THE ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO
This exhibition catalogue chronicles work rendered in gray throughout Jasper Johns's career. One challenge was to articulate the focus of the retrospective — the color gray — without explicitly using the hue. As the artwork spanned a variety of media, expressing materiality was another key curatorial concern.
Gray is defined as a color between white and black. Such tonality is thereby implied by placing emphasis on each end of the grayscale. Rather than using pure black and white, however, the palette of the cover and opening signature subtly shifts to midnight blue and a creamy off-white. (Toying with perception and blurring such subjective lines is a recurring theme in Johns's work.) The cloth used for the hardcover binding is woven from these colors, and the cumulative effect of the contrasting vertical and horizontal threads reads as gray. Countering convention, artwork is also conspicuously absent from the cover.
