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Cedric Christie Color Movement (Solo exhibition)

The first solo exhibition of Christie’s work in the USA, Color Movement (Flowers New York), presented 17 works that contribute to Christie’s critical appraisal of modernism through playful exploration of form and meaning, particularly through the role of colour, applied or found.

Pink Painting was a major element of the exhibition. A composite image of a crushed car presented as 104 separately framed digital prints, it represented the culmination of a series of works that allowed Christie to explore the particular value placed on the car as commodity, and the art object. A full-scale car, crushed into two-dimensions and bolted to an art gallery wall (2009) before its final presentation (printed and framed) into the gallery context at Flowers New York in 2011, it played with the valorisation of the flatness of the picture plane. The car in question is one of twelve, collectively forming the work ‘Disciples of History’ that ‘toured’ Europe on a ‘low-loader’ and shown at a number of venues including Superstratum at the Koraalberg Gallery in Antwerp (17/10/2008-20/12/2008). Christie covered standard production cars with vinyl decals; ostensibly the logos of well-known automotive brands that on closer inspection referenced the names of well-known artists. A further sub-text was provided by the names on each car being those of artists exhibiting at each Documenta (Kassel, Germany), the door race numbers denoting the year of the event. Implicitly the worlds of the ‘boy racer’ (able to recognise brand logo references), and the art connoisseur (able to recognise references to Documenta) co-related.

The exhibition also included works from the Dance series, drawn from George Balanchine’s ballet Agon (1957), inspired in particular by the pas de deux between African-American dancer Arthur Mitchell and white ballerina Diana Adams (whose performance was banned from being televised in the US until 1965).