Dark Matter
Posted by wilfried van den elshout on
A tightly conceived group show built around a deceptively simple premise: black, or the idea of darkness, as a starting point for radically different art-making practices. Its title nodded to the astronomical term for the invisible matter between points of visibility, and, as the poet E.E. Cummings put it, "the wonder that's keeping the stars apart." The roster was formidable — Art & Language, Katharina Fritsch, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mark Grotjahn, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Ellsworth Kelly, Damián Ortega, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Serra, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gavin Turk, Andy Warhol and Cerith Wyn Evans — spanning generations and continents but united by a shared fascination with the monochrome.
The curatorial thesis traced its lineage to Malevich's Black Square, framing black as both a "zero point" beyond which painting couldn't go and, paradoxically, a kind of "negative icon" — matter transfigured into the immaterial. Rather than treating this as one movement, the show let each artist recast that history on their own terms: some reworking minimalist rigor, others chasing a "negative sublime," others distilling images into stark, iconic abstraction that seemed to radiate a kind of dark aura.
It's the kind of show White Cube did well in that era — a serious, art-historically literate group exhibition that used a single formal idea (black) as a lens onto very different sensibilities, from Reinhardt's ascetic monochromes to Hirst's more theatrical darkness. A companion catalogue with essays by Donald Kuspit and Shani accompanied the show, suggesting it was conceived as more than a survey — closer to an argument about what black means in postwar and contemporary art.
www.ftn-books.com has the catalog on this show now available.
