9
Suzanne Pagé
17
Sam Gilliam
Preface
Exhibited works
67
Color on the Run
81
What Does Painting Do with the World?
93
Submerged in Color
101
Solids and Veils
103
An Ongoing Conversation
Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam & Jonathan P. Binstock
Philippe Dagen
Ludger Schwarte
Ludovic Delalande
Katharina Grosse 119
Large Surfaces Claire Staebler
129
Timeless Color
Katharina Grosse, Frank Gehry & Hans Ulrich Obrist
Steven Parrino 147
Mass Monochromy Claudia Buizza
153
Conversation
Steven Parrino & Marc-Olivier Wahler
Megan Rooney 163
A Journey of Light
169
With Sun
Florence Ostende
Megan Rooney
171
“Color is radical”
Megan Rooney, Ludovic Delalande & Claire Staebler
Niele Toroni 206 213
Artists’ biographies Selective bibliography
185
Painting as a Way of Seeing
195
Niele Toroni, interviews
Nancy Spector
Niele Toroni, Suzanne Pagé & Nathalie Ogé
9
Suzanne Pagé
17
Sam Gilliam
Preface
Exhibited works
67
Color on the Run
81
What Does Painting Do with the World?
93
Submerged in Color
101
Solids and Veils
103
An Ongoing Conversation
Sam Gilliam
Sam Gilliam & Jonathan P. Binstock
Philippe Dagen
Ludger Schwarte
Ludovic Delalande
Katharina Grosse 119
Large Surfaces Claire Staebler
129
Timeless Color
Katharina Grosse, Frank Gehry & Hans Ulrich Obrist
Steven Parrino 147
Mass Monochromy Claudia Buizza
153
Conversation
Steven Parrino & Marc-Olivier Wahler
Megan Rooney 163
A Journey of Light
169
With Sun
Florence Ostende
Megan Rooney
171
“Color is radical”
Megan Rooney, Ludovic Delalande & Claire Staebler
Niele Toroni 206 213
Artists’ biographies Selective bibliography
185
Painting as a Way of Seeing
195
Niele Toroni, interviews
Nancy Spector
Niele Toroni, Suzanne Pagé & Nathalie Ogé
Preface
Suzanne Pagé
Color may sometimes escape, but we cannot escape color
Since the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, color has been its permanent guest, as is evident in its inaugural exhibitions and commissions. While Olafur Eliasson played on reflections and diffractions in the Grotto, sculpting a path of light around the remanence of a yellow glow, the permanent installation created by Ellsworth Kelly for the auditorium sees five monochrome panels—yellow, red, blue, green, and violet—flow through the space like musical notes, with the stage curtain adding a rainbow chord. The dialogue between color and architecture was already proving to be of primary importance. The current exhibition La couleur en fugue (Fugues in Color) continues along the same line illustrated by Keys to a Passion in 2015. In that exhibition, color triumphed along the exhibition’s four creative themes: from Edvard Munch’s Scream to Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber and Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, for the expressionist line; from Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square to Piet Mondrian’s Composition in the Rhombus with Yellow Lines, from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies to Mark Rothko’s No. 46 (Black, Ochre, Red over Red), for the contemplative line; from Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Woman with Large Eyes to Robert Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team and Fernand Léger’s Constructors with Aloe, for the Popist line. This primacy of color came to the fore in the music line in one of the Fondation’s deliberate choices, celebrating the connections between sound and color, notably through two major works by František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors and Localization of Graphic Motifs II (fig. 2). The vortex effect of Katharina Grosse’s site-related creation in Gallery 10 can be seen as an echo of the dizzying vanishing points— centripetal and centrifugal—in that composition.
fig. 1
Katharina Grosse, Splinter, 2021 (detail), model, scale 1:25
In the same room, next to Kupka, Wassily Kandinsky and above all Henri Matisse’s Dance II (fig. 3) affirmed the paradigm of music and, with it, the fiery rhythm of the color-bodies. The radical revolutionary economy of only three colors—red, blue, green—forced the edges of the canvas to transgress via the impetuosity of the bodies.
