Paint vs Colour

BACKGROUND This project is located in the field of non-objective abstract art, in particular painting seeking to foreground concrete materiality. This debate is current in the ongoing programs of Museum für Konkrete Kunst Ingolstadt, Stiftung für Konkrete Kunst Reutlingen and The Field Revisited (NGV 2018). Given that paint and colour are necessarily interrelated in painting, this curation asks: How are contemporary painters investigating this crossover to pursue ongoing formalist innovations? CONTRIBUTION "Paint vs Colour" is a curation with artist/curator Dr Christoph Dahlhausen, conceived and presented collaboratively. This exhibition foregrounds a wide variety of approaches to how the integration or differentiation between paint substance and colour appearance through an international survey of 42 works by artists from 12 countries. We argue that these artists have innovated by tensioning the material qualities of paint against the phenomenal experience of colour. The artists variously achieve this through dialogues of colour and an over-emphasis on surface or texture and interplays between opacity and transparency, reflection and absorption, process and concept, body and appearance, experience and phenomenon. The exhibition design innovatively employed a stringed grid, within which work was hung, emphasising the generative freedoms found within the limits of an abstract formal language. SIGNIFICANCE Dr Dahlhausen is a collaborator of significant standing with over 35 solo shows in European museums and a monograph published by Skira. Surveys of this type are typically undertaken by museums with substantial resources, here achieved through engagement with prominent artists including Rushdi Anwar, Michelle Grabner and Dan Devening. The exhibition was selected through competitive proposal at premier non-objective peer-reviewed gallery Five Walls, with a program of international excellence, including Dr David Sequeira and Dr Julian Goddard.