At Studio 74, we've always believed the best art doesn't just depict a person — it lets you feel like you know them. That's the whole tradition of figurative art in one sentence, and it's worth understanding where it came from before we tell you why we think two of our artists, Bristol's own Anna Mazzotta and Texas-based Todd White, are among the ones carrying it furthest today.

A short history of putting personality on the wall

Figurative art — art that represents real people, animals, and the world as we see it — is one of the oldest forms of human expression there is, stretching back to prehistoric cave paintings and remaining a central way artists have explored identity, culture, and the human condition ever since.

But it wasn't until later centuries that personality, specifically, became the point. Portraiture became a key vehicle for asserting identity and status — an approach that still holds today. Then came the Baroque period, when figurative art turned genuinely theatrical: Caravaggio used dramatic lighting and intense naturalism to make his figures feel immediate and alive, often capturing moments of spiritual ecstasy or internal conflict, while Dutch painters like Rembrandt and Vermeer brought unprecedented attention to the quiet, inner states of ordinary people. This is really the moment figurative art stopped being about likeness and started being about interiority — what a face reveals, not just what it looks like.

Lucian Freud, "Double Portrait," 1988-90

For much of the mid-to-late 20th century, that tradition took a back seat. Abstraction — gestural marks, geometric minimalism, colour fields that left everything open to interpretation, dominated contemporary art, and figuration was treated as almost old-fashioned by comparison.

That's no longer true. Figurative art hasn't just returned, it's leading. Figurative painting has seen an unprecedented rise over the past decade, dominating art market trends and museum displays worldwide, from major institutional exhibitions to auction rooms. Artists like Lucian Freud and Jenny Saville pushed the human figure back to the centre of serious contemporary art, exploring the raw complexities of identity, body, and vulnerability with a psychological depth that reshaped how the art world engaged with representation — and museums took note, with major institutions curating exhibitions that treat representational art as a vital part of contemporary discourse.

Why now, and why it matters to collectors

A few things are driving this resurgence, and they're worth understanding if you're building a collection today rather than twenty years ago:

• A hunger for the human, in an increasingly digital world. The more mediated our lives get, the more collectors seem to want work that captures something unmistakably real, a face, a gesture, a feeling that can't be generated, only observed.
• A widening of whose stories get told. Contemporary figurative artists are using the human form to explore identity, cultural heritage, and the complexities of modern existence, with growing emphasis on diversity and previously underrepresented perspectives, figuration today is a genuinely bigger, more varied conversation than it was a generation ago.
• Technical mastery is back in fashion. After decades where concept often outweighed craft, there's a real collector appetite for artists who can actually do the thing, draughtsmanship, precision, control of light and emotion, as well as think it.

This is exactly the tradition we see Anna Mazzotta and Todd White working within and pushing forward.

Anna Mazzotta: charcoal, and the weight of a single line

Working almost entirely in charcoal, Anna Mazzotta continues the Caravaggio-to-Freud thread of figurative art most directly: strip away colour, and all that's left is light, shadow, and the truth of a face. Her recent collection, boxing's greatest legends, rendered with extraordinary intricacy - sits squarely in that lineage of using raw technical mastery to capture something emotional, not just physical: focus, power, and the quiet cost of a fight, all in monochrome. It's a reminder that figurative art doesn't need colour or spectacle to hit hard, sometimes a single, perfectly placed line does more than either.

you're the only dog for me, cha cha - Anna Mazzotta

Todd White: colour, chaos, and joy as a serious subject

Where Mazzotta strips things back, Todd White does the opposite, vivid colour, movement, and unmistakable energy, capturing the beauty and chaos of everyday life in a way that feels both painterly and immediate. His work sits in the more playful, expressive end of the figurative tradition, proving that personality on canvas doesn't always have to be solemn to be serious - that joy, charm, and warmth are just as legitimate a subject as vulnerability or gravity.

Together, these two artists show just how wide figurative art's range really is today: from the hushed intensity of charcoal to the electric colour of White's world, both rooted in the same centuries-old instinct, that the human face, and the personality behind it, is still the most powerful subject there is.

The Outsiders, Todd White