Preface
Suzanne Pagé
Color may sometimes escape, but we cannot escape color
Since the opening of the Fondation Louis Vuitton, color has been its permanent guest, as is evident in its inaugural exhibitions and commissions. While Olafur Eliasson played on reflections and diffractions in the Grotto, sculpting a path of light around the remanence of a yellow glow, the permanent installation created by Ellsworth Kelly for the auditorium sees five monochrome panels—yellow, red, blue, green, and violet—flow through the space like musical notes, with the stage curtain adding a rainbow chord. The dialogue between color and architecture was already proving to be of primary importance. The current exhibition La couleur en fugue (Fugues in Color) continues along the same line illustrated by Keys to a Passion in 2015. In that exhibition, color triumphed along the exhibition’s four creative themes: from Edvard Munch’s Scream to Otto Dix’s Portrait of the Dancer Anita Berber and Francis Bacon’s Study for a Portrait, for the expressionist line; from Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square to Piet Mondrian’s Composition in the Rhombus with Yellow Lines, from Claude Monet’s Water Lilies to Mark Rothko’s No. 46 (Black, Ochre, Red over Red), for the contemplative line; from Pablo Picasso’s Head of a Woman with Large Eyes to Robert Delaunay’s The Cardiff Team and Fernand Léger’s Constructors with Aloe, for the Popist line. This primacy of color came to the fore in the music line in one of the Fondation’s deliberate choices, celebrating the connections between sound and color, notably through two major works by František Kupka, Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors and Localization of Graphic Motifs II (fig. 2). The vortex effect of Katharina Grosse’s site-related creation in Gallery 10 can be seen as an echo of the dizzying vanishing points— centripetal and centrifugal—in that composition.
fig. 1
Katharina Grosse, Splinter, 2021 (detail), model, scale 1:25
In the same room, next to Kupka, Wassily Kandinsky and above all Henri Matisse’s Dance II (fig. 3) affirmed the paradigm of music and, with it, the fiery rhythm of the color-bodies. The radical revolutionary economy of only three colors—red, blue, green—forced the edges of the canvas to transgress via the impetuosity of the bodies.
Color on the Run
1 In French, the expression “faire une fugue” means simply to run away.—Trans. 2 It should also be pointed out that when I wrote this essay, all I knew about the site-related works of Grosse and Rooney came from my conversations with the two artists, and from the models that Grosse was finalizing at the time.
Philippe Dagen
An exhibition bringing together, in alphabetical order, Sam Gilliam, Katharina Grosse, Steven Parrino, Megan Rooney, and Niele Toroni: artists representing distinctly different generations and practices. Its title, Fugues in Color, contains allusions to František Kupka—Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors (1912, fig. 1)—and Wassily Kandinsky—Fugue (1914, fig. 2). But there is another way of understanding it, in which “fugue” no longer designates a musical composition but a voluntary disappearance, a desire to flee: a way of escaping from a situation deemed unbearable.1 So, on the one hand, a codified form of writing, based on the imitation and displacement of one or more themes; and, on the other hand, a fugacious move toward a life still unknown. These two meanings seem too far apart for there to be anything to be gained from their homonymity. However, I intend to go against this seemingly obvious conclusion and suggest that the word “fugue,” by its strange polysemy, might help us reflect on the uses and powers of colors. The observations that follow make no attempt to summarize what has been written on this immense subject. They are meant only to further understanding of what is at stake in the works assembled here, both separately and when seen together. They seek to show what is expressed, implied, or encrypted in works whose main—but not only—common denominator is that their use of color makes more obviously visible what is at stake in the practices themselves, in their materiality and appearance: issues of order and disorder, desire and constraint. The pictorial will be placed within a broader perspective.2
Colors in the wild: a rudimentary history The hypothesis on which this is based is as follows: colors are not an exclusively artistic issue. To push them to the limits of their intensity and to saturate a space with them, as Grosse, Rooney, and Gilliam all do, is not only to transgress artistic habits, but also to engage in physical and psychic experiences whose scope can be measured only by recourse to anthropology as much as to the history of the arts and of human societies.
Color on the Run
1 In French, the expression “faire une fugue” means simply to run away.—Trans. 2 It should also be pointed out that when I wrote this essay, all I knew about the site-related works of Grosse and Rooney came from my conversations with the two artists, and from the models that Grosse was finalizing at the time.
