Antony Micallef is a contemporary British painter making post-Expressionist portraiture and figurative paintings. Throughout his oeuvre, Micallef frequently obscures the visage of his subjects through gestural brushstrokes to comment on contemporary culture, politics, and emotional states. The artist has explained that “art can have many functions but essentially it’s a language where, if used in the right way, can get us to view or hear things and sense them with pure emotion instead of thoughts." He cites painters such as Francis Bacon and Caravaggio as important influences to his work, and can be compared to his contemporary peer Glenn Brown in his use of an abstract painterly lexicon to mar his otherwise classically composed portraits. Born in 1975 in Swindon, England, Micallef studied at the University of Plymouth before receiving a 2000 BP/Amoco Portrait of the Year award. He has exhibited his work internationally, including at the National Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia in 2005, Pearl Lam Galleries in Hong Kong in 2016, and at Lazarides Rathbone in London in 2015.