01Why the figure keeps returning
The figure never left painting, but the contemporary figurative painters I admire most have changed what it is for. They are not trying to record a likeness. They are asking what paint can do with a body that a camera cannot.
That is the test I apply when a client is drawn to figurative work. A portrait that could have been a photograph is usually a weaker painting. The ones that last make the body a problem to be solved, not a subject to be described.
Figurative painting also carries a particular responsibility. It pictures people, and who is pictured, by whom and for whom are questions the best painters take on directly. The seven painters below approach those questions in very different ways, which is why I find it useful to think about them together.
It is also, in my experience, the work collectors most often want to live with first, and the area where the gap between the strongest and weakest examples is widest.
The body at full weight: Jenny Saville and Marlene Dumas
Jenny Saville paints the body at close range and large scale, working directly through the history of figuration. In front of one of her canvases you are aware of mass, pressure and skin as paint before you are aware of a person. The scale is not a flourish; it is how the argument is made. Passages that read as abstract up close resolve into flesh only at a distance, which is why I never judge her work from an image.
Marlene Dumas, who is South African, works almost the opposite way. She paints from photographic source material in thin, immediate washes, so that politics, intimacy and grief arrive in the same mark. Where Saville builds the body up, Dumas lets it nearly slip away. Her washes are thin, but nothing in them is careless, and the speed of the mark is part of its truth.
Together they show that there is no single correct way to paint flesh. What they share is total commitment to the decision.
Where the figure dissolves: Cecily Brown and Christina Quarles
Cecily Brown's large canvases hover between figure and abstraction, drawing on Old Master composition and de Kooning's touch. Bodies appear and disappear as you look. I think her paintings reward living with them as much as any contemporary painter's, because they change with the light and with your attention. Across her body of work the balance between figure and abstraction keeps shifting, so it pays to look widely before choosing.
Christina Quarles paints bodies that stretch, merge and refuse a fixed outline, leaving identity deliberately unresolved. Limbs seem to belong to more than one figure, and space folds around them. It is figuration that declines to tell you who someone is, and that refusal is the content.
Both painters ask more of the viewer than a conventional portrait does. That is exactly why I think they suit collectors who want a painting they will still be discovering years after it arrives.
Who is being pictured, and how
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, who is British, paints fictional figures from memory and invention. They are portraits with no sitter. That frees the paintings from biography and asks the viewer to meet the figure as a presence rather than a record.
Amy Sherald paints portraits in grisaille skin tones against flat colour, and she is best known for the official portrait of Michelle Obama. As I read it, the grey removes a cue viewers usually rely on and puts the weight on posture, clothing and gaze.
Jordan Casteel paints large-scale portraits of neighbours, students and strangers from her own photographs. The relationship between painter and sitter is part of the work, and the scale gives ordinary people the monumentality usually reserved for the powerful.
What unites these three, for me, is that each makes a clear decision about the relationship between painter, sitter and viewer. Yiadom-Boakye removes the sitter, Sherald recasts how the sitter is seen, and Casteel builds the painting from a real encounter. When I look at younger portrait painters, I ask whether they have made a decision of that kind or simply inherited one.
How I judge contemporary figurative painters
Figurative painting is also where the market has been most crowded, and a recognisable look can spread quickly among younger painters. I pay attention to drawing in particular. Painters who draw well tend to take risks with the body that others avoid, because they know how to bring the figure back from the edge. These are the questions I ask before recommending a figurative work.
- Does the painting do something a photograph could not?
- Is the way the body is rendered a decision, or a default?
- How does the ground work, and does it do more than frame the figure?
- What does the scale do to the person standing in front of it?
- Is there a developing body of work, or one successful formula repeated?
- Where will the figure's gaze fall in the room, and will the owner want to meet it every day?
Living with a figure
The last question on that list is practical and often overlooked. A figure looks back. Placing a portrait in a home is closer to inviting someone to live there than hanging an abstraction, and I plan for that with clients from the start.
A painting by Saville or Casteel can hold a large room on its own. Work by Dumas or Yiadom-Boakye often rewards a quieter wall where it can be met at close range. Getting that right is as much a part of the recommendation as choosing the painter.
Scale and viewing distance matter more with figures than with almost anything else, because we instinctively measure a painted body against our own. Practical care applies too: large canvases with heavy paint need careful handling when they move, and thin washes on paper need the same protection from light as any drawing.