Philippe Dagen
An exhibition bringing together, in alphabetical order, Sam Gilliam, Katharina Grosse, Steven Parrino, Megan Rooney, and Niele Toroni: artists representing distinctly different generations and practices. Its title, Fugues in Color, contains allusions to František Kupka—Amorpha, Fugue in Two Colors (1912, fig. 1)—and Wassily Kandinsky—Fugue (1914, fig. 2). But there is another way of understanding it, in which “fugue” no longer designates a musical composition but a voluntary disappearance, a desire to flee: a way of escaping from a situation deemed unbearable.1 So, on the one hand, a codified form of writing, based on the imitation and displacement of one or more themes; and, on the other hand, a fugacious move toward a life still unknown. These two meanings seem too far apart for there to be anything to be gained from their homonymity. However, I intend to go against this seemingly obvious conclusion and suggest that the word “fugue,” by its strange polysemy, might help us reflect on the uses and powers of colors. The observations that follow make no attempt to summarize what has been written on this immense subject. They are meant only to further understanding of what is at stake in the works assembled here, both separately and when seen together. They seek to show what is expressed, implied, or encrypted in works whose main—but not only—common denominator is that their use of color makes more obviously visible what is at stake in the practices themselves, in their materiality and appearance: issues of order and disorder, desire and constraint. The pictorial will be placed within a broader perspective.2
Colors in the wild: a rudimentary history The hypothesis on which this is based is as follows: colors are not an exclusively artistic issue. To push them to the limits of their intensity and to saturate a space with them, as Grosse, Rooney, and Gilliam all do, is not only to transgress artistic habits, but also to engage in physical and psychic experiences whose scope can be measured only by recourse to anthropology as much as to the history of the arts and of human societies.
Large Surfaces
Claire Staebler
If I had the choice, I would have loved to become an opera singer or a perfume maker because it involves the body, but I’m a painter.1 My work is mainly about how a painted image can appear in our world, in our daily lives, in our activities and in the dedicated spaces to discuss its conditions of existence and its necessity.2 Katharina Grosse
1 Conversation with the artist, November 2021. 2 Email from the artist to Frank Gehry, January 2021.
Katharina Grosse, It Wasn’t Us, 2020 (detail), acrylic on floor, polystyrene and bronze, paint on asphalt, concrete, bricks, and metal, 700 × 6500 × 18300 cm, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
In the spring of 2020, when the world was in lockdown, when borders were closing, when populations, minds and bodies were retracting, Katharina Grosse pulled off a tour de force. At the invitation of the Hamburger Bahnhof, she has created a solo exhibition—her first in a Berlin institution for several years—using only the power of sprayed color to take over the interior and exterior of this large industrial hall and its surroundings. In the midst of a pandemic, It Wasn’t Us swept through the Museum für Gegenwart like a multicolored whirlwind taking everything in its path (figs. 1–2). In the center of the main space, the artist installed a large polyurethane sculpture, over thirty meters long, that acted as an abstract armature for her painting. This project combined several decisive parameters in Grosse’s work, relating to solitary artmaking (she paints alone) and to the collective (each project is the result of teamwork), to the universal (it speaks to all), and to the particular (each person has their own sensory experience, silent or noisy). With this spectacular ephemeral intervention, as with most of her works, her grip on the building made the space of the architecture explode. Once again, visitors were not just in front of the painting, but inside it, above and below it, discovering it as they shifted, as they moved and experienced the environment sensorially. Since the end of the 1990s, Katharina Grosse has turned her exclusive practice of painting into a powerful tool in the service of a desire to transform the world. Her massive and brilliantly colored interventions explore the potentialities of space, far beyond the limits of a stretcher or canvas, embracing floors, walls, ceilings, and all objects present to create multidimensional pictorial landscapes.
Large Surfaces
Claire Staebler
If I had the choice, I would have loved to become an opera singer or a perfume maker because it involves the body, but I’m a painter.1 My work is mainly about how a painted image can appear in our world, in our daily lives, in our activities and in the dedicated spaces to discuss its conditions of existence and its necessity.2 Katharina Grosse
