The Comforter, Spirit Of The Deep, 2024
Enoch Jr Chinweuba
Janet Rady Fine Art
We are exposed to thousands of images daily. On social media and within galleries, the 3-by-4 rectangle and square formats dominate, allowing us to easily glide past or scroll through masses of images. In this context, a new shape of artwork is proliferating across gallery shows and art fair booths. Today, artists are finding new ways to help their artworks stand out, creating exaggerated long, narrow works that demand attention. These visually intense, “ultra-vertical” paintings are at least twice as tall as they are wide, sometimes more, making an instant impact. They reassert the artist’s authorship and power to command attention, forcing their viewers to break out of a fatigued, passive state induced by endless digital and commercial imagery.
Nigerian painter Enoch Jr Chinweuba said he stumbled upon the format intuitively a couple of years ago when he was drawn to the sight of two side-by-side 40-by-40-centimeter stretchers in the studio, together appearing as if one long, narrow canvas. This led him to begin working with single canvases of similar dimensions. While he considered this might be a risky move considering the conventional formats favored by curators and collectors, he wanted to be “true to [his] desire to explore”. His 2024 acrylic painting The Comforter, Spirit of the Deep is rich with shadow, showing a young woman surrounded by doves. Here, Chinweuba wanted to “place a special kind of focus on the muse,” adding “the entire painting feels like a doorway” through which the viewer might bring their own ideas about the subject and her narrative.
SUNBUMS OUT WEST, 2024
Milan Young
Gillian Jason Gallery
CHAPTER 1, 2023
Milan Young
Gillian Jason Gallery
Emerging American artist Milan Young is also intrigued by the potential of this unusual format to evoke a doorway or portal, inspired in part by British fantasy novel The Chronicles of Narnia. “As a child, I was fascinated by the idea that an everyday object, a wardrobe, could open onto an entirely different world,” said the artist. “That something so small could contain an experience so vast.” Her painting SUNBUMS OUT WEST (2024) was shown at Gillian Jason Gallery’s booth at 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair the year it was made, and it includes acrylic, oil, and graphite. It could be described as peak ultra-vertical painting, stretching 150 centimeters high but just 60 centimeters wide. It features an intense mass of golden and deep brown marks, focusing on abstract emotional complexity rather than legibility. “What I try to offer is an atmosphere, an emotional temperature, for viewers to enter.”
While most contemporary painting uses square or more regular rectangular shapes, tall and narrow dimensions have a long art historical tradition. Today, artists are using that association to elevate the subjects of their paintings, drawing upon devotional or dramatic conventions of the past.
Basing her work on towering artworks of all kinds throughout history, British artist Louise Giovanelli creates monumental zoomed-in paintings. For example, her vertically extended painting Silo (2022) shows only part of an ear and the side of a cheek, with a single giant ringlet of hair running down the canvas. It was exhibited at her first White Cube show “As If, Almost” in 2022 and at He Art Museum in Foshan, China, in 2024 for her debut Asian solo exhibition. Similarly elongated canvases Alter (2022) and Enthoegoen (2023) were included in her early 2025 show “A Song of Ascents” at the Hepworth Wakefield, both showing ecstatic close-ups of young women’s faces. She describes her long works, which stretch up to three meters high, as “totemic,” elevating her everyday subjects. “Those vertical slabs inevitably bring to mind ancient history: the towering columns of the Pantheon, shamanistic totems, religious icons, or the slender verticality of stained-glass windows in Gothic cathedrals.”
In his current show at London gallery Sid Motion, Graham Silveria Martin has two tall, narrow paintings that tightly crop details of historical works. For instance, the Scottish artist’s ethereal acrylic painting Cloak of Theseus (after Canova) (2025) is inspired by Antonio Canova’s marble sculpture Theseus and the Minotaur (ca. 1782). “I was aware of a connection with art historical religious painting…to suggest reverence for the subject in its totemic form.” He also noted that the shape offers “the suggestion of a panel that makes up the anatomy of an altarpiece.”
Charlotte Edey is also inspired by the verticality of religious art. At Ginny on Frederick’s booth at Frieze London 2024, the British artist presented eight long, narrow, mixed-media works that surrounded the booth. Their tall shapes were divided up into sections by fine panels of wood meant to reference doors and stained-glass windows, in Edey’s words, “forming portals to exit throughout the booth.” In her current solo exhibition at James Cohen in New York, unusually narrow works will hang both vertically and horizontally. “Elongation is a narrative tool that implies passage, sort of storyboarding, to establish a choreography of looking across the work as if it were unfolding over time,” she said in an interview.
For many artists, the long shape of these canvases also references the shape of the human body. “I find the stretched proportions, particularly vertically, implicate the body as they suggest a sort of containment,” said Edey. “The viewer has to renegotiate how they enter the work by getting closer.” Giovanelli also considers the viewer’s body when making her long canvases: “Because of their proportions, [the paintings] become anthropomorphic. They stand like silent figures in the room, confronting the viewer at roughly human height.”
At times, these narrow canvases create unsettling effects. In Lydia Pettit’s 2023 painting The Seduction, the American artist painted herself clutching a knife in her black-gloved hand. The blade glistens with a reflection of her rageful face and naked shoulder. The violence of this work—inspired by sexual trauma and the psychological conflict that followed—is enhanced by its intense verticality, which exaggerates the sharp presence of the knife. A fan of horror films, Pettit conjures the familiar shot of a camera panning up the length of a knife or sword, though in this case the viewer sees it in a terrifying, single view.
Other artists play with the format’s disarming potential by using its unusual space to show parts of a scene that exist outside the natural eyeline. In Danielle Fretwell’s oil painting Between Need and Gift (2025), which was on show at NADA New York 2025 with Alice Amati, a still life setup is elongated to a surreal degree. Its silky tablecloth stretches down the canvas and dwarfs the fruit in the center. Here, the American artist explores the line between painting and digital imagery; this extended work feels artificially stretched and requires the viewer to keep looking.
Between Need and Gift, 2025
Danielle Fretwell
Alice Amati
Entry Points, 2024
Lydia Pettit
Guts Gallery
With their unconventional proportions and unusual use of space, ultra-vertical paintings trigger immediate attention from a visually fatigued audience. Whether they reveal or conceal more than we would usually see on a canvas, these works toy with our expectations and make us take another look. “The paintings frustrate because they refuse full disclosure,” said Giovanelli. “This combination—bodily confrontation paired with visual withholding—produces something that is simultaneously frustrating, enchanting, and mysterious.”
Browse more ultra-vertical paintings for narrow walls and unconventional spaces in Artsy’s collection.
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