Tate Liverpool: Colour Chart Exhibition

Colour Chart: Reinventing Colour, 1950 to Today, currently showing at Tate Liverpool, takes the commercial colour chart as its point of departure, addressing the impact of mass-produced colour on the art of the past sixty years. It is the first major exhibition devoted to the shifting moment in twentieth-century art when artists began to perceive colour as 'readymade' rather than as a vehicle of spiritual or emotional content.

Colour Chart celebrates a paradox: the beauty that occurs when artists assign colour decisions to chance, readymade source, or arbitrary system. Midway through the twentieth century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colours gave way to an excitement about colour as a standardised commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol's "I want to be a machine"; the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's "straight out of the can; it can't get better than that."

Winsor & Newton have contributed to this exhibition by loaning a number of significant items from our museum: Some original Ostwald colour charts plus the Ostwald Double Cone Colour System which together demonstrate Wilhelm Ostwald's well-known colour theory.  This theory was based on an analysis of colour harmony created by a scientific colour order and Ostwald's double cone system demonstrates how certain colours achieve this harmony and some don't.

The Ostwald Colour System was marketed with enormous success by Winsor & Newton from the 1930s.  Ostwald's published theory was translated into English by J.Scott Taylor who was Chief Chemist at Winsor & Newton between 1890 and 1939. We also produced a full range of Scholastic Water Colours during this time based on the system.

The Colour Chart exhibition at Tate Liverpool is showing over the summer and includes major works by more than forty artists, including Ellsworth Kelly, Andy Warhol, Gerhard Richter, Frank Stella, Yves Klein, Richard Serra, John Baldessari, Dan Flavin, Damien Hirst, David Batchelor, Jim Lambie, Angela Bulloch and Cory Arcangel. 

Exhibition runs from 29 May - 13 September 2009
Admission: £7.80 (£5.90 concessions)

To find out more, visit www.tate.org.uk/liverpool/exhibitions/colourchart/