Black and White - Group Show

Taymour Grahne Projects is pleased to present ‘Black and White’ - an online group exhibition curated by Matthew F Fisher. 

Participating artists include Mairikke Dau, Fanny Brodar, Matt Leines, Matthew Cole, Marina Kappos, Christopher Dunlap, Matthew Kirk, Lydia Maria Pfeffer, Brad Hoseley, Amy Pleasant, Michele Hemsoth and Rob Matthews.

Black and White,

What is black and white and white and red all over?

The newspaper.

A classic childhood joke, ironically, that works better spoken than read.

In this Technicolor world of constant chroma stimulation, endless flat screens, glossy print outs, and high key instant fashion, a black and white image instantly stands out. The colorless image is an unspoken pre-1960s throwback. It can read as retro, vintage, and punk - all at the same time.

It is interesting to consider that contemporary children, when flipping through the past generations of family photos, do not experience an immediate association of unknown relatives or previous events when presented with a black and white image. We have come to accept the world must be full color all the time. The direct concept behind this show was to assemble twelve artists and ask them to make artwork in black and white. The result is a pictorial biography of the importance of imagery, with an understanding that each of these works are indeed a painting, not an anecdote. Reducing the image to its most graphic building blocks feels radical in our oversaturated moment. Of course, these artworks are photographed in full color, a fact that is hidden by their black and white nature.

The artists selected for this show came out of my personal desire to see several monochrome works placed together, putting the focus more directly on each artist's personal imagery. Some artists nearly always use only black and white, as with the drawings of Matt Leines and Rob Matthews. Others tend to use a limited palette, and here have made it even more limited, as in the pieces by Brad Hoseley, Michele Hemsoth and Amy Pleasant. The works of Matthew Kirk and Marina Kappos are inherently graphic, and at times have been black and white. There are artists who are traditionally identified as a colourist, including Lydia Maria Pfeffer, Christopher Dunlap, Fanny Brodar, Mairikke Dau, and Matthew Cole. Here, their paintings are almost completely stripped of chroma allowing us to focus on the image represented.

The history of black and white paintings is richest in the mid-twenty century. A who’s who of that time worked in this reduced palette: Lygia Clark, Carmen Herrera, Franz Kline, Elsworth Kelly, and Robert Motherwell, to name a few. This is not a show celebrating nostalgia for this forgotten era; rather, it is about the mark, the creation, and the reading of those actions. It’s about the wonderful result of placing pencil to paper, paint to canvas, and leaving a dark line - about mixing black and white paint to find the colour of gray. This is a show about bringing together a large selection of styles and approaches, asking everyone to work within the same parameters, and see what happens. This in turn heightens the individualistic personalities of each artist. This is a collection of work that celebrates the structure of the images each artist has created and asks you, the viewer, to add the colour.

Text by Matthew F Fisher