BLACK HOLE SUN: The Monochrome in Art
Houston Art Advisory is pleased to present as its Inaugural Exhibition BlACK HOLE SUN: The Monochrome in Art, Curated by New York-based independent Curator and Writer Raul Zamudio.
The mixed-media exhibition of international artists takes its title from the eponymous song by Soundgarden. More than just homage to one of the most iconic bands to come out of Seattle’s Grunge music scene with its charismatic lead singer Chris Cornell, the exhibition explores the monochrome within the context of contemporary painting, sculpture, photography, video, installation, and performance-based work.
The history of the monochrome is a colorful one beginning with the early twentieth-century Russian painter Kazimir Malevich and his other-worldly, Suprematist canvases, to the Neo-Plasticism of Dutch artist Piet Mondrian who was inspired by, among other things, the theosophy of Victorian spiritualist Helena Blavatksy, and on through Minimalism of the 1960s and Post-Minimalism at the end of the twentieth century. Today, there are few artists that work in a singular color or even a pared down palette, but it is a genre still practiced whose counterpart in contemporary culture is underscored in colloquialisms including “green with envy,” “red as a beet with anger,” and "blue with sadness." Not only are emotions conveyed through monochromatic metaphors but other euphemisms too: “heart of gold,” "yellow rain," “greenbacks,” etc. While the artworks in BLACK HOLE SUN are formally unified by their restrained color and expressed in both pure abstraction and representational styles, their content is diverse in addressing a myriad of themes of a topical, historical, political, social, and/or personal nature.