugee life jackets into monuments of conscience.

Painting since the 1950s, Katz distils portraits and landscapes into flat, radiant immediacy — cool surfaces that influenced generations.

Kapoor bends space with mirrors, voids and pigment — from Chicago's Cloud Gate to the blackest black ever made.

Imhof's glass-and-steel performances — models, dogs, drones, doom — won the Golden Lion at Venice 2017 and made her a generational voice.

Kiefer confronts German history and myth in monumental paintings layered with lead, straw, ash and sunflower seeds. His studio complexes in France are artworks in their own right.

Gormley casts his own body to ask where a person ends and space begins — from the Angel of the North to figures staring out to sea.

Viola made video art sacred: slow-motion floods, fire and submersion drawing on mysticism and old-master painting.

Nauman turned the studio itself into art: neon wordplay, corridors, surveillance and discomfort. Few living artists are more influential.

Shiota weaves rooms shut with kilometres of red or black thread, entangling beds, keys and boats in webs of memory.

Wool's stencilled word paintings and silkscreened abstractions capture urban grit with cool precision — icons of late-twentieth-century painting.

Parker blows up sheds, flattens silverware and suspends the fragments mid-air — violence transformed into weightless wonder.

Iglesias builds thresholds — latticed corridors, sunken wells, bronze thickets of water — where architecture dissolves into nature.

Twombly's scribbled myths — chalkboard loops, blood-red peonies, Homeric names — bridge American abstraction and Mediterranean antiquity.

The definitive Young British Artist: a shark in formaldehyde, spot paintings, a diamond skull. Hirst made mortality into spectacle and became the most commercially successful artist of his generation.

Buren's 8.7 cm stripes have marked museums, palaces and streets since 1965 — art as a tool that reveals the place around it.

Britain's best-loved living painter, from the California pool paintings to iPad landscapes of Yorkshire and Normandy. A tireless investigator of how pictures are made.

Shrigley's deadpan drawings and absurd sculptures — a giant thumbs-up on Trafalgar Square's Fourth Plinth — make profound points while making you laugh.

Suh sews life-size, translucent fabric replicas of every home he has lived in — hauntingly beautiful meditations on migration and memory.

Chronicler of the American West and its words: gas stations, Hollywood signs and laconic phrases painted with deadpan cool since the 1960s.

The Basque master of iron and air: Chillida's combs of the wind grip the San Sebastián coast where sculpture meets sea.

Anatsui transforms thousands of bottle caps into shimmering metallic tapestries that fold African history, trade and craft into monumental beauty.

Antwerp-trained, Mexico City-based: Alÿs walks, pushes ice blocks and moves sand dunes — poetic actions with political undertow.

Baselitz turned his paintings upside down in 1969 so you would look at the paint instead of the subject — and kept doing it for half a century, becoming the towering figure of post-war German art.

Widely considered the greatest living painter, Richter has moved between photo-based blur paintings and radiant abstraction for six decades. His works regularly set auction records for a living European artist.

Wearing gives strangers a voice — and a mask: photographs and films about the gap between public face and private self. Turner Prize winner 1997.

Genzken's assemblages of concrete, mirror foil and shop-window mannequins anticipated how a generation now sees the city and itself.

Plensa builds heads and figures from letters, light and water — public sculptures that give cities places to gather and dream.

Tinguely built joyous, clattering machines that mock the machine age — some designed to destroy themselves in front of the audience.

Saville paints monumental flesh — bodies seen close, heavy and alive — renewing the grand tradition of figure painting for the present.

Mehretu layers maps, architecture and gesture into vast abstract paintings about migration, revolt and the modern city.

Grosse paints with an industrial spray gun across buildings, beaches and entire rooms — colour unleashed from the canvas.

Wiley paints Black men and women into the poses and splendour of old-master portraiture, most famously President Obama.

Marshall paints unapologetically Black figures into the grand genres of Western painting — history painting, portraiture, pastoral — correcting the canon.

Smith's sculptures and prints move between the body, fairy tales and the natural world — wolves, girls, stars — with fragile, visceral grace.

