Output details
34 - Art and Design: History, Practice and Theory
University College London : A - History of Art
Color manual
Contribution and context: Fer’s essay is included in the catalogue for the exhibition Color Chart: Reinventing Color, 1950 to Today curated by Ann Temkin at the Museum of Modern Art in New York March 2-May 12 2008. It was one of two essays (the other was written by the curator). This was the first exhibition devoted explicitly to the subject of modern color in MOMA’s history, and included the work of 44 artists and spanned the last sixty years. Building on her wide-ranging research on 20th century art, Fer’s essay made a set of claims about how color works in modern culture.
Research imperative and process: Both the exhibition and catalogue took as their point of departure the commercial color chart and its impact on modern and contemporary art. Fer’s catalogue essay concentrates on how color works rather than on what is its essence; taking as its starting point the failure of modern color theory to provide a totalizing system, Fer looks to the work of European artists such as Klein and Boetti to rethink questions of color in terms of its geographies as well as histories.
