The return of faces: When contemporary painting reinvents the human

This scene, repeated thousands of times since 2018, marks a turning point. After decades in which abstraction and conceptual art dominated galleries and auction houses, figuration has made a forceful return. But not just any figuration: one laden with history, politics, and memory. Portraits and landscapes are no longer mere representations—they have become manifestos, living archives, investments as emotional as they are financial.

Why this return? Perhaps because in the age of screens and artificial intelligence, we crave what machines cannot reproduce: the trace of a human hand, the ambiguity of a gaze, the complexity of an identity. Collectors have understood this. In 2023, figurative works accounted for nearly 40% of contemporary art sales at Christie’s and Sotheby’s—a figure unthinkable ten years earlier. But behind the auction records lies a subtler reality: these paintings tell stories no one else can.

01The ghosts of the twentieth century

To grasp the scale of this shift, we must go back to the 1980s. At the time, abstract art reigned supreme. New York galleries exhibited vast canvases where color seemed to float in space, as in the works of Mark Rothko or Helen Frankenthaler. The market followed suit: in 1988, Van Gogh’s Irises fetched $53.9 million at Sotheby’s—a record that cemented art as a safe haven. Yet something grated in this well-oiled machine.

In a Brooklyn loft, a young Black artist named Jean-Michel Basquiat was scribbling skeletal figures on refrigerator doors. His works, halfway between graffiti and painting, teemed with wide-eyed characters, crowns, and crossed-out words. No one yet knew that these canvases, sold for a few thousand dollars, would be worth tens of millions twenty years later. Basquiat embodied the first crack in abstraction’s hegemony. His art was figurative, but not in the classical sense: it depicted broken bodies, fractured identities, an America that had never kept its promises.

Yet in the 1990s, figuration remained marginal. Critics spoke of "the death of painting." Douglas Crimp published The End of Art, prophesying the demise of traditional media in favor of installation and video. The Young British Artists, led by Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin, made headlines with sharks in formaldehyde and unmade beds—but their works, however provocative, remained rooted in the conceptual.

It was the arrival of the internet that changed everything. In 2010, Instagram democratized art. Suddenly, a figurative painting—with its vibrant colors, expressive faces, and immediate narratives—became far more "Instagrammable" than an abstract canvas. Collectors, weary of monochromes and ephemeral installations, turned toward what spoke directly to the senses. Then came the crises: the 2008 financial meltdown, the Black Lives Matter movement in 2020, the pandemic. In these moments of fracture, figurative art offered something abstraction could not—a mirror.

02The studio as a political laboratory

Take Lynette Yiadom-Boakye’s studio in London. The walls are covered with small canvases where Black figures emerge from dark backgrounds like ghosts. The artist, seated at her easel, works fast. Very fast. "I paint each picture in a day," she explains. No preparatory sketches, no models. Just a blank canvas and an idea that imposes itself. Her characters—a man sitting on a couch, two women dancing in an empty room—do not exist. They are fictions, possibilities.

Yiadom-Boakye was born in 1977 to Ghanaian parents. When she began exhibiting in the 2000s, the art world was still largely dominated by white men. Her paintings, in which Black figures occupy space with quiet grace, unsettled viewers. "People told me my work was too beautiful, too aesthetic to be political," she recalls. Yet it was precisely this beauty that made them subversive. By depicting Black bodies in intimate, almost banal poses, she repaired centuries of absence.

Her process is almost alchemical. She mixes earthy pigments—ochres, browns, olive greens—which she applies in thin layers to the canvas. The faces are never quite finished; the hands remain sketched, as if the figures are about to vanish. "I want the viewer to complete the story," she says. In 2020, her retrospective at Tate Britain drew more visitors than any other exhibition of the decade. Suddenly, everyone wanted a Yiadom-Boakye. Prices soared: Condor and the Mole, an oil on canvas from 2011, is now estimated at over $2 million.

Thousands of miles away, in a Lagos studio, Kehinde Wiley works by a radically different method. Here, no creative solitude—just a team of assistants preparing canvases, mixing colors, projecting images. Wiley himself roams the streets with a camera. "I look for faces that tell a story," he explains. One day, it’s a young man in a tracksuit, met in a Dakar cybercafé. The next, a woman in a boubou, seated in front of a market stall in Accra.

His process is a rewriting of art history. Wiley takes classical portraits—Napoleon crossing the Alps, Renaissance kings—and replaces the white figures with Black models dressed in contemporary clothing. The result is both familiar and deeply unsettling. In Napoleon Leading the Army Over the Alps (2005), a young man in a hoodie and sneakers rides a warhorse, while golden patterns inspired by African fabrics invade the background. The work, acquired by the Brooklyn Museum, became an icon. "I don’t paint portraits," Wiley sums up. "I paint manifestos."

03The revenge of landscapes

While portraitists reinvent the human face, another revolution is unfolding in the realm of landscape. Long considered a minor, even reactionary genre, it is experiencing a spectacular resurgence. And no one embodies this renaissance better than David Hockney.

At 86, the British artist is a living legend. In the 1960s, he revolutionized painting with his Californian swimming pools and pop portraits. But for the past decade, he has turned to a more intimate subject: the hills of Yorkshire, his native region. Not just any way. Hockney doesn’t paint landscapes—he captures light.

