Seeing Things in Black and White

There’s Olafur Eliasson’s Room for One Colour light installation. Paintings and drawings by Old Masters such as Rembrandt, Jan van Eyck and Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres. Works by contemporary artists such as Gerhard Richter, Chuck Close and Bridget Riley.

The common denominator? They’re part of the National Gallery’s exploration of what happens when artists choose to leave the colour spectrum behind and explore the beauty of grey —and black, and white. That’s the main focus of Monochrome: Painting in Black and White.

“Painters reduce their colour palette for many reasons, but mainly as a way of focusing the viewer’s attention on a particular subject, concept or technique,” explain Lelia Packer and Jennifer Sliwka, the exhibition’s curators. “It can be very freeing: without the complexities of working in colour, you can experiment with form, texture, mark making and symbolic meaning.”

Indeed: in the Middle Ages, devotional stained glass eliminated colour to focus the mind and point to an otherworldly context —colour was seen as the forbidden fruit. Other artists used these chromatic challenges to examine the behaviour of light and shadow —that’s the case of Domenico Ghirlandaio’s 1477 Drapery Study. Gerhard Richter took to grey to signal society’s indifference to the murder of a prostitute in 1966’s Helga Matura with Her Fiancé.

And then there’s Eliasson’s installation, which trick the senses, plays with light frequencies and entraps the visitor in a monochrome world —finally, a rest from the distractions of the real one.

Monochrome is on display until February 18