David Batchelor - My Own Private Bauhaus at Ingleby Gallery, Edinburgh

There are a selection of artists who produce work that always manages to delight me and fill me with joy. David Batchelor is one of them. No matter how bad a day I have been having, seeing his work makes me smile, cheers me up and makes me feel more positive. Simplicity is underrated. An enjoyment of colour, form, shape and surface is what I get from looking at the work. I cannot help but feel an urge to go to the studio and make work. Thank you David Batchelor - you are a star! May my own work move people and bring happiness to others in the way that your work does for me.

'My Own Private Bauhaus’ is an exhibition that marks the 100th anniversary of the founding of the Bauhaus by Walter Gropius in 1919.  It is, in Batchelor’s words ‘a phrase that has been hanging around the studio for a few years’ and pays tribute to the movement through Batchelor’s personal appreciation of the square, circle and triangle.

Since he began working with colour, over 25 years ago, Batchelor’s installations, sculptures, paintings, drawings and photographs have been characterised by simple shapes and regular forms. But, unlike the pure geometry of the Bauhaus, Batchelor’s forms are, he says ‘often damaged, bent or broken; and the colours, while vivid, are neither pure nor primary.’ Batchelor’s work pays tribute to the geometric abstraction of the 1920s, but is also characterised by improvisation, informality, humour and what Batchelor describes as ‘a distrust of formal ordering systems and regulated theories of colour’.

My Own Private Bauhaus is the artist’s collective title for a wide variety of small sculptures, paintings and drawings that sit together on long, shallow, wall-mounted aluminium shelves. Made from plastic offcuts, shards of glass, found objects, metal mesh, tin tops, timber, concrete, gloss paint, spray paint and adhesive tape – individual works are arranged in irregular rows. Together they represent the diverse output of Batchelor’s practise and the interconnected nature of his colour-based work, whether it is two- or three-dimensional. 

The exhibition also includes a number of large paintings made using poured commercial paint on aluminium panels. These Colour Chart paintings become virtual sculptures with precariously colourful, off-circular forms balanced atop schematic, plinth-like bases. In turn; several smaller sculptures in the exhibition, made from the discarded tops of the tin cans from which the paint was poured, refer back to the paintings.'

https://www.inglebygallery.com/exhibitions/7132-david-batchelor-my-own-private-bauhaus/overview/

David Batchelor on grey

In a recent conversation between artist David Batchelor and Andrea Schlieker, curator of Batchelor's current Flatlands exhibition at The Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, Batchelor talks about the colour grey.

Batchelor: "There's that great phrase by Wittgenstein:

'Whatever looks luminous does not look grey'.

It is such a fascinating observation. What is it about grey and luminosity? Why is it so hard to think of a bright grey?

I thought I'd make a suite of grey paintings, but grey is so complex. The minute you select a grey and put it next to another grey, it becomes not grey, it becomes slightly greenish, or reddish, or pinkish, or blueish or brownish"

Schlieker: "That's similar to what you said about Robert Ryman's white : his are the most colourful whites"

Batchelor: "White is many, not one. And grey is many, many, many. If you read the thesaurus, synonyms for grey are bland, boring, dull, old, lifeless. Grey gets a really bad press, but read Vincent Van Gogh or Johannes Itten or Gerhard Richer on grey, and it's something else. Grey is as complex as any other colour, but in a way it's the most surprising colour because it's the colour where you least expect surprises."