The group exhibition was curated by Gregory Lang exploring different artistic experiments and aesthetic research of monochrome paintings by both famous and lesser known American and International artists. It seems especially crucial these days to have moments without images, like a detox for our senses in these tumultuous times.

Beyond the opportunity to perceive colour and intensity as related to format and shape, it is also an occasion to detect the subtleties of pigment, surface, and texture that can reveal light more visibly. Such a perception of colour, as distinct from the body, can allow for a greater appreciation of hue as an immaterial and transcendent phenomenon. Color is a formless optical appearance that is created by light, and it is a basic element of painting. After nearly a century of the monochrome legacy in art, new concepts attempting to dissolve the link between paint and substrate continue to appear. Although Malevich’s black square on black background proposed a new experience of space and time, and Yves Klein’s blue is the vision of infinity, monochrome can also express something finite, like colour as a state within a process, and as a transforming matter. (LAb[au])

In these exhibitions, many artists’ works reveal decades of practice with subtle variations in the application of painting, either relating to art history, or pushing the boundaries of experimentation. Yet for others, the single colour is simply an expression of thought, a reflection about meaning, and a statement about art as idea. In both cases, however, the experience of singular colour can dissociate perception from the paint’s materiality towards something that exists beyond it. In this idea of resonance, monochrome paintings implicitly radiate outward while also absorbing the projected space inward and onto the viewer. These approaches extend the range of colour into the space occupied by the beholder, with colour fields being used to extend the image-based depths of colour beyond itself. For these exhibitions we are interested in non-objective art from before 1960 until today.