Cartographies of Colour with Sam Gilliam, Peter Halley, Odili Donald Odita and Pat Steir

For years, the curator David Moos has been working on the topic of the ‘cartography of colour’ in contemporary painting. The exhibition at Galerie Thomas is based on his theses:

Cartographies of Colour brings together works by four artists whose painting is fundamentally based on colour and abstraction. All are considered important representatives of abstract painting from the 1960s to the present day. For all four artists, the presence of colour and its arrangement in regulated patterns or in a gestural relief is the decisive means with which the nature of the world is remeasured. This is how cartographies of colour are created.

Peter Halley addresses the geometrisation of our living environment as a result of modern mechanisation in colour-spatial compositions of strict clarity. Sam Gilliam detaches the pictorial space and colour from a fixed location in an unchangeable composition. In Pat Steir‘s works, the colour oscillates between pure gestural abstraction and a material, figurative representation. Odili Donald Odita allows the coloured geometric patterns of his pictures to become a metaphor for the complexity of the world and of thoughts in their kaleidoscopic alternation.