Liu Xiaodong, perhaps one of the greatest painters of all time, is known for his strong brushwork, rich colours, and precise forms. He started out with traditional brushwork to create extremely realistic subjects, but later changed his approach and started working with cropped framing, an unusual use of perspective, and the use of colours to strengthen emotion. Liu paints his subjects in their natural settings, capturing everyday people in complex places such as Israel-Palestine, Tibet, and rural China. His intimate, on-location approach and sensitivity to his subjects are what make his painting style so moving and powerful when compared to works by other contemporary artists.

Liu is an observational painter who works on site, often on a very large scale.

Meanwhile this character’s ambiguous name adds to the artist’s desire to question the nature of art and its relationship to the real world. Along with this artwork, Murakami has featured his character as a brand like Mickey Mouse or Hello Kitty on a range of artworks and merchandise. The title of the artwork – 727 – nods towards the Boeing American airplanes that he saw flying over his home in Japan as a child. In naming his artwork after them, Murakami acknowledges the continuing presence of the U.S. in post-war Japan.

Japanese Neo-Pop artist Takashi Murakami is a superstar in the contemporary art world, also known as the “Warhol of Japan”, is famous for his merging of fine art and popular culture, often referencing colourful anime and manga cartoons to create abstract paintings of faces. According to Murakami, “Japanese people accept that art and commerce will be blended.” It is the West that imposes such a severe hierarchy when it comes to art. Despite this, Murakami has been fully embraced in the Western art world as well, and his work is extremely in demand in the art world today.

Peter Doig is a Scottish artist who spent most of his formative years in Trinidad and Canada, and studied art in England. His contemporary art is described by the Saatchi Gallery as containing themes of magical realism, “capturing timeless moments of perfect tranquillity, where photo-album memory flits in and out of waking dream.” Doig takes inspiration from photographs, newspaper clippings, scenes from movies, covers of record albums, and the work of earlier artists like Edvard Munch. In 2002, he settled in Trinidad again, where he opened a studio at the Caribbean Contemporary Arts Centre. In 2007, his White Canoe sold for $11.3 million at Sotheby’s, which at the time was a record for a living European artist, and is one of the reasons he is on our list of popular artists.

John Currin, one of several famous American painters on this list, and photographed above while working on a portrait of his wife, is known for his seductive yet also repelling paintings of lustful women. He combines the beautiful and the grotesque, and influences ranging from Renaissance paintings to magazine ads from the ‘50s can be found in his often erotically charged works. It could be precisely his ability to create contemporary art that defies taste, that makes you both hate and love it, which has helped make Currin one of the most popular artists today, and maybe one of the greatest painters of all time.

One of the most provocative and successful artists of his generation, John Currin makes delightfully bad, perverse paintings which enchant and repel in equal measure. His art, which constantly evades categorization, pinpoints the moment where sublime beauty and the grotesque are held in productive tension. An irreverent mannerist who brings a satirical savvy to contemporary portraiture, Currin has been confounding and seducing critics and audiences for over two decades. His work is characterized by a meticulous, masterly technique and an unfashionable investment in classical painting traditions commingling with other representational languages drawn from popular culture, including movies, pinups and 70’s Scandinavian porn.