2024-04-25
One of the artist's primary visual tools is colour. It determines the character of a painting, it determines whether it will be warm or cold, expressive or delicate, light or dark. Painters spend years practising the correct use and combination of paints in order to achieve the best colour effect. Recently, the art world has noted a certain change in the style of figurative works by contemporary artists: the variety of the range of colours used is disappearing and is even being replaced by a uniformity of tonality on the canvas. Increasingly, artists are abandoning the realism of colour, replacing it with a monochromatic play with a chosen hue.
Monochrome paintings are works of art for which a single colour or a palette of shades of a single colour has been used. The colour palette used by an artist can be of particular significance to his overall oeuvre, as for example in the case of Pablo Picasso, whose specific moments in his oeuvre were named and defined in terms of the colour scheme he used. Yves Klein, on the other hand, invented his own distinctive shade of blue and used it almost exclusively in his work, rejecting all other colours. Monochrome art is primarily associated with abstractions. The abandonment of the colour spectrum seems to take away the possibility of depicting specific scenes or figures, while allowing the creation of interesting non-representational works that attract collectors with their minimalism. This trend is evident, among other things, in the market success of the work of Mark Rothko, who became famous for his sparse in form and simple in colour, paintings currently worth millions of dollars. However, artworks focusing on a single colour do not have to be abstractions, as young artists have been proving recently. More and more figurative works maintained in a single primary colour and its shades are appearing on the art market.
Monochrome figurative paintings stand out from other recent artworks in several respects. Firstly, they captivate with their unique technique of execution. Painting a scene using the entire available colour palette seems to be easier than depicting the same frame using only shades of a particular colour. By operating with a range of colours, the artist has the ability to depict the chosen subject in a more realistic and comprehensible way, whereas taking away the colour variety puts the artist in the difficult position of portraying reality in a false tonality. Secondly, the artist can demonstrate a great play with light. In figurative monochrome art, light is extremely important, as its task is to reassure the viewer that the painted scene qualifies as realism despite the uniform colour scheme. This requires a special skill in the correct distribution of the lighter and darker shades of the chosen colour on the canvas, so that the result is a concrete monochrome representation. Thirdly, monochrome paintings attract collectors and art lovers with their unusual aesthetics. When choosing a work of art for your interior, the question of colour is very important. It is not without reason that abstract works attract the most interest - their versatility and pure representation of a particular colour range make customers eager to buy abstracts, especially in their favourite colours. Monochrome figurative paintings seem to be a good alternative for those looking for art with a specific colour scheme.
Although the trend of monochrome figurative paintings has been noticed mainly among young foreign artists, in our offer you will also find artworks in this type by both recent and contemporary artists. We would particularly like to draw your attention to two paintings by Agnieszka Brzezinska - 'Dancing' from the series 'Sisters' and 'Sisters with passion'. In these two canvases, the artist has managed to clearly bring out the female figures from the blues and greens. Robert Rojek's 'Return to the End' is an example of a work with more detail submerged in a single colour, while 'Portrait' by Piotr Trusik's brush presents a monochrome structure from which a female face emerges. 'Observe' by Jagoda Piekarska, on the other hand, is a more conceptual work, modest in colour. Collectors interested in a monochrome aesthetic that is not only figurative will also find something for themselves, such as Marta Makos' monochrome abstraction 'Rusty Morning' or Edward Dwurnik's blue veduta 'Białystok'.
