Troubling Pigments (after Polke)

Fransisca Angela uses film, photography and text to explore collective memory in both endorsed and erased histories from an intergenerational female perspective. As part of 'Troubling Pigments (after Polke)' she engages with the medieval instructional tome 'Il Libro dell’Arte' – a key reference for Polke himself. The project will focus on colour recipes through the lens of their gendered labour associations and reveal pigments to be more than material. Angela will develop research that expands the histories of these substances into choreographies of bodies and repeated acts of extraction. Utilising the performative methodology of the Fluxus score, she reinterprets pigment processing and use through a linguistic, gendered, and filmic lens.

Juan Arturo García’s current practice re-historicises quinine, the botanical alkaloid that – apart from its instrumentalisation in western colonisation – led to colour science and chromatographic developments with regards to the property of fluorescence and the synthetic dye industry. In the frame of 'Troubling Pigments (after Polke)', he approaches colour as a material spectre; through an archaeology of geographical vibrations that pulse in the present with the force of a ghost. Considering legacies of scientific knowledge (and ignorance) production, García unearths the consequences of their related and deeply entangled technical, cultural, mystical, and political proclivities. His research aims to interrogate the substances’ socioecological scars, while also opening up a dialogue on the articulation of their legibility and potential processes of reparation.

Müge Yılmaz researches the colour purple as a symbol of entanglement between material extraction, social hierarchy, and metaphysical imagination. A colour with fraught historical resonance that Yılmaz’s project will explore, purple had a special significance for Polke, who learned the technique to extract the colour from the glands of snails. In the frame of 'Troubling Pigments (after Polke)', Yılmaz will trace how purple pigments were extracted from the ancient Tyrian mollusks until synthetic aniline violets, and how its meaning has changed from representing empires, kings and popes until today, where it has become associated with queer and feminist activism. She has invited artist Cyn Micheli to collaborate with his ongoing research on purple.

In 1986, Sigmar Polke exhibited his work 'Athanor' in the German pavilion at the Venice Biennale. In addition to a wall painting, a scroll of silk, a meteorite and the artist’s signature raster paintings, it included a series of four large-scale monochromes on canvas made from pure pigments, titled 'Farbtafeln'. Today, a second set of eight 'Farbtafeln' (1986-1987, 1992) are part of the permanent collection of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.

The eight pigments used in the eight monochrome canvases – orpiment, malachite, copper oxide, realgar, red lead, azurite, cinnabar, and lapis lazuli – are extremely precious and rare. A lot of them were introduced in Europe, and subsequently in European painting, via colonial trading routes.

Others are notoriously toxic, like orpiment, and their synthetic replacements are not without their own problems; for instance, recent environmental studies have drawn attention to the detrimental effects of synthetic dye manufacturing. Polke was deeply attracted by the properties and histories of these pigments, and the works in the pavilion revealed a layered understanding of colour at the intersection of labour, science and material histories.

'Troubling Pigments (after Polke)' uses the Farbtafeln as a kernel to explore pigments as part of larger stories of trade, illness, colonialism, and environmental violence through artistic research. Merging environmental and materials histories with creative practice, a team of Rijksakademie alumni, in collaboration with Mavrokordopoulou, will study the transnational ecologies that allowed the arrival of these pigments in Europe. Building on and extending Polke’s complex grasp of pigment history, the project aims to create the conditions for a collective study of the cultural and eco-material preconditions of art making.

The research includes readings, a lecture/screening, hands-on analysis of the paintings by a Stedelijk Museum conservator, and a museum excursion to the Old Holland paint factory, which holds one of the richest pigment and painting tools collections in the world.

Kyveli Mavrokordopoulou is an art historian and curator, a research fellow (VENI), and lecturer at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Her current project explores the aesthetic and material strategies that women artists developed to resist nuclear technologies from the late 1970s to the present, with a focus on antinuclear feminist groups. She holds a PhD from the École des hautes en sciences sociales (as an Onassis scholar) and was the scientific advisor of the exhibition ‘The Atomic Age: Artists put to the test of history’ (2024–25), at the Musée d’art Moderne in Paris. She is the recipient of a grant within the Athanor research project of the Anna Polke Foundation, through which she develops the projects ‘Troubling Pigments (after Polke)’ and ‘Polkean Scenography, from Venice to Paris’ (Musée d’art Moderne in Paris).

Melissa Waters studies environmental humanities (RMA) at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, where her research focuses on the nature of museums, archives, and how collecting practices have shaped our engagement with the other-than-human world. Her background is in archaeology, human geography, and curatorial studies. Previously she developed a project centred on an oological collection of bird eggs, which considered the constructed divide between humans and other animals through the concept of language. Recently, she has been drawn to the long history and future of mineral mining, with respect to the (post)colonial and the ecological. She is the research intern on 'Troubling Pigments (after Polke)'.