The walls of London’s Serpentine Gallery are covered with the kind of color charts you find at a hardware store. Only these colors aren’t grouped by greens, blues or reds.
They are random, computer-generated combinations, arranged in grids and titled “4,900 Colors: Version II” by German artist Gerhard Richter.
Richter used the same random process to design a stained- glass window for Cologne Cathedral last year: 11,500 hand-blown squares of glass were produced in 72 colors. The Serpentine’s 49 panels can be displayed 11 ways, including one that shows them all side-by-side.
Richter, 76, has long been drawn to color grids. In the mid-1960s, while he was busy doing paintings based on photographs, he reproduced hardware-store color charts on a big scale.
During an interview yesterday at the gallery, Richter wore a dark jacket and open-collared blue shirt as he spoke candidly about paint samples, the art market and Damien Hirst, sometimes seeking help from a translator. With his close-cropped white hair and glasses, he looked like a college professor. (Bloomberg)