The Gunzenhauser Museum will draw on the holdings of the Kunstsammlungen Chemnitz so as to mount a special exhibition devoted to the colour black, the international code for which is #000000. Black is the colour of night, death, magic and misfortune. Everything ends in black, decay and decomposition. In physics, black is the colour of a non-luminous object that absorbs light. From the viewpoint of depth psychology, black is the absolute border at which life ends; the idea of nothingness. In western cultures above all, black is linked with death, mourning and fear.
Antiquity counted black, along with white, among the basic colours. To this very day, black is an essential component of art; Kasimir Malevich’s pictorial representation of the “feeling of objectlessness”, the Black Square (1915), is an icon in the realm of painting. Artists allot various functions to black. The artists in the exhibition use black in different functions: to represent vacuum and emptiness, light and shadow. Black is used to visualise life, death, violence and fear, to depict volume, mass and weight, to show three-dimensionality and depth or for an objective documentation in photography.
Artists in the exhibition:
Karl Heinz Adler, Horst Bartnig, Willi Baumeister, Bernd und Hilla Becher, Erwin Bechtold, Hermann Glöckner, Eberhard Göschel, Volker Hildebrandt, Ion-Ilarion Isaila, Werner Knaup, Michael Morgner, Georg Karl Pfahler, Otto Piene, Arnulf Rainer, Richard Serra, K.R.H. Sonderborg, Fred Thieler, May Voigt
