BLACK.
ELISABETH BODEY
PAUL BOSTON
DAVID HARLEY
EMMA LANGRIDGE
AARON MARTIN
DAVID THOMAS

19-01-22 – 05.02.22

I became intrigued with the colour black or, more to the point, the idea of Black or Blackness after having a conversation with Paul Boston about a particularly intense Japanese black paint he had discovered while in Japan. It then moved on to different available blacks and their applications, being of interest to me as I had recently veered off the full-colour track to make two small black works.

Traditionally, black has been considered the culmination of four colours, red, blue, yellow, green but without light. I became interested in how other artists might approach the use of such a colour.

What became interesting to me was the extended thinking about what is Blackness and the use of black by painters. I was also interested to demonstrate in this exhibition an expanded thinking of Black, where it is not only a surface attribute, not what black looks like but how it is, how it ‘thinks’, how it contributes to a conversation. When considering an exhibition exploring Black and Blackness by artists, I wished to engage with different interdisciplinary, cultural, conceptual considerations in their particular use of black. These visual responses to sound and music, to different formal, phenomenological, or philosophical applications eventually created a broad-ranging and rich conversation.

Elisabeth Bodey, Thinking Black, 2022 (catalogue essay extract)

image: David Thomas, “Shifts in Time ( Black)” 2019. Acrylic on Digital photo on copy paper . 234 cm x 167 cm “Horizontal Reflection Painting/ Movement of Colour ( Black)” 2020-21. Enamel, dust on linen on wheels. 60 cm x 182 cm x 10 cm. David Thomas is represented by Blockprojects Gallery, Melbourne, and Minus Space , NY