1 Conversation with the artist, November 2021. 2 Email from the artist to Frank Gehry, January 2021.
Katharina Grosse, It Wasn’t Us, 2020 (detail), acrylic on floor, polystyrene and bronze, paint on asphalt, concrete, bricks, and metal, 700 × 6500 × 18300 cm, Hamburger Bahnhof – Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin
In the spring of 2020, when the world was in lockdown, when borders were closing, when populations, minds and bodies were retracting, Katharina Grosse pulled off a tour de force. At the invitation of the Hamburger Bahnhof, she has created a solo exhibition—her first in a Berlin institution for several years—using only the power of sprayed color to take over the interior and exterior of this large industrial hall and its surroundings. In the midst of a pandemic, It Wasn’t Us swept through the Museum für Gegenwart like a multicolored whirlwind taking everything in its path (figs. 1–2). In the center of the main space, the artist installed a large polyurethane sculpture, over thirty meters long, that acted as an abstract armature for her painting. This project combined several decisive parameters in Grosse’s work, relating to solitary artmaking (she paints alone) and to the collective (each project is the result of teamwork), to the universal (it speaks to all), and to the particular (each person has their own sensory experience, silent or noisy). With this spectacular ephemeral intervention, as with most of her works, her grip on the building made the space of the architecture explode. Once again, visitors were not just in front of the painting, but inside it, above and below it, discovering it as they shifted, as they moved and experienced the environment sensorially. Since the end of the 1990s, Katharina Grosse has turned her exclusive practice of painting into a powerful tool in the service of a desire to transform the world. Her massive and brilliantly colored interventions explore the potentialities of space, far beyond the limits of a stretcher or canvas, embracing floors, walls, ceilings, and all objects present to create multidimensional pictorial landscapes.
Timeless Color Katharina Grosse, Frank Gehry & Hans Ulrich Obrist Conversation from January 5, 2021
At the initiative of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Katharina Grosse, a conversation between the artist and architect Frank Gehry, moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, took place via screens uniting three time zones: Los Angeles, Auckland, along with Zurich and Paris. Going beyond the mutual curiosity and fascination acknowledged by Katharina Grosse and Frank Gehry, their exchange explored the connections between painting and architecture, color and surface, light and reflection, and returned to the great question of the synthesis of the arts, and this is a significant instance of the debate between the artist and the architect. Claire Staebler
Hans Ulrich Obrist Katharina, you’re developing two works for Frank Gehry’s building—one for Gallery 10 and one for the so-called “Canyon.” What were your first thoughts about these projects?
Katharina Grosse, In Seven Days Time, 2011 (detail), acrylic on glass fiber reinforced plastic, 920 × 1950 × 12 cm, Kunstmuseum Bonn
Katharina Grosse First I asked myself how could a painting engage with the building’s multilayered complexity. Could it sit in-between the layers? Where would it come from and how would it enter the building? It could enter Gallery 10 from the outside patio through the high doorway, and develop various complex layers touching the walls, the floor, and an inserted sculptural element (figs. 1–2). I began to experiment with different plywood structures. Using standard sheet sizes I began to double them up, cut them into triangles and shift them in relation to one another. Because of the height of the Galerie 10 space, I have spread them like a deck of cards forming a zone of interference between the wall and the painting. In its current shape it consists of twenty reiterating, overlapping triangles that cast rhythmical shadows as they are stacked up against the wall toward the skylight (fig. 3). I started to look at the space like an interface between painting and daylight—its rays piercing the air—like from a torch—and demarcating an area on the floor as if burning through the painting, creating a void. The plywood structure intertwines the notion of a body as a whole and its repetition in parts—either falling apart or reassembling itself. The Canyon holds a large volume below the glass roof that can be seen from many areas and floors, even from
Timeless Color Katharina Grosse, Frank Gehry & Hans Ulrich Obrist Conversation from January 5, 2021
At the initiative of the Fondation Louis Vuitton and Katharina Grosse, a conversation between the artist and architect Frank Gehry, moderated by Hans Ulrich Obrist, took place via screens uniting three time zones: Los Angeles, Auckland, along with Zurich and Paris. Going beyond the mutual curiosity and fascination acknowledged by Katharina Grosse and Frank Gehry, their exchange explored the connections between painting and architecture, color and surface, light and reflection, and returned to the great question of the synthesis of the arts, and this is a significant instance of the debate between the artist and the architect. Claire Staebler
Hans Ulrich Obrist Katharina, you’re developing two works for Frank Gehry’s building—one for Gallery 10 and one for the so-called “Canyon.” What were your first thoughts about these projects?
