Monochrome

Monochrome means "of one colour"; in art a monochrome work is one executed in a single colour or in its shades and tones. The artist limits the palette to one pigment, working instead with gradations of light and dark, surface texture, materiality and form. Monochrome painting focuses attention on the very essence of colour and the flat plane, freeing the canvas from depiction and narrative. Historically the monochrome manner appeared in grisaille — painting in grey tones imitating relief — and in tonal drawings. As a radical avant-garde gesture, the monochrome emerged in the early twentieth century, when black and white canvases became manifestos of pure art. In the 1950s and 1960s Yves Klein registered the formula of the saturated ultramarine IKB (via a Soleau envelope, 1960) and created a series of purely blue paintings, Robert Rauschenberg made white canvases and Ad Reinhardt near-black ones. The monochrome raised questions about the limits of painting, the presence of the viewer and colour as a self-sufficient event. The tendency is closely linked with abstraction, Minimalism and Conceptual art and remains an influential strategy for contemporary artists, including in Ukrainian abstract painting.