Figuring Color: Kathy Butterly | Felix Gonzalez-Torres | Roy McMakin | Sue Williams

Hardcover | 16.76 x 1.27 x 24.13 cm | 136 pp

Hatje Cantz | 2012 | 9783775733304

Colour is a daily experience, from the colours we wear, to the cars we drive, to the food we eat, to the flags we fly. We use colours to describe our emotions: we feel green with envy, red with anger, or on a sad day, blue. This publication examines the work of four artists who employ colour and form to represent a metaphorical body.

In Roy McMakin’s wood sculpture a chair is at once a body and an implication of an absent body. Kathy Butterly’s evocative use of glaze transforms her ceramic sculptures into miniature bodies. In Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s sculptures, piles of wrapped candy and plastic-bead curtains are experienced through a literal touch, privileging a sensory experience. Sue Williams’ riotously colourful paintings explore an abstracted body represented entirely through colour.

Figuring Color combines images by the four artists with poems by twenty-two contemporary poets who further explore colour through rhythm, meter and rhyme.

Published to accompany an exhibition at the Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, 2012.