Poul Gernes and Birgir Andrésson

This exhibition pairs Poul Gernes and Birgir Andrésson, two Nordic artists whose works deal with the experience of color. The Danish Gernes painted between 1960 and 1980. His untitled dot, target, and horizontal stripe paintings are emphatically objects: He applies pure brushless industrial enamel to the limits of Masonite boards, yet holes and scuffs from previous hangings keep his luscious paint tones from becoming precious. His utopian use of color is more social than optical or phenomenological: more Joseph Beuys than Newton or Goethe. Interested in creating social spaces with color, Gernes stopped making paintings in the 1980s to design color schemes for public buildings; the Palads Teatret and Copenhagen University Hospital are among more than a hundred buildings whose architectural color systems he planned.

The younger, Icelandic Andrésson’s works channel Ludwig Wittgenstein’s Remarks on Color, in which Wittgenstein asks: “Can one explain to a blind person what it’s like to see? . . . Can we then describe to the sighted person what it is like to see?” Andrésson’s novelistic text portraits are acts of translation between the visual and the verbal. The three flags of undyed wool in United We Stand, 2004, imagine the American, British, and Icelandic flags in color-blind tones. The series “Grey Colours in the Work of William Morris,” 2006, is composed of a vast array of nearly identical muted grays and melancholy blues overlaid with printed descriptions of the hues, such as DARK ASHEN GREY, NOT VERY DARK GREY, and WOEFUL GREY. While Gernes’s color is immediate and nonverbal, Andrésson insists on the possibility of the equivalence of tone and text. Seen together, the works create a thoughtful debate on color’s relationship to language and experience.