Cornelia Parker: History Painting

An exhibition of new works by Cornelia Parker. For this show, Parker has created a series of paintings: seemingly abstract oil-on-canvas works inspired by historic newspaper and magazine covers and the colour analysis charts of American artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939). Also shown are a series of colour plots, made with home-made pigments produced from objects she has used over decades of her practice.

Vanderpoel’s pioneering 1902 volume Color Problems: A Practical Manual for the Lay Student of Color presented colour analysis in a way that appealed across disciplines, breaking down key theories in a series of experimental and visually striking illustrations that were easy to understand. While it was underappreciated in its time, her expression of colour anticipated major developments in modern art by nearly half a century, inspiring abstract artists like Piet Mondrian and Josef Albers.

Parker was drawn to Vanderpoel’s collection of coloured grids, geometric expressions which deconstruct the colour palettes of everyday, antique and natural objects. Egyptian sarcophagi, Assyrian tiles, early Greek vases, butterfly wings and leaves were all under inspection, their palettes scrutinised in 10 x 10 grids of coloured squares, where shades were laid out next to each other in a method of colour analysis that was revolutionary at its time. Parker was struck by Vanderpoel’s maxim: ‘Until our attention is called to it, we are unconscious what apparently unpromising material may yield new and beautiful motives for colour-harmonies.’