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| Juan Muñoz Back Drawing 1990 chalk and ink on canvas Tate, London |
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| Robert Medley A Crucifixion 1992-93 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Around the age of eighty Medley began a series of paintings which focused on groups of naked or semi-naked male bodies, painted in a subdued palette of silvery, greeny colours. These late works were inspired by the twin forces of old age and war. This painting began as a composition in which semi-naked men were exercising in a gymnasium, and the figure at the top was inspired by a diver jumping on a springboard. Friends, seeing the work in progress, commented on how this figure reminded them of a crucified person and Medley then took up this theme."
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| Lisa Milroy Finsbury Square 1995 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"Finsbury Square is a large painting depicting the facade of a building in the City of London seen from across the street. . . . It is cropped as though viewed through a camera's lens in a composition based on horizontal and vertical lines. . . . Finsbury Square belongs to a series of Travel Paintings Milroy created between 1993 and 1995. . . . Between figuration and abstraction, the paintings offer simply representation, what the artist has called 'giving space to looking'."
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| Michael Gross Self Portrait 1996 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Ed Ruscha Red Rooster 1996 acrylic paint on lithograph Tate, London |
"Red Rooster combines a spray-painted stencil image of a rooster with a lithographic print. The lithograph has been printed right to the edge of a large landscape-oriented sheet of paper, and depicts in yellow and brown inks a row of four wooden floorboards viewed from a direct downward-looking perspective. . . . A colour lithograph such as Red Rooster is achieved through the printing of at least four stones: one for each of the separate coloured inks of which this image is comprised. Each stone adds a further level of detail and definition to the trompe l'oeil wooden floorboards. However, this technically-accomplished verisimilitude is undermined by the second layer of the image."
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| William Kentridge Sleeper - Red 1997 etching, aquatint, drypoint Tate, London |
"Sleeper is an etching produced by the intaglio process in an edition of fifty. It was made at 107 Workshop, near Bath, and published by David Krut, London, during a visit Kentridge made to England."
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| Nicola Tyson Curtain Figure 1999 acrylic on canvas Tate, London |
"Trained in London during the 1980s, Nicola Tyson is now based in New York, where she staged her first solo show in 1994. Tyson describes her work as 'psycho-figuration' through which she examines issues of identity, gender and sexuality. She depicts mainly solitary female figures, typically set against minimal or flatly painted backgrounds. Often these figures begin as self-portraits that are then contorted into androgynous beings."
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| Anselm Kiefer Let a Thousand Flowers Bloom 2000 oil, shellac, resin, wood, metal, dried roses, string and screws on canvas Tate, London |
"Kiefer travelled to China in 1993, and some years later made a series of paintings based on photographs taken there. The title refers to a 1957 speech in which Mao encouraged greater freedom of expression, declaring 'Let a hundred flowers bloom and a hundred schools of thought contend'. This freedom was short-lived, as the intellectuals who criticised Mao were swiftly arrested."
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| Sigmar Polke Untitled (Square 2) 2003 oil and acrylic on canvas Tate, London |
"Here a winged angel and a group of women are combined with areas of free-flowing paint reminiscent of contemporary abstraction. The classical imagery has been enlarged to show the black benday dots from which it is composed, emphasising its source in an existing printed image. Dripping and flowing painterly gestures are usually associated with individualism, energy and dynamism, but Polke's use of them seems to ironically question those values."
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| Eberhard Havekost Ghost 1 2004 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Eberhard Havekost Ghost 2 2004 oil on canvas Tate, London |
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| Andrew Grassie Tate New Hang 8 2005 tempera on paper Tate, London |
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| Andrew Grassie Tate New Hang 6 2005 tempera on paper Tate, London |
"Grassie paints highly detailed and self-referential tempera-on-paper copies of photographs. . . . His paintings have been praised for being 'disorienting' and 'melancholy' – and criticised for consisting of 'bureaucratic ironies'."
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| Nigel Cooke New Accursed Art Club 2007 oil on canvas Tate, London |
"New Accursed Art Club is a large, unframed and detailed painting depicting a small group of male figures in an untidy landscape, set against a background featuring brutalist architectural structures. Five men with unkempt grey beards and tatty-looking clothes are shown on a small hill or escarpment in the foreground. . . . Describing this painting in 2010, the British writer Michael Bracewell stated that its figures 'occupy a landscape that is both urban and destitute – as though a debased pastoral had been colonised by a slab-like modernist architecture'."
– quoted passages based on notes by curators at the Tate in London