Published on the occasion of Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium at the Whitechapel Gallery, from February 6 2020.

After a long period dominated by abstraction and conceptual approaches, painting saw a revival of figuration in the 1990s by artists whose work updated portraiture and history painting but remained rooted in the conventions of realism. However a new generation, coming to prominence in the new millennium, are distinguished by a radically different approach to the figure, in which bodies are fragmented, morphed, merged and remade but never completely cohesive.

Radical Figures explores the resurgence of figurative painting in the past two decades through works by ten leading artists: Michael Armitage, Cecily Brown, Nicole Eisenman, Sanya Kantarovsky, Tala Madani, Ryan Mosley, Christina Quarles, Daniel Richter, Dana Schutz and Tschabalala Self, and this accompanying publication examines the political and aesthetic implications of their work, alongside contributions from each artist offering insights into their ideas and working processes.