David Zwirner gallery is, at the moment, exhibiting a series of paintings by German-born American abstract artist Josef Albers. The works presented here, which span five decades (1950-1976), are part of Albers’ famous Homage to the Square paintings and are curated around the colour yellow. The theme of the exhibition, titled Sunny Side Up, stems from the artist’s interest in Goethe’s Theory of Colour (1810), in which the German poet wrote:
‘a strong yellow on lustrous silk…has a magnificent and noble effect. we also experience a very warm and cozy impression with yellow. Thus, in painting, too, it belongs among the luminous and active colours…the eyes is gladdened, the heart expands, the feelings are cheered, an immediate warmth seems to waft toward us’. (Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Goethe The Collected Works Volume 12, Scientific Studies, ed. and trans. Douglas E. Miller (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 279.)
Josef Albers' exhibition Sunny Side Up at David Zwirner, a gallery view.
Yet, Goethe’s influential theorisation of colours does not just examine them as given artefacts but as ideas that question perception. The paintings, displayed on the ground floor of the gallery on Grafton street, seem to precisely explore this question: how colour can be perceived, challenged and defined in visual terms? Here, the exhibition gives an illustration of the rigorous and systematic approach that Albers describes in his 1963 book Interaction with Colour. As part of his focused study on the essence of colour, the artist relies on three of four colour squares nested within each other as a way of examining the optical effects that this composition creates. (The legacy of this method can be seen in the work of British video artist Simon Payne New Ratio, 2007). The result is a series of immersive chromatic experiments where the boundaries between the different squares seem to vanish. With his systematic approach, Albers is drawing the viewer’s attention to the dynamic relationship between different hues of yellows. For instance, one is led to re-consider the qualities of a saffron yellow when it is juxtaposed with Naples yellow.
To me, by exploring the possibilities of one colour, Josef Albers seems to also point at the limitations of verbal language and opens up a dialogue between the concept of yellow, with all its cultural meanings, and its endless pictorial expressions. Alongside this dialogue between verbal and pictorial, there also lies another conversation between pigments and light. Indeed, what is remarkable in Albers’ work, is its ability to translate the transparency and brightness of light into opaque pigments.
This multidimensional nature of the concept of colour reminded me of the parallel that philosopher Gilles Deleuze draws between colour and the philosophical concept. In his 1988-1989 Abécédaire, the French philosopher talks about the time it took for Van Gogh (who is famous for being a great colourist, especially with yellows) to approach colour. Deleuze reads in Van Gogh’s early career earthy tones, a respect, a fear and even a panic for colour. For Deleuze, it signifies that the painter doesn’t think of himself as being ready for approaching colour. Interestingly, Josef Albers started his Homage of the Square paintings in 1950, aged 63. With both his body of work and his theoretical writings, Albers seems to somehow anticipates what Deleuze later called philosophical colour. I also see in Sunny Side Up, the beginning of a response to the problem outlined by Goethe in 1810.
Josef Albers' exhibition Sunny Side Up at David Zwirner, a gallery view.
Josef Albers' exhibition Sunny Side Up at David Zwirner, a gallery view.