Antony Micallef

Antony Micallef is a British contemporary artist and painter working in London (born 1975). Micallef was notably taught by the austere landscape painter John Virtue, who was taught by the postwar painter Frank Auerbach. Antony appeared on the British art scene after being a prize winner of the BP Portrait Award competition. Since then, his mix of political imagery fused with contemporary expressionism has won him worldwide acclaim. His heavily laden, texture-rich canvases are reminiscent of artists as diverse as Auerbach, Kossoff, the White Russian-French painter Chaïm Soutine and the British painter Walter Richard Sickert, whose works explore and ultimately foreground the pure materiality of the medium of paint.