The bartender looks up from making a drink, a lemon slice still held in hand, with an inscrutable expression, perhaps exhaustion, perhaps inviting. His hair, worn in two long braids, is a deep emerald hue, as is the long, billowy shirt he wears. A mirror positioned behind the bar reflects the night’s revelry in a dazzling array of perspectives, painted in verdant shades of green from mint to pine green, and passages of chartreuse.
The painting, The Bar on East 13th (2019) by Salman Toor, is the centerpiece of “Someone Like You,” the New York painter’s first solo museum show in Europe, on view through January 10th at the Courtauld Gallery in London. The work is Toor’s reinterpretation of Édouard Manet’s A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882), itself part of the Courtauld’s permanent collection, and on view in an adjoining room. Whereas Manet’s 19th-century masterpiece was a study of light and reflection in blacks, grays, and whites, Toor’s vision is a heady, seductive vision in lush leafy greens. Over recent years, Toor’s works have become known for reveling in these verdant hues, and at the Courtauld show, about half of the 19 paintings of queer and immigrant life on view are dominated by them. “There’s something glamorous about emerald green—and something nocturnal, inviting,” Toor said of his fascination with the hue, which he first embraced around 2019.
While Toor is perhaps the most well-known artist working with a green palette today, he is far from the only one. Contemporary artists including Brook Hsu, Colleen Barry, Jenny Morgan, and Huang Zhe are all embracing the color.
Why? For these artists, and others, green, with its associations with nature as well as toxicity and the alien, is the nuanced color for our complex times.
It embodies a collective longing for renewal
Fugue, 2026
Colleen Barry
Half Gallery
Art historian and author Evie Hatch, who runs a popular Instagram account about pigment history, says the earliest known uses of green in art trace back to the use of malachite in ancient Egypt. While the hue has had varied meanings across cultures and times, “the association between green and fertility and growth is a recurring one,” she said in an interview. In ancient Egypt, artists often gave the god Osiris—god of agriculture, fertility, and the afterlife—green skin to link the renewal of vegetation to his resurrection, for instance.
Hatch notes that green has more recently become the “color of ecological responsibility.” In June 1968, the Argentine artist Nicolás García Uriburu dyed Venice’s Grand Canal bright green with fluorescein during that year’s Biennale, to draw attention to pollution. Olafur Eliasson later paid tribute to the artwork with Green River (1998–2001), pouring harmless uranine into rivers in cities including Stockholm, Bremen, Los Angeles, and Tokyo.
For contemporary artists, the embrace of green is less rooted in any sense of environmental advocacy than a desire for personal renewal and reconnection to the earth. New York artist Colleen Barry made her first predominantly green painting, The Feet Washers (2022), after years of painting in browns, earth tones, and dark backgrounds. “It reminds me of spring emerging from winter, when everything suddenly comes alive after months of gray and brown,” she said. Earlier this year, Barry opened “Iconophilia,” a solo exhibition at Half Gallery. Most of the works in the exhibition leaned into an emerald palette. For Barry, green reflects a cultural turn away from detachment and irony toward something more earnest. “Green is the color of life, growth, and regeneration,” Barry said, “so it makes sense that it would accompany this renewed interest in the human condition.”
Green is also the color of poison and toxicity
Cell Death 16, 2018
Brook Hsu
Bahamas Biennale
The Symbolizer, 2024
Jenny Morgan
Anat Ebgi
But green is far from purely positive. In the 19th century, the hue became associated with poison and toxicity. Scheele’s green, a warm yellowish leaf hue, was developed in the 1770s by Swedish German chemist Carl Wilhelm Scheele and introduced commercially in 1814. The arsenic-based pigment was cheap and startlingly vivid. It was used to color candles, wallpaper, textiles, artificial flowers, and children’s toys. Yet, despite its widespread use, it was poisonous. Though most cases of arsenic poisoning were miserable but survivable, some were not. In 1861, Matilda Scheurer, a 19-year-old artificial flower maker in London, died of arsenic poisoning after dusting leaves with green powder. Her case was widely reported and helped turn public opinion against these pigments.
These toxic associations for green still linger. “Poison is still so often drawn in lurid green,” said Hatch, noting scenes in popular culture, such as the poisoned apple dipped in green brew in Disney’s Snow White. Green embodies, in her words, “paradoxical associations—with growth and renewal, and sickness and poison.” Last year, artist Maja Ruznic made an installation of paintings for the SITE Santa Fe International which centered around the color green. For Ruznic, who was born in Bosnia and lives in New Mexico, green became a subconscious way of referencing both the green fields of her homeland and the state’s history as a nuclear testing ground and, infamously, the site of Area 51. “I think about the land as being both beautiful but also still radioactive,” she said at the time.
Other lasting associations with the color green, as both glamorous and hallucinatory, may have been introduced by the popularity of absinthe, a green liquor popular during the late 19th century. Absinthe was fashionably consumed at the l’heure verte (or the green hour), a five o’clock feature at cafés in Paris and Prague. The drink was popular with artists including Van Gogh and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, and became associated (on poor evidence) with hallucination and madness. The green glow of absinthe is a direct inspiration for Toor’s green paints as well as the jewel tones of emeralds and jade.
New York and Wyoming–based painter Brook Hsu is known for her often mythic, sometimes autobiographical small-scale paintings rendered in hues of green, currently on view in the show “Trout Fishing in America” at Heidi in London. Hsu’s interest in the color is complex, but relates originally to the body and illness. About a decade ago, she saw someone vomit the “softest pale green-blue” and her relationship to the color changed. “The experience awakened me, and I fell in love,” she said in an interview. She thinks of herself as being in an ongoing relationship with the color, she added, and described her work with green as “intimate.”
For others, green simply offers a sense of distance
Control, 2025
Huang Zhe 黄喆
AAIE Gallery
Green smoke, 2025
Huang Zhe 黄喆
AAIE Gallery
For some artists, the color reflects the passage of time, the unreality of a dream state, or simply a critical distance from the demands of the moment. New York artist Jenny Morgan moved toward a cooler palette around 2016 and was deeply engaged with painting in minty tones by 2019, moving from skin tones to bodies and surroundings painted fully green. “Green felt like an immediate escape hatch out of the body,” she said, a move away from the warm and knowable toward something alien. She reads the wider trend of artists leaning into greens as a sign of a communal desire to escape, whether into nature, away from the body, or into a shared alternate space.
For Florence-based artist Huang Zhe, green is the color of memory. He grew up in a Buddhist family in southern China, where ceremonies and folk rituals were red, the color of good fortune. After more than a decade away, studying in Beijing and then Italy, “the red of my hometown gradually faded into yellow, and then into green in my memory.” Green became a way of filtering perception and emotion, he added, first carrying estrangement and later, as his work developed, associations with nature and vitality.
Barry sees green similarly, saying that in her figurative paintings, green can make an image feel “both intensely alive and strangely distant, like in a memory.”
Huang, for his part, sees artists embracing green palettes as a resistance to immediate legibility, a muddling of emotional meanings. “It can introduce distance and uncertainty, inviting a slower and more contemplative way of looking.” Green, in his reading, lets feelings stay unresolved.
But perhaps this penchant for green will only be understood in time. Art, as Barry said, “often reveals the psychological needs of its time before we can fully articulate them.”
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