The New Painting is a seminal monograph by Finnish artist Elina Brotherus that explicitly bridges the gap between the history of painting and contemporary photography. The book features landscapes and figures—often the artist herself—positioned in dialogue with the compositional rules of Romanticism and the Renaissance. Through a rigorous study of light and color, Brotherus moves away from the purely autobiographical focus of her earlier work toward a more formal exploration of the “image” itself, questioning what makes a photograph look like a painting and vice versa.
