Anamarija Batista und Iva Simčić: Color Me
Anamarija Batista und Iva Simčić
Amidst the countless simultaneous, largely confusing, incoherent existences of YouTube videos, pantomimes, Instagram snapshots, Tik-Tok presentations, Flat Earth theories, media war spectacles, cam-trails diagrams and HAARP scares, the Aurora Borealis (the Northern Lights) appears over southeastern Europe on November 5, 2023. The sky turns purple-red. The sight is captivating. This impressive red coloration of the sky can be experienced in a weaker form at dusk. However, the intensity of the color is partly due to the toxic particles that cause air pollution.
The interconnectedness of things and the vastness of the whole are perceived when events become extraordinary and the intensity greatly increases. The work Color me … explores the extent to which color-intensive events create aesthetic contexts that may subsequently be used as a stimulus for an engagement with ecological contexts.
In the color field abstraction of the 1950s and 1960s in the USA, the search for “a feeling of vastness and omnipresence” can already be found. As the result of a conscious and unconscious painting process, the abstract image itself reflects the parts of a larger network of relationships (Wilkin & Belz 2007). Color me … attempts to evoke a sensory experience akin to Rothko’s mystical spaces, Still’s mesmerizing wilderness landscapes, or Newman’s evocation of the infinite, and represents a signal zone for reflection “whose boundaries are defined only by the radiance of hue” (ibid.).
, Karen und Belz, Carl, Color as Field: American Painting, 1950-1975, American Federation of Arts/Yale University Press, 2007, S. 23
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