COLOR FORM

Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei announces Color Form, an exhibition that delves into the two fundamental building blocks of painting the two properties that lie at the heart of the medium’s potential.

March 21 – May 31, 2024

For modern physicists, color is seen as the eye’s perception of light waves of different frequencies—while form relates to the shape of matter. In science, as in art, the precise nature of this intrinsic relationship between light, energy, and matter is veiled. For artists, the creative relationship between form and color is one that has been explored intuitively ever since the first cave paintings made over 40,000 years ago.

It is no accident that during the modern Atomic Age of the 1950s and ’60s—when the elemental nature of the relationship between light, energy, and matter had been made evident to all mankind— many painters began to focus uniquely on form and color in their work: elevating these two central components as the sole protagonists of their art.

In America, this marked the period of color-field painting, with artists like Mark Rothko and Barnett Newman creating large-scale canvases filled with blocks of emotive, abstract color. In Europe, another type of color-form painting also became a mainstay of various avant-garde artists from Pierre Soulages and Alberto Burri, to Lucio Fontana and Zao Wou-Ki.

While Soulages made use of monochromatic fields of black to portray light, Italian artists such as Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana took monochrome painting in other directions. For Burri, planes of single hues, as seen in Nero Cellotex (1986–87) became a means of exploring the innate nature and selfexpressive potentials of painted matter—while for Fontana, monochromatic tone was a vehicle for the articulation of deeper understandings of cosmic space.

In his investigations of space, including his Attese works, and Concetto spaziale, Attese (1968) in particular, Fontana destroyed the material surface of the canvas with a slash of a knife, opening up the saturated red picture plane to the embracing voids of space. In so doing, he created a painting that unites form, color, material, and space through his decisive gestures.

By contrast, Pat Steir’s Waterfall series reflects the attempts of an American-born artist to draw inspiration from Eastern approaches to color and form. Deeply influenced by Chinese literati paintings, Zen Buddhism, and the example of John Cage, Steir’s work, exemplified by Another Place (2017), investigates the aesthetic potentials of chance, gravity, and the weight of pigment to generate a painting’s ultimate form.