Contemporary Artists Are Tapping into the Age-Old Allure of Nocturnal Scenes

The occult, the uncanny, the mysterious, the sensual: Nighttime conjures a myriad of connotations in art. American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler was the first to turn such works portraying the night into their own genre in the 1870s; a so-called “nocturne” painting takes its cue from the musical term in emphasizing the harmonious quality of a scene over a narrative. Whistler hoped to capture a moment’s symbolism and formal properties, rather than its story. Since then, Impressionist artists created works that emphasize the invention of electricity—its artificial glow a beacon in the dark skies of train yards—while others simply celebrated the natural illumination of the moon or the stars. In depictions of the night, everyday life can be revealed plainly, like in Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks (1942), or made into an enigma, like in Vincent van Gogh’s Café Terrace at Night (1888).

While nocturnal depictions certainly have not ceased since the mid-century, more recent en plein air painting has focused on the waking hours. However, in the last few years, an increasing number of contemporary painters are turning again to the genre, inspired to embrace its subject’s unknown. Gallerists and their art collectors have noticed. Earlier this year, group shows of contemporary works like “Night, Light.” at London gallery Cob, “The Moon and I” at GRIMM’s New York space, and “The Blue Hour” at London’s WORKPLACE evidenced the breadth of artists currently exploring the significance of the night. The Hole also showed a variety of nighttime paintings in “The Midnight Hour” at the beginning of the year.

On September 7th, New York gallery Albertz Benda opened its fall season with a solo show of new works by Korean-born, New York–based artist Sarah Lee, whose sublime yet foreboding paintings of moonlit nature draw on the slick oil techniques of Old Masters with brushstrokes that appear, from afar, almost too perfect to be handmade. Lee said she doesn’t track celestial bodies, but she does browse NASA’s website to view the “unreal” telescopic images of galaxies. Her work has changed since the pandemic: “When every day in New York felt almost like perpetual night, I began using darker palettes more frequently,” said the artist, who paints only at night in her East Village studio where photos of the Northern Lights, French illustrations, and a reproduction of John Everett Millais’s Ophelia (1851–52) hang on the wall.

“The nighttime has a silence and inherent loneliness,” she continued. “It reminds me of my vulnerability as a human, and acknowledging it oddly consoles me.” Her dusk landscapes are unpopulated, aside from occasional illuminated insects, and rendered in colors as saturated as computer images or dreamscapes. She cited Surrealists Giorgio de Chirico and Yves Tanguy as inspirations.

Today, the contexts and meanings of nighttime symbols have shifted, though history is never too far out of mind. Styles have shifted, too. Like in Lee’s work, many new nocturnes are playing with the distinction between digital and analogue techniques. “I think there has been an increased interest in painters that explore noir or neo-noir aesthetics, and with that often comes a sense of ambiguity or mystery among the composition,” said Michael Plunkett, senior director of GRIMM gallery, whose recent show focused specifically on the film-inspired look that can also be found in video games, and included artists like Michael Ho, Wanda Koop, and Eric White.

Elsewhere, works like Cece Phillips’s tbt (2023) or Adriel Visoto’s Augusta (2022), both featured in Cob’s “Night, Light.” exhibition, use darkness lit by streetlights or fluorescent bulbs to enhance this feeling in their city scene subject matter, while Alice Miller’s Knowing (2023) explores the unique light provided by new technology—an iPhone flash in the dark. In this work, the artist paints a digitally induced portrait by hand, showing the subject at a bar turning shades of neon pink, reflections dancing in their eyeglasses.

Simultaneously, however, Cob curator Cassie Beadle has seen “a rejection of the industrialization of light” in contemporary nocturne paintings. “People are looking at the moon and lunar cycles, which I feel is maybe a product of lockdown and a bit more soul-searching,” she said. “There are smatterings of that across a lot of artists’ work, a kind of resurgence of the spiritual side of things.”

In the urban scenes painted by Brooklyn-based artist Sung Hwa Kim, insects, figures, and plants glow often more brightly than the moon overhead. A frequent nighttime bicyclist, he also finds comfort in the cover of darkness where “the moon, the stars, and the streetlights became my guides, beacons of hope, compassion, and goodwill toward humanity,” Kim explained. Fragments of memories of things he sees on rides are the origins of artworks he makes at night, when he finds “a moment of pause to think and feel clearer,” he said of his studio process. Some of his emotion-driven images toe the line of still life, like in the poetically titled 2022 work When The Evening Song Begins, Everything Turns Into Nothing. From Nothing, You Find Everything (which was included in The Hole show), in which a vase in front of a window appears to become a vessel for the moon and a meadow.

The nebulous nature of the nighttime is a connotation familiar from art historical references, and a thread that also runs through current nocturne painting. “I think of the night both as an in-between period of stillness (the time after everything has happened and before it all begins again at dawn) but also an active hidden time when future events start brewing,” said Madrid-based artist Jeronimo Elespe, who works in painting, printmaking, and woodcut. “This double quality is a fertile ground for potential narratives.” His dappled works verge on abstraction: Large clouds, haze, and shadows obscure his scenes’ figures, like the laptop-wielding man in Talante Crítico (2023) or an anthropomorphic/vegetal object inside a window in the 2016 etching Slow Rays (1).

Across these contemporary works, artists are continuing the genre’s historical focus on intimacy. It’s what is so appealing to buyers as well, said Cob’s Beadle. “Collectors told me they’d fallen in love with the work,” said the curator. “They just felt like it touched on a universal feeling in these overlooked moments of the nighttime.”

That aura is holistic, including the comfort, the magic, and the simultaneous uncertainty of nocturnal hours. “There is a timelessness to the subject of the night, especially through the canon of landscape painting; there is a romance and a melancholy that resonates with anyone that has a deep appreciation for art,” explained Plunkett. There is also, however, “an underlying sense of unease, or perhaps a looming threat…I found this was surprising to collectors who came in expecting a straightforward summer show about the moon.” Instead, they encountered a new generation of painters celebrating its complexities.