His secret? The iPad. Since 2010, he has used the Brushes app to draw the changing seasons. Every morning, he sits in his car, facing a field or a country road, and captures the nuances of the sky, the play of shadows on the trees. These digital drawings, which he later prints in large formats, have a magical quality. In The Arrival of Spring, Woldgate, East Yorkshire in 2011, a winding road cuts through a blooming forest. The colors are saturated, almost unreal—acid greens, fluorescent pinks, blazing yellows. "I want to show what the eye really sees, not what the brain thinks it sees," Hockney explains.

His approach has reignited the debate over the place of landscape in contemporary art. In an era when climate change threatens ecosystems, these paintings are not mere decorations. They are archives, testimonies. In 2022, one of his canvases, Nichols Canyon, sold for $41 million at Christie’s—a record for a living artist. Proof that landscape, far from being outdated, is more relevant than ever.

04The art of memory: when the canvas becomes an archive

If Wiley and Yiadom-Boakye reinvent the portrait, and Hockney the landscape, Njideka Akunyili Crosby blurs the boundaries between the two. Born in Nigeria in 1983, she emigrated to the United States at 16. Her work explores this dual identity through domestic scenes where African memories and American life intertwine.

Her process is unique. Akunyili Crosby begins by collecting images: family photos, pages from 1980s Nigerian magazines, wax fabric patterns. She then transfers them onto the canvas using a decalcomania technique before covering them with oil paint. The result is a visual collage where the boundaries between past and present, here and there, fade away.

Take The Beautiful Ones (2016), a series of portraits of Nigerian children. The faces are painted with almost photographic realism, but the backgrounds teem with enigmatic details: fabric patterns, newspaper clippings, floating shadows. "I want each canvas to be an archive," she explains. In 2018, one of these works sold for $3.1 million at Christie’s—a record for a Nigerian artist.

Her success reflects a broader shift in the art market. For a long time, Western collectors viewed African art as exotic, even folkloric. Today, artists like Akunyili Crosby, Julie Mehretu, and Amoako Boafo are courted by museums and investors. In 2022, the National Gallery in London organized the first retrospective of a Black artist—Akunyili Crosby, of course. A symbol.

05The market of emotion

How to explain this frenzy for figuration? The reasons are both aesthetic and economic. First, there is fatigue with abstraction. After decades of monochrome canvases and conceptual installations, collectors seek works that speak directly to the senses. A portrait or a landscape offers immediate gratification: one recognizes a face, an emotion, a place. It is reassuring in an uncertain world.

Then there is the political dimension. In the age of social media, where identities are constantly negotiated, figuration allows artists to explore questions of race, gender, and class. The works of Wiley, Yiadom-Boakye, or Salman Toor are not mere representations—they are acts of resistance.

Finally, there is the financial aspect. The contemporary art market has seen staggering growth in recent years, but the prices of abstraction’s giants (Rothko, Pollock) have reached stratospheric heights. Investors are thus turning to emerging or mid-career artists, whose works remain affordable. In 2023, a canvas by Salman Toor, a 38-year-old Pakistani-American painter, sold for $1.2 million at Phillips—ten times its estimate. Toor, who depicts queer life with a vibrant palette, embodies this new generation of figurative artists.

But beware: the figurative market is not without risks. Some works, driven by trends, see their prices collapse after a few years. Other artists, too dependent on a single style or subject, struggle to reinvent themselves. "You have to buy with your head, but also with your heart," advises a New York dealer. "A work that moves you today is more likely to gain value tomorrow."

06The secret studios

Behind every painting lies a creative process often unknown to the public. Take Christina Quarles, a California artist whose distorted, intertwined bodies explore questions of gender and identity. Her canvases, exhibited at MoMA and Tate Modern, are the result of meticulous work. Quarles begins with charcoal sketches, which she then photographs to project onto the canvas. She paints in successive layers, adding geometric patterns that seem to float around the figures. "I want the viewer to feel like they’re falling into the painting," she explains.

Julie Mehretu’s approach is even more radical. The Ethiopian artist, known for her abstract canvases where thousands of lines overlap, has recently introduced figurative elements into her work. In Epigraph, Damascus (2016), human silhouettes emerge from a whirlwind of black strokes and color splashes. Mehretu uses a projection technique to layer images of destroyed cities, moving crowds, and ancient maps. The result is a canvas both chaotic and deeply ordered—like collective memory.

These processes, often long and complex, partly explain the rarity of figurative works on the market. A Mehretu canvas can take six months to complete. A Yiadom-Boakye painting, a day. But in both cases, the result is the product of a unique alchemy between technique and intuition.

07The future of the face

So where is contemporary figuration headed? Several trends are emerging. First, the hybridization of media. More and more artists, like Julie Curtiss or Genieve Figgis, use digital tools to prepare their canvases. Curtiss, for example, sketches her drawings on Procreate before transposing them to oil paint. The result? Works that are both ultra-contemporary and deeply rooted in tradition.

Next, there is the rise of new artistic scenes. Africa, long underrepresented, has become a breeding ground for talent. Artists like Amoako Boafo, whose portraits with brushstrokes painted by finger have set auction records, or Toyin Ojih Odutola, who invents fictional African dynasties, are redefining what a portrait can be.

Finally, there is the question of AI. Some artists, like Refik Anadol, use artificial intelligence to generate faces or landscapes. Others, like Hockney, see these tools as a threat to the human hand. "A machine cannot capture the soul of a face," he asserts. Yet the debate is underway: will tomorrow’s figurative art be created by algorithms?

One thing is certain: the return of figuration is not a passing trend. It is a response to our time—a need for faces, bodies, stories. In an increasingly virtual world, these paintings remind us of a simple truth: we are made of flesh and memory. And that, no machine will ever be able to reproduce.