Why Figurative Artists Have Turned to Monochromatic Palettes
A notable shift has transpired in the painting world of late: A growing cohort of emerging and mid-career artists, many of them figurative painters, are enveloping their subjects in varying shades of high-intensity colors, all taken from the same section of the color wheel. Neon-nearing hues like ghostly teals, laser lemon yellows, and mythical fuchsias are being used in similar shades to depict the world around us from the mundane to the magical. Often depicting the world through monochromatic compositions, these artists have developed a signature palette that they rarely deviate from.
Historically, painting styles have adapted alongside advancements in photography and film. In the age of virtual reality with the contemporary world oversaturated with imagery, it’s only natural for painters to gravitate towards a single-color palette as a way to emphatically differentiate their real or imagined scenes from digital media. One intent feels clear: a shared desire to convey what it feels like to be alive today, a sensation that the true-to-life colors of realism may no longer fully capture.
Artists have always focused on specific hues to influence a viewer’s mood: The warm oranges and earthy pinks synonymous with Picasso’s Rose Period, for instance, evoke feelings of serenity, even joy. Similarly, contemporary painters are using a finessed color scheme to allure viewers into their own intimate way of seeing the world. Like the late French artist Yves Klein once said, working in his signature blue was an “open window to freedom,” granting him “the possibility of being immersed in the immeasurable existence of color.”
Here are 11 contemporary artists who share Klein’s passion for color, showing that a single hue can define a whole canvas, even birth an entire body of work. Whether working in varying shades of the same color or one dominant shade, these artists are all creating worlds shaped by the infinite possibilities of color.
Yamuna Forzani
B. 1993, England. Lives and works in Amsterdam.
To make her euphoric, mostly monochromatic tapestries, Yamuna Forzani uses a circular knitting machine—a computerized tool that limits the number of yarns she can work with. Even so, her use of eye-catching, phosphorescent hues is a deliberate choice. “I like to take up space and scream for attention,” Forzani said. A textile artist, designer, and queer activist, Forzani creates immersive performances or queer “utopias,” using her knitted tapestries and kaleidoscopic line of streetwear to bring these free-spirited productions to life.
Energized by her love of dressing drag queens, performers, and dancers within the underground queer ballroom community in the Netherlands, Forzani approaches her ascendant career in textile-making with a sense of verve and veneration for queer life. Marrying Renaissance-inspired lighting and composition with lambent colors, each tapestry is a celebration of the queer body. Her subjects’ bodies are contoured with recycled neon yarn, enhancing their 3D effect—as seen in The Adoration of Mystique (2023)—signifying “we’re here, and we’re not going to be ignored,” she said.
Although Forzani’s background is in textiles and fashion—she won the Dutch Design Awards for her artistic direction of a ballroom fashion show—she has gained notoriety as a fine artist. Her work is in the Stedelijk Museum’s permanent collection and is currently part of “She Knows,” a group exhibition open through April 27th at Rademakers Gallery in Amsterdam.
Jesse Zuo
B. 2000, Beijing. Lives and works in New York.
An MFA candidate at the School of Visual Arts, Jesse Zuo credits Lisa Yuskavage as the source of inspiration for her painterly voice. After discovering the pioneering painter at a David Zwirner show in 2021, she made an “impulsive attempt” to move beyond traditional realism in pursuit of a style that would better showcase her innate attraction to color. “They were the best-received pieces that I’d done up until that point,” Zuo said.
Whether depicting the moment of anticipation before a painful pimple bursts or capturing a woman’s waist as she struggles to squeeze herself into too-tight jeans, Zuo’s paintings monumentalize the mundane. Colors that appear pulled from thermal heat-map imaging inflate the underlying mood behind each moment. Interested in viewers’ subjective, emotional response to tints like warm yellows and sticky oranges (as in her 2023 painting Rain), Zuo sees colors as “suggestions,” never the “right answer,” she said. The emerging painter was included in Soft Times Gallery’s presentation in the winter 2024 edition of Artsy’s online art fair Foundations, and currently has three paintings in “Chapter II,” a group show at sobering galerie in Paris open through April 4th.
Elijah Kauffman
B. 1998, Salt Lake City. Lives and works in Providence, Rhode Island.
Growing up queer in the world capital of Mormon culture might present its challenges, but artist Elijah Kauffman credits Salt Lake City’s strong counterculture and “DIY” community for giving them the tools to launch their painting career. Action-filled coming-of-age scenes meet magical realism and mythology in the young figure painter’s dynamic works, which teem with the tumult of adolescence. Limiting each work to a single, monochromatic hue not only dramatizes each scene, making the works feel “larger than life,” but helps “convey a lot about the emotions and experiences of the figures in the paintings,” Kauffman told Testudo.
