Shahzia Sikander

Shahzia Sikander

Mirror Plane, 2012

Shahzia Sikander likes the idea of exhausting an image. Sikander creates stimulating visual experiences for her audience through the addition of modern and non-traditional elements by forcing the viewer to reconcile conflicting sensibilities hidden within beautifully rendered landscapes as well as offering a wide range of stimuli from the traditional Muslim world to popular Western culture, such as mandalas, airplanes and cowboy boots and soccer balls. 

For her subjects, she mixes personal and historical experiences such as reading the Qu'ran. She seeks to subvert Eastern stereotypes through her work.

She is very skilled in Indo-Persian miniature painting technique and formal practice.  She frequently uses repetitive shapes to represent movement. In the one above, she uses the same shape repetition for the hair and the flight of birds, which is really cool. She does a lot of performance-based installations to further get her concept across.

Art 21 video

Cy Twombly

Cy Twombly

Red Painting, 1961, oil, crayon, and pencil on canvas

Untitled, 1968, house paint and crayon on canvas

Cy Twombly evaded the dominant styles of the time: Pop, Abstract Expressionism, and Minimalism in favor of his large-scale, calligraphic, graffiti-style paintings.

He works in mixed media: sprayed graffiti-like paint on solid fields of gray, white, or tan. They appear to have been scribbled by a child.

His influences of each individual work are suggested in the titles. He sites the lines and smudges as the subjects of the paintings. He paints with cultural memory and sometimes evokes landscapes through use of color.

During the 1960s, his exhibitions were negatively received; people said their kid could paint that. His later works have been categorized into Romantic Symbolism.

Amy Cutler

Amy Cutler

Above the Fjord, gouache on paper

Tiger Mending, 2003, gouache on paper

Amy Cutler is a contemporary artist who makes illustrations of women, often dressed in Victorian style clothing, performing strange, cryptic tasks.

Formally she uses gouache on paper with large, white backgrounds that provide little context to the meanings. Figures are rendered simply but with exquisite detail. Her style is reminiscent of European Folk Art.

Her works have elements of humor and fairy tales.

Cecily Brown

Cecily Brown

Performance, 1999, oil on linen

Skulldiver III (Flightmask)

Cecily Brown's works ARE representational, although at first glance appear to be sloppy Rorschach-like ink blobs. Her paintings have been linked to Abstract Expressionism.

She creates expressive oil paintings of slippery body parts entwined, engorged, and ecstatic that form kaleidoscopically in the mind. She rides the line of abstraction, figuration, and pornographic abandon.

Her subject matter mainly centers around sexual pleasure, often public acts. She makes viewers question what they see by hiding her images in lavish folds of oil paint.

Pia Fries

Pia Fries

Pia Fries' work results from a conceptual and aesthetic wrestling match with Modernist painting.

She uses palette knives, spatulas, brushes, syringes and other instruments in a variety of applications on heavily primed wood panel. Her use of color is daring and inventive. She creates visual music with graceful swooshes, ethereal spills, muscular swipes, and awkward smears.

Stylistically, Fries blurs the line between painting and sculpture. Conceptually, she is interested in process painting and painting as a verb.

Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman

Amy Sillman speaks of painting as a physicality, like an extension of her arm. She believes honesty is the most important quality in a painting.

She uses richly complicated textures and colors (although with limited palettes). She uses gesture, color, and drawing-based procedures to imply femininity, performativity, and humor.

Merlin Carpenter

Merlin Carpenter

from The Opening, 2009

Nigel, 2003

Merlin Carpenter uses a critical appropriation of painting strategies to challenge the history of late Modernism. He also challenges figure vs ground relationships with his disconnected backgrounds.
Some of his early work features abstract gestural figures - women standing in front of non representational backgrounds.
Actually his works vary quite a bit which makes his style hard to classify. (see huge variety in examples above) I am mostly interested in his most recent works like The Opening, in which he did all the "paintings" at the opening reception.

He is pretty involved in the DIY scene and started his own self-financing collective artist-run space in London.

Fred Tomaselli

Fred Tomaselli

Untitled (Expulsion), 2000, leaves, pills, mushrooms, photo collage, acrylic, and resin on wood panel

Gravity's Rainbow, 1999, leaves, pills, photo collage, flowers, acrylic, and resin on wood panel

Fred Tomaselli works with a variety of unorthodox materials in an attempt to transcend the banality of our everyday world. His life in Southern California has had a profound effect on his work, as he looks for a spiritual transport to the idea of "somewhere else". He includes themes inspired by Disneyland, music and drug culture, and wilderness.

His works are very aesthetically interesting. At first glance they appear to be patterns of paint on a wood panel, but they're actually composed of pot leaves, pills, wings, stems, petals, and photographs. He then uses acrylic paint and seals it with resin. The unusual materials reinforce the concepts of his paintings.

Francis Alys

Francis Alys (two dots over the y)

I was initially drawn to Francis Alys through his work with performance art, photography, and book arts.
He says the style of his painting is derived from hand-painted signs in his neighborhood in Mexico City. He sort of plays a game of Telestrations with commercial sign painters by giving them copies and then working from the reproductions.  As the process continued, it would ask questions about painting itself and relationships with painting and between painters in the modern world.

He works with narratives and introspective situations. His work with reproductions reminds me of Luc Tuymans.

http://www.francisalys.com/public/painting.html

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama

Yayoi Kusama always wears polka dots and paints polka dots and other obsessive patterns. She works in neon, almost radioactive colors.

Her work has been classified as Abstract Expressionism, Minimalism, and Pop Art.

It's important to mention that she's been living voluntarily in a psychiatric clinic since 1977.

Also she did a collaboration with Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton.

http://www.nowness.com/day/2013/6/28/3135/yayoi-kusama-self-obliteration