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Celebrated artists from Marina AbramoviÄ to Dale Chihuly will rub shoulders with rising stars of the art world in a new show exploring “how we see red”.
SEEING RED opens at Phillips’ London Galleries on March 16 and will run for eight days, with 70 works from 40 contemporary artists.
Curators Jane Neal and Fru Tholstrup called it a “show that delights the senses and provokes wonder – perhaps even awe in our turbulent times.” They wanted to bring established artists together with emerging talents, ones who may well become the “future luminaries of the art world”.
Red, the curators say, is a “bold and evocative hue; the colour red holds deep emotive and cultural significance for many communities, symbolising luck, joy, passion, danger, love and more.”
Neal adds that it conjures up different emotions and different responses given it’s such a passionate colour, “it’s good and bad, it’s extreme”.
AbramoviÄ’s work, titled The Spirit in Any Condition Does Not Burn, which portrays the artist in a straitjacket with the work’s title written across it in red, is one of the most prominent pieces in the show.
“Everything she does is so audience inclusive,” Neal says. “For us she had to be the figurehead.”
The curator continues, “It’s an iconic image of her with the red writing going across it... When you look at her work, and that particular image, she looks ethereal and the idea that the spirit will not burn, no matter what happens; it struck a chord with all of us.”
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The artist says that the message of that work from 2011 (the only one in the show that is not new) still means a lot to her and with it “I want to give young artists the message to never give up”.
As well as AbramoviÄ and Chihuly, on display are works from Alma Berrow, Lara Bohinc, Martin Eder and Alexis Soul-Gray.
SEEING RED came about as the two curators had worked on other shows before and were looking for other ideas to collaborate on. According to Neal, inspiration came from a chance remark. “Fru said, ‘To be honest at the moment all the things going on in the world, all the artists and their responses, I just see red.’ And I said, ‘That’s it, seeing red!’”
It had started for Tholstrup with an artist she was interested in working with, who made a series in red “and it was just the simplicity of the colour; it’s bold and visceral, but it also encapsulates what is going on. We are living in a world where everything seems red and bloody on the TV. But it is also a very passionate colour and a positive colour.
“We are in a moment of not really understanding what’s going on, and Jane and I thought it would be a great moment to get artists to navigate and give us their own perceptions of this colour.”
All the artists they went to were keen to produce new work, Tholstrup says. “A lot of them took this as a massive challenge. Some have been so delighted with the results that they’ve started whole new bodies of work off the back of our brief, which is incredible.”
In addition to the art works on view, SEEING RED will have poetry by multi-disciplinary artist and broadcaster LionHeart, jewellery designed by Stephen Webster and even has a bespoke scent made by Azzi Glasser. Tholstrup adds, “We’re trying to make it a bold, visceral exhibition which I think it will be. But it’s meant to be fun too.”
The pair are open to doing other colour-themed shows, possibly blue, inspired by Maggie Nelson’s book Bluets which LionHeart gave to Tholstrup while working on SEEING RED. They may expand it even further. “It would also be fun to do the four personality colours: red, blue, yellow, green,” says Neal.
If it all sounds a bit psychedelic, then that may have something to do with the curators’ thinking for their next project. “Jane and I genuinely are doing a psychedelics show as I am on the Art Advisory Board of Professor David Nutt’s Foundation for Visionary Science and Art – which is going to be huge!” Tholstrup says.