In moody blues, teenagers gaze longingly through car windows. Elsewhere, ablaze in the orange glow of birthday candles, friends celebrate another year gone by. Or, spotlit by traffic-light green, an adolescent duo plays twister in tall, swaying grass. Inspired by film stills from teen drama series like Skins and My So-Called Life, Kauffman told Testudo that they are “not necessarily condoning” or critiquing their subjects’ behavior, but “recognizing some of the moments in these scenes that feel kind of divine or ethereal and bringing those to the foreground.” Since graduating from the Rhode Island School of Design in 2022 with a BFA in painting, they have had solo exhibitions in London, Salt Lake City, and Providence, Rhode Island.
Alayna Coverly
B. 1994, Bloomington, Indiana. Lives and works in New York.
With the precision of a hyperrealist, Alayna Coverly captures silhouetted bodies swathed in the shining, undulating folds of fabric. Faceless women pose defiantly, their faces wholly obscured by opulently patterned head scarves that seem to entrap their thoughts. In newer works from her inaugural solo exhibition “Find Me” presented by VillageOneArt earlier this year, women appear in small groups, tussling between tangled silken sheets enveloping them. A grandeur arises not only from the seductive and voyeuristic mystery of Coverly’s subjects but also from the painter’s masterful use of color.
Keeping her colors saturated and bright is a way of offsetting the “suffocation and anxiety of people wrapped in fabric,” Coverly said. Tired of “seeing traumatic things shown aggressively” in the media, particularly instances of abuse towards women, she adopts a gentler, more tender approach to depicting the hardships of womanhood. Coverly graduated from the New York Academy of Art in 2023 with an MFA in painting and was included in “The Quiet Moment,” an all-female group exhibition at FORMah, on view in New York last August.
Dominic Chambers
B. 1993, St. Louis, Missouri. Lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.
The interiority of Dominic Chambers’s Black subjects takes center stage in the mid-career artist and writer’s introspective paintings—his subjects rest, read, contemplate, and wonder in idleness and repose. “Our normative understanding of the Black body is a hyperactive one,” Chambers told Artsy when he was named a member of The Artsy Vanguard 2022, deliberately dispelling this racist misconception.
Drawing influence from writers like James Baldwin, Zora Neale Hurston, and Fred Moten, Chambers incorporates elements of Surrealism and magical realism into his paintings as a way of capturing the full spectrum of the Black experience. In Chambers’s works, color is a character in itself, a way to draw a direct line between his subjects’ inner worlds and the dreamlike spheres that surround them. Squares of translucent color and patterned, tear-like ovals appear regularly in his paintings, evoking transcendence.
Now represented by Lehmann Maupin, Chambers graduated from Yale with an MFA and has work in the collections of international institutions including the Centre Pompidou, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Institute of Contemporary Art, Miami. He was featured in a solo museum exhibition at the Contemporary Art Museum St. Louis earlier this year.
Cathy Tabbakh
B. 1989, Lyon, France. Lives and works in London.
Cathy Tabbakh grew up in the lush countryside of France’s Beaujolais region, born into a family with green thumbs. Her father tended to a flourishing garden surrounding their house while her mother amassed copious amounts of houseplants. Enraptured by the way plants “seem to be constantly dancing, in movement” as Tabbakh told Court Tree Collective, her color-rich still lifes feature sumptuously shaped vases housing elegant plants. Crisp shadows enunciate each leaf’s vitality while highlighting the singularity of its silhouette.
In opposition to the darkly lit still lifes of the early modern era, Tabbakh’s work utilizes elements of abstraction. Influenced by architecture, she juxtaposes stark colors in similar shades using angular lines, creating high-tension points that seem to pop off the flat picture plane. Egyptian blues, forest greens, and plum purples appear frequently in her work—vibrant, contemporary colors that underscore the artist’s buoyant approach to art making. In September 2023, Rhodes in London inaugurated their new exhibition space with “La Vie en Couleurs,” Tabbakh’s debut solo show.
Ashley Marie
B. 1985, Michigan. Lives and works in Detroit.
Detroit-based artist Ashley Marie paints translucent figures floating through thick foliage in the dark of night. Some fix their gaze directly upon the viewer, while others appear fleeting, reminiscent of occult whispers or the elusive touch of the divine. “There is something greater than us,” Marie said in an interview with Artsy, “something beyond this life that we can’t even possibly imagine.” After her sister passed away, the artist asked the universe for a sign that her sibling was still there, and okay. Her request was precise: a purple flower. Within a matter of weeks, a purple pansy had sprouted from between the brick lining on her front porch steps.
