10. Damien Hirst (b. 1965)

Damien Hirst is the most prominent member of a group of modern artists, the Young British Artists, which dominated the UK contemporary art scene in the ‘90s. Hirst is the UK’s richest living artist, and also broke the record for a one-artist auction in 2008 when he sold a complete show, Beautiful Inside My Head Forever, for $198 million. He is most well known for his series of famous modern art depicting dead animals preserved in formaldehyde, and for his diamond skull, For the Love of God.

9. Zeng Fanzhi (b. 1964)

Zeng Fanzhi grew up in China during the Cultural Revolution, an experience that marked him as an artist. His work points to his concern with modernity’s problematic history and the isolation and instability of contemporary life. He achieved recognition in the ‘90s for his Hospital and Meat contemporary painting series. His works can be recognised by his signature expressionistic style, figures with large heads and exaggerated features, and at times abstract paintings of faces. In 2013, Fanzhi’s The Last Supper sold for a record-breaking $23.3 million at Sotheby’s Hong Kong, making it the highest price for a piece by Asian modern artists at auction.

8. Keith Haring (1958-1990)

Keith Haring’s pop art and graffiti-like work emerged from the New York City street culture of the ‘80s. He found himself in the thriving alternative art community outside of the galleries and museum institutions. His contemporary art came to life on the streets, in the subways, and in clubs. Haring wanted to devote his career to creating a truly public art. In the subway stations, on unused advertising panels, he found his medium to experiment and to communicate with the wider audience. Haring’s works remain extremely popular to this day, selling for up to approximately $6 million at auctions.

7. Yoshitomo Nara (b. 1959)

Yoshitomo Nara is one of the central figures of the Japanese neo-Pop movement, creating paintings, drawings, and sculptures of child-like characters. These characters are deeply inspired by popular culture such as anime, manga, Disney, and punk rock. This influence results in images that are cute, yet also unsettling and sinister. His contemporary fine art concerns itself with finding an identity in today’s rapidly modernizing, violent world with its constant visual inputs.

6. Richard Prince (b. 1949)

Richard Prince is one of the modern artists infamous for appropriation. Prince reuses mass-media images in order to question and redefine notions of authorship and ownership. In his 1980’s “Cowboys” series, he re-photographed Marlboro ads in order to create close-ups of these mythical cowboys. In 2005, his Untitled (Cowboy) became the first re-photograph to be sold for more than $1 million at auction. More recently, he has become occupied with Instagram, stealing Instagram posts from several young women and selling them for vast sums. The controversy and lawsuits that ensue are, in a sense, part of Prince’s artworks

5. Mark Grotjahn (b. 1968)

Mark Grotjahn is an American artist best known for his abstract paintings of faces and geometric depictions. His contemporary painting style is said to strike a complex dialogue with the works of Kazimir Malevich, Barnett Newman, and Bridget Riley. Grotjahn often explores the vanishing point of perspective and works with bright colours. Demand for Grotjahn’s work has risen steadily in the past years.

4. Rudolf Stingel (b. 1956)

Rudolf Stingel is an Italian artist based in New York. Since the ‘80s, Stingel’s contemporary art is concerned with interrogating his chosen medium of painting and subverting notions of authenticity, hierarchy, meaning, and context. He is interested in engaging the audience in a dialogue about their perception of contemporary art and including them in the process. After his 2007 show at the Whitney Museum in New York, Stingel’s prices went through the roof.

3. Christopher Wool (b. 1955)

Christopher Wool first made a name for himself in the New York contemporary fine arts scene in the 1980’s. He is best known for his modern art paintings of words, his trademark white canvases with large black stencilled letters. Works like Apocalypse Now (“Sell the house sell the car sell the kids”) and If You (“If you can’t take a joke you can get the fuck out of my house”) made between $15 and 30 million at Christie’s auction house.

2. Peter Doig (b. 1959)

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

1. Jean-Michel Basquiat (1960-1988)

Jean-Michel Basquiat, one of the most famous contemporary artists and American painters of all time, emerged from the early ‘80s American Punk scene in New York and swiftly became recognised in the international art circuit for work such as his abstract paintings of faces. His “naïf” art skilfully merged styles and traditions, creating collage-type works of contemporary art which often referred to his urban and African-Caribbean heritage. Basquiat’s modern art paintings are an example of how counter-cultural art practice can become a completely recognised, embraced, and celebrated form of art by the commercial masses. His abstract paintings of faces sell for the highest prices on the art market today.