Colour is of course one of the most salient and important aspects of the visual arts – yet colour is far from a universally understood experience. Artists through the ages have adapted colours to make bold expressions and statements about the world, but this new group show pinpoints the period of Color Field movement in the 1950s and its influence on contemporary colourists.
Curated by Flora Hesketh and Omar Mazhar, this exciting exhibition acknowledges the way various cultural understandings of colour can change the meaning of an artwork, including 27 artists from different continents, from the very established (Bridget Riley, Ellsworth Kelly, Howard Hodgkin) to a new generation of artists engaging with colour in different ways (such as
Leila Bartell, recently featured on The Wick).
Full of wonder, luster and awe, this exhibitions charts the symbolic significance of colours and the immense evocative power they possess. The possibilities are endless. As Bridget Riley once put it: “If you can allow colour to breathe, to occupy its own space, to play its own game in its unstable way, it’s wanton behaviour, so to speak. It is promiscuous like nothing.”
