The self-taught Kenyan photographer Thandiwe Muriu is best known for her artfully constructed images celebrating Africa’s vibrant patterned textiles and its rich mix of cultural practices and beauty traditions. In recent years, her unique visual language blending Kenyan tradition, heritage and modernity has garnered her critical acclaim and loyal collectors around the world.

Muriu often photographs her models with sculptural hairstyles and their eyes closed or covered in the same striking fabric that is used for the backdrop. In doing so, she creates a surreal illusion that prompts the viewer to ask questions around identity, beauty ideals and what it means to be a modern woman in Kenya today.

Maridadi, meaning ‘beautiful with style’ in Kiswahili, is part of the artist’s Material Culture series, which is inspired by the elaborate headwraps that her mother dons for special occasions. Even if many women use the same fabric, Muriu says, no two headwraps are ever the same. As such, they reveal each wearer’s personality and style.

Richard Prince made his name creating works with appropriated imagery. His photographs featuring images of mass media — luxury magazine ads, social media profiles and entertainment flyers — raise questions around authenticity, ownership and copyright as well as the role of consumer culture in the construction of American identity. This photograph is the highpoint of his famous series Cowboys (1980-1992), which was pulled from Marlboro cigarette ads. By removing the text and cropping the images down, he enhanced their dynamism and intensified their original artifice. His pictures of cowboy pictures deconstruct the most famous of American archetypes, prompting the viewer to question what is real and what is fiction or myth.

For his Anthropométries, one of the twentieth century’s most daring artistic projects, Yves Klein invited naked female models to cover themselves in blue paint — a patented ultramarine pigment now known as ‘International Klein Blue’ — and imprint their bodies onto the canvas. Some of these paintings were produced during elaborate performances in front of an audience. Although the display of nudity shocked the French establishment, these works were not intended to titillate, Klein argued, but to liberate. The forms made by his models, or ‘human paintbrushes’, float freely and drift into the beyond, sealing the passage from the material to the immaterial realm. Featuring multiple solid imprints against a cream backdrop, this example now resides in the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

Grayson Perry is one of Britain’s most famous living artists. He is best known for his subversive ceramics and printed tapestries that interrogate what it means to be English today. By using art forms traditionally associated with grand country houses, he elevates the dramas of contemporary British life, from class and identity to money, commuting, marriage and social media. Executed in 2021, this brightly coloured tapestry references celebrated works by Morris, Gainsborough, Turner and Riley. However, in typical Perry style, their works have been digitally altered or adjusted, their colours and orientation changed within the tapestry’s rich and layered textures. It is currently on view at Victoria Miro in London as part of their solo show of Grayson Perry tapestries.

Best known for her ‘Anatomy of Architecture' series which began in 2016 and for being the artist who represented the United States at the 59th Venice Biennale, New York-based artist Simone Leigh poses much needed questions about cultural stereotypes. Both figurative and abstract, Leigh’s sculptures extend beyond the human form and manifests both personal experience and colonial narratives of societal history. As a female form emerges from a structured skirt made of raffia, Cupboard XI (Titi), 2020, blurs the lines between decorative and fine art whilst questioning the value of an object and the fetishisation of the female body, with an emphasis on the black body. In a world that is partial to iconoclasm, Leigh is rewriting the art historical cannon.

Although Piet Mondrian is best known today for his abstract compositions featuring rectangles of primary colours, neutrals of white, black and grey and thick black horizontal and vertical lines, he began by painting representational pictures of landscapes and trees. It was not until after the First World War, when he was in his 40s, that Mondrian rejected naturalistic painting to develop the highly distilled pictoral language which he called Neo-Plasticism. ‘Every true artist has been inspired more by the beauty of lines and colour and the relationships between them than by the concrete subject of the picture,’ he once said. Composition with Red, Blue and Yellow (1930) brilliantly illustrates Mondrian’s pioneering aesthetic of balance, order and purity, which later influenced celebrated artists, architects and fashion designers including Lola Prusac and Yves Saint Laurent.

Jadé Fadojutimi is hot property. Her gloriously colourful paintings fusing abstract and figurative elements have fetched seven-figure sums at auction and are highly prised by contemporary collectors around the world. Her work’s even been acquired by the Tate. Often made in bursts of energetic mark-making, her large-scale compositions reference a range of sources and experiences from personal memories to anime, politics and popular culture. An Empathetic Revolution (2022), inspired by feelings of displacement, was made for her solo show at the Hepworth Wakefield. Typical of Fadojutimi’s raw and lively style, it features bright reds, pinks and oranges, and a dizzying web of marks that captivate the gaze.

Amy Sherald is having a moment. The American painter rose to celebrity in 2018 with her official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama and later cemented her reputation with her lauded posthumous depiction of Breonna Taylor, the hospital worker who was shot and killed in 2020 by police officers who forced entry into her apartment. Now, in her first solo show in Europe, Sherald unveils a new suite of paintings of Black Americans. ‘My mission as an artist [is] to put more complex stories of Black life in the forefront of people’s minds,’ she has said. Among the works on display is this painting of a man in a green jumper with the number 22 on it. He is not shaped to be an athlete, but his confident stance and gaze draws you in, prompting you to wonder about his interior life, hopes and dreams.

It’s hard to think of a British artist of more touching scenes than Charlie Mackesy. His endearing drawings of four unlikely friends, the boy, the mole, the fox and the horse, accompanied by life-affirming words and phrases, have earned him an adoring public the world over. Many have sought comfort and solace in his uplifting messages of love and friendship. But why does his work resonate so widely? ‘The world is complicated and quite frightening and there is a simplicity to it perhaps,’ he has said. Added to this is his refreshing outlook on what constitutes success. ‘To me the [greatest] achievement is to love and be kind. It’s so rarely seen as success, but I think it is.’ This gorgeous illustration is testament to Mackesy’s heart-warming vision. Share or save immediately.