The Art of Repetition: Top 10 Pattern Artists

Repeated forms and regular arrangements have been used in art from ancient times. The simple act of repeating the same unit over and over again creates new narratives and interpretations. From art inspired by ancient architectural patterns to the development of serialisation in Op and Pop Art, we highlight 10 pattern artists who used repetition in their art, each in their own different way.

1. Gustav Klimt

Gustav Klimt, known for his ornate, decorative style and the use of luxurious gold leafing, often used patterns in his artworks. The motifs were inspired by Byzantine, Greek and Egyptian art. In The Kiss (1907-8) for example, flat areas of irregular patterns compose the entire painting. The man’s body is created using a repeating rectangle motif, and the woman’s body is composed of circles. In cartoons for the execution of a frieze for the dining room of Stoclet House in Brussels (1910-11), we see a recurring swirling motif that makes up the Tree of Life. The figure on the left side of the tree wears a dress with triangular patterns, while the figure on the right, in the midst of an embrace, has several different shapes on his robe: circles, squares and triangles. In fact, even the gold leafing Klimt used so frequently in his paintings provides a dazzling patterning, clearly visible in his Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I (1907).  

2. M.C. Escher

Dutch artist M.C. Escher came to his signature style following a trip to the Alhambra Palace in Granada, Spain. He carefully copied the geometrical tilings covering the facade of the palace and from that moment onward, his artistic production became much more formally inventive. He started to develop art following the principles of tessellation (covering a plane using one or more geometric shapes, with no overlaps and gaps). At first, Escher explored working with the basic patterns, but then he moved on to work with all sorts of creatures resembling fish, birds, lizards and insects, stemming from his love for the natural world. Escher arranged his shapes across a flat plane such that the spaces between his figures would create other recognisable shapes. In these images, the viewer can choose to see one or the other set of shapes as the foreground at his or her will. 

3. Anni Albers

Born in Berlin in 1899, Anni Albers received her education at the Bauhaus in Weimar, before moving to the United States where she started to create mass-producible fabric patterns. Albers worked with striking geometric patterns and bold colours, helping to pioneer the Modernist movement. 

Albers’s revolutionary “pictorial weavings” were influenced by Pre-Columbian art and textiles, which she studied during her trips to Mexico in the 1930s and 1940s. In both her textiles and her prints, she created intricately patterned, complex compositions built upon geometric motifs and repeated elements. After 40 years of creating her iconic woven works, Albers started printmaking in 1963, just when the Op and Pop Art movements were in prominence. In one of her serigraphs, Untitled (1969), we see a hard-edged geometric composition characteristic of her prints. Hundreds of identical turquoise blue triangles are set against a red background, and by rotating individual triangles, Albers energised the composition and revealed various red shapes.  

4. Andy Warhol

Legendary Pop Artist Andy Warhol is known for working with repetition in his silkscreen prints inspired by the imagery of popular culture and mass production but also worked across a wide range of media besides printmaking, including painting, drawing, sculpture, photography, music and film. He became famous for his repetitive images of soup cans, soda bottles, dollar bills, and portraits of celebrities including Marilyn Monroe, Mick Jagger, Elvis Presley and Elizabeth Taylor. He would often repeat the same picture in one piece, differentiating between them with various colours. In essence, Warhol was creating his own repetitive patterns, and these became some of the most iconic images of the 20th century. 

5. Keith Haring

1980s street art phenomenon Keith Haring became known for his graffiti tags of interlocking bodies that he would mark the black poster mounts in the New York City subways with. He soon created a recognisable set of images and symbols that he would repeat over and over again as enigmatic and colourful patterns, all across town in New York City as well as in his paintings and prints. Famous Haring themes are his line-drawn radiant babies, barking dogs and human figures. With the increase of his public recognition, Haring started creating large-scale murals that addressed political and societal issues (like his Crack is Wack mural from 1986), always using his personal iconography and the repetition of these symbols.