Jonathan Morrison
Exhibition review: Breathing Colour at the Design Museum, W8
Hella Jongerius’s installations aim to transform the way we experience the world around us — and they succeed
Once in an indigo moon, an exhibition comes along that fundamentally changes the way you see something. But never before has an exhibition tried to change the way you see everything.
Some 14 years after her first solo exhibition at the old Design Museum in Shad Thames near Tower Bridge, Hella Jongerius, the influential Dutch designer, returns to the museum’s new venue in Kensington with an artistic exploration of something we usually take for granted: colour itself. Her ambition in this series of newly commissioned installations is equally all-encompassing: to transform the way we experience the world around us.
Look more closely at Jongerius’s work and you will be rewarded (ROEL VAN TOUR)
Despite this, the room seems a little underwhelming initially. The tapestries which Jongerius uses in her experiments hang limply from the beige stone walls, while drapes frame a row of watery crystals collecting “hopeful” if pallid luminosity. The morning section of the exhibition — there are three zones, designed to show how objects and light interact at different times of the day — could have been removed from a fortune-teller’s tent. Yet this is typical of Jongerius’s approach: look more closely and you will be rewarded.
This becomes obvious with the noon area, where sculptural “colour catchers” of varying sizes — up to and including “architectural”— demonstrate the metamorphic effect of folds and facets. Suddenly the world seems turned on its head — form has become a function of shade, the power of colour overwhelming shape. And yet a circle of 300 glazed vases makes the opposite point: that it is fragile, too, and sometimes strangely imperfect. “We’re used to being given colour in industrial forms these days,” Alex Newson, the senior curator, says, “but really we can’t control it, as it’s inherently unstable. We’re showing how colours change and are alive and can flex and evolve.”
“We’re showing how colours change and are alive,” says Alex Newson, the senior curator (ROEL VAN TOUR)
The evening section is more startling still, as shadows take on solid form, like something out of a gothic fairytale. A black still life demonstrates that even the darkness is rich in tone and texture, not just the colourless grey layer we perceive unless told to stop and concentrate. It is unsettling at first. Then liberating.
Emerging into the sunlit Holland Park is like having the scales fall from your eyes — every leaf seems to have been picked out in its own green. Every nuance of bark and brick seems apparent. For a moment, you will see the world afresh. There may be a skip in each step. You might smile at dogs and pet small children. Of course, it doesn’t last.
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