What’s with all the rusty painters?

Describing the early market for his artists, German gallerist Michael Werner said “I couldn’t sell anything. Georg Baselitz and Markus Lüpertz would show paintings and people would laugh. But I never accepted the fact that people scorned my artists.”

Fast forward to 2023 and Baselitz and Lüpertz are now market darlings. Their semi-abstract heavily impastoed, brooding (almost menacing) works often appear at auction with sale prices ranging from the many thousands to the millions. Each artist regularly receives major institutional and commercial gallery shows and resides in countless museum collections.

These artists, as well as others from their generation – such as Per Kirkeby and Anselm Kiefer – do not make pretty, colourful pictures. Instead, hard-to-decipher figures and allusions to nature are deathly, morbid and solemn, speaking to postwar anxieties.

But now, a new group of painters are following in their footsteps, drawing on a similar palette of sullen umbers and ochres – coarse with a rusty and old-world feel. These painters are seeking solace in darker works, and shunning the pop colours we are affronted with in contemporary life.

It could be said that these works are the total antithesis to paintings by recent market darlings whose bright, candied, kaleidoscopic palettes have seen huge financial success in the pandemic years. Christina Quarles, Shara Hughes and Jade Fadojoutimi have all seen auction records reaching well into the millions.

“There has been a massive shift,” says Ted Targett of Brunette Coleman. “There is an interest in timeless painting at the moment. Painting that looks like it could have existed centuries ago and has pentimento, an Italian word that references this idea of ghosts of previous paintings behind the one on top.”

As another source, working in an established commercial gallery tells me: “It’s interesting because now there’s a cabal of artists emerging that are really plugging into those darker pigments and creating that market from a so-called anti-painting type of stance. They think this approach stands in opposition to the commercialisation of painting,” they add, hinting at the art market’s unique ability to financially subsume even the most resistant artists.

A notable number of these artists come from Copenhagen and are exhibiting in London, such as Oliver Bak who recently had a solo exhibition with Cassius & Co, and Martin Aagaard Hansen who showed with Union Pacific in 2022. Other artists include Katrine Bobek, J.G. Arvidsson, Anton Munar and Tomas Leth. “They have this shared palette and dreamlike sensibility where figures don’t necessarily pop out at you and you have to find them among swirling vistas and landscapes and nature,” says Targett. “Nature is very important within this. Colours and tones that reflect the earth beneath them: grass and soil.”

“This is the colour scheme that people seem to be drawn to right now.” says London-based collector Alexander DiPersia, who in a recent podcast with Jerry Gogosian mentioned the same Copenhagen-based artists. Bak features in DiPersia’s private collection, as well as Maki Na Kamura, another artist who could be placed in this ‘rusty’ painting club. “I think people are drawn to these colours because it’s soothing,” he tells me. “It’s very lowkey, it reminds of a brick wall… of autumn. I think the warmth of these paintings is what people crave.”

“For me, everything comes back to the three wizards of dark painting in Europe: Rembrandt, Titian and Goya,” says my source. “This new generation of artists are invoking the ghosts of the past and trying to forge new imagery… it’s primordial. In every movement, in every group of artists, there are always the artists at the other end of the spectrum that are painting the dirty images, the encrusted images.”

He notes that contemporary artists like Jake Grewal – who is currently showing at Pallant House Gallery – are inspired by the shadowy paintings of previous generations of British artists like John Singer Sargent and Peter Doig. Willa Wasserman’s dark paintings are applied directly to metallic panels made of copper or hammered bronze, a medieval technique popular with old masters.

But it is Kai Althoff who both Targett and my source agree is the most notable living artist of this genre – a northern star for many painters. The German-born artist is as elusive as his mystical paintings, which Artforum have described as ‘neo-expressionist religious imagery’ and somehow straddle being both violent and tender to convey the breadth of the human condition. Althoff received an acclaimed survey at Whitechapel Gallery in 2020. It would be an understatement to say it was a critical hit, one painter told me they visited seven times.

Rich in ochres, clarets and moss greens, Althoff’s paintings are often crudely framed by hand in jagged shapes; sometimes curving off the wall. Interestingly, following the lockdown, when most people’s screen time skyrocketed, and services like Zoom were daily essentials, not obscure communication tools, the artist requested that photography be prohibited in his exhibition. Works like this are more difficult to photograph which is interesting, considering the age that we live in,” my source explains. “They don’t look good online – on screens, on phones – which I think is notable.”

Paintings of this rusty ilk were abundant in London around Frieze Week; from Pace showing 28-year-old painter Pam Evelyn, to Stuart Shave showing Justin Caguiat, Brunette Coleman showing Barbara Wesołowska, and Thomas Dane showing Jake Grewal. Arcadia Missa, a gallery known for being on the pulse with London-based emerging artists, showed a brown, layered abstraction by Japanese artist Reina Sugihara. Alison Jacques, a dealer known for discovering overlooked artists, showed the ambiguous and dreamlike paintings of American artist Randy Wray.

In Marylebone, Angelica Jopling’s gallery Incubator showed recent Camberwell College of Arts graduate Mia Graham. Graham’s sludgy paintings depict living organisms situated in agitated and cavernous realms. Jopling explains that these murky, mysterious works demand slow looking, “You have to stay with Mia’s work a while in order to excavate their concealed forms… Once these forms reveal themselves, the challenge lies in holding onto their edges, like clutching the remnants of a dream before it slips away at breakfast.”

I’ve been cautious not to use the word ‘trend’ in this article. Everyone I have spoken to has stressed that rusty painting has been around for centuries, ebbing and flowing in popularity but never disappearing. As ‘next-gen collectors’ swamp Instagram and TikTok with their latest figurative paintings and online selling platforms flood our inboxes offering lurid (can we say basic?) artworks that all look slightly similar to something else, nuanced painting lovers are proving their cultural cachet by flexing difficult, brown-ish paintings, and many of the above artists are now showing with major galleries. One thing’s for sure: the buzz around rusty paintings isn’t corroding any time soon.