'Significant Color' At The Aram Gallery

Significant Colour is an exhibition exploring the impact of colour and its richness as a subject matter for designers in different disciplines. This show continues the Aram Gallery’s interest in the ways designers think and work. Pieces on show include furniture, photography, textiles, jewelery art, sculpture, communication, lighting and architectural projects.

Participants in the exhibition are architects de Rijke Marsh Morgan and Sauerbruch Hutton, who both in their own right communicate a contemporary use of colour on the external facades of their buildings. Artist Sophie Smallhorn will be showing wall sculptures exploring three dimensional colour theories. Ori Gersht’s photographs reveal the beauty of found colour in our environments and designers El Ultimo Grito show their Guau lamp - scarlet disks of circular light floating and shimmering on the wall like a red moon. Cristian Zuzunaga who has recently collaborated with both Ligne Roset and Moroso, applies his ‘pixel’ textile designs to a uniquely commissioned window blind in the gallery. The jewellery artist Mah Rana challenges us with her conceptual jewellery art pieces. Ptolemy Mann is showing a new series of three dimensional, free-standing monolithic textile sculptures that vibrate with saturated threads. Olivier Droillard has made a poetic Mushroom console table inspired by a walk in the French Alps exploring the de-saturated colour nuances of nature. The graphic designer James Goggin playfully tests the boundaries of print on demand colour reproduction in bespoke publishing, with his project Dear Lulu. Finally, the essential inclusion is the colour theorist, Josef Albers, showing both his classic nest of tables for Vitra and his Homage to the Square lithographs.

These works, beyond being ‘colourful’, engage the viewer to think more deeply about the choice and implications. Some play with process and substance, others with scale and emotion but they all reveal and enjoy the significance of their colour.

Colour is a deeply emotive and personal subject; every one of us has unique responses developed through experience. But experiences associated with certain colours affect our responses. Josef Albers famously showed 100 people the exact same shade of iconic Coca Cola red and got 100 different responses as if they were looking at 100 different shades of the same colour. We all see and relate to colour differently, making it an almost impossible subject to predict and define people’s reaction with any certainty.

Guest Curator Ptolemy Mann, a textile artist and architectural colour consultant describes recent trends: ‘Colour has always been significant for human beings and there has always been a desire to place colours in and around our environments. In Western thinking of the 20th Century, however, colour seems to have diminished in importance, becoming secondary and merely decorative, deeming an object, space or building less intellectual, pure or serious than its white counterpart. More recently there seems to be a desire to readdress this balance. Especially on the façades of buildings, a visible renaissance is taking place where use of colour is being applied to serve form and function in an unreserved manner.

With the generous sponsorship of Dulux and their colour mixing expertise, the gallery itself will be transformed into a background of varying colour saturations to create a dynamic exhibiting environment.