Lamb Arts is pleased to present a new group exhibition, which celebrates our entry into spring, through a multi-medium exploration of the colour orange, red and yellow. The show, inspired by a quote by Wassily Kandinsky - ‘Orange is red brought nearer to humanity by yellow’- and featuring one of his works, explores the individual aesthetic reactions and approaches of eleven different artists towards a warm colour pallet. By grouping the artists under a universal aesthetic umbrella, the exhibition aims to underline the distinctions in their artistic styles and identity.
In 1914, Wassily Kandinsky started heavily exploring, The Spiritual in Art. The starting point for Kandinsky is the effect these colours had on men. His study focuses on the different approaches one can feel towards warm and cold colours. He speaks of the colour yellow as of “that over spreading the boundaries. Yellow is steadily gazed at in any geometrical form, has a disturbing influence and reveals in the colour an aggressive character”. It was in 1928 that Kandinsky officially became a German citizen and was fully integrated into Bauhaus. During this period, he focused particularly on the geometrical elements of the point and the line. His work became recognisable as a geometric play of colour, such as the work on view Untitled (1928), which pulls together many of these characters.
Whereas in Ruben Brulat’s photographs, the dusty orange landscape serves as a unified background to pinpoint the presence of the nude human figure, in Valentino Cortazar’s diaries, orange is centric to the viewer’s experience of the work. It represents and captures the artist’s emotional reaction to his 1970s pilgrimage through the Balearic Islands; further communicated in the poems and illustrations which decorate the diary’s turmeric pages.
Similar importance is given to colour in the work of GT Pellizzi, in which his stark presentation of the primary colours - red, yellow and blue- in the form of light bulbs on a circuit grid, deconstructs orange to its origins and recalls Kandinsky’s analysis of the colour. James Hillman’s work similarly presents a deconstruction of orange, however in a much less pronounced manner. His canvas presents an eroded gradation of colour from orange to mustard to ivory, which strips the colour to its bare essentials. The Peruvian artist Alberto Casari, who is known for his three identities within his practice, explores geometry within his work. Particularly in this one, presents a entirely yellow painting which represents the three key geometric forms: circle, square and triangle. However, for Casari the colour yellow becomes the main focus on the work, and thus the title Yellow Cross on Yellow Triangle on Yellow Circle on Yellow Background.
