Museum of Modern Art (New York, N.Y.)

Briony Fer

Ann Temkin

Color Chart celebrates a paradox: the lush beauty that results when contemporary artists assign colour decisions to chance, readymade source or arbitrary system. Midway through the 20th century, long-held convictions regarding the spiritual truth or scientific validity of particular colours gave way to an excitement about colour as a mass-produced and standardized commercial product. The Romantic quest for personal expression instead became Andy Warhol's 'I want to be a machine'; the artistry of mixing pigments was eclipsed by Frank Stella's 'Straight out of the can; it can't get better than that'. This book, and the exhibition it accompanies, is the first devoted to this pivotal transformation, and features work by some forty artists ranging from Ellsworth Kelly and Gerhard Richter to Sherrie Levine and Damien Hirst.

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