Black & White Art For Sale

Explore black & white art for sale online today. Whether you’re just starting out your collection or have been collecting for years, we can help you buy black & white art that suits your aesthetic. From Black & White Photography to Black & White Paintings, our selection covers a diverse range of mediums and styles.

Lena Szankay is an Argentinian photographer who trained in Berlin, experiencing the tumultuous history of the city that led to the fall of the Berlin Wall. While she doesn’t work entirely in monochrome, many of her photographs are beautiful examples of black & white art. Her work is influenced by her life experience in Berlin, showcasing some of the city’s architecture and spaces with a focus on how this architecture can shape human lives. The use of black & white in her photography is evocative of the past and memories that fill the city of Berlin.

For a piece of black & white photography in a similar style to the famous Ansel Adams, take a look at American photographer Geoffrey Ansel Agrons. These images take the natural world and landscapes as subjects, infusing them with Agrons’ signature sense of melancholy. The result is quiet and haunting imagery that speaks of the uneasy relationship between humans and their environment, demonstrating the power of black & white art to create a feeling of sadness. His image Twenty-two Starlings encapsulates this feeling perfectly, with the stark silhouette of the starlings contrasted against a misty sky and trees.

Colour is usually considered one of the most important assets in an artist’s toolkit, so the decision to create black & white art today is a radical one. In terms of visual media such as photography and film, the art form began with black & white only and gradually progressed to using colour as technology advanced. The use of a monochrome palette is surprisingly effective, creating a unique effect that can be both striking and sombre and inviting the viewer to focus more on shapes, contrast and shading rather than on colours.

Black & White Film and Photography

In the first days of film and photography, images could only be produced in black & white. The earliest fixed images were known as daguerrotypes, a process developed by Louis Daguerre in the early 19th century and used to capture portraits of wealthy individuals and families. The scope for photography as an art form beyond portraiture did not emerge until later, and began to truly take off at the start of the 20th century.

Ansel Adams was an important photographer of the early 20th century and an advocate for environmental conservation, which he conveyed through his photography. His black & white photographs showcased the natural beauty of national parks, and these breath-taking images were used to emphasise the importance of protecting the world around us. From the sheer cliff edges of Yosemite to endless sand dunes in Death Valley, Ansel is a true master of capturing the wonders of the natural world.

Diane Arbus is another key photographer of this period. Born in 1923, Arbus was a true pioneer in social progress, using her platform as a photographer to normalise marginalised groups and ensure their representation in art. Her intimate portraits were all in black & white and showed people from the fringes of society, including transgender people and the mentally ill. Her photo of two identical twins is perhaps her most famous, and interestingly highlights both the differences and similarities between these two girls.

Even today, as the world is dominated by colour images on our many screens, some photographers take the bold step of shooting in black & white. Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni are a French and Italian photographer duo who have produced several black & white art projects. Forcella is one such series, that documents the gritty, mafia-run part of Naples with candidness.

Black & White Paintings

The painted medium has not had quite the same restrictions as visual media. Although artists have faced limitations in terms of the pigments they were able to acquire, paintings have been produced in colour for centuries, with even some of the earliest cave paintings using colour. In a similar way to modern photography, the use of a monochrome palette is an interesting artistic decision that creates a unique effect.

Pablo Picasso is well known for his use of black & white in painting. His most famous work, Guernica, was painted entirely in greyscale. The haunting masterpiece shows the aftermath of a bombing of a Basque town during the civil war, showing expressions of anguish and dismembered body parts. The lack of colour in this work makes it particularly effective, inviting the viewer to consider the subject matter carefully rather than becoming distracted by colour. Picasso repeatedly used this restrictive palette in his work, provoking questions about the use of colour in art and the meaning of its absence.

Another painter famous for their black & white art is Jackson Pollock. As one of the pioneers of modern art, Pollock created vast canvases onto which he poured, splattered and dripped paint. Often he chose to do this in black & white, drawing focus away from colour and towards the textures and shapes in the piece.