This month Spin members are invited to Gravitiy’s Rainbow to see and discuss work by artists David Batchelor, Jonathan Callan, John Chamberlain, Ian Davenport, Yves Klein, Peter Liversidge, Kay Rosen and Ed Ruscha.
Gravity’s Rainbow is, as the title suggests, an exhibition about colour, with a nod to the American writer Thomas Pynchon’s use of ‘borrowed’ colour adjectives as imaginative prompts in his novel of the same name. This is a show in which colour is integral to the work, and may even be its subject, but which always originates elsewhere: ‘Found’ colour – borrowed or stolen from outside the studio. This exhibition includes a diverse range of inspirational work including: a site-specific piece by Tommy Grace and Kate Owens who have transformed the gallery’s glass frontage by creating a temporary stained-glass window from coloured plastic bags; a wall drawing created by Ian Davenport by deconstructing an old master painting into its colour components and re-assembling it as a series of poured lines; and an sculptural installation by Peter Liversidge presenting found objects and fragments united only by their common hue.
This exhibition will be an opportunity for us to discuss how contemporary artists think about colour and to consider the shifting moment in twentieth-century art when artists began to perceive colour as ‘readymade’ rather than as a vehicle of spiritual or emotional content.
