Technically speaking, the world surrounding us has no color at all. Blue skies, red tomatoes, green grass — the colors we attribute to objects as inseparable characteristics of their quality are actually a result of light being filtered and reflected by colorless but multi-textured surfaces. That is why sight is by some considered as a second act of creation: A bleak achromatic world is animated and changed into a place of variety and beauty by the touch of the eye of man — just as the biblical God breathing life into inanimate clay to create man.
Obviously, this is a very anthropocentric view. Snakes for example can also see temperature and in different galaxies creatures may live without any concept of color at all. However, man is a very visual animal and for planet Earth nature considered sight to be of utmost importance — that is why evolution “invented” it not only once but several times parallel.
The scientific background sheds a different light on the question why artists through the millennia were fascinated by the phenomenon of color: Besides the stimulus and joy colors may provide and their emblematic power, it is the inherent idea of creation itself. It is only natural that the artist, the créateur, should be electrified by a perpetual act of creation within his own creation that integrates him into the cosmic context of eternity. The group show Color transposes the phenomenon of color — also the leitmotif of UPON PAPER Magazine 02 — to the actual UPON PAPER space.
Ever since his first work for the fledgling Factory Records in the late 1970s, Peter Saville has been a pivotal figure in graphic design and style culture. In fashion and art projects as well as in music, his work combines an unerring elegance with a remarkable ability to identify images that epitomize the moment. After almost 30 years, he has once again taken up the color code of his pioneering cover for New Order’s Power, Corruption and Lies (1983), — for UPON PAPER.
Sergey Prokudin-Gorsky was a pioneer in color photography much ahead of his time, who undertook a photographic survey of the Russian Empire for Tsar Nicholas II. He was able to capture color by taking three pictures of each scene, each with a different red, green or blue color filter. The random color stripes at the edges of the pictures add a puzzling modernity to these images from a lost empire.
From the series Russian Empire, 1909–1915. Sergej Prokudin-Gorski
Nick Knight is one of the world’s most innovative and influential image-makers: The gentleman photographer is always jumping the borders between art, fashion, film and pop culture, and interrogating photography’s aesthetic and technical boundaries. The world of fashion can usually be relied upon for bold and exciting use of color, and Knight’s image of model Lily Donaldson in a powder pink Dior dress does not disappoint. Extracted from Unbelievable Fashion, a digitally composed frieze published over ten pages in British Vogue, December 2008, this image has gone on to be one of his most iconic of recent works.
The early works of Wolfgang Tillmans provided access to a sub-cultural world of friendship, sex and hedonism. The fact that he was also questioning the basic esthetics of photography became more obvious in his later works. These openly explore the meaning of color for the composition of an image—sometimes on the verge of the abstract as the two works from the exhibition illustrate.
Hepthathlon, 2009. Wolfgang Tillmans
Beijing in 1966: Streets full of young people bustling around, the demonstrations of Mao’s activists, a sea of red flags. The 19-year-old Solange Brand, then a secretary at the French Embassy, captured the early years of China’s Cultural Revolution. Seen through the eye of an unbiased young foreigner these poetic images show an almost monochrome world in which red seems to be the only color.
Hermann Nitsch has always conceived his art outside traditional categories of genre and developed his own variety of Viennese Actionism, the “Theatre of Orgies and Mysteries”. His ritualistic performance pieces satirize and question atavistic religion and sacrifice as well as our culture’s fixation with violence. Slaughtered animal intestines and blood represent the existential aspects of his work: “Blood is a very special juice”.
The 3 x 3 “portraits” of garishly colored pigeons originate from a collaborative work by Julian Charrière and Julius von Bismarck. The artists’ controversial project “Some pigeons are more equal than others” created a worldwide sensation during this year’s International Architecture Exhibition – Biennale Architettura di Venezia.
If there is a photographer who can be credited with establishing color photography as a legitimate artistic medium, it is William Eggleston. In the fifties and sixties when black and white photography was considered “artistic” and color photography vulgar, he released color from its adhesion to the object. This genuine artistic quantum leap has a striking parallel to Cezanne’s similar efforts in the field of painting. Down to the present day his oeuvre floats between the narrative and the abstract.
Untitled (Morals of Vision, Sink St. Simons), 1978 (1980). William Eggleston
Anita Back’s photo series from the Russian summer camp of Orlyonok is one of many works that result from her fascination with Russia. When she returned to her native country Germany after her first photographic trip to Russia, she was appalled to see that her analog films had been corrupted by the airport security scanners — only to find out that the films were actually intact. It was the Eastern light that had created these special color moods.
TEXT: Helder Suffenplan
EXHIBIT LIST
Anita Back
Beach day, 2008
The girls, 2008
Black Sea, 2008
Inkjet on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
105 x 70 cm
Solange Brand
Beijing, 1st of October 1966, 1966
Inkjet on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
111 x 76 cm
Julian Charrière & Julius von Bismarck
Some Pigeons Are More Equal Than Others, 2012
9 Inkjet Prints on Hahnemühle Museum Etching Paper
27 x 36 cm each 1/6 + 2 AP
Courtesy the artists, Alexander Levy and Dittrich & Schlechtriem, Berlin
William Eggleston
Untitled (Morals of Vision, Sink St. Simons), 1978 (1980)
Dye-Transfer Print
40.5 x 51 cm 1/15
Courtesy Galerie Hengesbach
Nick Knight
Lily Donaldson, 2008 (2010)
Hand-coated Pigment Print on Hahnemühle Photo Rag Pearl
101.6 x 76.2 cm 1/10 + 2 AP
Courtesy SHOWstudio
Hermann Nitsch
Books:
Nitsch – Orgies Mysteries Theatre, 1969
Hermann Nitsch: Das Orgien Mysterien Theater. Die Partituren aller aufgeführten Aktionen1960-1979, Band 1
Neapel 1974. Hermann Nitsch. 45. Aktion, 1980
Hermann Nitsch, Galerie Krinzinger, 1991 Hermann Nitsch – Aktionsmalerei 1961-1963, Galerie Heike Curtze, 1981
Hermann Nitsch: Ordensregeln, 1981
Invitations/Handouts/Posters:
Courtesy Perfect Book, Wiebestr. 42, 10553 Berlin
Sergej Prokudin-Gorski
20 exposures from the series Russian Empire, 1909–1915
Inkjet on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
50 x 50 cm
Peter Saville
Color Code, 1983 (2012)
Inkjet on Hahnemühle Photo Rag
59 x 83 cm
Courtesy the artist and New Order
Wolfgang Tillmans
Hepthathlon, 2009
Framed C-Print, 61 x 50.8 cm 2/3 + 1 AP
Still Life (Bethnal Green), 2008
Framed C-Print, 30 x 40 cm 2/10 + 1 AP
Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz
