Alles Farbe! It’s All Colour!

With works by Josef Albers, Carl Andre, Arman, Joachim Bandau, Georg Baselitz, Alexander Calder, Bernard Frize, Katharina Fritsch, Rupprecht Geiger, Barbara Hepworth, Alexej von Jawlensky, Donald Judd, Yves Klein, Imi Knoebel, Jeff Koons, Norbert Kricke, Sol LeWitt, Joseph Marioni, Charlotte Posenenske, Fiona Rae, Robert Rauschenberg, David Reed, Oskar Schlemmer, Jörn Stoya, Andy Warhol, and Lawrence Weiner.

“Each colour tells its own story,” says Jörn Stoya. “Not only does it have a sound of its own, but also a taste and fragrance of its own.” This Düsseldorf artist (*1957 in Lüneburg) applies pure pigments to canvases using his bare hands. His energy-laden paintings allow colour to become a sense experience and viewers to immerse themselves in pulsating colour spaces.

In the framework of a special collection presentation Stoya’s works engage in a dialogue with works from the Museum Morsbroich Collection as well as from top-ranking private collections with which the museum regularly collaborates. This collaboration enables us to also show important works by internationally renowned artists like Jeff Koons, Sol Le Witt or Joseph Marioni in our collection presentations. The exhibition will include outstanding paintings and a number of sculptures dating from the early 20th century to the present. The painter Jörn Stoya has chosen them together with the two collection curators, Fritz Emslander and Stefanie Kreuzer, and in doing so has relied totally on colour, as he does in his own works.

Within the historical museum walls a conversation emerges about colour as the basis of art, transcending individual works and epochs—colour either as a structuring or space-shaping pictorial element, as an atmospheric medium, or as a resonating hue. The shimmering colours in Stoya’s Père Lachaise III (2018) re-enliven three works by Joseph Marioni each painted in one of the primary colours, red, yellow or blue. Imi Knoebel’s monumental black Schlachtenbild (1990), mistreated as it has been with saws and blades, encounters Jörn Stoya’s fragile glittering silver paintings from the series Killing Me Softly (2015/18). In the work group Mais Oui (2018) Stoya’s irregular rectangular and trapezoid shapes, radiating in their daylight luminous paint, seem to respond to the neutral white stringent geometries of Carl Andre and Sol LeWitt. In another cabinet, the colour fields in Stoya’s work group Maintenant (2018), which hover like sails against a white ground, strive heavenwards along with Calder’s Mobile (1942) and Yves Klein’s painting Monochrome bleu (1959). The juxtaposition of classical modern portraits in which the colourful disengages expressively from the representational, with Jörn Stoya’s highly colourful re-workings of reproductions of modern stone sculptures (in the series LOFI, 2018) generates a discourse about the emotionally expressive force of colour.

Stoya’s works, with their partly blazing colourfulness and the archaic impact of the materiality of the hand-applied pigments, along with the selected collection pieces are characterized by a partly purist clarity and a decidedly affirmative grasp of the world. Their presentation together is sometimes harmonious, like a family gathering or an indirect homage, sometimes like an exchange of blows. In combination, they heighten our view of the very varied ways in which colour can be used and achieve its impact.

Curators of the exhibition are Fritz Emslander and Stefanie Kreuzer together with Jörn Stoya.

Along with It’s All Colour!, we are showing on the Graphics Floor:
Paco Knöller. Drawings and Woodcuts 1989–2018
May 26–September 1, 2019

Permanently. Presentation of Works on Loan from the Foundation “Kunst im Landesbesitz” North Rhine-Westphalia
May 26–September 1, 2019, Graphics Floor / Collection Rooms

Supported by