Robert Combas is a French figurative artist, born in Lyon in 1957. He studied at the École des Beaux-Arts de Montpellier. He has lived and worked in Paris since 1981. Combas rose to international prominence in the early 1980s as a leader of the Figuration Libre movement, a movement associated with Neo-Expressionism in the United States and in opposition to Conceptual and Minimalist art. His work has always been firmly rooted in the representation of the human figure, often in wild, violent, or orgiastic settings. He creates frenetic narratives of war, crime, sex, celebration, and transgression—in short, of all the phases that make up the constant flux of modern life. In recent years, a strong autobiographical influence has emerged in his work, which was only present on a subliminal, if at all, level in his earlier works. Combas exhibited at the Leo Castelli Gallery in New York alongside Keith Haring in 1983 and has since been the subject of numerous retrospectives, in France and abroad: ARCA in Marseille (1984), CAPC in Bordeaux, Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam (1987), Taipei Fine Arts Museum in Taiwan (1990), Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris (1993), Musée Paul-Valéry in Sète (2000), Seoul Museum of Art, in Seoul (2006), Mudima Foundation in Milan (2009), MAC in Lyon (2012), and Grimaldi Forum in Monaco (2016).