"The monochrome is a subject that has interested me for a long time, partly because it's the dumbest form of painting that could possibly exist. Anyone can make a monochrome: it really doesn't require craft or skill of any kind at all. The difficult thing is how to make a good one, or an interesting one. How do you make a monochrome that isn't like every other monochrome. That always seems to offer the problem for the studio".
(David Batchelor in conversation with Clarrie Wallis in Shiny Dirty, Ikon Gallery catalogue, 2004)
David Batchelor is one of Britain's most exciting contemporary artists. His work is concerned above all things with colour, a delight in the myriad brilliant hues of the urban environment. As author of the book 'Chromophobia', it's not surprising that his work is underlined by a critical concern with how the Western world sees and responds to colour in this technological age.
Nikolai Suetin (1897 - 1954) is acknowledged as one of the leading Russian Suprematist artists, having studied at the High Institute of Art, Vitebsk under the movement's founder, Kazimir Malevich.
This exhibition presents Batchelor's Found Monochromes of London Volume I (1997-2003), a projection of 81 35mm slides of blank or bleached out rectangles - old posters, empty billboards and such like - discovered in the city and photographed by the artist, alongside Suetin's 1924-6 oil painting / collage White Square (Suprematist Volume)
