For centuries, art history was written by men – museums, markets and textbooks all skewed male, leaving women’s voices at the margins.

Even today, only a fraction of museum collections and exhibitions are by women (one survey found 87% of artists in 18 major U.S. museums are male), though cracks are appearing. Recent major shows signal a shift: the 2019 Venice Biennale achieved 53% women artists, and private collectors report a record 44% of works by women in their collections in 2024.

This article reflects on that turning tide through ten contemporary women whose work bends light, politics, and tradition into new form – women who not only occupy gallery walls but reshape the questions art itself can ask. If you’re reading this and feel that more remarkable women artists should be included — drop their names in the comments below! Tell us who, in your opinion, had the biggest impact on culture and the way we perceive art around the world.

Yayoi Kusama

In Tokyo, Yayoi Kusama is an elder visionary whose art feels both infinite and intimate. Her endless arrays of polka dots and mirrored “Infinity Rooms” turn exhibition spaces into cosmic playgrounds – a response to trauma that became universal. Critics note that Kusama “has always been a step ahead of her time,” yet her art remains intensely personal. Her installations – from the iridescent Infinity Mirrored Room (2016) to the giant pumpkin sculptures – invite viewers into the very cores of obsessions.

That duality (personal delirium and cultural icon) is her legacy: the Artstory notes her influence stretches from Andy Warhol and Carolee Schneemann to Yoko Ono and Damien Hirst. Kusama’s work has become a global brand (her 2021 High Line light installation reached tens of thousands), but for Kusama it still feels like therapy: as she once said, making art is “a symptom and cure” for her visions In every dotted blossom or repeated pumpkin, Kusama reclaims space for women’s inner worlds and shows that painting with psyche can be as radical as painting with color.

Sarah Lucas

In London’s edgy art scene, Sarah Lucas has always been the class clown with a message. A core member of the 1990s Young British Artists, Lucas plays with household debris and pub banter to skewer gender stereotypes.

Her 1992 piece Two Fried Eggs and a Kebab literally turns breakfast foods into a nude: fried eggs become breasts and an open kebab becomes a vulva. It’s as crude as it sounds, a jokey but pointed critique of the “reduction” of women’s bodies.

In Au Naturel (1994), Lucas slumps a stained mattress against a wall and shoves melons and zucchini through it – unambiguous penis, breasts and buttocks made from fruit and tubers.

When Au Naturel hit the Royal Academy’s sensational 1997 show, it cemented Lucas’s reputation for confronting viewers with “flagrant” sexual puns that both amuse and offend. But beneath the ribald humor is serious craft: as art historian Anne Wagner observes, Lucas’s work is about “the semantic possibilities of everyday things” – how one man’s kebab is another woman’s mirror. Unlike some of her peers, Lucas has remained vital beyond the 1990s; commentators note she “probably has had the most enduring influence” of the early YBAs.

Damien Hirst (who bought many of her early works) famously praised her as “the greatest artist I know… making excellent pieces over and over again”. In short, Lucas turned the banal (an egg, a kebab, a mattress) into a shorthand for female experience – forcing art-lovers to laugh, gasp, and then think about why we laugh and gasp at all.

Cindy Sherman

Cindy Sherman revolutionized photography with a simple device: herself. In Buffalo and New York in the 1970s, Sherman became “one of the most important artists living today” by turning her own image into a mirror on culture. Her famous Untitled Film Stills (1977–1980) – 69 black-and-white photos of Sherman posing as women out of 1950s and 60s B-movies – drew the viewer into a noirish mystery.

In one, a bruised woman looks through a window at a menace unseen; no backstory is given, yet we can’t look away. By making herself into ingénues, housewives, femmes fatales, Sherman forces us to ask “Who is she? What happened?”.

Each photo upends the male gaze: Sherman plays both the object and the subject of the lens. For her incisive choreography of stereotype and selfhood, Sherman “has become a key figure in late 20th- and early 21st-century art,” notes the Madison Museum of Contemporary Art. In 1995 MoMA famously bought her entire Film Stills series, and later devoted a retrospective to her work.

With each new series – from her lavish History Portraits (recalling famous paintings) to her Society Portraits (aging socialites in couture) – Sherman has peered at the masks we wear and asked who’s really behind them. Her legacy is to show that identity is not fixed: it is a collage of roles, a posed narrative. As MoMA puts it, Sherman stands “at the vanguard of female artists” reshaping how we see women through art.

Chitra Ganesh

Brooklyn-based Chitra Ganesh brings myth and science-fiction crashing into our age. Drawing on her Indian heritage and pop culture, Ganesh paints a multiverse of goddesses, monsters and futurist narratives. As Guernica notes, her canvases “brim with visual and narrative references to Hinduism, Buddhism, and Greek mythology,” filtered through comics and rock posters.

