FORM THROUGH COLOUR until Aug 31
Somerset House East Wing
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| Hand-knotted rugs, made of hand spun wool and mohair, 2.0 x 2.9m |
I'm walking towards Somerset House. It's very hot. I pass a grid of floor-level fountains outside the Royal Festival Hall where water shoots up or disappears into the ground in unpredictable patterns. In the middle is a fully-clothed man with a waterproof knapsack on his back playing with his children. I look again. There are other adults splashing around, laughing, soaked to the skin. I cross Waterloo Bridge . Somerset House has 55 fountains dancing in its beautiful courtyard (in the winter it's turned into an ice skating rink) but here it's only children and they are more circumspect.
I turn into the cool of Somerset House and wonder how am I going to interest you in a book published over 50 years ago, a gloss-painted door and some rugs hanging on the wall?
The artist Gary Hume came across Interaction of Colour (1963), by the artist Josef Albers early in his career and has been an admirer of Albers’ work ever since. In 1988 his Goldsmiths paintings were based on hospital doors rendered in high gloss, but where one might have expected bureaucratic creams and browns, there were pinks and golden tans, panels and roundels, hand and foot plates picked out garishly. I first saw some of Hume's doors displayed down the sides of a long thin room (I don't know where) in the 1990s, and have never forgotten the experience. Doors are heavy with meaning. They are silent and blind but some you open with delight, others with dread. Fairy tales make the most of forbidden doors: Bluebeard's bring death in a dungeon. Goldilocks sneaks past one to steal porridge in a bowl. If you need to be convinced of the power of doors, even in everyday life, turn to Blog 53, Mark Wallinger's Threshold to the Kingdom.
Form Through Colour is cerebral and challenging, designed to showcase the innovative and imaginative use of colour in art inspired by Albers. If you have time, there is a short explanatory video showing his passion as a teacher who believed that art is an experience, not an object. 'I don't give answers because I'd be depriving you of finding out for yourself...I have not taught painting, I have taught seeing...' Not for him the colour-supplement agony of trying to match colours, obeying firm rules about what 'goes with' what. Consider, he said, the power of disharmony in music.
I turn into the cool of Somerset House and wonder how am I going to interest you in a book published over 50 years ago, a gloss-painted door and some rugs hanging on the wall?
The artist Gary Hume came across Interaction of Colour (1963), by the artist Josef Albers early in his career and has been an admirer of Albers’ work ever since. In 1988 his Goldsmiths paintings were based on hospital doors rendered in high gloss, but where one might have expected bureaucratic creams and browns, there were pinks and golden tans, panels and roundels, hand and foot plates picked out garishly. I first saw some of Hume's doors displayed down the sides of a long thin room (I don't know where) in the 1990s, and have never forgotten the experience. Doors are heavy with meaning. They are silent and blind but some you open with delight, others with dread. Fairy tales make the most of forbidden doors: Bluebeard's bring death in a dungeon. Goldilocks sneaks past one to steal porridge in a bowl. If you need to be convinced of the power of doors, even in everyday life, turn to Blog 53, Mark Wallinger's Threshold to the Kingdom.
Form Through Colour is cerebral and challenging, designed to showcase the innovative and imaginative use of colour in art inspired by Albers. If you have time, there is a short explanatory video showing his passion as a teacher who believed that art is an experience, not an object. 'I don't give answers because I'd be depriving you of finding out for yourself...I have not taught painting, I have taught seeing...' Not for him the colour-supplement agony of trying to match colours, obeying firm rules about what 'goes with' what. Consider, he said, the power of disharmony in music.
www.somersethouse.org.uk/
albersfoundation.org/
www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/gary-hume-2403
christopherfarr.com/
www.tate.org.uk/art/artworks/wallinger-threshold-to-the-kingdom-t12811
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