Héctor Fuenmayor “Citrus 6906”
Hunter College Bertha & Karl Leubsdorf Art Gallery
This event has ended.
Citrus 6906, by Héctor Fuenmayor (born 1949, Caracas, Venezuela), challenges assumptions about how works of art are created and displayed. While it brings to mind monochromatic painting and even the symbolic value of yellow in the western tradition— light, warmth, and luxury—it also questions our conventional understanding of art because it is a work that can be executed by anyone, anywhere. The only materials necessary to make it are yellow paint and gallery walls. Even its title—Citrus 6906—is unstable. Originally called Sunshine Yellow KYV68 after a patented color in the Sherwin Williams’s product catalog, Fuenmayor changed the name of the work to Citrus 6906 when the company decided to rename its particular yellow hue.
When it was initially installed in 1973 at the experimental gallery Sala Mendoza in Caracas, Citrus 6906 challenged prevailing trends in Venezuelan art of the 1970s: the embrace of material technology and geometric abstraction. In a context where abstract, colorful sculpture and murals were commissioned by the government and corporations to embellish Caracas’s modern urban environment, Citrus 6906 playfully confounded this enthusiasm for modernity.
Citrus 6906 invites multiple interpretations. Although Fuenmayor created the installation prior to his study of Zen Buddhism in the early 1980s, it relates to his subsequent spiritual practice. Citrus 6906, he has said, “has strengthened in me the idea of ‘previous life data.’” The methods of Buddhist meditation Fuenmayor has practiced include Guru Yoga in Tantric Hindu and Guru Yoga Tantricism in the Tibetan tradition. As an object of meditation—a unicolor Mandala—Citrus 6906 asks the viewer to focus his or her effort (sadhana) on abandoning the intellectual habit of perceiving forms as objects and emptiness as vacancy. Confounding the difference between emptiness and form, Citrus 6906 shows us that color is neither contained in a space, nor applied to the surfaces of its walls. Instead color constitutes the substance of space itself.
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Schedule
from April 05, 2014 to May 03, 2014
Opening Reception on 2014-04-08 from 18:00 to 20:00