FACTUAL / ACTUAL: COLOR AFTER ALBERS

ERIC HIBIT / MATTHEW KLUBER / SUSAN LICHTMAN / FABIOLA MENCHELLI / DEBORAH ZLOTSKY

MAY 10 - JULY 22, 2023

EVENTS

OPENING RECEPTION (NEW DATE)
Friday, May 12, 6:30 pm - 8:30 pm 
Wege Gallery 

MATTHEW KLUBER | ARTIST TALK / GALLERY WALK-THROUGH
Saturday, May 13, 10:00 - 11:00 am
Wege Gallery

SUSAN LICHTMAN | VIRTUAL ARTIST TALK
Saturday, June 10, 10:00 - 11:00 am (CT)
ZOOM
VIEW RECORDING

Join us for a virtual artist lecture with East-coast based painter, Susan Lichtman. Lichtman will speak about her practice and the atmospheric color in her work.

When Interaction of Color was published in 1963, it was hailed as a groundbreaking work that would fundamentally change the way artists and designers approached color. Written by the German-born artist and educator Josef Albers (1888-1976), the book presented a revolutionary new approach to color theory that emphasized the subjective nature of color perception and the dynamic interactions between colors. Originally produced as a limited silkscreen edition of 150 color plates, Interaction of Color was an essential handbook and teaching aid in the classroom, illustrating the central tenet of Albers’ teaching philosophy that underscored direct experience over passive observation or intellectual analysis. Demonstrating the elasticity of color, he defined “factual color” as fixed--measurable through its physical properties of hue, saturation and brightness, and “actual color” as fluid--existing within the context of its surroundings and influenced by our subjective perception of it.  

FACTUAL / ACTUAL brings together five artists whose work demonstrates a range of processes and possibilities that emerge from their own inquiries into color and its effects, social implications, mysteries, seduction, and ever-fluctuating nature. Like Albers, the artists in this exhibition are also educators, working directly with students learning the foundational principles of art and design, photography, painting and digital art. FACTUAL / ACTUAL features the work of Eric Hibit, Matthew Kluber, Susan Lichtman, Fabiola Menchelli, and Deborah Zlotsky.  

INTERACTION OF COLOR PRINTS ON DISPLAY AND THEIR LESSONS

The work presented in the exhibition represents a segment of each artist’s practice, offering insight into how they experience and discover color. Their texts throughout the exhibition situate their work in relation to color and Albers’ teachings. 

In Susan Lichtman’s work, formal alterations in color, geometry and light serve to heighten domestic places, as she considers the home as a stage filled with family, guests and imagined figures that contribute to an ensuing drama. Her paintings materialize through a process of constructing space that spirals around a singular detail, inventing the world, objects, and context surrounding it. 

Fabiola Menchelli’s photographs are constructed through multiple exposures masking the light with paper cut outs to generate an array of colors and forms. Using one of the few remaining 20 x 24” Polaroid cameras that exist today, she utilizes the additive color system of photography, which uses colored light (red, green, blue) to generate colors, as opposed to the subtractive color model of painters in which pigment produces color to reflect light. Menchelli’s process relies heavily on a balance of chance and control, as she draws with light and guides colored filters in the darkroom to produce hand-made illusions of architectural space. 

Citing the social and cultural upheavals and rapid developments in science and technology that took place in the 1960s and 70s, Matthew Kluber’s work conceptualizes the absolute and fluid through the physical intersection of painting and digital technology. Through the use of custom-coded software, Kluber’s paintings fluctuate and shimmer, meeting in a space of combined color systems, simultaneously additive and subtractive. 

Deborah Zlotsky creates “soft paintings” from reclaimed textiles that become activated through transparent overlays of color. In recognizing the hard-edged, geometric, “Albers-ian” patterns, Zlotsky teases by allowing the once pristine graphics to reveal traces of their former use through stains and tears. The material reveals its actual nature by sagging instead of standing up straight and billowing rather than holding its breath.   

In Eric Hibit's paintings, color is a fantasy acted out through changing color schemes. His subjects accept the color transformations willingly, remaining still as the light and context shift around them. In an unfolding narrative form, the constant in his work proclaims its malleability.