Van Abbemuseum

Mikhail Karasik

02 Jun - 09 Oct 2015

Mikhail Karasik - Color is Optics
MIKHAIL KARASIK
colour is optics
library exhibition
2 June - 9 October 2015

Curator: Willem Jan Renders (Project Leader)

“In visual perception a color is almost never seen as it really is – as it physically is. This fact makes color the most relative medium in art. In order to use color effectively it is necessary to recognize that color deceives continually.” Josef Albers, Interaction of Color.
The Russian artist Mikhail Karasik (born 1953) specialises in graphics, in particular, art books of lithographs. A series of graphic works was used as the starting point for this library exhibition, which he made in response to a manual on colour theory by Mikhail Matyushin, Spravotsjnik po tsvetoe (Reference on Color), which was published in 1932. These lithographs were supplemented with other manuals about colour by Josef Albers, Paul Schuitema and Jasper Johns, amongst others. In this way the exhibition provides a summary of the theme of colour in the twentieth-century history of art.
All the works come from the LS collection and the library collection of the Van Abbemuseum.
An English catalogue has been published for the exhibition with contributions by Irina Karasik (Russian Museum), Jared Ash (Metropolitan Museum Library), Margareta Tilberg (Matyushin specialist) and Albert Lemmens and Serge Stommels (curators of the LS collection).
 

Tags: Josef Albers, C.T. Jasper, Jasper Johns