Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today at MoMA The Museum of Modern Art on artrepublic.com
Exhibition running from Mar 02 2008
until May 12 2008
This exhibition examines two separate but related meanings of readymade color: color as store-bought rather than hand-mixed, divorced from an artist’s subjective taste or decisions; and color found and appropriated from everyday life—fluorescent bulbs, car color, or computer color, for example. Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today takes as its point of departure the commercial color chart, an item that openly attests to the status of paint as mass-produced and standardized. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual aspects and scientific properties of color gave way to an acceptance and embrace of color as a commercial product. At the same time, many artists rejected traditional artistic pedagogy about the relationships between colors and instead adopted aesthetic approaches that relied on chance, readymade sources, or arbitrary systems. The first major exhibition devoted to this pivotal transformation, Color Chart will feature some 90 works of art— including paintings, sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs, digital art, videos, and films—by 44 artists, primarily ranging in date from the 1950s to the present. Several site-specific installations and commissions for the exhibition will be installed in the sixth-floor galleries and the Museum’s lobby. The exhibition, which is organized by Ann Temkin, The Blanchette Hooker Rockefeller Curator of Painting and Sculpture at The Museum of Modern Art, is on view from March 2 through May 12, 2008, in The Joan and Preston Robert Tisch Gallery, sixth floor, and other locations in the Museum. Color Chart opens with Tu m’ (1918), Marcel Duchamp’s final painting, which features a cascade of lozenge-shaped color samples inspired by a paint manufacturer’s catalog. In the few years before he painted this work, Duchamp had broken ground with his invention of the readymade; with Tu m’, he set the stage for the interpretation of color itself as readymade. This notion would become a widespread artistic preoccupation three decades later. The exhibition includes pivotal masterpieces by such internationally renowned artists as Gerhard Richter, whose 31-foot-long Ten Large Color Panels (1966–71/72), never before exhibited in the United States, will be on view. Color Chart also explores lesser-known dimensions of the work of great artists such as Andy Warhol, John Chamberlain, and Sherrie Levine. Finally, the exhibition introduces American audiences to work by artists who have remained unfamiliar in the United States despite great success in Europe, such as Giulio Paolini, André Cadere, and François Morellet. There are several site-specific installations in the exhibition. Damien Hirst’s spot painting, John, John (1988), is painted directly onto a wall, in keeping with Hirst’s original conception for this series of works. Daniel Buren has created silk vests in five different colors of his signature stripes to be worn by the Museum’s security guards. Works by Niele Toroni, Sol LeWitt, and Lawrence Weiner are all being newly created or recreated for this exhibition. ZOBOP! (2006) by Jim Lambie, a multicolor floor installation made of vinyl tape, will be on view in the Museum’s Agnes Gund Garden Lobby. OPENING HOURS: Sat - Mon: 10.30 - 17.30 Wed & Thur: 10.30 - 17.30 Fri: 10.30 - 20.00 Image Captions: Image 1: Jim Lambie (British, born 1964), Zobop! 2006, Vinyl tape on floor, Dimensions variable, Installation view, The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2008. The Museum of Modern Art. Fund for the Twenty-First Century. © 2008 Jim Lambie Image 2: Andy Warhol (American, 1928-1987), Green Marilyn. (1962), Silkscreen on synthetic polymer paint on canvas, 20 x 16” (50.8 x 40.6 cm), National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Gift of William C. Seitz and Irma S. Seitz, in Honor of the 50th Anniversary of the National Gallery of Art © 2008 Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York Image 3: Ellsworth Kelly (American, born 1923), Colors for a Large Wall. (1951), Oil on canvas, Sixty-four wood panels, overall: 7', 10 1/2" x 7' 10 1/2" (240 x 240 cm), The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Gift of the artist, © 2008 Ellsworth Kelly Image 4: Frank Stella (American, born 1936) Gran Cairo. (1962), Alkyd on canvas, 85 ¼ x 85 ¼” (216.5 x 216.5 cm), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Purchase, with funds from the Friends of the Whitney Museum of American Art, © 2008 Frank Stella/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York  |