Katharina Grosse, In Seven Days Time, 2011 (detail), acrylic on glass fiber reinforced plastic, 920 × 1950 × 12 cm, Kunstmuseum Bonn
Katharina Grosse First I asked myself how could a painting engage with the building’s multilayered complexity. Could it sit in-between the layers? Where would it come from and how would it enter the building? It could enter Gallery 10 from the outside patio through the high doorway, and develop various complex layers touching the walls, the floor, and an inserted sculptural element (figs. 1–2). I began to experiment with different plywood structures. Using standard sheet sizes I began to double them up, cut them into triangles and shift them in relation to one another. Because of the height of the Galerie 10 space, I have spread them like a deck of cards forming a zone of interference between the wall and the painting. In its current shape it consists of twenty reiterating, overlapping triangles that cast rhythmical shadows as they are stacked up against the wall toward the skylight (fig. 3). I started to look at the space like an interface between painting and daylight—its rays piercing the air—like from a torch—and demarcating an area on the floor as if burning through the painting, creating a void. The plywood structure intertwines the notion of a body as a whole and its repetition in parts—either falling apart or reassembling itself. The Canyon holds a large volume below the glass roof that can be seen from many areas and floors, even from
Mass Monochromy
Claudia Buizza
This liberation of folds that are no longer merely reproducing the finite body. … It may be that painting needs to leave the frame and become sculpture in order to fully achieve this effect.1
1 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 122. 2 Interview between Steven Parrino and Marc-Olivier Wahler, in Steven Parrino: Nihilism Is Love, eds. Friedemann Malsch and Fabian Flückiger (exh. cat. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2020), p. 66, republished in the present volume, p. 154. 3 Ibid. See also, Steven Parrino, The No Texts (1979–2003) (Geneva: JRP|Editions, 2003), p. 43. 4 Interview between Steven Parrino and Marc-Olivier Wahler, in Nihilism Is Love, p. 65. 5 This is the performance Disruption (1979), which was inspired by Vito Acconci’s Claim Excerpts (1971). See Parrino, The No Texts, p. 19. 6 “The important thing about Andy wasn’t that he was a Pop artist or a fashion person, it was that he took on the responsibility of being a mirror. … That responsibility came down to me, and I hope I could do him justice by being a responsible artist and reflecting life as best I can. Whether that life is ugly or beautiful is out of my control, but it’s out of everyone’s control. It makes painting important because you’re reflecting what’s around you.” Interview with Reinhard Ermen in Nihilism Is Love, p. 75.
Steven Parrino, Cyclotron, 2002 (detail), enamel on canvas, diam. 213.4 cm, courtesy the Parrino Family Estate and Gagosian Gallery
Painter, draftsman, performer, musician, video artist—Steven Parrino (New York, 1958–2005) was impossible to pigeonhole and was appreciated in Europe and the United States by critics as well as by new generations of creators in every field (visual arts, live performance, fashion, music, etc.). Coming from the East Village art scene of the early 1980s, he was primarily concerned with continuing to paint at a time when the discourse on painting claimed that it was “dead,”2 and likened his pictorial approach to a form of “necrophilia.”3 Throughout his career, he favored the monochrome canvas, a perfect image of pure color, devoid of figures and forms, which he revisited through the prism of the American cultural and social reality of his time. Growing up in the disenchanted context of New York countercultures, in a society that he felt was increasingly politically conformist and dominated by the media, as an adolescent Parrino was driven by a craving for freedom, which he expressed first and foremost in music and performance. Always dressed in black and wearing shades, he listened to punk and no wave bands (including his friend Lydia Lunch), and raved about Ramones concerts,4 especially their brutal energy and distorted sound. As a young artist, his first interventions, smashing television sets with a sledgehammer,5 were inspired by the performances of Vito Acconci in the streets of New York. He then entered the Parsons School of Design in New York, where he was required to choose between painting and sculpture. The former won out. Confronting the dogma of “the death of painting,” he built up, over a period of twenty-five years, until his shock death in a motorbike accident in 2005, a prolific body of work described by critics as “post-Minimal,” “post-Pop,” and “post-punk,” but also as radical and appropriationist, processual and performative, elegant and trashy (fig. 1). Following the lesson of Andy Warhol, Parrino held up a mirror to the society in which he lived, in work that fused mass culture and “high art.”6
Mass Monochromy
Claudia Buizza
This liberation of folds that are no longer merely reproducing the finite body. … It may be that painting needs to leave the frame and become sculpture in order to fully achieve this effect.1
1 Gilles Deleuze, The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p. 122. 2 Interview between Steven Parrino and Marc-Olivier Wahler, in Steven Parrino: Nihilism Is Love, eds. Friedemann Malsch and Fabian Flückiger (exh. cat. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2020), p. 66, republished in the present volume, p. 154. 3 Ibid. See also, Steven Parrino, The No Texts (1979–2003) (Geneva: JRP|Editions, 2003), p. 43. 4 Interview between Steven Parrino and Marc-Olivier Wahler, in Nihilism Is Love, p. 65. 5 This is the performance Disruption (1979), which was inspired by Vito Acconci’s Claim Excerpts (1971). See Parrino, The No Texts, p. 19. 6 “The important thing about Andy wasn’t that he was a Pop artist or a fashion person, it was that he took on the responsibility of being a mirror. … That responsibility came down to me, and I hope I could do him justice by being a responsible artist and reflecting life as best I can. Whether that life is ugly or beautiful is out of my control, but it’s out of everyone’s control. It makes painting important because you’re reflecting what’s around you.” Interview with Reinhard Ermen in Nihilism Is Love, p. 75.
