Cedric Christie, Peter Hedegaard, Michelle Grabner, Ditty Ketting, Gerold Miller, Lars Wolter.
27/6 – 29/8 2020
Curator | Jonathan Stephenson
Rocket Gallery | London | United Kingdom
As London emerged from lockdown, this summer group exhibition proposed not a celebratory spectacle but a measured reflection on colour—its restraint, its resonance, and its quiet capacity to structure perception. Bringing together works produced between 1965 and 2020, the presentation unfolded as a meditation on chromatic subtlety across generations and contexts, where painting, sculpture and wall-based objects entered into a nuanced dialogue.
Rather than foregrounding contrast or expressive intensity, the exhibition emphasized modulation. Colour appeared calibrated, distilled, sometimes nearly dematerialized. The installation allowed works from different decades to coexist without hierarchy, revealing continuities in how artists have approached surface, material and tonal gradation over time.
Cedric Christie’s works, often constructed from precisely cut and layered materials, treat colour as both surface and structure. His shaped supports and clean lines create a tension between objecthood and image, where hue is inseparable from the physical presence of the work. Similarly attentive to the object quality of painting, Gerold Miller’s lacquered aluminium pieces oscillate between sculpture and wall relief. Their industrial finish amplifies colour’s luminosity, transforming monochrome fields into reflective, spatial events that shift subtly with the viewer’s movement.
In contrast, Michelle Grabner approaches abstraction through repetition and pattern. Her woven or grid-based compositions temper chromatic restraint with tactile density, allowing colour to emerge from structure rather than overlay it. The result is a rhythm that feels both systematic and intimate, where small variations generate perceptual vibration. Ditty Ketting’s works, by comparison, tend toward reduction: measured planes and carefully balanced compositions in which colour operates with architectural clarity, guiding the eye through quiet transitions and calibrated intervals.
Peter Hedegaard and Lars Wolter further expand this conversation through material exploration. In their works, colour is embedded within layered processes—sometimes translucent, sometimes matte—so that surface becomes a site of depth and accumulation. Subtle tonal shifts replace overt gesture, encouraging prolonged looking rather than immediate impact.
Installed together, these practices form a coherent reflection on the enduring relevance of chromatic investigation. The temporal span—from mid-1960s abstraction to recent works—reveals not a rupture but a sustained inquiry into how colour can define space, articulate structure and generate atmosphere without excess. In this context, beauty is not theatrical; it is measured, restrained, and discovered in the interplay between light, surface and perception.