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Helen Baker – The Material of Colour Opening Tuesday, 16 April 2013, 18.30-20.00 Artist’s talk Thursday, 18 April 2013, 18.00 Monday-Saturday, 16.30-19.00 (closed Sunday) until Tuesday 30 April 2013 THE BRITISH SCHOOL AT ROME Via Gramsci 61, 00197 Roma tel. 06 3264939 www.bsr.ac.uk Tuesday 16 April 2013, from 18.30 to 20.00, British artist Helen Baker presents in the exhibition The Material of Colour (until 30 April) new works that illustrate her recent investigation on painting as object. The support extends in the form of a shelf or moves away from the wall so that the shadows creep in it. The artist writes: “These works operate with light, form and colour in a very basic sense. I have made paintings that engage with the act of building, making colour function like building blocks one square on another.The colour seems to be coming or going, in a state of transition.Over the last year I have begun to create paintings that also look like objects. I have added bits to paintings to disrupt the surface edge and I have made the surface thicker and some into building blocks as a solid painted form.” Thursday 18 April at 18.00, in conjunction with her exhibition, Helen Baker will give a lecture by the same title, The Material of Colour, in the BSR Sainsbury Lecture Theatre. “This talk seeks to explore how colour and material communicate and the way contemporary painters are continuing a dialogue and craft that is both medieval and of current significance through a reinterpretation of the painting as object. As painters we learn to indicate our own attitude towards our subject through the way we offer the paint as a substance. Paint, is not only explored through gesture, through mixing, through different pigments, through glazing, through the interruption of the supports and through different consistency of mediums. It is explored within subject readings so that the material presence of the paint offers up the subtle layers of interpretation that we are able to negotiate. Donald Judd has become an important figure for those of us interested in paint and colour. Judd understood and attempted to articulate the wider implications of colour, material and space in the world we are building around ourselves. What is it we are responding to when we consider innately coloured material against the painted or customised? There is something that can only be described as ‘made’ about those beautiful Amtrak American trains in polished steel. Alternatively, there is something oddly archaic but continually compelling in the power of paint to transform whether it’s a car chassis or a canvas.” [Helen Baker] The project is supported by NORTHUMBRIA UNIVERSITY and the ARTS COUNCIL ENGLAND. Helen Baker lives and works in Newcastle, UK. After being 1994 to 2006 Head of Fine Art at Northumbria University, is currently Professor of Fine Art and director of Gallery North. Directed at the same university the MA Fine Art & Part-time Education in collaboration with the Department of Education BALTIC Centre for Contemporary Art, and is also examining external Chelsea School of Art, University of the Arts London, and the MA Fine Art & Education at Goldsmiths College, London. Since 2008 he is member of the Board of Trustes of BALTIC, in which he contributed to meetings and conferences (including "Carol Rama" and "Otherworlds"). In 2007 was Abbey Fellow in Painting at the British. His works born from the residence in Rome were exposed among other things to the Red Box Gallery, Newcastle, and the APT Gallery, London. Among the recent group which he participated, "Building With Colour" by Sean Scully and other artists, Gallery North, Newcastle. http://www.helenbaker.org/ For further information, please contact Pia Lauro, Fine Arts Intern