Artists: Ansuya Blom, Harmen Brethouwer, Hugo Canoilas, Guy Debord, Helmut Federle, Siobhan Hapaska, Taf Hassam, Susan Hiller, Klaas Kloosterboer, Pieter Laurens Mol, Carl Michael von Hauswolff, Astrid Nobel, Susan Norrie, Roland Schimmel and Michael Stubbs.
This a group exhibition curated by Dutch curator and art writer Mark Kremer. Porta Nigra has been conceived as an enquiry into the use and significance of black in contemporary art. The exhibition is named after the Roman city gate in Trier, Germany, which was named Porta Nigra or Black Gate in the middle ages because of the dark colour the stone it is made from had turned. Like the original Porta Nigra, this show also acts as a passageway; a ‘psychological and existential passage in a dark territory’ but also as ‘an urgent, enriching experience’.
Spanning painting, sculpture, installation, sound, photography and film, the works in the exhibition have been selected for their ability to transcend their dark origins. Touching upon notions of the sublime and the alchemical, dense black surfaces of lacquer and enamel conjoin here with painted depictions of light, a record of the sound of silence, records of human protest and the burnt remains of former artworks.
The accompanying publication includes an introduction by Mark Kremer, As Kremer writes in the introductory essay ‘what lies beyond the limits of our vision, what exists within the darkness, is a terrain we are drawn to imagine all the more. It (black) is the very darkest colour, a result of the absence or complete absorption of light….With their dominant blacks, secondary greys, soft degrees and sudden flashes of whites, as well as a few faint and ‘real’ colours, the artworks in Porta Nigra form an abstract spectrum.’
I presented a single, early, cream coloured 'cake' painting which gave me the opportunity to re-contextualise this work in a context that felt alien to its' making and original intentions (as a deconstructed parody of gesture in modernist painting and as an object of 'consumed' luxury in the art market).
