Neo-Expressionism" refers to one of the last international contemporary art movements of the 20th century. It is a style of late modernist painting and sculpture which emerged during the late 1970s and early 1980s. Acting as a major revival of painting in an expressionist manner, the artists depicted their subjects in an almost raw and brutish manner. Notable for its large-scale narrative that had been rejected by the immediately preceding art movements, Neo expressionist canvasses were keenly characterized by expressive brushwork, dramatic figural forms, highly textural applications of paint, vividly contrasting colors and extremely emotive subject matter.

Neo-expressionism was seen as a reaction to the minimalism and conceptual art  that had dominated the 1970s. Leading artists of the movement in the USA were Julian Schnabel and Philip Guston and in Britain, Paulo Rego and Christopher Le Brun. Aside from the USA, Britain and France, neo-expressionism also flourished in Germany where the neo-expressionists became known as the new Fauvists and in Italy, were expressionist paintings appeared under the banner of Transavanguardia or ”beyond the avant-garde.