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This room brings together contemporary artists who paint the figure in ways that respond to art history and to comment on society today. These paintings are all recent additions to °Õ²¹³Ù±ð’s collection, and this is their first time on display.

From the 1970s onward, conceptual art, with its wide range of media and subject matter, seemed to triumph over paint on canvas. The artists in this room show how untrue this is. Using paint, they capture the complexity of everyday life and transform it. They tell emotionally charged stories or invent alternative realities, with meanings emerging as more than the sum of their visible parts.

In our current time dominated by screens and digital images, by choosing to paint, an artist asks us to think of the physicality of paint on canvas, the presence of the artist in their studio and our position as viewer standing in front of the work.

Many different histories emerge. Lisa Brice reclaims the female nude from a European tradition shaped largely by male artists, re-enacted here by women as active participants. Salman Toor says: ‘For me painting is a process of self-definition, as an outsider in multiple worlds which become more and more entangled and complex.’