Spec Gallery: The Color of Emotion — Caitlyn Liu Portfolio

The Color of Emotion

Spec Gallery for MoMa by Caitlyn Liu

Gallery Description

The Color of Emotion delves into how artists from 1880 to 1970 utilized color as a catalyst for expressing, evoking, and transforming emotional experiences. The gallery will stress how color, other than its representational form, became central to modern artists' learning to depict complex emotions, whether joy and serenity or turmoil and despair. The gallery will focus on the evolution of color theory and its influence on the diversity of artistic movements, impressionism, fauvism, and abstract expressionism to demonstrate how artists engineered color to formulate visceral and immersive experiences for viewers.

When modernism began to garner traction, artists parted with traditional artistic techniques to hone into the emotional construct of color. Claude Monet, an infamous impressionist in the late 19th century, used vibrant color to depict the fleeting moments of light and atmosphere, creating an environment of immediacy and connection with nature. In the early 20th century, Fauves, such as Henri Matisse, utilized bold, unblended colors in an expressive, unrestrained method to heighten viewers' emotional response. Moving forward into abstraction, Mark Rothko and Helen Frankenthaler channeled color fields to directly communicate emotion, resulting in audiences experiencing the emotional value of their pieces directly and personally.

These proposed artworks will span a multitude of mediums, but the primary focus will be on paintings, sketches, and studies to showcase the artists' processes.

The gallery will feature works by artists whose approach to color is unique and innovative. It will demonstrate their usage of hue, contrast, and composition to explore universal emotions. With white walls and ample spacing to convey minimal distraction or contrast to the color of the pieces, the works will also follow a timeline of this evolution, providing the viewer with a sensory and emotional journey through almost a century of modern artworks.

Wall Text

Color has its own language, harnessing the power to evoke feeling, memory, and emotion beyond words. The Color of Emotion explores how artists transformed the role of color from decorative to an essential means of communication, tracing the evolution of color through nearly a century of modern artworks. Early modernist visionaries such as Kandinsky and Matisse embraced the expressive potential of color, while later artists such as Frankenthaler and Rothko explored abstraction to convey a universal language, one that communicates directly to our profound senses. In this exhibition, color becomes the sole narrator of the story, with each artwork inviting you to experience states of mind that transcend literal representation. Each piece of this exhibition manipulates color into a vessel for emotional experience, whether through Frankenthaler’s effervescent washes or Alber’s methodical explorations of hue and perception; consider how each artist uses color to connect with you.

Proposed Works

Henri Matisse, The Red Studio, 1911, Oil on canvas, 181 x 219.1 cm

Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 28 (Second Version), 1912 Oil on canvas, 111.4 x 162.1 cm (Current location: Guggenheim Museum)

Franz Marc, Blue Horse with Rainbow (Blaues Pferd mit Regenbogen), 1913, Watercolor, gouache and pencil on paper, 16.5 x 26 cm

Léopold Survage, Colored Rythm: Study for the Film, 1913 ,Watercolor and ink on paper on black paper-faced board, 36 x 26.6 cm

Claude Monet - Water Lilies - 1914-1926 - Oil on canvas - 200 x 180 cm

Johannes Itten, Farbenkugel in 7 Lichtstufen und 12 Tönen (Color Sphere in 7 Light Values and 12 Tones)

1921 - Lithograph, 74.3 x 32.2 cm

From Bruno Adler, ed., Utopia: Dokumente der Wirklichkeit I/II (Weimar, 1921), foldout from inside cover

(Current location: The Getty Research Institute)