Evoking the viridescent glow of the heart chakra, Marie’s use of fluorescent, night-vision green conveys a deep spirituality and offers room for “healing and growth.” Delving into the realm of the supernatural, Marie offers affirmation to her viewers that humans are more than just physical beings. “I want to give that gift [that my sister gave me] to the audience,” she said. Largely self-taught, Marie has work in the Imago Mundi collection and has participated in group shows across the U.S. A solo exhibition of new paintings will open at M Contemporary Art in Ferndale, Michigan, on April 26th.
Katia Lifshin
B. 1993, Ukraine. Lives and works in Tel Aviv.
M.C. Escher meets Alice in Wonderland in the phantasmagorical blue-green world of Katia Lifshin’s oil paintings. Drawn to the cosmic wonders of the night, Lifshin sought a female character who could fit neatly within a nocturnal world, existing as an extension of it. The mutable “shapeshifters” she depicts in her work represent an inner child of sorts, persistently chasing a distant goal.
In Light Twist (2022), a radiance seems to emanate from the subject herself, while in other works, the light source is external—a distant beam coming from the horizon. Working in grass green, Katia takes elements of the natural world and exaggerates them, pulling inspiration from the “spirit” of life. Her curious little girls are “not just humans,” Lifshin said, “they’re trying to connect to something bigger.” The emerging painter will present her first solo show in the U.S., “Light Journeys,” opening at Long Story Short in New York on April 5th.
Xiao Wang
B. 1990, Beijing. Lives and works in New York.
Growing up in Beijing, Xiao Wang and his peers were taught to master Socialist Realism, the Soviet-inspired painting style typically using an earthy, naturalistic palette. Eager to distinguish his style from the influences of his early studies, Wang began “distorting” colors as a way to elevate his works to “a different space, a parallel dimension almost,” he said.
Drawing on the visual and narrative language of cinematography, Wang approaches his paintings in the same way as a set designer does a stage. Beams of light illuminate his subjects who ponder, reflect, and agonize in luxuriant foliage and under lavender, cloud-filled skies. His subjects are frozen in these shades “not just to create a sense of drama and mood, but almost as a way [for each canvas] to tell a story on its own,” he said. Wang’s work has been included in group shows in Germany, the U.K., Italy, and Denmark. In 2023, he was the subject of a solo exhibition at PM/AM in London.
Thebe Phetogo
B. 1993, Serowe, Botswana. Lives and works in Gaborone, Botswana.
The eye-blinding, neon shade of Thebe Phetogo’s phantasmic paintings has been described as “puke green” and likened to nuclear waste and acid rain. For the artist, however, the reference is simple: Evocative of a green screen, it’s an “artificial backdrop” as he describes it, upon which “modern myths are told.” Using shoe polish to cast a black sheen over his ghostly figures as seen in Proposition 2 - Material Need and Practical Effects, Painting 2 (2022), Phetogo cleverly—but subtly—weaves the history of minstrel performances into his work.
Interested in the idea of the Black body as both a social construct and as an analog to a “blackbody,” a hypothetical object in physics that absorbs electromagnetic radiation, Phetogo uses jarring, contrived colors in an act of satire. Societal expectations of Blackness are mocked and exaggerated to the point where the humor turns back on the viewer. In his 2024 series of “Lowe” landscapes, the Motswana artist paints a regional creation story as an infographic, once again using outlandish colors to explore the theme of misconstrued information. With recent solo exhibitions at kó in Lagos (“7 Propositions for the Origin of a blackbody,” 2023) and at Von Ammon Co. in Washington, D.C. (“8 Propositions for the Origin of a blackbody,” 2024), Phetogo is beginning to gain more mainstream acclaim.
Siji Krishnan
B. 1983, Kerala, India. Lives and works in Kochi, India.
There is a calm elegance and understated beauty to Siji Krishnan’s works that is perhaps born from the “weightlessness” the painter says she feels when creating. Often painting in watercolor on rice paper, she is intentional about her gentle use of color. Earth tones like amber, sand, and oatmeal characterize her palette, which she sees as an extension of herself. To make a difficult emotion feel lighter, she might introduce pastel yellows, as seen in Against the wind (2022). In other moments, however, an ominous soil-colored cloud might encroach upon a scene as in Circus Family (2020). “Everything I’m feeling comes through [my work],” the artist said.
Krishnan’s work was included in Michael Kohn Gallery’s booth at Art Basel Miami Beach 2023, and will be the subject of a show at the gallery in Los Angeles, opening on April 27th—her first solo exhibition in the U.S. Her paintings are held in international institutions including the National Gallery of Victoria in Melbourne, the Dallas Museum of Art, and the Kiran Nadar Museum of Art in New Delhi.