Steven Parrino, Cyclotron, 2002 (detail), enamel on canvas, diam. 213.4 cm, courtesy the Parrino Family Estate and Gagosian Gallery
Painter, draftsman, performer, musician, video artist—Steven Parrino (New York, 1958–2005) was impossible to pigeonhole and was appreciated in Europe and the United States by critics as well as by new generations of creators in every field (visual arts, live performance, fashion, music, etc.). Coming from the East Village art scene of the early 1980s, he was primarily concerned with continuing to paint at a time when the discourse on painting claimed that it was “dead,”2 and likened his pictorial approach to a form of “necrophilia.”3 Throughout his career, he favored the monochrome canvas, a perfect image of pure color, devoid of figures and forms, which he revisited through the prism of the American cultural and social reality of his time. Growing up in the disenchanted context of New York countercultures, in a society that he felt was increasingly politically conformist and dominated by the media, as an adolescent Parrino was driven by a craving for freedom, which he expressed first and foremost in music and performance. Always dressed in black and wearing shades, he listened to punk and no wave bands (including his friend Lydia Lunch), and raved about Ramones concerts,4 especially their brutal energy and distorted sound. As a young artist, his first interventions, smashing television sets with a sledgehammer,5 were inspired by the performances of Vito Acconci in the streets of New York. He then entered the Parsons School of Design in New York, where he was required to choose between painting and sculpture. The former won out. Confronting the dogma of “the death of painting,” he built up, over a period of twenty-five years, until his shock death in a motorbike accident in 2005, a prolific body of work described by critics as “post-Minimal,” “post-Pop,” and “post-punk,” but also as radical and appropriationist, processual and performative, elegant and trashy (fig. 1). Following the lesson of Andy Warhol, Parrino held up a mirror to the society in which he lived, in work that fused mass culture and “high art.”6
A Journey of Light
1 Extract from the film Megan Rooney, captured in the artist’s studio by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery: https://ropac.net/artists/210megan-rooney/. 2 Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are from a conversation with the artist in her London studio on June 7, 2021.
Megan Rooney, Fire on the Mountain, 2019 (detail), acrylic, wall paint, oil stick, pastel, spray paint, 800 × 1700 cm View of the exhibition Fire on the Mountain, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2019
Florence Ostende
Placing painting, sculpture, writing, and performance on an equal footing, Megan Rooney’s work sets pictorial material into motion. Her physical, almost performative commitment to the act of painting culminates in monumental works that cover the entirety of one or more museum walls, and recall murals in urban space or the history of cave paintings. The artist creates them alone over a period of several weeks using a cherry picker, in long-term performances that push her to exhaustion, aware that this ephemeral conquest of space will disappear at the end of the exhibition. Rooney drives the lift in a kind of trance and rises into the air as the mural enters into a symbiosis with her body and the movement of the machine: “I imagine myself in flight when I’m painting, hovering above the surface and searching for places to land, touching down and lifting off. I do this again and again until the surface starts to collect information. The painting becomes like a capsule, holding the weight of time.”1 The layers accumulated over the weeks are then revealed in places by abrasive discs. The sanding of the surface reveals the wall’s flesh, as if we were entering the bowels of the painting. The monumental and spectacular mural at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf for her exhibition Fire on the Mountain (2019) is the artist’s largest to date, measuring 17 meters long by 8 meters high (fig. 1). On the top floor of a building in the King’s Cross area, Rooney’s studio is pierced through by the white light characteristic of London. Under a thick layer of clouds, an almost dazzling luminosity overexposes her workspace. “My palette has changed in recent years. I’m gradually moving away from the pastel nightmare of the North American suburbs where I grew up. I’m starting to develop a strong connection to the light of London. When I was younger, living in Canada, I was marked by the exhibition Turner, Whistler, Monet: Impressionist Visions at the Art Gallery of Ontario [2004]. Curiously, I never thought of Turner’s painting in relation to my own work until I recently came across Regulus [1828], a painting from the point of view of a man blinded by the sun’s rays, tortured by the glare.”2 Although her technique consists of generous, rhythmic
A Journey of Light
1 Extract from the film Megan Rooney, captured in the artist’s studio by Thaddaeus Ropac Gallery: https://ropac.net/artists/210megan-rooney/. 2 Unless otherwise stated, all quotes are from a conversation with the artist in her London studio on June 7, 2021.
