Anne Lindberg: Of all colors

For Of all colors, Anne Lindberg will create a sweeping horizontal sculpture made with thousands of lengths of fine cotton thread pulled taut from wall to wall under the gallery’s bow truss skylights. With a gap at the artist’s eye level, the form will deepen in dark blue hues and gradually fade to white or almost white. Flashes of hot color will appear to float within the gradient of blue. In addition, 13 new drawings made with graphite and colored pencil on mat board will pick up elements compositionally and chromatically from within the thread installation. Ranging in scale and number of panels, Lindberg’s drawings explore the luminous possibilities of hue. Intermittent bold bands of contrasting color shift imply a layered space while referencing changes in light that come with time of day, viewpoint and atmosphere.

Blue, and the concept of blue, has a beguiling history, cultural significance, phenomenological radiance and scientific profundity. From artists to philosophers, scientists and astronauts, blue is by unequal measures intangible, mysterious and indeterminate. Scarce in nature, blue eludes perception emotionally and physically but is also everywhere - making it a symbol for the ideal - verging on the utopian. Whatever this color evokes in an individual, one of the most powerful elements is its ability to create meaning-making which, by definition, designates the way in which people interpret the world around them.

Anne Lindberg has been exploring the color blue for much of her artistic career. As a young artist, she traveled to Kyoto several times to work with traditional indigo dyers where she became fascinated with indigo’s unique ability to generate beautiful slow gradations from deep blues to hints of the lightest blues. It was Lindberg’s early experience watching cloth being lifted out of an indigo dye pot and its exposure to oxygen changing the yellow-ish green color of the fermented liquid dye into deeper and deeper shades of blue with each successive dip that formed the underpinnings of her lifelong interest in color. In recent years, Lindberg has been considering the semiotics of color, or how color can be used as a signifier for meanings associated with socio-emotional, cultural, environmental and political significance.

Searching for ways to visualize the mysteries of visual and spatial experience is a compelling way of working especially in times of social, environmental, and economic change. Color, particularly blue, has an inherent intrigue in human vision; it exists beyond our grasp as it holds constant conversation with adjacent colors in both time and space. Imagining a world without color, and particularly blue, underlines its significance in the whole of human experience.