NYAB Event - "Color" Exhibition

"Color" Exhibition

Carolina Nitsch Project Room

This event has ended.

Carolina Nitsch presents the exhibition Color; including work by Damien Hirst, Donald Judd, Anish Kapoor, Ellsworth Kelly, Sherrie Levine, Sol Lewitt, Olaf Nicolai, and Blinky Palermo, at Carolina Nitsch Project Room, 534 W. 22nd St, New York.

Donald Judd’s Untitled (s. 157-166), from 1988 is a suite of ten woodcuts printed in cadmium red light on Okawara paper. This series presents the rectangle and its subsequent partitions as both positive and negative space. It begins with a solid red rectangle surrounded by a wide margin of paper. Next to it stands its counterweight, the negative space of the same rectangle formed by a frame of red printed in the wide margin. Each subsequent print in the series partitions these rectangles horizontally and vertically as if continually clarifying itself.

Meltdown (1989) by Sherrie Levine is a suite of four 12-color woodblock prints on Korean Kozo paper. This series of abstract squares is the result of employing computer technology to reduce four famous paintings to their essential 12 colors. The 4 paintings are: Mondrian's Tableau No II; Kirchner's Potsdam Square, Berlin; Monet’s Rouen Cathedral, and Duchamp's L.H.O.O.Q. (mustached Mona Lisa).

Damien Hirst has been painting and making prints of evenly spaced colored spots since 1986. They call to mind candy or pills and permeate a strange sense of indifferent optimism. Each work is named after a bio-chemical or organic compound used in pharmaceutical drugs and the title of the print in this exhibition, Hydroxylysine (2010), is a component of collagen.

Ellsworth Kelly’s lithograph, Purple, (2001) is a simple, thick wedged form tilting on the paper. Its simplicity results in varying observations; it can seem like a rectangle which has been hit by some invisible force, two squares colliding into each other from oblique angles, or a bloated arrow. Green Shadow (2011) by Anish Kapoor is a suite of 4 etchings with each print utilizing 2 photopolymer plates with half tone screens, which are printed slightly out of register in order to purposely create a moiré effect. The intense pigmentation and moiré lends these prints a three-dimensional quality akin to Kapoor’s sculpture. The viewer is constantly pulled back and forth between pure color and bright white as if falling into a vortex.

Olaf Nicolai’s Kombination series from 2007 are woven Pantone strips using 30 different colors in as many different combinations as is mathematically possible. Each assemblage is made by the same process but no 2 are alike. Nicolai is fascinated by the effects standardization has had on artistic practice and by functional applications of color in everyday life.
Isometric Forms (2002) by Sol Lewitt are rich linocut prints of various three dimensional forms whose volume is defined purely by color, rather than tonal value. Because of this they constantly fluctuate between appearing flat and three-dimensional. Blinky Palermo’s Untitled print from 1971 is a screen printed blue and green oval form that seems to be attempting to break away from the constraints of the 4 sided paper on which it sits.

[Image: Sherrie Levine "Meltdown" (1989) Suite of four 12-color woodblock prints on Korean Kozo paper, with colophon, in wooden box, 36 x 25 in. Edition of 35, Each signed and numbered]