Ganesh’s signature works are lush mixed-media murals and collages (often hand-drawn or painted over digital prints) teeming with fusion imagery.

She sources 1960s Amar Chitra Katha comics and Bollywood iconography, then recasts them: in Tales of Amnesia (2002–2007) she “upends the heroic male saviour narrative” by giving voice to alternative, often queer myths.

Her heroines are exotic and erotic, powerful and vulnerable: Ganesh herself says her practice is grounded in “feminist studies, science fiction, queer politics, popular culture, and social histories”. In piece after piece, she spotlights the stories that patriarchy left out – goddesses as punk rockers, queens as community organizers, rebels as mothers – treating old symbols with new reverence and rebellion. Her art shows that the future of myth can be feminist and anarchic. Chitra Ganesh reminds us that art need not obey history: it can rewrite it.

Njideka Akunyili Crosby

Njideka Akunyili Crosby stitches together continents on her canvases. Born in Nigeria and based in Los Angeles, her collaged paintings layer personal history with cultural imagery in lush but coherent chaos.

In a single sprawling scene, you might see a Nigerian living room wallpapered with Western magazine clippings, IKEA chairs, family portraits and even political figures.

One critic describes her work as “intimate… scenes of domestic life in Nigeria and the U.S. … bold and colorful, literally layered with narratives that are personal and political”.

Crosby herself sums up the mash-up: “the point I make in my work is that my home is Nigeria and the United States at the same time”. Indeed, photographs of relatives eating fufu might sit beside a transferred image of Madonna or a Grace Jones album cover, all woven together into oil paint and torn paper. Her technique updates the age-old genre of history painting: the histories she paints are hybrid, diasporic, and female-centered.

In doing so, she has become a defining voice for globalization in art. Her 2017 MacArthur “genius” grant announcement noted how her monumental portrait-collages “reflect her life in both countries,” placing ancestors and everyday objects side by side. Akunyili Crosby’s work insists that portraiture can hold many truths at once – Nigeria, America, womanhood, motherhood – without losing coherence, just as she does.

Jenny Saville

Jenny Saville took the millennium by storm with paintbrush in hand. In a world of Photoshop and beauty filters, her giant canvases of fleshy, unapologetic female nudes were nothing short of revolutionary. Her breakthrough works (like Plan and Branded in the 1990s) were sheer walls of flesh – thighs, torsos, sprawled bodies – rendered in thick impasto. Art historians note that Saville “pushed painterliness so far over the top that it signifies a kind of disease of the pictorial,” confronting viewers with every scar, stretch mark and fold.

By rejecting any idealization, Saville reasserted that the human body (especially the female body) could be raw and monumental. In 2018, her 1992 painting Propped even sold for $12.4 million – a record at the time for a living female artist. But beyond the market buzz, Saville’s real legacy is painterly: she proved that figurative painting still matters.

As critic Linda Nochlin observed, Saville’s work updates the tradition of figuration, making flesh “the reason oil paint was created”. In her hands, flesh becomes landscape – violent in its gestural brushstrokes, yet tender in its empathy.

Her influence has rippled through a generation: one can see her psychological gaze in later artists, from Cecily Brown’s visceral canvas to the warts-and-all portraits of Celia Paul and the confrontational bodies of Mona Hatoum. Saville, bluntly put, turned the female nude into a space of power and question rather than beauty and object.

Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger rewrites the language of power in plain sight. A former graphic designer in New York, Kruger became known for emblematic posters that hijacked advertising’s voice for feminist critique.

Her style is unmistakable: black-and-white photographs overlaid with white-on-red Futura text proclaiming slogans like “Your body is a battleground” or “I shop therefore I am”. In one of her most famous pieces, made for the 1989 Women’s March, a woman’s face is split by light and shadow behind the bold statement “Your body is a battleground.”

As The Broad Museum notes, Kruger “addresses media and politics in their native tongue: tabloid, sensational, authoritative, and direct,” merging commercial imagery with pointed commentary. That artwork – simultaneously art and protest – became a feminist icon, its “timeless” declaration still echoing in debates on autonomy.

Throughout her career, Kruger has applied the same tactic: direct captions that “synthesize a critique about society, the economy, politics, gender” in a few words. (Her 1987 Untitled (I shop therefore I am) wryly captured the consumerist ethos of the 80s, becoming a catchphrase of its own.) By collapsing image and text into ready-made manifestos, Kruger forever shifted how art can confront viewers.

She showed that a poster on the subway or a billboard in a gallery could speak as forcefully as any painting – and force its audience to question who really holds the microphone.

