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until 14.01. | #0854ARTatBerlin | ŻAK | BRANICKA presents from 29th October the exhibition “Who’s Afraid of Color? (Positive vs. Negative)” by the artist Ryszard Wasko.
Back in the 1970s, Wasko was looking at analytical photographs and asking why “a negative, which is the starting point and model for the positive image, seems to be unimportant; just as if it was the weakness of photography, seeing that only the print (the positive) becomes the ‘real’ photograph”. With his experiments, he investigates this phenomenon and tries to revise the significance of the source: “for me, it was about the equality of both realities”, he says. Decades later, in more recent series such as Timeline (2014), he tries to fabricate the nonexistent negatives of digital photographs.
The central theme of the exhibition is Wasko’s relation to colour, which has evolved during in the course of time. He explains the fear of color among the artists of the avantgarde of the 1970s: “the rule of ‘sparingness’ used to prevail. Although at that time, colour photography was already quite common (mainly in commercials and tourism), the majority of the artists used to avoid colour and continued to work with black-and-white photography. We thought that in this way, ideas could be brought to the point much more clearly, that ideas would be freed of unnecessary decoration”. Despite this, he will later discover colour for himself. Wasko leaves photography behind and picks up the paintbrush. This was for him a similar statement to the one of Barnett Newman: Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue (to which the title of this exhibition makes a reference), and also to Kazimir Malevich’s Black Square. With this gesture, Wasko distances himself from the strictness of Conceptual Art. In the end, however, this is also an attempt to discover different media, to test the borders of their possibilites, to try, again and always – in order to be able to find them.
Vernissage: 28th October 2016, 6 to 9 p.m. (the artist will be present)
Exhibition period: 29th October 2016 until 14th January 2017
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Image caption: Ryszard Wasko, Timeline No 17, 2014, oil on canvas, 50 x 130 cm
Exhibition Ryszard Wasko – ŻAK | BRANICKA – Kunst in Berlin ART at Berlin
