YELLOW
June 22, 2019 thru August 04, 2019
Opening Saturday, June 22, 2019, 6–8pm
Katherine Bauer, Annie Bielski, Ashley Garrett, Brenda Goodman, Anne Lindberg, Lauren Luloff, Donna Moylan, Michelle Segre, Jackie Saccoccio, Odessa Straub, Kianja Strobert, Amanda Valdez, Sun You, Nicole Wittenberg
SEPTEMBER is pleased to present Yellow, a group exhibition of 14 artists working with the color yellow in subtle or startling ways. Regardless of the surface area occupied, the color yellow plays a significant role in each work selected for the exhibition.
“His dizziness increased; he fixed his gaze, like a child upon a yellow butterfly that it wants to catch, on the precious patch of wall. ‘That’s how I ought to have written,’ he said. ‘My last books are too dry, I ought to have gone over them with a few layers of colour, made my language precious in itself, like this little patch of yellow wall.’ Meanwhile he was not unconscious of the gravity of his condition. In a celestial pair of scales there appeared to him, weighing down one of the pans, his own life, while the other contained the little patch of wall so beautifully painted in yellow. He felt that he had rashly sacrificed the former for the latter.” -Marcel Proust, The Captive
Yellow ochre was one of the first colors used in art. The yellow used to produce Vermeer’s little patch of yellow wall is more or less identical to the pigment in a 17,000-year-old painting of a yellow horse at Lascaux. Yellow has a habit of getting into things. A yolk breaking in scrambled eggs. Yellow journalism was named after a particular newspaper comic character’s 19th century yellow nightshirt. In Italian, the yellow of crime novel covers in the 1930s now refers to any real or imagined crime story. In China today, “yellow movie” refers to pornography. Yellow is a complex color. In the West, surveys note people’s association of yellow with humor and spontaneity, but also duplicity. In China a hundred years ago and more, it was also the color most closely associated with the emperor. Yellow dazzles, flatters, fascinates. No coincidence that Narcissus lives on as a yellow daffodil. Yellow pages are an index, a directory of possible responses. Like Vermeer’s little yellow wall, they are surfaces that scatter sunlight, precious in themselves.
For more information, please visit the gallery, our website, or contact kristen@septembergallery.com.
SEPTEMBER
449 Warren Street #3, Hudson, NY 12534