Megan Rooney, Fire on the Mountain, 2019 (detail), acrylic, wall paint, oil stick, pastel, spray paint, 800 × 1700 cm View of the exhibition Fire on the Mountain, Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 2019
Florence Ostende
Placing painting, sculpture, writing, and performance on an equal footing, Megan Rooney’s work sets pictorial material into motion. Her physical, almost performative commitment to the act of painting culminates in monumental works that cover the entirety of one or more museum walls, and recall murals in urban space or the history of cave paintings. The artist creates them alone over a period of several weeks using a cherry picker, in long-term performances that push her to exhaustion, aware that this ephemeral conquest of space will disappear at the end of the exhibition. Rooney drives the lift in a kind of trance and rises into the air as the mural enters into a symbiosis with her body and the movement of the machine: “I imagine myself in flight when I’m painting, hovering above the surface and searching for places to land, touching down and lifting off. I do this again and again until the surface starts to collect information. The painting becomes like a capsule, holding the weight of time.”1 The layers accumulated over the weeks are then revealed in places by abrasive discs. The sanding of the surface reveals the wall’s flesh, as if we were entering the bowels of the painting. The monumental and spectacular mural at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf for her exhibition Fire on the Mountain (2019) is the artist’s largest to date, measuring 17 meters long by 8 meters high (fig. 1). On the top floor of a building in the King’s Cross area, Rooney’s studio is pierced through by the white light characteristic of London. Under a thick layer of clouds, an almost dazzling luminosity overexposes her workspace. “My palette has changed in recent years. I’m gradually moving away from the pastel nightmare of the North American suburbs where I grew up. I’m starting to develop a strong connection to the light of London. When I was younger, living in Canada, I was marked by the exhibition Turner, Whistler, Monet: Impressionist Visions at the Art Gallery of Ontario [2004]. Curiously, I never thought of Turner’s painting in relation to my own work until I recently came across Regulus [1828], a painting from the point of view of a man blinded by the sun’s rays, tortured by the glare.”2 Although her technique consists of generous, rhythmic
Painting as a Way of Seeing
1 Interview with the artist by Francesca Pola, “Breathing Walking Painting,” in Niele Toroni (exh. cat. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017), p. 59. 2 Interview with the artist by Jeanne Siegel, “Real Painting,” Arts Magazine (October 1989): p. 50. 3 Ibid. Toroni observed, “I do think that painters today fall into systems and they don’t have methods,” p. 49.
Niele Toroni, Imprints of a No. 50 Paintbrush Repeated at Regular Intervals of 30 cm, 1997 (detail), acrylic on wood, group of 11 tondi, diam. 52.5 cm each, Private collection, Paris, on deposit at the Collection Lambert, Avignon Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Nancy Spector
Every single painting Niele Toroni has created since 1966 is, in his mind, part of a larger continuum. He considers the myriad works comprising his oeuvre to be an “indivisible totality.”1 While this idea would be difficult to comprehend in the case of an artist whose career careens from one stylistic endeavor to another, Toroni’s declaration makes complete sense. From the very inception of his mature work, he formulated one distinct approach to his production and has never deviated from it. The universal title for all his paintings, Imprints of a No. 50 Brush Repeated at Regular Intervals of 30 cm, describes both the artist’s working method and its visual results. Nothing more. Nothing less. Toroni quite literally presses a flat, 5-cm-wide, paint-laden brush onto a surface, spacing each imprint 30 cm apart. The resulting gridded pattern can be of any size and orientation. His surface choice is ecumenical, having realized such paintings on paper, oilcloth, and canvas, but also on architectural elements such as walls (figs. 1 and 3), arches, doors, columns, windowpanes, and floors. Sometimes these grids appear layered in space, when they migrate from wall to paper to wall again. And sometimes they are as simple as six perfectly placed marks in the form of a triangle. Toroni is a singular artist, not associated with any particular movement, though in the Venn diagram of contemporary art history, his work intersects with a number of isms and other individual