I remember the first time I saw Barnett Newman’s Who’s afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. I think I was still in primary school, I think we were on a schooltrip to the museum, I don’t remember the exact circumstances, but I remember seeing the painting, and being awestruck, mesmerized, almost ecstatic at the color and size.
My Monochromaster series is partly an investigation in what it means to reproduce a work of art, an image. What can be retained, what can be left out, what is truth? The WAORY&B works are far too large to make into Monochromasters, at least with my current budgets (I made them into multi-post instagram works. If you want to help bankroll it to happen IRL, HMU). Thinking in a lateral way I came up with a different concept:
Keep the size of the colored areas the same as the original real size versions, but stack them on an A0 paper. So one color becomes the ground. The other colors become fields that retain their original size and get placed within the confines of the A0 size.
The resulting prints are works that feel artificial constrained, which they are, but which also gives them something of the power of the original images.
Getting the colors right was a challenge; I only found one image of number 1 on the whole internet, in a low-res PDF file. The painting in the Stedelijk was badly mauled and badly restored and has been taken out of view, into storage and I could not get permission to see it. The other ones are too far away to be able to visit. So I had to rely on digital images and my own sense of color. I created some test prints, and decided on the colors you see above.
The original paintings by Barnett Newman:
Some installation pictures of my prints in the Under Construction After Party exhibition:
