Cornelia Parker: History Painting

For this solo exhibition Cornelia Parker has created a series of paintings: seemingly abstract oil-on-canvas works inspired by historic newspaper covers and the colour analysis charts of American artist Emily Noyes Vanderpoel (1842-1939) as well as pieces on glass, created from 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 deconstructed 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 arranged 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.

A website dedicated to Vanderpoel’s methodology includes a generating algorithm that allows one to take any image and break it down into an analytical colour grid. Using well-known newspaper headlines, covers from Time and Life magazine, and iconic photographs as her source, Parker used this to create her own colour charts. The headlines themselves are from over a century of tragic, awe-inspiring and shocking events, from the sinking of the Titanic to Martin Luther King’s famous speech, through the death of Princess Diana to the trial of Donald Trump.

Newspapers have appeared in Parker’s works before, in her News at Ten series in which children copied headlines onto blackboards, and in her films Left Right & Centre, and Election Abstract, which she produced when she was the UK’s official Election Artist (all 2017). The artist’s use of this source material highlights the absurdity, humour and tragedy of the human condition at a time when print ‘heritage’ media is in decline.

The paintings in this exhibition are abstract but tied to representation by the narrative suggested in the titles. Her colour charts are rendered in impasto oil on canvas, using a palette knife, an incongruous technique not readily associated with the precision of modernism. The canvases range in scale, some referencing the size of an LP, which also relates to the various album titles used in the series, including Pink Floyd’s Dark Side of the Moon and Bob Dylan’s The Times They Are a-Changin’.

A large wall-based installation entitled COLOUR PROBLEMS is a playful assemblage of the palettes which were used to make the works on canvas in the exhibition. The concept of the alter-ego is a constant theme in Parker’s practice and she considers the artists palette as the subconscious of painting; on these individual surfaces are unintended compositions which call to mind the gestures of abstract expressionism.

In the lower gallery there is a display of colour charts painted on to glass, created from pigments Parker has made herself. 90 MILLION YEARS AND COUNTING features ground-up dinosaur fossils, while the works from GUNPOWDER PLOTS are painted with sulphur, saltpetre and charcoal: the ingredients of gunpowder. The works are offset by a solitary blue grid painting entitled GLACIERS MELT.

Over the years Cornelia Parker has amassed her own table of very particular elements including snake venom, charcoal from a Texan church struck by lightning, burnt cocaine, chalk from the White Cliffs of Dover and beachcombed bricks from a house that has fallen off those cliffs. 90 MILLION YEARS AND COUNTING introduces a new material, that of fossilised dinosaurs, which she has ground down to create pigments that are then plotted on sheets of glass. The colours denote the different parts of the long-dead creatures, which were collected from Morocco, America and the Isle of Wight, they suggest laboratory samples, mapping the curious histories of their constituent parts.

In her Explosion Drawings (1999-2004) Parker used the ingredients of gunpowder for their potential, when combined, to explode as well as for their colours; black, white and yellow. GUNPOWDER PLOTS follows on from these earlier drawings, separating out each colour to create carefully composed abstract paintings. Parker is interested in the potentially volatile nature of these materials which, when presented in this form seem rational and even meditative, yet they are quite literally explosions waiting to happen.

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Photography: Ben Westoby / Fine Art Documentation

Videography: Finn Blythe