Grey is the color of practicality and understatement. Grey accentuates other colors. Grey is an achromatic color. Gray is all shades between black and white. The themed series “Hauptsache Grau” is dedicated to the color gray in four differently conceived exhibitions. The focus of the exhibition series is on painting. Lectures and a two-day symposium will examine grey as a color of modernity in art, architecture and design. The overall project sees itself as a kind of laboratory on the subject of “gray”.
The project “Hauptsache Grau” aims to present a type of painting that is rarely exhibited in Berlin, but has become established in the international field, and is at the same time an occasion for an interdisciplinary examination of the color gray in architecture, design and the environment.
On the one hand, the four exhibitions attempt to explore what grey, which is generally seen as an achromatic non-color, actually is or can be, and on the other hand – against the background of a more or less uniform hue of the exhibited works – to illustrate the diversity of current painterly concepts and views of the image beyond representational depiction and to relate them to everyday life.
Non-representational painting is a form of artistic work in which color is not only a means of representation, but its sole object. Just as portrait painting depicts a person, color painting depicts color and painting, i.e. its characterization in all its facets. The color grey is a particularly good example of what painting can achieve and how it differs from other forms of visualization, especially electronically generated images. Because gray cannot only be created from the achromatic mixture of black and white,
but also an extremely colorful phenomenon: Contrary to popular expectation, painterly grey is the lively and multifaceted result of mixing different chromatic colors. As part of the overall project, the exhibitions are intended to function as a kind of laboratory on the subject of “gray”, which can provide reference values for gray values found in everyday life – in architecture, design and clothing. This connection to everyday life will be established through a symposium and various lectures that examine and discuss gray as a color of modernity.
Matthias Bleyl, Michael Fehr and Wita Noack have developed the concept for the themed series and are also responsible for the various exhibitions, either jointly or individually.
Exhibition Hauptsache Grau 03.03. – 19.05.13
Vernissage: Sunday, 03.03., 4 pm
Exhibition Living Gray 02.06. – 18.08.13
Vernissage: Sunday, 02.06., 6 pm
Exhibition Colored Grey 01.09. – 10.11.13
Vernissage: Sunday, 01.09., 5 p.m.
Exhibition Constructed Gray 24.11.13 – 02.02.14
Vernissage: Sunday, Nov. 24, 2 p.m.
Symposium Main thing gray
Contributions from art history, architecture,
Psychology, linguistics and design.
Friday, 21.06. and Saturday, June 22, 2013, 3-9 p.m.
Registration To participate in the lectures, please register by June 14, 2013 at the latest at the following telephone number or e-mail address:
Tel. 030.970 006 18 . Tuesday to Friday 11 am to 5 pm
info@miesvanderrohehaus.de
Admission 20 Euro per person/day
Mies van der Rohe House District Office Lichtenberg of Berlin
Oberseestraße 60 .13053 Berlin . Tel 030.970 006 18
info@miesvanderrohehaus.de .
www.miesvanderrohehaus.de
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