{"id":1219,"date":"2026-10-12T10:33:28","date_gmt":"2026-10-12T10:33:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/?p=1219"},"modified":"2026-10-12T10:33:29","modified_gmt":"2026-10-12T10:33:29","slug":"dark-matter-at-the-white-cube-in-2006","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/?p=1219","title":{"rendered":"Dark Matter at the WHITE CUBE in 2006"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Dark Matter<\/strong> (White Cube, Hoxton Square, 7 July \u2013 9 September 2006), curated by Annushka Shani<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A tightly conceived group show built around a deceptively simple premise: black, or the idea of darkness, as a starting point for radically different art-making practices. Its title nodded to the astronomical term for the invisible matter between points of visibility, and, as the poet E.E. Cummings put it, “the wonder that’s keeping the stars apart.” The roster was formidable \u2014 Art & Language, Katharina Fritsch, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Mark Grotjahn, Damien Hirst, Gary Hume, Ellsworth Kelly, Dami\u00e1n Ortega, Ad Reinhardt, Richard Serra, Hiroshi Sugimoto, Gavin Turk, Andy Warhol and Cerith Wyn Evans \u2014 spanning generations and continents but united by a shared fascination with the monochrome. White Cube<\/a>White Cube<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The curatorial thesis traced its lineage to Malevich’s Black Square, framing black as both a “zero point” beyond which painting couldn’t go and, paradoxically, a kind of “negative icon” \u2014 matter transfigured into the immaterial. Rather than treating this as one movement, the show let each artist recast that history on their own terms: some reworking minimalist rigor, others chasing a “negative sublime,” others distilling images into stark, iconic abstraction that seemed to radiate a kind of dark aura. Artmap.com<\/a>Artmap.com<\/a><\/p>\n\n\n\n

It’s the kind of show White Cube did well in that era \u2014 a serious, art-historically literate group exhibition that used a single formal idea (black) as a lens onto very different sensibilities, from Reinhardt’s ascetic monochromes to Hirst’s more theatrical darkness. A companion catalogue with essays by Donald Kuspit and Shani accompanied the show, suggesting it was conceived as more than a survey \u2014 closer to an argument about what black means<\/em> in postwar and contemporary art.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

www.ftn-books.com<\/a> has the catalog on this show now available.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Dark Matter (White Cube, Hoxton Square, 7 July \u2013 9 September 2006), curated by Annushka Shani A tightly conceived group show built around a deceptively simple premise: black, or the idea of darkness, as a starting point for radically different art-making practices. Its title nodded to the astronomical term for the invisible matter between points … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1220,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1219","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1219"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1222,"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1219\/revisions\/1222"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1220"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1219"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1219"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ftn-blog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1219"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}