A quiet revolution in painting is seeing artists reject large-scale, bombastic installations in favor of intimate subjects and techniques.

The worldwide reaction against globalism takes many forms, most of them less dramatic than Brexit. In the art world, a trend has been emerging toward personal, intimate, and sometimes (but not always) small-scale paintings. This new work has almost nothing in common with the overblown, space-filling, mixed-media installations that the critic Peter Schjeldahl described in 1999 as “festival art”—made for the commercial art fairs that have proliferated internationally for almost two decades. Museums and commercial galleries fell over themselves in the rush to follow suit, building huge new spaces to accommodate installation and performance art. Everything got bigger and more public, it seemed, and many artists were lured into producing the sort of work that would fill the new spaces and fit the appetites of ravenous new collectors. But art doesn’t move in one direction only, and a reaction was overdue.

In the late 1990s, many young artists who felt that the fields of painting and sculpture were too crowded found a way around this through video and performance work. “Younger artists are always looking for new paths, and often those paths are easier to find in areas that are not necessarily in the public eye,” says the Tate’s Sir Nicholas Serota, the most influential museum director of our time. “It doesn’t surprise me at all that people are sitting in studios making intimate, confessional, personal art at this moment.” As if to underscore the point, New York’s James Cohan Gallery recently put on a show called “Intimisms,” with mostly small figurative paintings by 26 artists, some old and some new.

Among those working in this vein are the painters Genieve Figgis, Shara Hughes, Sadie Laska, Anna Glantz, Katherine Bernhardt, and Ryan Nord Kitchen. A striking example is 33-year-old Nigerian-born Njideka Akynyili Crosby, winner of the Prix Canson, an annual award for works on paper by an artist under 50. The prize ceremony took place in June at the Drawing Center in SoHo, where work by the five finalists was on view. Njideka, tall, beautiful, warm, and a trifle nervous about the upcoming announcement, embodies the excitement and positive energy coming out of Nigeria these days, which is deeply present in her work.