practices. His unswerving dedication to the formula for painting he prescribed decades ago puts him in the company of structure-based artists like Daniel Buren, Imi Knoebel, Sol LeWitt, Olivier Mosset, Roman Opalka, and On Kawara, with whom he has professed an allegiance.2 But, the distinction between systematic painting and one with a well-defined methodology is important to him. While repetition is the lifeblood of his art—he has likened it to the essential role of breathing or a beating heart—replication for its own sake is of no interest to him.3 Kawara’s Today Series, known better as the “Date Paintings,” while always essentially the same, differ only in the specific date itself, the color of the background, and the size of canvas. This syncopation between uniformity and variation within a given structure is key to Toroni’s work. Each of his painted grids is different from another due to the color of the paint, the texture of the imprints, the size of work,
Painting as a Way of Seeing
1 Interview with the artist by Francesca Pola, “Breathing Walking Painting,” in Niele Toroni (exh. cat. Cologne: Verlag der Buchhandlung Walther König, 2017), p. 59. 2 Interview with the artist by Jeanne Siegel, “Real Painting,” Arts Magazine (October 1989): p. 50. 3 Ibid. Toroni observed, “I do think that painters today fall into systems and they don’t have methods,” p. 49.
Niele Toroni, Imprints of a No. 50 Paintbrush Repeated at Regular Intervals of 30 cm, 1997 (detail), acrylic on wood, group of 11 tondi, diam. 52.5 cm each, Private collection, Paris, on deposit at the Collection Lambert, Avignon Courtesy of the artist and Marian Goodman Gallery
Nancy Spector
Every single painting Niele Toroni has created since 1966 is, in his mind, part of a larger continuum. He considers the myriad works comprising his oeuvre to be an “indivisible totality.”1 While this idea would be difficult to comprehend in the case of an artist whose career careens from one stylistic endeavor to another, Toroni’s declaration makes complete sense. From the very inception of his mature work, he formulated one distinct approach to his production and has never deviated from it. The universal title for all his paintings, Imprints of a No. 50 Brush Repeated at Regular Intervals of 30 cm, describes both the artist’s working method and its visual results. Nothing more. Nothing less. Toroni quite literally presses a flat, 5-cm-wide, paint-laden brush onto a surface, spacing each imprint 30 cm apart. The resulting gridded pattern can be of any size and orientation. His surface choice is ecumenical, having realized such paintings on paper, oilcloth, and canvas, but also on architectural elements such as walls (figs. 1 and 3), arches, doors, columns, windowpanes, and floors. Sometimes these grids appear layered in space, when they migrate from wall to paper to wall again. And sometimes they are as simple as six perfectly placed marks in the form of a triangle. Toroni is a singular artist, not associated with any particular movement, though in the Venn diagram of contemporary art history, his work intersects with a number of isms and other individual practices. His unswerving dedication to the formula for painting he prescribed decades ago puts him in the company of structure-based artists like Daniel Buren, Imi Knoebel, Sol LeWitt, Olivier Mosset, Roman Opalka, and On Kawara, with whom he has professed an allegiance.2 But, the distinction between systematic painting and one with a well-defined methodology is important to him. While repetition is the lifeblood of his art—he has likened it to the essential role of breathing or a beating heart—replication for its own sake is of no interest to him.3 Kawara’s Today Series, known better as the “Date Paintings,” while always essentially the same, differ only in the specific date itself, the color of the background, and the size of canvas. This syncopation between uniformity and variation within a given structure is key to Toroni’s work. Each of his painted grids is different from another due to the color of the paint, the texture of the imprints, the size of work,
© Éditions Gallimard, Paris, 2022 www.gallimard.fr © Fondation Louis Vuitton, Paris, 2022 www.fondationlouisvuitton.fr With the permission of Walther König for the texts pp. 103–114 and pp. 153–158. This catalogue is set in Everett (Nolan Paparelli) and Nib (Colophon Foundry) Papers: Munken Polar 400 g/m2 (cover), Magno Volume 150 g/m2, GardaGloss 150 g/m2 (interior) Photoengraving: Les Caméléons, Paris, France Printed in May 2022 on the presses of Printer Trento for Maestro, Trento, Italy Legal deposit: June 2022 ISBN: 978-2-07-297991-0 Edition number: 434091