New generation of artists, many of them women, use figurative painting to redress imbalance

A new wave of figurative painters – many of whom are women of colour – are breathing new life into a form that has traditionally been dominated by white male artists and has been described as “anachronistic, inert, crusty”.

Joy Labinjo was a star at Frieze London last month. The 24-year-old, who has already had two major solo shows: Recollections at Tiwani Contemporary in London and Our histories cling to us, which is currently on at the Baltic in Gateshead, has become one of the most in-demand young British artists.

Labinjo is not alone. This year there has been Faith Ringgold’s lauded show at the Serpentine; Claudette Johnson’s first major solo exhibition since 1990 at Modern Art Oxford; London-based Kudzanai-Violet Hwami’s paintings at Gasworks in Vauxhall; the British-Liberian painter Lina Iris Viktor at Autograph in Hackney; and in October, Christina Quarles opened a show full of abstract figures at Hepworth Wakefield.

In the US, Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald have embraced the form – ultimately resulting in their presidential portraits of Barack and Michelle Obama.

Next March, the Nigerian-American artist Toyin Ojih Odutola – known for her obsidian drawings of black subjects – will bring a site-specific installation to the Barbican. A month earlier, Whitechapel Gallery will open a major exhibition focused on the new figurative movement called Radical Figures: Painting in the New Millennium, featuring Quarles and Tschabalala Self – another star of Frieze this year.

The Treatment by Toyin Ojih Odutola. Photograph: Jack Shainman Gallery, New York

Lydia Yee, chief curator at the Whitechapel Gallery, said that for many of the new generation of figurative artists, painting minority ethnic subjects was a way to redress the lack of diversity in major institutions and to experiment with the limits of the form.

“For them, figurative painting is about subject matter, as opposed to abstraction or other forms of painting that are less representational,” she said.

“It’s radical both in terms of the social and political elements of what these artists are doing, but also in the kind of experimental nature of the way they’re painting.”

Labinjo said her interest in figurative painting came from studying Sonia Boyce, and after attending the Saatchi’s Painters’ Painters exhibition, which included work by contemporary artists such as Martin Maloney and Dexter Dalwood.

“It was supposed to be the greatest painters of the 20th century. They were all white men,” said Labinjo, who began painting her own Nigerian family from photos in an album.

The idea of addressing the balance is a key element to the revival of figurative painting and drawing, according to the art critic and author Eddie Chambers, who said black artists had far fewer “images of self-affirmation” than their white contemporaries.

“Images that say ‘I am here’, ‘I am important’, ‘my stories are important’ – these are, I think, some of the motivations behind the use of figuration,” he said.

But despite the popularity of Labinjo and other artists at Frieze – most of the work she had at the fair sold out a few hours after the preview opened – data shows the hype around young, female, minority ethnic artists has not offset the huge discrepancies seen in the art world.

Last year a joint investigation by In Other Words and Artnet found that American museums dedicated only 7.6% of their exhibitions to the work of African American artists – with the Studio Museum in Harlem, which has helped develop black talent including Kerry James Marshall, accounting for more than a third of the total.

More research this year found that only 11% of all acquisitions and 14% of exhibitions at 26 large American museums over the past decade were of work by female artists.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Detail from one of the works in Claudette Johnson’s I Came to Dance show at Modern Art Oxford this year.

Despite the figures, Charlotte Jansen, the editor-at-large of Elephant magazine, thinks there is a wider cultural shift that is hard to measure.

Jansen sees a link between the new wave of figuration and the resurgence of interest in radical black feminist writing by Octavia Butler, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison and Angela Carter, who have become influential among a younger generation and “definitely give a sense of history, purpose and solidarity among the under-represented”.

Jansen also puts the trend down to the influence of west African studio photographers such as Malick Sidibé and Seydou Keïta, who found subjects in their immediate surroundings.

“I think that’s had an effect on the way a lot of younger painters are working,” said Jansen.

“Especially the approach of going back into your own visual history, family photo albums, collected and found pictures and exploring your identity through that – something that artists like Njideka Akunyili Crosby, Joy Labinjo and Kudzanai-Violet Hwami have done.”

Labinjo said: “I think just by painting black figures, it’s politicised. But I don’t see myself as a political artist. I just see myself as a figurative painter, but – because of the time we’re in now – the paintings are loaded.”

• This article was amended on 18 November 2019 because an earlier version misnamed Modern Art Oxford as Oxford Modern. This has been corrected.