Kay Rosen

In the summer of 2008 we celebrated the gallery’s 10th birthday by moving premises from the Edinburgh townhouse in which the gallery was founded, to a 6000 sq ft warehouse at the back of Edinburgh’s main train station, a property we inhabited until 2016. Our inaugural exhibition in the new space was a first ever UK exhibition of work by the American artist Kay Rosen. She titled the show 'HUEN', a word that doesn’t exist, except as an invented amalgam of two others - hue and hewn - a typically precise gesture of imprecision to describe a body of work ‘shaped from colour’.

Rosen’s love of colour is second only to her love of language and much of her work harnesses the power of both to make us see things we would otherwise miss. Today’s selection for the Unseen Masterpiece ‘Blurred’ is a typical combination of simplicity and nuance - her 2004 comment of the fudge of party politics in an era of political sameness, realised originally as a wall painting in 2004 (now in the collection of the Art Gallery of New South Wales).

Kay also took part in 'Gravity’s Rainbow' in 2011, already mentioned in this sequence as an exhibition about found colour, or in her case, a combination of appropriated colour and words, taken from the pages of paint charts on the basis of their quasi-poetic names. The resulting wall painting was presented as a modernist abstraction in stripes of green, brown and russet with an evocative, if slightly ridiculous, new title created when the names of the paints used were gathered together in the appropriate order – ‘Mud Hut between Willow Tree and Apple Tree beside Rocky Road separated by Hedgerow from Copper Canyon’.