![]() ![]() We come to understand how color played an equal role to splash and dash in his twisted “representation.” It’s a revelation for those among us who have fallen for Still in the past few months. That arrangement, which opened the place a year ago, invited us to follow his career this one makes us consider his thinking.Ĭurated knowingly by museum director Dean Sobel, the exhibit gives us works not previously seen, including 1951’s “PH-31,” which shares the same composition as Still’s famous and beloved “PH-247” (you may know it as “Big Blue”) with whites and bare canvas subbing for the blues. Second, it takes us to a deeper level with Still than the museum’s chronological ordering of his works allowed. Intellectual underpinnings aside, these rooms are all viscerally overwhelming, and there’s an immersive 360-degree tactileness to them that no one-dimensional computer screen can duplicate. ![]() In fact, to a large degree Still’s work is powered by the interruption of a single color a tiny, deliberate splidge of red in a yellow field, a chunk of unpainted white canvas left on a blue background.īut this show cuts its losses and calls its colors, and we are better for it. ![]() The show unfolds as its name implies, with five rooms, each devoted to paintings of a single color, or mostly that color since Still rarely stuck to one hue in his oils. Color is at the heart of “Red/Yellow/Blue (and Black and White),” the new arrangement of things at Denver’s Clyfford Still Museum. The symbols, the styrofoam - it’s all detritus of our modern world - we might as well make something useful out of it, and Salter does.Īs for the abstract expressionism, that comes courtesy of Clyfford Still, who never endeavored to entertain as Salter does, but startles us just the same with his outrageous brush strokes and swaths of brilliant shades. It’s so endearing you want to take it home, but it’s mechanical and distant at the same time. It transforms trash into a life-form, something both natural and unnatural, and certainly remade. We are bombarded with the images he is drawing from, and Salter is reordering them to make sense of it all, or nonsense, but he is forcing us to reconsider what we see every day. Set in the lotus position, ankles crossed, back straight, index finger curled to meet thumb, he appears to be meditating, thinking, despite his foamy brain. He just sits there really (sound familiar?), but he exhibits a rare humanity. Chunky pieces of polystyrene, the kind computers are shipped in, are neatly connected into a bony, anthropomorphic form. Artist Michael Salter built him from used packing material collected over a year from across campus. He’s 10 feet tall (seated!) and makes his home in the GOCA gallery at the University of Colorado campus there. Yes, all the way to Colorado Springs, but it’s worth it. Or maybe some big and colorful abstract expressionism. You need art that’s breathtaking and bold enough to shock you out of your coma. That’s why you are getting fat and stupid and have nothing more interesting to talk about than last Sunday’s episode of “Downton Abbey,” which, sorry to tell you, is a season past interesting. Blame your iPad, or On-Demand, or your warm, slacking cat, but all you want to do is sit on that same corner of the sofa day and night and stare at a lit screen, maybe drink some wine. You are lazy, and you have come to lead a boring life. Digital Replica Edition Home Page Close Menu ![]()
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