Color

No Comments

Color as complete medium

A monochrome or monochromatic painting is one created using only one color or hue. It can use different shades of one color but by definition should contain only one base color. For more than a hundred years artists have used a single color as a vehicle for exploring both the potential and limitations of painting, using this reductive formula to experiment with formal concerns of composition and tonality or to advance theories related to nature, the sublime, and analogous spiritual concerns. Rendered with geometric precision or with the nuance of expressive brushstrokes, the monochrome is an enduring idiom of avant-garde modernism.

Even long before these 20th Century philosophical ponderings, color in art has had a long, multicultural history of representation and symbolism. Purple has represented royalty, wealth, and power across civilizations due to the historic difficulty in acquiring its pure pigment; Red represents luck in China, but also its bright, destructive relationship to fire has lent its meaning to various depictions of hell; Blue, often a calming and natural color seen in the sea and sky, also carries with it connotations of despair, depression and the cold.

“The chief function of color should be to serve expression as well as possible. I put down my tones without a preconceived plan. If at first, and perhaps without my having been conscious of it, one tone has particularly seduced or caught me.”

Location: EMST Museum of contemporary art (Athens, Greece)

Production

No Comments

Art and factory: look to the production

‘Production’ is a word with many meanings. It can refer to the making of something, or to a final product like a performance. It can be the process of bringing a song or musical work to life. Or honing that work to perfection. ‘Production’ might conjure images of factory production lines or the theories of Karl Marx. Production is labour, capital, and the invisible groundwork of modern society. And it can be as simple as making a clay pot with your hands. Production is at once mechanical and biological – think of ‘reproduction’ – and ultimately human.

Production is at the heart of making art. Artists and theorists have long acknowledged its importance as both an artistic action and an idea to be explored. And as the role of production has shifted in our lives, so have the ways which artists have responded to it. While some contemporary artists foreground production as a tool, others use their work to explore ideas around production we might otherwise overlook.

Painters and sculptors of the 1960s sought a more mechanized “look” for their art. The changes reflected in the art have their source in a deeper shift – a shift at the level of production, expressed in new studio practices as well as in the space of the artworks themselves.

In the period immediately before, during, and after World War II, the dominant peack of the artist’s career was genius, been alone in studio, witness of creation of own art. Since 1960s, against of heroic modernism, engaged in a different rhetoric and practice, one based on the models of industry and business. The studio of Andy Warhol, named the “Factory,” is viewed as great change, with its rudimentary assembly line and highly social mode of production.

Warhol’s Factory became “place of knowledge” – the space with Warhol’s paintings and objects, and the new social space in which they signify. The context for that signification thus becomes crucial to our understanding of the “Warhol phenomenon” celebrated in popular and arthistorical texts. The ambivalencies embedded in Warhol’s Factory, where the artist’s role oscillated between manager and proletarian worker, are seen as a function of their context. Conflicting signals are also broadcast by the works of art, which speak in the dialect of mass production with the accent of the irreplaceably unique.

Photo from solo show by Andy Warhol at Caixa Forum, Barcelona, Spain

Nature

No Comments

Art and nature have always found ways to intersect with one another, the latter being a huge source of inspiration for artists. Found across many forms: rural and historical for the Classicists, grandiose and wild for the Romantics, or sensitive and poetic for the Impressionists. But it was only much later that the artist became aware of the environment’s fragility.

Art subsequently became the preferred medium to express this. Nature began to be depicted beyond pure aestheticism, as art and nature found themselves at the heart of this political battle. In fact, nature’s deterioration has profoundly changed the relationship between artists and the landscape.

Today, environmental approaches towards art and nature are very varied. From raising awareness to militant action, representations of ecological issues are everywhere in art fairs and exhibitions. Through their work, artists try to raise public awareness in order to create a better world, placing humanity in harmony with the environment.

With Friedensreich Hundertwasser’s painting at his named museum in Lindau, Bavaria, Germany

Contemporary

No Comments

Contemporary art

The problem isn’t just that nobody can agree on what contemporary art is; it’s that nobody knows when the contemporary era begins.

Mark Rothko said that Rembrandt was the first contemporary artist. It Is far isn’t it? Some curators see a likely candidate in 1989: the year of the Berlin Wall’s fall. Other influential figures have offered different start dates, ranging from the early 1970s to 1945 to the 1910s. Search the prevalence of the phrase “contemporary art” in print between the early 19th and 21st centuries on Google Books, and you’ll find that the term was virtually unused for 120 years. There is no precise date in history when the contemporary era begins, any more than there is a precise answer to the question “What is the sound of one hand clapping?” But the temptation to find that date seems to be all but irresistible for art historians: By the time they get around to figuring out what the contemporary era is, it will be contemporary no longer. A quote by a great novelist (who may or may not be contemporary) comes to mind: “If they can get you asking the wrong questions, they don’t have to worry about answers.”

Location: KunstHistoriche Museum Vienna, Austria