Lee Bul builds cyborgs, crystal cities and mirrored labyrinths — a science-fiction imagination grounded in Korea's turbulent modern history.

Bourgeois turned childhood wounds into spiders, cells and hanging figures — a seventy-year career crowned in her final decades.

Tuymans' pale, cropped paintings changed the course of figurative painting in the 1990s. He paints history — colonialism, war, power — through banal, unsettling images.

The grandmother of performance art: five decades of testing the body's and the audience's limits, from Rhythm 0 to The Artist Is Present.

Amsterdam-based Dumas paints the human figure from photographs, wet-in-wet, with unmatched psychological charge. One of the most influential painters of her generation.

Borremans paints like an old master gone eerie: velvet surfaces, theatrical light, and scenes that refuse to explain themselves.

Arte Povera pioneer: mirror paintings that pull the viewer in, and the Venus of the Rags — beauty confronting waste.

Cahn paints bodies glowing with rage and tenderness — war, flight, sexuality — with an urgency that has only grown over five decades.

Goldin's intimate photographs of her chosen family — lovers, friends, drag queens — redefined documentary photography. Subject of the film All the Beauty and the Bloodshed.

Leader of the New Leipzig School: dream-logic history paintings where socialist realism, romanticism and comics collide.

Cave's Soundsuits — wearable sculptures of buttons, twigs and sequins — began as armour after the Rodney King beating and became joyous, political icons.

From shooting paintings to the voluptuous Nanas and the Tarot Garden in Tuscany — Saint Phalle made feminist joy monumental.

Eliasson builds weather: artificial suns, rainbow walkways, waterfalls and fog corridors that make perception itself the artwork.

The painter of black — outrenoir — who spent seventy years drawing light out of darkness with ridged, gleaming surfaces.

Rist floods rooms with saturated video — bodies, flowers, water — turning museums into dreamlike immersive baths of colour and sound.

Whiteread casts the empty space inside and around things — rooms, houses, staircases — making absence solid and memory visible.

Kjartansson stages durational performances of heartbreaking repetition: a band playing one phrase for hours, nine screens of musicians alone together.

Van de Velde draws an invented autobiography in monumental charcoal scenes, extending it into films and cardboard props.

Scully's stacked stripes and walls of colour carry raw emotion in rigorous abstraction — one of the defining abstract painters of our time.

Hicks made thread a sculptural language decades before textile art's revival — cascades of colour from tiny weavings to museum-filling bales.

Turner Prize-winning artist and Oscar-winning director: McQueen's films — in galleries and cinemas — bear witness with unflinching patience.

Dean is cinema's great analogue poet: 16mm films of clouds, chalk drawings and portraits of artists in the last light of film itself.

Inventor of Superflat: Murakami fuses Japanese painting tradition, anime and luxury branding into smiling flowers and apocalyptic waves.

Schütte models the human condition in clay, steel and watercolour: monumental United Enemies, fragile women, architectural follies.

Düsseldorf School photographer of museums, jungles and machines — large-format images of how we look at the world.

Saraceno works with spiders, dust and air: floating sculptures and webs that imagine a post-fossil-fuel life in the atmosphere.

From My Bed to raw neon confessions and, latterly, ferocious paintings of the body — Emin turned her life into a shared language of longing.

Fischer makes sculpture that melts, rots or towers: wax figures burning like candles, bread houses, giant aluminium teddy bears.

Radical pioneer of feminist media art: EXPORT's street actions and expanded cinema of the late 1960s remain shockingly current.

Kentridge turns charcoal drawing into animated film, opera and theatre. His work processes South Africa's apartheid history with tragicomic poetry.

From club kids to abstract darkroom experiments to views from the edge of space — Tillmans expanded what photography can hold. First photographer to win the Turner Prize.

The most visited living artist in the world. Kusama has painted, sewn and mirrored her hallucinations of endless dots since the 1950s — her Infinity Rooms turn obsession into wonder.

Shonibare dresses headless mannequins in Dutch wax fabric to unpick colonialism with wit and beauty, from ship models to wind sculptures.