Elizabeth Peyton

Elizabeth Peyton turned the cult of celebrity into painterly intensity. In the 1990s she became famous for intimate portraits of both art-world friends and distant icons – everything from Napoleonic generals to Kurt Cobain to Princess Diana. Unlike Warhol’s mechanical repeats, Peyton’s are small, jewel-toned and trembling with emotion. As one profile notes, she “defined an era that fused fashion, music, celebrity and art,” repeatedly painting the young and beautiful as if capturing their very soul.

Peyton insists she does not paint famous people per se, but rather people she admires; still, the choice of glamorous musicians and actors made her canvases feel like diaries of admiration. Her work is often grouped with peers like John Currin and Luc Tuymans, but she stands apart in sincerity: she “calls her work ‘pictures of people’ as opposed to portraits” and has long considered herself a populist painter.

Crucially, critics credit Peyton with reviving interest in figurative painting in the 1990s At a time when abstraction seemed ascendant, her delicate brushwork proved that painting faces and personalities could be urgent again. Whether she’s sketching a rock star mid-concert or the Queen Mother at tea, Peyton’s art asks us to feel as well as see. In a world of selfies and digital images, she reminds us of the timeless thrill of a painter communing with her subject – a kind of devotion that raises questions about fame, beauty and the artist’s own gaze.

Tracey Emin

Tracey Emin’s art is autobiography turned inside-out. Labeled the “bad girl of British art”, Emin became notorious for spilling her diary into neon lights, blankets, tents and installations. Her most famous piece, My Bed (1998), was simply her actual mattress – rumpled and stained – surrounded by bottles, cigarettes, used condoms, tampons, pills and other detritus from a late-night reveler. By exhibiting it at the Turner Prize show, Emin forced the question: is this trash or treasure?

As Guardian critic Jonathan Jones wrote, My Bed is “a self-portrait through objects,” equating the shame and intimacy of Emin’s life to Van Gogh’s empty chair. Whether through raw confessions on canvas or a neon statement like “I never stopped loving you,” Emin weaponizes vulnerability. Her public persona – raw, angry, tearful, defiant – was herself a performance. As The Art Story summarizes, Emin’s work collapsed the identity of artist and art: abuse, loss and sexuality become the materials of expression.

This taboo-breaking candidness generated endless gossip in the tabloids, but it also opened up possibilities. Emin dared to ask: how much of an artist’s soul can and should be put on display? In doing so she challenged the genteel norms of art and spoke directly to a generation grappling with humiliation and freedom.

Today Emin is a Royal Academician and Dame – a far cry from her enfant terrible days – but she still reminds us that art can be as confessional and messy as life itself, pushing viewers to question why we shy away from such truths.

Marina Abramović

Marina Abramović’s art operates on our nerves. Since the 1970s, this Serbian-born performance artist has been pushing the limits of physicality, vulnerability, and human connection – often using her own body as the medium. While others painted or sculpted, Abramović endured. She sat, stood, bled, screamed, fasted, and stared – not for shock, but to ask: What is presence? What is pain? Where does art end and life begin?

Her early collaborations with Ulay, such as Relation in Time and Rest Energy, were raw studies of trust and duality, where their bodies became metaphors. But it was solo works like Rhythm 0 (1974) – in which she allowed the public to do anything to her body using 72 objects, from feathers to knives – that forced the art world to confront its own morality. For six hours, she stood motionless, offering herself as canvas, as mirror, as warning.

Critics often note that Abramović doesn’t perform for us – she performs with us. Her 2010 MoMA piece The Artist Is Present became a cultural phenomenon: nearly 750,000 people visited the show, many queuing for hours just to sit silently across from her gaze. In that silence, tears fell. Emotions surfaced. The act of simply being became enough.

As The Art Story notes, her work is not theater – it’s real time, real stakes. “She transformed performance into a form of durational consciousness,” one critic wrote. Through intense stillness or extreme action, Abramović makes us reconsider what we think art should do – not entertain, but awaken.

Even into her seventies, she remains a relentless innovator, recently embracing virtual reality and new media to extend the reach of presence. By doing so, she proved that embodiment – not the brush or chisel – could be the most radical artistic tool. In Abramović’s world, art is not something you view from a safe distance. It is something that happens to you.

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These ten women do not just add to the canon — they rewrite it. Their works are not footnotes in a male-dominated timeline, but chapters of their own making: loud, intimate, unapologetic. 

Through mirrors and myths, neon and flesh, dots and diaries — they ask the questions that history forgot to pose.

What does it mean to be seen? To take up space? To turn the private into something public — and the public into something personal?

In their hands, art becomes not just a reflection of culture, but its provocation. A rebellion not of noise, but of presence. They remind us: art does not have to flatter. It can confront. It can whisper. It can roar. 

And above all — it can belong to anyone brave enough to make it.

This is not a trend. It’s a rebalancing. And the future is already hanging on the walls.