In 1960 an international exhibition called Monochrome Malerei was held in Germany. The curator of the catalogue wrote: ‘The paintings are not composed of multiple colours: red, white, black, yellow, blue aren’t differentiated; they are pure and limitless’. It was an exhibition of works by artists interested in the power of a single colour, who distance themselves from both realism and abstraction, and foreground a single element. Lucio Fontana’s green is an expression of infinite space; Yves Klein’s blue unites the sky and earth, cancelling out the horizon; Anish Kapoor’s red is a spiritual colour, symbolic of blood and life. Others, like Elsworth Kelly, make the elements equal by contrasting two or more tones. Piero Manzoni, in his Achrome, on the other hand, choses white, which isn’t a colour. What is he trying to say? White is what remains when we take away form, dimension and colour. By doing this, Manzoni allows the pure material to speak, this being the only way in which it can unleash pure energy.
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In 1960 an international exhibition called Monochrome Malerei was held in Germany. The curator of the catalogue wrote: ‘The paintings are not composed of multiple colours: red, white, black, yellow, blue aren’t differentiated; they are pure and limitless’. It was an exhibition of works by artists interested in the power of a single colour, who distance themselves from both realism and... continue...
