ART-PRESENTATION: Roy Colmer
Roy Colmer was a painter, photographer, graphic designer and video & film artist. One of his well-known projects is “Doors, NYC”, From November 1975 to September 1976, Colmer photographed more than 3,000 doors, inclusive and in sequence, on 120 intersections and streets of Manhattan from Wall Street to Fort Washington. The project, although documentary in nature was essentially conceptual to Colmer, for whom “Doors, NYC” was as much an exploration of the serial possibilities of photography as of its ability to capture a place.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Lisson Gallery Archive
The exhibition of works by Roy Colmer at Lisson Gallery in New York, featurs 15 of his early spray-gun paintings, most of which have never been exhibited, and a selection of late photo collages. Roy Comer studied at the Hochschule fur Gestaltung in Hamburg, he moved to New York in 1967. Inspired by the shifting artistic landscape created by the introduction of electronic media, Colmer challenged the boundaries between painting and film to develop a new kind of perception. Colmer’s began creating large paintings of horizontal bands in sprayed acrylic recall the glare of early color T.V. and share its visual crackle. Colmer was able to connect the surfaces of his paintings to video by using this spray technique and a careful selection of color, to suggest filmic effects such as movement, flicker, distortion, and as Colmer described, “feedback”. He was interested in the immediacy and versatility of the spray gesture, and the ability to manipulate space and depth through color and form, notions influenced by his Concretist mentors at the Hochschule für Bildende Künste in Hamburg, Germany. In 1971he began to work with video and film. He experimented with closed-circuit television and incorporated video feedback into a multimedia event at the University of Cincinnati in 1972. In the mid-70s, Colmer stopped painting to work on documentation and photography projects. His exploration and manipulation of electronic signals was aligned with a larger group of artists working in the area at the time, among them Nam June Paik and Bruce Nauman. Colmer stopped experimenting with paint entirely a few years later and focused his attention on conceptual photography and documentary projects. A selection of photographic works from the ‘80s are also included in the exhibition. Arranged in a grid, they create striking contrasts between order and disorder, and focus and distortion, similar to the tension between the field and centralized figure in the early spray paintings. Placed together, the early paintings and late photo collages articulate Colmer’s lifelong experiment with color, form and technique.
Info: Curator Alex Bacon, Lisson Gallery, 504 West 24th Street, New York, Duration 13/1-18/2/17, Days & hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, www.lissongallery.com
