05.11.2017-06.30.2017
Black is a colour
As part of the 21st edition of Art en Vieille Ville (AVV) in Geneva’s Old Town, the Schifferli gallery proposes an exhibition which celebrates the subtleties of a color that has long been shunned by academic circles, but which nonetheless boasts a long history: black. Here’s the chance to revisit a famous paradox, as indicated in the title of the show.
Building on two exhibitions from 2015 – one based on the drawings of Louis Soutter, and the other on Bram van Velde, where one could admire precious works in Indian ink – the Schifferli gallery presents as of May 11 a selection of works on paper that showcases the color black in all its intricate nuances. From the vibrant and quivering gray-shaded grids of Vieira da Silva (1908-1992), building up an almost seismological relationship to space; to the lavish bluish-black, shimmering works in ink by Antonio Saura (1930-1998), with his spectacular eruptions of pen; to the padded quality and burnt shades of black, accentuated by gouache pigments of Zoran Mušič (1909-2005), poetically evocative of the Dalmatian land of his childhood, this exhibition invites us to rediscover the virtues of a color that was not even considered as such for centuries – black, formerly known as the “absence of color” or “absence of light”.