Artists to Follow if You Like Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko comes from a generation of 20th-century artists who revolutionised abstract art in the 1950s. Like many artists of the modern art era, he did not exclusively adhere to a singular art style; his early works saw his artistic expression move through urban scenery, figuration, and surrealism before entering the world of abstraction. The 1940s marked his transition into abstract art, visually eliminating representational interpretation in his artistic expression. Rothko eventually developed his iconic style of colour field paintings, which depicted large planes of flat solid colour across a surface. Although the art style faced a decline in the 1960s, Mark Rothko's essence and colour field paintings continue to live on through contemporary artists.

This week, The Artling has put together a series of artworks by artists who continue developing and conveying the expressive potential of colour in their artworks.

Debra Ramsay

Debra Ramsay is an American abstract artist who creates acrylic paintings, drawings, and installations that explore the conceptual interplay between colour, line, and surface. Beginning with an idea, she then chooses the appropriate medium and method and demonstrates her understanding of colour. Much of her work is painted with acrylic paint applied to polyester film, paper, or museum board.

Debra's process engages a systematic, mathematical approach heavily influenced by colour. She interacts with nature, documents the shifting colours of elements of the natural environment, such as landscapes, fruit, leaves, and trees. Often, she returns to the same exact spot at different periods throughout the year, documenting the shifting colours over time.

Irena Tone

London-based Irena Tone focuses on the unconventional presentation of daily life in their artworks. By enlarging, hyperbolising, or using metaphors, she encourages the viewer to have a fresh perspective on the familiar. Regardless of painting or sculpture, monochrome or highly coloured, she always aims to achieve balanced tones and textures suitable for the contemporary interior.

Fieroza Doorsen

Fieroza Doorsen is an English abstract artist who has developed her own personal language with an emphasis on pattern and coloured forms. The London-based artist uses a wide range of materials, such as charcoal, ink, pastel, oil, acrylic, gouache, collage, producing works on paper, oil on canvases, and wall sculptures. Fieroza brings to life the tensions and harmonies that emerge when structure meets intuition in her abstract works. Her visual language occupies a middle ground between the organic and the geometric and the systematic and the random. The surfaces on which she works, mostly weathered sheets of paper, are tactile and possessive of their own presence.

Arvid Boecker

Heidelberg born and based artist Arvid Boecker focuses on abstractions in his works, mobilising the tensions and harmonies between colour relationships, textures, and the processes of time. The German artist begins each new work by pencilling in his composition, but the work is ultimately about the colours and layers that evolve on the surface over time. Arvid derives inspiration from opposing forces he perceives in the visual world. He brings out harmonies and tensions between light and dark hues and between fields of unbroken colour and worn down layers. He finds guidance for the next painting in the final state of his previous painting.

Wendy Powell

New Hampshire-based artist Wendy Powell abstract watermarks evolved as a reaction against the sterile environment she worked in as a graphic designer. While staying true to her roots as a designer, she found a more tactile process of working - one that connected the heart, head, and hands while also serving as a method for expressing her lived experience.

Elizabeth Gourlay

Elizabeth Gourlay's work emerges from a progressive process of layering colour, lines, and forms, informed both by inner emotional states and her observation of nature and architecture. Based in Chester, she uses a wide range of media such as painting, ink, and graphite to create artfully simple yet strong compositions.

Tomasz Cichowski

Polish artist Tomasz Cichowski graduated from Multimedia Communications at the University of Arts in Poznań. He has been practising a range of media from painting and drawing to installations and photography for over 20 years. His recent artworks minimalist and near-monochromatic colour palette are a statement against the contemporary world’s visual and information overload. He uses the simplification of composition and colours to achieve inner peace and escape from the noise that engulfs him when he leaves his studio.

Paul Taylor

San Francisco-born Paul Taylor is a Los Angeles-based photographer. He has been making commercial advertising work for 35 years, making abstract personal work for even longer, now weaving these strands together. His interest in the abstract is rooted in his exploration of the flat-gridded farmlands of California. Like a blank sheet of paper, the land invites hard work and nurture to bring forth its creations.

Shyun Song

South Korean artist Shyun Song moved to the United States in 1989 and obtained a B.A. and M.A. in Education from Ewha Woman's University in Seoul. After moving to New York in 2000, she studied at the Art Students League of New York with William Scharf. She begins her process with a subject, which usually becomes the title of the painting. The delineation of her subject is succinct to capture the essence of the subject. Letting her intuition dictate a geometric composition by applying my own symbolic logic; the lines, shapes, angles, and placements are formed, and the colour scheme follows. While executing it on canvas, she finds herself instinctively improvising along the way to achieve its aesthetic value.
 

"Painting is not merely an aesthetic endeavour for me, but also an existential one. Life is the overarching theme of my paintings. I hope to share with others my observations in life in simple yet layered terms."

Marilina Marchica 

Italian artist Marilina Marchica was born in 1984 in Agrigento. After graduating from the "Michelangelo" Art School in Agrigento, she moved to Spain for the Erasmus project at the Polytechnic University of Valencia in 2008 and graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna. Living and working in Rome, she is interested in the different shades of reality present in landscapes and cities. 

The horizon line present in her abstract 'landscapes' is poised between order and disorder and chaos and cosmos. Marilina's artworks appear as effective minimalism that captures the hidden dimension of landscapes where time and space gather in the memories of the observer.

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Click here to check out more artworks if you like Mark Rothko. Here on The Artling, we have artworks in a wide range of styles by artists from all over the world that you can browse here in our curated art collection. If you need additional guidance or have specific requirements, get in touch with our expert curators on any page.