Explore an extensive selection of original paintings for sale or available to rent. Showcasing contemporary paintings from some of the most exciting artists working today, our curated selection includes everything from oil paintings to watercolour, and from landscapes to acrylic paintings. Browse our online collection and discover new paintings perfect for your home.

Buy Contemporary Paintings

Use our filters to find contemporary paintings in a range of media and styles by artists based in the UK and around the globe. Whether you’re looking for vibrant works by Kotaro Machiyama, delicate watercolour landscapes by Tou Toa, Louise McNaught’s mixed media animal portraits, or anything in between, we have something for art collections of all types.

We curate an unparalleled collection of paintings. As well as offering artworks embodying the cutting edge of experimentation in painting, such as Michael Tierney’s surrealist mixed media pieces, we are proud to showcase a range of painters drawing influence from the medium’s far-reaching history. Andrew Crane and Philip Tyler take inspiration from 20th-century expressionism, whilst Ta Byrne and Stella Kapezanou employ more traditional representational techniques to make us take a second, deeper look at their real and imagined subjects.

Discover more of our painters here.

History Of Modern Painting

Although painting has been a pastime for humans throughout our existence, the abstract and conceptual artworks we now see as timeless examples of the practice are relatively modern. Until the 20th century, painters focused exclusively on representational images: still lifes, portraiture or natural and religious subjects. We see this trend to varying degrees in the work of Monet, Van Gogh and other epoch-defining artists. Since then, painters have been testing the limits of the medium, experimenting with an expanding range of media and subject matter. The trend for geometric abstract paintings, for example, runs from pioneers such as Mondrian and Martin to contemporary artists such as Hetty Haxworth and Crispin Holder. The artists we hand-pick are at the forefront of the evolution of contemporary painting in the 21st century.

Painting has long been seen as a means of communication, albeit more slight and indirect than the spoken or written form. Edward Hopper once stated, “if you could say it in words, there would be no reason to paint.” This has increasingly been the case with the emergence of new painting styles and methods that push the boundaries of representation, from Impressionism to Surrealism to Expressionism. Each of our artworks has been chosen because it communicates in its nuances something not tangible enough to convey by other means – from the straightforwardly representational to the abstract and conceptual.

Find out more in our Guide To Paintings.